In the fall of 1978, I was on my first tour of the UMass Lowell (UML) public relations department, then-University of Lowell. (Later in my working life, I returned to UML to do communications work and manage community programs for 22 years.) Fortunately, after scratching around for a job for two years after getting my bachelor’s degree at Lowell, I was hired from the pool of the unemployed and underemployed in the area who had active applications with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal jobs program like the Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression years. I had been writing on my own in college including sending guest columns (Letters to the Editor) to the Lowell Sun, and had been a fill-in sports writer at the Sun for high school football in 1972. Linda Frawley, director of ULowell’s public relations department, picked out my application that said “writer” on it and hired me as a reporter for the PR office. The CETA pay was minimum wage, but I was thrilled to be at a typewriter and learning the fundamentals of journalism.
I had been writing poetry for a few years, too, and noticed there were poets on campus, teaching in the English department. I proposed a story to Linda—a profile of four poets on campus. Helena Minton and Mike Casey of Andover, Mass., are still publishing. Bill Aiken passed away in 2017. I don’t have current information about Robert DeYoung and James Martin.. Below is the news feature that we sent to newspapers in New England. The piece was carried in papers around the region.The Bedford, Mass., Minuteman weekly paper ran our story 45 years ago, on Dec. 28, 1978.—PM
Helena Minton’s poetry in Personal Effects (Alice James Books, 1976)
Teacher-Poets on Campus
Though contemporary poetry has a limited audience, the creation of imaginative literature in any generation is the work of many individuals. This year, the University of Lowell English department has four poets on the staff: William Aiken, Robert DeYoung, James Martin, and Helena Minton.
To William Aiken, a poem is “a verbal approximation of an emotional truth.” He is not writing poems at the moment, but published in literary magazines including New Renaissance and Hanging Loose in the 1960s and ‘70s. He’s written critical essays about American poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Bly.
“Modern poetry speaks to some people,” says Aiken, “but the audience may be limited because some people don’t want to work at it.”
A graduate of Harvard and Boston universities, he was deeply involved with poetry when Michael Casey was a student of his. Casey, a Lowell native and physics graduate (1968) of then-Lowell Technological Institute, one of the two local root-schools of today’s university, continued writing poetry, later served in the Vietnam War, and won the Yale Award for Younger Poets in 1972 for his book Obscenities, based on his military experiences. The book is dedicated to William Aiken.
Like Aiken, Robert DeYoung has been on the Lowell faculty for many years. A graduate of New York University, his poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and America, among others. DeYoung has a keen interest in New England’s diverse character: “It offers choices in its distinct differences between country and city, between mountains and the sea.” Noting that solitude is crucial to his writing, he mentions that the region offers that possibility as well as crowds if one seeks them.
Asked about trends in contemporary poetry, he says that he is encouraged by the large number of poetry readings, although he feels this may have peaked. On the topic of poetry teaching poetry, he says that writers may take a different approach, “stressing technical aspects and the effect of reading poetry aloud, but on the whole their methods are not very different.”
Lately, he is exploring new themes, writing about domestic life and driving cars, ordinary subjects in which he finds poetry. DeYoung’s poems are included in the publication 10 x 3 from Northeastern University Press, and he’s working on a new book.
A new member of the Lowell faculty, Helena Minton is a graduate of Beloit and the University of Massachusetts. Her poems have been published in Personal Effects by Alice James Books, a volume with poems by Robin Becker and Marilyn Zuckerman. She is also represented in the anthology Flowering After Frost, a collection of poems by New England writers.
Being in the university community gives her a sense of being involved in important work. She adds, however, that there is a new for balance in the teacher-writer. “There’s a danger in each, because a person can spend all or his or her energy teaching and not have time for writing, or one can commit all one’s energy to writing, which may not be healthy either because of the isolation.”
She has worked in the Massachusetts Poets-in-the-Schools program and is enthusiastic about children’s writing projects. Her experiences with junior high students have gone well. Admiring their creative responses, she says, “They can write poems in a room crowded with people!”
Currently focused on long poems, one of which deals with the Middlesex Canal of the 19th century, Minton has been exploring historical themes, which, she feels, is a natural progression for a writer. “After writing about personal subjects, many poets move on to larger themes, history is one of them.”
James Martin, a visiting lecturer at Lowell, has two books with Copper Beech Press at Brown University: A Reunion and Other Poems (1975) and Ceaseless Talk, Which Never Stops, of Auschwitz From Our Bliss (1978). His poems have been in Harper’s, Esquire, and Poetry magazines.
Martin, who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, says, “I love living in New England. It’s close to my own past, and I’m most interested in finding out about my past, some of it done in and through the poems”
An ordained United Methodist minister, he will graduate from Boston University’s Graduate School in 1979 with a doctorate in Theology and English Literature. “My preparation in Theology influenced my poems much more than any English course,” says Martin.
He believes that schools can put people in touch with Poetry, but not the power and beauty of major poems. “Major poetry can’t be talked about.” He does believe that schools can help you find a mentor who can help you find your voice as a writer.
On being a poet, James Martin offers this: Being called a “Poet” is a gift that someone else gives to you.”
A campus reading by the four poets is scheduled for the spring semester. The University of Lowell may not be known as a “writers’ school,” but the local literary tradition is felt strongly when one stands on the lawn in front of Ball Engineering Center on the north campus, Riverside Street, and look across the street at the third floor of a gray tenement where teenager Jack Kerouac lived in the late 1930s.