This is an excerpt from an unfinished memory book. The working title is “Do You Think You’ll Ever Go Back?” The narrative takes me through my first 22 years. — PM
‘Make Big Money Writing Poems’
BROWSING IN THE STACKS of the Merrimack College library in 1974, I noticed a book—I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet by William Carlos Williams. The quirky volume, a “talking bibliography,” introduced me to modern poetry. Suddenly, I was reading poems written for the American voice, a voice like the one in my throat. The doctor-poet who made house calls in New Jersey, was a general practitioner of literature. Williams wrote poems, stories, essays, and accounts of American history. He described a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” Into his poetry processor went the plums in the fridge, paper bags from the street, a red wheelbarrow, a young housewife, and the local waterfall.
When I was six years old, I watched the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on TV. With the young President stood white-haired Robert Frost whom Kennedy had invited to read a poem for the ceremony, at the time a rare example of poetry being included in a national event. The iconic pairing of a political leader and a poet stayed with me.
Enthralled by the Beatles from the time I was ten years old, I must have developed an affinity for lyrical writing through all the hours of listening to British Invasion hit songs, three-minute singles like short lyric poems later. When two of my teen-aged cousins and I pretended for a few months to have a rock band, I scribbled music lyrics on loose-leaf paper. We made the best of a snare drum, a cast-off schoolroom piano, and a thrift-shop tambourine.
Poetry wasn’t part of my high-school world. Jack Kerouac died in October 1969, when I was a sophomore. The coverage in the Lowell Sun and a course in local history brought him to my attention, but I started with his Lowell novels, not Mexico City Blues, the poetry book Bob Dylan credits as a major influence. For a senior-year assignment, I wrote a parody of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and titled it “The Politician.” Poetry looked like an individual sport. I preferred teams. I played baseball for four years with guys who didn’t talk about Carl Sandburg. Before long, though, a radiant girl and modern poetry helped me find my emotional voice. They changed my life.
The only writers I knew were authors in the library and reporters whose names were on newspaper articles. A Lowell-born writer won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1972, the year I finished high school. Michael Casey’s book of poems about his military service stateside and in Vietnam, Obscenities, was a publishing phenomenon. Casey was a physics graduate from Lowell Technological Institute where an English professor encouraged him to write. Yale University Press sold the rights for a mass-market paperback to Warner Books, which made the book available everywhere, from airport book racks to the local drugstore. In March 1974, in Prince’s Bookstore on Lowell’s main street, I bought the pocket-sized book with a color cover photograph of Casey and two friends in Army gear. The poems were interspersed with black-and-white UPI news photos of scenes from the war zone. Yale prize judge Stanley Kunitz called Obscenities, “…the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam. …”
In college I wrote essays, short stories, and letters to the editor of the daily paper, the Lowell Sun. Merrimack is where my writing kindling burned into a real fire. First-year rhetoric teacher Catherine Murphy encouraged me to keep writing outside of class. I followed up with her course on the short story and found the form comfortable. I pictured myself as an updated John Updike in the suburbs of my time. While studying for a bachelor’s degree in political science, I opened a door onto writing, only to find poetry slipping in through the window. Later, I would joke that I was content looking for a form. That’s CON-tent, not con-TENT, although I did search happily.
I favored the compressed structure, heightened language, and imagery in poems, all of which intensify the effect of a composition. I was interested in the visual aspect of a poem, the architecture of an object made of words. As much as to be moved by the artful use of language, I read poetry to enter conversations that I wasn’t finding elsewhere. Poetry became a way for me to organize my response to the world.
Halfway through my undergraduate years, I veered off my planned career course. The political science degree/law school/elective office road map on my brain’s bulletin board lost a corner push pin and peeled forward. The bottom curled up. Creative writing gained on the imagined career in government or international affairs, maybe with the United Nations or State Department. My father had a second cousin who had been the Canadian Ambassador to the United States, Marcel Cadieux, an author also.
After two years at Merrimack in North Andover, Mass., I left in the summer of 1974 for financial reasons. I had entered with a Massachusetts State Scholarship, merit-based, that paid $900 towards private school tuition and the full cost of state school tuition. I also had a $1,000 federal grant for two years. The summer after sophomore year, Merrimack’s financial aid staff informed me that my grant had been eliminated and I would have to borrow $1,000. I said, “No, thank you,” and took my public-college scholarship to Lowell State College where I had a free ride. At Lowell State, I stayed on track with the poli-sci major and history minor concentration. But I slipped into the deck of social sciences courses electives on classical music appreciation, the philosophy of art and beauty, watercolor painting, and poetry writing. While my grades were as good as they had been throughout, I looked to customize my curriculum, doing a directed-study course on “Poetry and Politics” (from Plato to Yevtushenko) and an independent project on political economy with my academic advisor, Prof. Joyce Denning. Both Joyce and her office mate, Prof. Dean Bergeron, mid-career faculty members, encouraged me to pursue my passions, whether that meant a deeper dive into public policy or publishing poems in the student campus newsletter, The Advocate, which took several pieces between fall 1974 and spring 1976.
I had also placed a couple of short poems signed with my initials in The Communicator, an alternative tabloid in Lowell produced by Acre-neighborhood activists and student radicals seeking fair treatment of poor people in the city and better community services. One poem was a snarky take on the plan for a national park in Lowell. I couldn’t put together labor injustice for mill workers with shiny tourist boats on canals. Later, I would become one of the loudest cheerleaders for the park, but we can all be indignant at twenty-one years old.
Conversations in the Joyce-Dean drop-in center had 500 channels: from Springsteen’s new Born to Run and Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris’s chances in the 1976 Democratic primaries to an unconventional novel that turned out to be a “culture-bearer” of its time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Joyce said, “Don’t just do what you think you should do to get your ticket punched to move on to the next expected gate.”
More than the money, the move to Lowell State worked out better than I could have imagined. The array of courses taught by first-rate faculty suited me. I’d been wrong coming out of high school thinking that Lowell State was substandard, the “safety school” for average local students. The reality was educationally impressive, outdistancing the perception of the school among many people in Greater Lowell. I graduated summa cum laude in June 1976 without a plan.
After Dr. Williams, I pored over the works of Sandburg, Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. I moved back and forth through American poetry, finding, among many others, Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, e. e. cummings, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Forché, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Maxine Kumin, Roethke, Stevens, and Ferlinghetti. Beyond the Americans, I read Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Yevtushenko, Rimbaud, Neruda, and Seamus Heaney.
Steeped in their music, I absorbed the words of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Chuck Berry, Leonard Cohen, Carole King, and Harry Chapin. Among the prose works that were important to me were Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s essays, The Enormous Room by cummings, Albert Camus’ Notebooks (1935-1942), Joan Didion’s essays, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Pirsig’s road seminar, Snyder’s essays in Turtle Island, The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, Katherine Anne Porter’s stories and My Antonia by Willa Cather, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Updike’s fiction, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Kerouac’s Lowell books, especially Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy for the poetry in his prose. Each writer gave me something. Kerouac’s lesson? Write your own story. Lennon’s lesson? Produce your own dream.
Why did I choose the poetry path? In 1978, I asked the same of Charles Simic. He had agreed to see me one spring day at a time when I was adrift. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) campus in Durham was deserted on Good Friday when I pulled into the parking lot near Simic’s office. I found him at his desk and stammered something complimentary. It was the first time I had sought out a writer whose books were on my shelves. I was unsure about applying for entrance to the Master of Fine Arts poetry program at UNH. Simic said:
“Going through a program like ours won’t make you a poet. That’s up to you. In my case, I
might have had a choice when I was eighteen. Now, writing poetry is like breathing. I happen
to be teaching here, but I would be writing poems even if I were sweeping streets to make a
living.”
Five years later I was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Poets James McMichael, Garrett Hongo, and Louise Glück took turns leading workshop sessions. I hoped to study with Charles Wright, but he left for the University of Virginia a few months before I arrived, returning to his native South. Several of my workshop compadres have since put fizz in the literary waters: author and critic Shawn Levy, editor and writer Dana White, and poets Juan Delgado and Maurya Simon.
As valuable as the workshop was, perhaps as useful was my teaching assistantship at Irvine. I taught composition to freshmen for three semesters and learned again how to write an effective sentence. Living alone in a studio apartment off Pacific Coast Highway in Dana Point, up the hill on Seville Place behind a nursery with small orange and lemon trees, I composed poems and revised old work for hours and days at a stretch. I had given myself permission to be a writer full-time. The move to the West Coast, the immersion in literature, and the isolation amounted to a recommitment to writing. Within a year, however, weighing a job offer back east against my shrinking savings, I left the program to return to the Merrimack Valley.
At a book festival in Boston around 1980 I had picked out of a goldfish bowl a matchbook with these words printed in red on a white background: Make Big Money Writing Poems. Why not? This pitch was a come-on from Apple-Wood Books of Massachusetts. I don’t remember if I checked out the Apple-Wood products, but I still have the matches.
After college, I worked part-time in the Dracut public library and applied for jobs in Lowell that lined up with my interests and skills. An opening for an outreach worker at the anti-poverty agency Community Teamwork, Inc., in Lowell did not go my way.
In the fall, I took two steps up on the writing ladder. I withdrew a few hundred dollars from my savings account, called Northern Printing & Publications in Dracut, and published my first pamphlet of poems (The literary term is chapbook, from a cheap-book sold by peddlers on London streets.), called Horsefeathers & Aquarius, twenty-four pages with a light-brown cover and stapled binding. By then I knew a lot about early twentieth-century writers and the vigorous small-press publishing scene of the time, little literary magazines and books. The literary activists reminded me of the pamphleteers of the American Revolution and the Committees of Correspondence. Writing and publishing in the drive for independence from the British King were a powerful complement to and at times prerequisite for the long rifles and powder horns. Horsefeathers referred to mythic Pegasus, the flying horse, who kicked a hoof into the side of Mount Helicon and set flowing a stream of inspiration in the form of the Muses. It was the Seventies, and the Age of Aquarius still a thing in people’s heads—plus, I was an Aquarian as was an “old flame.”
I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to publish the poems. Issuing the chapbook seemed like a normal step to take, like announcing a political candidacy with a tri-fold brochure for mailing or opening your own grocery store. This move was not unlike signing up for organized baseball when I was fourteen, after years of playing in the neighborhood. It was time to get in the market. Wise Men and Wise Women will caution young writers not to rush their work into print. Looking into the collection now, some pages make me wince. At the same time, I enjoyed the heck out of announcing myself to the world. I didn’t know another poet to talk to. Poets were in books or on TV (almost never). I had heard a few authors speak in college, Jonathan Kozol, Ralph Nader, Julian Bond, but not a poet.
When I got the book, I asked the manager of Prince’s Bookstore and Stationery across the street from the clothing store where I had worked in downtown Lowell if she would take copies on consignment for sale. She agreed. Between my friends’ purchases and my mother sending over her customers from the women’s clothing store, Prince’s ran through the first dozen in a couple of days. When I went back to ask the manager if she would like to re-order, she said, “What did you do, send all your friends in to buy the book?” I thought, Isn’t that what you would expect me to do? She took another twelve copies and reordered several times over until I had sold more than half of the 250 copies in the initial printing run.
The Lifestyle columnist in the Lowell Sun, Mary Sampas, gave me a strong boost with a headlined story in her weekly column. The newspaper sent a photographer to the library to get a picture of me in a shirt and tie, holding the book open. Mary Sampas knew my mother from cultural events in the city and told her that aspiring writers sometimes sent her material to review. Most were not ready to publish, she said, but she saw something different in my work, a spark, a turn of phrase, depth of insight, something to set it apart. She was well-read and along with her husband had been a tireless advocate in the city for Jack Kerouac’s books. Before his death in 1969, Kerouac had been married for a short time to her husband’s sister, Stella Kerouac. The Sampas couple had been writing for the Sun since the late 1930s. I was in the game.
When in 1977 I published my second chapbook, Marking Fresh Ice, Mary Sampas wrote another positive article, which ran in the newspaper with a photo. Same with my third pamphlet, Focus on a Locus: Lowell Poems (1980), a title that never failed to crack up some of my pals from the other side of the poetry tracks. Mucous on a Puke-us may have been the best parody. Hocus on a Pocus came in second. I was doing pioneer work with that crowd. They didn’t read anyone else’s poems on their afternoon breaks at the Gas Company and Post Office.
The second step was an opportunity that came my way through the Andover Library, described elsewhere in this collection. I stayed with the Poets’ Lab for a few years, and in 1978 collaborated with members Steve Perrin and Eric Linder on a basic poetry broadside that we laid out and took to a quick-print shop for reproduction. We pushed out one broadside together, and then I kept the series going for several years. This is the beginning of Loom Press, the small publishing company I still manage.
Nineteen-seventy-eight was also the year of CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal jobs program. The national economy was so weak when I graduated from college that a federal intervention was justified. The program reminded people of the Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression in the 1930s, which provided jobs for a vast number of people from coast to coast, building sidewalks and post offices, constructing bridges and dams, researching state histories, and painting murals in railroad depots. I think every fourth person in the liberal arts who graduated alongside me did a stint with CETA. Without a lot of other options locally, I signed up for the jobs program and filled in the blank after the question about what type of work I was seeking: Writing—I may have mentioned poetry as an interest. My preferred outcome was to get hired for the new CityFair program of the Human Services Corporation (HSC), a nonprofit organization in Lowell. HSC’s mission was to build “concrete economic and social programs that would instill hope and determination in city residents.”
CityFair employed about ten people, musicians, painters, photographers, ceramicists, and a dancer. Their jobs were to teach in community settings, offer performances and displays, and provide creative services. I was sure the project needed a poet. The program manager did not agree when I knocked on her office door and urged her to look at my file and bring me on board. She wasn’t looking for a writer … or a poet.
CityFair did not work out, however, a month later while I was on one of my short-term residencies in Maine, I called my mother to check in and heard that I had been called by the University of Lowell public relations office. Would I come in for an interview? I called the university the next day and said I would leave right away and be there for an interview the following day. The director of public relations, Linda Frawley, had been to the CETA office trawling for free help. What a deal for government and nonprofit organizations. And, likewise, what a deal for people out of work or under-employed, especially recent college graduates who could gain real-world experience in professional settings, from city planning offices to public school programs for kids with special needs.
Linda saw my “writing” preference and was further intrigued by the mention of poetry. She gave me a hand up, like Mary Sampas reporting on my first book. Linda was the youngest woman executive on campus. She had written for newspapers and done some political campaign work. A vivacious blonde with a sparkling smile, beaming affect, and a nose for news sharpened during her days working with ink-stained scribes at a city tabloid, Linda had been brought in to the inner circle of the first president of the new university.
In 1975, Lowell’s two colleges with roots in the 1890s, Lowell Technological Institute and Lowell State College, merged to form a comprehensive public university one rank below the state’s flagship, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The new president, Dr. John Duff, most recently of Seton Hall University, was an historian, a scholar of Irish American history. He bear-hugged the Lowell job. He would soon become the first chair of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC), U.S. Department of the Interior, when Congress passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation creating a national park in Lowell to commemorate the American Industrial Revolution and the pluralistic workforce in the mills. The innovative LHPC helped put together the building blocks of the park in its early years. Linda Frawley served as Duff’s passport to Lowell, using her city contacts and native knowledge to assist his networking efforts. Duff’s sprawling white mansion on the exclusive Belvidere Hill in the city became The Place to be for after-theater parties, fundraising galas, Irish arts stars, and holiday celebrations.
Linda’s open mind and intellectual curiosity worked in my favor. I was hired as a campus reporter and editor, writing news releases, editing a weekly newsletter, preparing annual reports and department brochures, and helping out with events and campus VIP tours. The job paid the federal minimum wage at the time, $2.65 per hour.
The new campus reporter.
In the winter of 1978-79, Dr. Duff provided start-up space in the back of the public relations office for the LHPC. I met the first staff people who were hired, including executive director Fred Faust, operations director Ray LaPorte, and administrative assistant Mary Kiafas. Three of them jammed into an oversized storage closet, but they had access to phones, a shared receptionist, a copy machine, the campus print shop, and meeting space upstairs for business. We became friends. That spring I played on the LHPC/National Park Service softball team. I attended monthly meetings of the Preservation Commission in the trustees’ room on the second floor of the building we worked in, Cumnock Hall. The more I learned about what they did, the more I wanted to get in on that project. It would take a while, until March 1981, but Fred Faust finally brought me on board as a cultural-affairs program assistant, part-time. And that led to an enormous opportunity in 1984.
The CETA slot was good for eighteen months, after which the university picked me up at the minimum hourly wage for another several months. By this time, Linda Frawley was managing communications at California State University in Fresno, in the Great Central Valley south of where I had lived in Stockton. Linda stayed in touch, coaching me from afar because I was now running the operation at ULowell. The administration had not replaced her.
Ever the promoter, Linda made sure to talk up her poet-reporter in Lowell to Fresno’s marquee poet of the time, Philip Levine, one of my favorite writers. Levine liked having poems in The New Yorker because people read them in the dentist’s office. He used that line at his poetry readings. He was a working-class guy from Detroit who had made it into the poetry establishment without giving up any of his political edge. Linda showed him some of my work. She had him sign one of his books and sent me the gift.
After a few months of being the acting director of the public relations office, I walked upstairs to the president’s suite to ask for a pay raise. I got an increase of twenty-five cents an hour, ten dollars a week. The response was not what I expected.
Two months later I went to the president’s office again to tell his top aide that I intended to resign. If the university would not pay me more for the added responsibilities that I had assumed, then I would look for another job. It was self-respect, as much as anything, that pushed me. There’s a French expression for the overly prideful: “Fierté mal placée.” Misplaced pride. Maybe. I believed they were taking advantage of me. I figured I could find something else that paid as much, and, besides, my expenses were low even though I had my own apartment close to the campus. I had enough money saved to carry me through a short transition period.
My CETA application with writer/poet on it got me the university gig, a full-time position where I learned about journalism, institutional communications, publications, and public program management, all of which served me well in future employment. As far as I was concerned, and compared to what I was doing before CETA, I had already made big money writing poems.
The president’s assistant, a tenured faculty member, sat behind a large wooden desk just outside the president’s office, listening to me quit. When she started talking, I wasn’t sure if she was incredulous about my decision to leave or trying to snow me in order to get the outcome that was convenient for the upper administration.
“What are you doing? You can’t resign without having another job. Think about it. You have a liberal arts degree. You’re like me. We have no skills.”
I left two weeks later.