'San Clemente'

Richard Nixon's presidency matches up with my high school years and into the first half of college. My eyes were seeing politics full-view for the first time even though I grew up in a household where current events had always been on the menu at suppertime and the Vietnam War was on television news programs every evening. I detested Nixon for his corrupt White House. By 1968, I hated the war. But I caught a huge break when Nixon suspended the military draft just as I turned 18 in 1972. In those days we had a draft lottery, and my birthday had been the 62nd date pulled from a glass bowl or whatever it was the previous summer. The conventional wisdom had it that any person with a number below 100 was battlefield bound. We didn't know at the time, but the U.S. would keep fighting in Vietnam into 1975. Political commentators speculated that the draft was halted to drain steam from the antiwar movement ahead of the fall election for president. Whatever the motivation, I was a beneficiary.

Skip forward to 1983 when I was going to graduate school and based in Dana Point, Calif., just north of San Clemente where Nixon lived in retirement. More than once I sat on Capistrano Beach and looked down the Pacific coast, picturing Nixon at his compound. In his song "Hurricane," Bob Dylan has these lines: "Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties/Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise." With his pardon from President Ford in his pocket, Nixon scanned the beach, wrote books, and, momentously, answered questions from David Frost for a TV broadcast. At the end of the "national nightmare" in Ford's words, in 1975 I wrote the following poem to put a shape on the long wild episode for myself, to make a record in this form of what happened. I was 21 years old. The title is updated from the original. 

This poem is included in my book Union River: Poems and Sketches (Bootstrap Press, 2017), which is available for purchase online or at the national park visitor center in Lowell, Mass.

San Clemente

We asked if the system had worked when it was through.

The drumming of Post reporters in '72

Had White House bag-men scrambling in the stew.

Instead of counting dead Viet Cong, they dreamt payoff sagas,

Talking "stonewall" and "tossing out the big enchilada."

Credible Dean blew a factual whistle for Sam Ervin.

Milhous squirmed, but knew Spiro had slipped the pen.

The Saturday Night Massacre of Cox drew mail by tons.

Oval Office lawyers and priests trotted out candid lines.

Dick TV'd his edited transcripts, said he wasn't lying.

But Judge Sirica persisted, the full Supreme

Court said, "Give," and Rodino, red-eared from screen-

Ing tapes, found the high crime. Impeachment's Goliath sword

Sent Nixon scuttering west in a dethroned whirlybird.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

What's on the Shelf for Reading?

I have a small stack of books in play this week. My reading has been all over the place in the past few months. The books are in various stages of completion. I jump around when the contents are made of different pieces like poems and essays. 

Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole (2016), a writer and photographer whose work includes fiction and art criticism. His writing feels urgent. There are two photo portfolios with a couple of his images among the selections. He writes about poets, human rights, place, international affairs, race, politics, and more. 

My Private Property by Mary Ruefle (2016), a book I ordered after seeing a poem of hers posted on Facebook by Brian Simoneau. I like the concise prose here. The subjects vary widely.

Tropic of Squalor by Mary Karr (2018). Better known for memoir now, Karr came out of the gate as a poet and in this collection delivers strong compositions, especially the sequence "The Less Holy Bible." 

There There by Tommy Orange (2018). The hot novel of the moment even if not best-selling at the New York Times Book Review. The author takes us to a new place, contemporary Oakland, Calif., among urban Indians. The Prologue tells you this is something new.

Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape by Shaun O'Connell (1990). I had this book a long time ago and gave it to the Pollard Library in Lowell for the annual book sale. When I moved to Amesbury, Mass., I remembered that O'Connell had a wonderful section called "North of Boston" that covers the writers of the Greater Merrimack Valley and Concord, Mass. I ordered a used copy online so I could re-read what he had written about Frost, Thoreau, Whittier (Haverhill/Amesbury), Kerouac, Lucy Larcom, Andre Dubus II, John Updike and others. He includes Maxine Kumin as being from the "North" in "The Boston Sphere of Influence."

They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing edited by Simone Muench and Dean Rader (2018). I got a contributor's copy for the poem Kate Hanson Foster and I wrote that was selected for this book. This is new territory for me, but I'm curious about the process that produced 500 pages of poems and prose. 

The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny (2015). I haven't cracked this volume that I borrowed from the Amesbury Public Library. I read about the popular Louise Penny in a newspaper profile a month ago. My wife, Rosemary, has read all her books. I was intrigued by her French Canadian-ness and have wanted to read a few mysteries this summer. Book report forthcoming. 

Charles Olson on History, Story, Localism

I expect to be in Gloucester, Mass., a couple of times this month, and have been thinking about Charles Olson and his insights about History. The following passages are from The Special View of History, a thin book with text that was originally presented as a series of talks at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1956. Ann Charters edited and introduced the book. 

. . . . "What did happen? Two alternatives: make it up; or try to find out. Both are necessary. We inherit an either-or, from the split of science and fiction. It dates back at least to Plato, who used the word 'mouth' as an insult, to say it lies, and called poets muthologists--don't tell the truth, and so mislead the Commonwealth.

"Story was once all logos, the art of the logos. 'The normal or characteristic function of the ancient Story Teller,' says J. K. Thomson, from whom I draw most of this on the Logos, 'was not to invent. It was to repeat.' It was not mere word or expression of human experience so much as it was a form of human experience itself.

"Because it was oral it was also Muthos. Logos itself did not originally mean 'word' or 'reason,' or anything but merely 'what is said.' For some reason, says Thomson, Homer avoids Logos, preferring Muthos, but Muthos with him means 'what is said' in speech or story exactly like Logos in its primary sense. Herodotus calls Aesop a Logopoies, and is himself called by Aristotle not that, but 'the Muthologos.' What it all comes to is this, that to those who listened to the Stories a Muthos was a Logos, and a Logos was a Muthos. They were two names for the same thing.

"One need notice, however, that Herodotus may have been conscious of a difference he was making when he did add the word 'history.' The first words of his book --- oi logoi --- are 'those skilled in the logoi' --- not 'historians.' '['I]storin in him appears to mean 'finding out for oneself,' instead of depending on hearsay. The word had already been used by the philosophers. But while they were looking for truth, Herodotus was looking for the evidence."

. . . .

" 'Story. Be cockney. Drop the H --- how often, if you are a writer, have you been told by everyone you meet, if you could take my life down, that would be a story?"  . . . .

" 'Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar.' --- Heraclitus" . . . . 

"History is the new localism, a polis to replace the one which was lost in various stages all over the world from 490 BC on, until anyone of us knows places where it is disappearing now."

Wendell Berry on Writing Poems and a Definition of Regionalism

These Wendell Berry quotes are lifted from one of my workbooks (1980-81). He is one of the writers I was paying attention to at the time. I remain interested in his overall stance as a writer who put his stake down in a place, Kentucky for him, but has not been contained or limited in any way by that decision. The first book of his that I read was The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) in which he writes about social and environmental damage that must be repaired if people in our nation are to find happiness when they pursue it. Berry is conservative in the root sense of the word, a way of thinking and seeing which at times has prompted him to ethical and political action in public. I've always preferred his prose to his poetry, however, it may be time to revisit the poems after a long time away from them.

"A poet could not write a poem in order to earn a place in literary history. His place in literary history is another subject, and such a distraction. He writes because he has a poem to write, he knows how, the work pleases him, and he has forgotten all else."

"The regionalism I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for it continuance, upon local knowledge."---from "The Regional Motive" in A Continuous Harmony (HBJ, 1972)

The Many Lives of a Book

MY LONGTIME FRIEND Paul Brouillette sent this photo via Facebook as a report from the field during vacation book-surfing at Yellow House Books in Great Barrington, Mass.

Atop an Underwood, a collection of Jack Kerouac's early writing that I edited, hit the streets in 1999 as a Viking Press hardcover (the Penguin paperback followed a year later), making next year the 20th anniversary. The book earned good reviews and sold well and is still in print, although I don't see it as often in stores now that so many bookstores have cut down on inventory. In the good old days there could be 15 different Kerouac titles among the K's in the fiction section. Now, it is not unusual to see On the Road and maybe two others. In niche literary communities a wider assortment of Kerouacs would likely be found.

Last fall in Paris, at Shakespeare and Company on rue de la Bucherie, right in the front of the store books by Kerouac and other Beat writers filled a tall bookcase. I looked for Atop, but we had not made the cut that day. There is a French translation by Editions Denoel, although I didn't see that either. Through the years, I've gotten a big kick out of seeing the book in stores in different places, from San Francisco's City Lights to Boston shops.

Every once in a while I get a letter from a reader, sometimes a student, who wants to tell me how much the book has meant to him or her. Still, it's difficult to know the impact of a book. It gets cited in certain scholarly articles and books analyzing Kerouac's work. I've seen volumes in which I expected to see it referenced but where it was left out. What to make of that? After almost 20 years, with thousands of copies in circulation, it's not unusual to see used copies for sale online or at book fairs. If you are someone fortunate enough to have published a book or several titles, then you know the special lift you get when you see the book living its life in public, away from you, having left somebody's hands in this used scenario or waiting to be picked up new, fresh from the latest printing.

New Collaborative Poem with Kate Hanson Foster

This poem co-written with Kate Hanson Foster appears in a new anthology from Black Lawrence Press, "They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing." Kate and I composed this in response to the opening of Karel Schrijver's Living with the Stars in which the author states: "Our bodies are made of the burned-out embers of stars that were released into the Galaxy in massive explosions long before gravity pulled them together to form Earth." We created the poem by sending email back and forth with additions and revisions in each version. By the end, we had achieved a unified voice. This was a new process for me although not uncommon for the writers in the 500-page anthology. I'm grateful to Kate for proposing the collaboration. We landed ourselves in good company in this volume. 

'No Charity in the Islands'

No Charity in the Islands

To the drivers of ceaseless elevators,

Nothing is “no sweat.”

They hunt quarks in the coliseum.

They never assume parade rest.

They could stand to croon the hesitation blues.

Not a chance to be shy.

In bathrooms, they replace neon

With high-intensity lamps.

A great fear of being automatic

Bangs at sea-coral brains.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Recordings'

Recordings

Beware of common sense

     Sun & moon look the same size

Galileo said Earth circles the sun

     Described wine as air bound by light

Aristotle saw heavenly bodies as perfect

     Earth as imperfect, at rest

Nature is inexorable and mutable

Poet Saimonedes tells Hiero

     Don’t be selfish, do for the people and city

You will be praised and honored and loved

     We are informed in On Tyranny

You must submit to vulgarity

     Or cease to be the First Minister

Lady Glencora told Plantagenet Palliser

     Try to co-exist with the hornets

Our business is with life, not death,

     The challenge is to give what account

We can of what becomes of life

     In the solar system, this corner of the Universe

That is our home, and, most of all,

     What becomes of us, George Wald wrote

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Water Man'

Water Man

He stops the Sparkletts truck near a palm tree

That looks like a pineapple and steps down—

His lemon-lime uniform glows, the tanned face

Whitens a smile, matching the look on the woman

In her yard, red shirt tucked into silver gym shorts.

She’s been painting. The water man walks to the side

Of the truck and lifts out a large, clear plastic jug—

In one motion swings it onto his shoulder and turns.

The truck is filled with vessels, each with a sky-blue

Plastic seal. The back panel of the truck, all green and

Yellow fish scales, shimmers, shimmers, shimmers.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Survey Team' (2004)

For 26 years, I lived with my family across the street from the South Common in Lowell, Mass. The Common is one of two so named in the city, the other being the North Common on Fletcher Street in the Acre neighborhood. One of the largest open green spaces in Lowell, the 22.5-acre park dates from 1845. It was a municipal showpiece for a long time with an ornamental fountain, flowers and bushes, and paved walkways -- an appealing location featured on color postcards of the era. Through the decades South Common activities drew crowds to baseball games, high school field day exercises, military celebrations, carnivals, swimming programs, and the Lowell Folk Festival. Beginning in the 1970s, changes in city life and in neighborhoods around the park led to its declining status and quality, however, there is a renovation plan and City- and state-funded improvements are in progress.

For several years my exercise routine involved early morning walks on the track around the sports field. During that time I began writing about the South Common in various forms: blog posts for the RichardHowe.com blog, a set of haiku later collected in a limited-edition handmade book produced with artist Susan K. Gaylord, random prose sketches, and an essay, "Cut from American Cloth," in my book Union River: Poems and Sketches (Bootstrap Press, 2017). The names in the piece below are invented, the situation is not. 

Survey Team

Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Tran are ahead of me on the track this morning, both wearing faded camouflage baseball caps, which makes me wonder if they are two veterans of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam, who have lately gathered with local Vietnam War vets for Memorial Day ceremonies. Chanthy, a nursing assistant at the community health center, is a quarter-lap behind me, and gaining. When I passed her earlier, I read the back of her T-shirt, “Survey Team,” left over from the last census. Everyone walks in the same direction, against the clock, face into the low sun until the turn at the pool. Now and then someone crossed the soccer-lined infield diagonally, rushing to the train station just beyond the western lip of the Common.

When I arrived at 6 a.m., Mr. Vu was already stretching near the track with four neighbors from South Street, friends who likely would have been strangers had he passed them in a Saigon park where he lived during the war. He wears a brown fedora out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, tweed sport coat, gray pants, white shirt open at the collar, and blue canvas shoes. Before he starts walking around the South Common’s asphalt oval, he pulls out of his coat pocket eight small plain stones, which he arranges in two rows of four on a bench near one of the green oil-drum trash barrels. After each turn around the track, he stops to return one stone to his coat pocket.

He doesn’t keep up with his companions and sometimes waits until they catch back up to him, so he can chat again. With his cane, he can match their pace for more than an eighth of a mile. When I pass his group on the inside lane, saying “Hello,” Mr. Vu and friends nod, smile, and wish me a good morning before getting back to their own words, not one of which I understand. The peppy conversation reminds me of my grandparents and parents chewing over the day’s events in French. He probably knows French from the old country. Mr. Vu is about eighty and arrived in the city in the late 1970s, at the beginning of the resettlement period for thousands of refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Eliot Church atop the rise on the north rim of the Common kept an open door for people arriving from the refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. The sign out front today announces Swahili services and Brazilian Communidade. 

—Paul Marion (c) 2004, 2018

'Statue of Liberty Deli'

My wife and son and I recently walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny Sunday in July. It was an American checklist experience like looking over the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. My son had already crossed over a few times with friends. The world was with us as we moved along above the honking traffic below, as if the crowd had poured out of the United Nations building across town and sifted through the city neighborhoods picking up companions for the trek. Pilgrims go on the road to shrines in other parts of the world. This crossing has a similar feel. There were local people heading home, but for most folks there was something more going on than getting their steps in for the day. I sensed a low-key giddiness, too, with everyone being high up over the water. Only the bicycle riders seemed not to notice the scenery when they pumped along, head forward, past casual pedestrians. An occasional hard-core cyclist got annoyed when a couple would back up the flow by stopping for a selfie with Lady Liberty in the background. Not being an engineer, it's a stretch for me to get the physics and math evident in the bridge, especially for a structure dating from 1883. We crossed Brooklyn to Manhattan, keeping the high-rise skyline in view the whole time. Below is a poem I wrote after an earlier visit to New York City in the 1980s, that time looking out from a different vantage point.

Statue of Liberty Deli

Up in the tall green lady’s crown,

I see Brooklyn and a ship in the Narrows,

And Manhattan, built puzzle with only inside pieces,

The story about millions of people hailing rides,

Heading for a million delis to order sandwiches,

Chopped liver on rye, with a pickle and Bubble-Up.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

Harriet F. Curtis, 19th-Century Author & Editor

There are two Harriets who are notable figures in the intellectual history of Lowell, Mass. Both were writers in the mid-nineteenth century and both are associated with the high tide of young women factory workers that flooded Lowell when the innovative textile mills linked up in a mile-long, multi-story red-brick wall along the Merrimack River. Harriet Curtis (1813-1889) is the focus here, written about by Harriet Hanson Robinson (1825-1911).

The reference to "then Dracut" suggests that Curtis lived in a part of the town of Dracut (where British immigrants had settled in the 1600s) that was later annexed by Lowell (founded in the 1820s) as the neighborhood called Centralville.

What interests me in the passage below is the way women writers formed a community, what we might call a network, around a literary magazine they produced. Dracut has a thin literary history as far as I know, so the existence of a "literary centre" intrigues me. Why is that? Because it makes a connection for me, and in a small way provides a footing or a piece of a footing for my attempt more than 100 years later. I grew up in Dracut from the mid-1950s through the 70s and did not know of any writers in town except for a newspaper reporter or two. I jumped into unknown water. I may not have said it in so many words, but I'm sure I had a sense that I was an unlikely writing candidate. We didn't have major league baseball prospects being recruited in the town either.

With no literary tradition in the immediate town, I looked to the region, the river valley, where the tradition is almost intimidating in its greatness even as it inspires: Bradstreet, Whittier, Frost, Kerouac. Anthology regulars. American Literature names. World class authors. These were stars to steer by.

Gradually, after college when I was living in Lowell, I learned about contemporaries from Dracut doing the same thing and met some who are friends of mine now. Ann Fox Chandonnet, Jane Brox, Susan April, Sarah Sousa, and Jonathan C. Stevens stand out today as writers with Dracut roots. The late poet Bob Schaefer is another. I'm sure there are younger writers in the town whose names I don't yet know. 

Harriet F. Curtis, 19th-Century Author & Editor

Editor of the Lowell Offering magazine, novelist, and newspaper reporter, Harriet F. Curtis lived nearby in the town of Dracut, Mass., in the mid-1840s, even as she is more often associated with the peak years of the textile mill-era in Lowell. 

In her memoir, Loom & Spindle (1898), Harriet H. Robinson writes: "I first knew Miss Curtis in about 1844, when she and Miss Farley lived in what was then Dracut, in a little house embowered in roses, which they had named "Shady Nook."  The house was a sort of literary centre to those who had become interested in the Lowell Offering and its writers; and there were many who came from places both near and far to call on the editors, and meet the "girls" who by their pens had made themselves quite noted." There's a letter by Curtis reprinted in the book with the heading: "Sunny Hill, Dracut, Jan. 7, 1849."

Among Curtis's novels are Kate in Search of a Husband, a Novel by a Lady Chrysalis; The Smugglers; Truth's Pilgrimage, His Wanderings in America and in Other Lands (an allegory); Jessie's Flirtations; and S.S.S. Philosophy. She co-edited the Lowell Offering for three years, edited the Lowell Casket for a year, and was associate editor of Vox Populi, a pro-labor newspaper in Lowell, in 1854 and 1855. Curtis's articles were published widely, including in the New York Tribune, Home Journal in New York, the Lowell American, and the Lowell Journal. Web links point to sources of information about these women for those who are interested in learning more about them. 

'Semesters Incomplete'

More tracks and traces from the old days, this piece from my college years in Lowell, Mass., when I was beginning to find my way as a writer. I had kept a journal since high school, writing in 8.5 x 11, hardbound, black artist sketchbooks that I had seen my oldest brother use for ideas, drawings, quick watercolors, scrapbook items taped in or rubber cemented, reading notes, etc. The cleaned-up entries below remind me about what it was like to be primarily a consumer rather than a producer day to day. I was awake in the city, alert on the campus, taking in as much as I could. Later, my community role would change, shifting to engagement and action as much as continued observation and absorption.

Semesters Incomplete

1.

The intramural Stragglers and Red Daggers played extra innings on the diamond looking north up the Merrimack River as far as New Hampshire hills where Robert Frost never left the woods. Afterwards in the Old Tavern, the softball players drank not enough beer and fought over Crazy Eights and bowls of pistachios under the creaky ceiling fans spun by leather belts and pulleys. Outside, marches by John Philip Sousa, a Portuguese-American giant, blared into the open bar door from loudspeakers on The Freedom Train, at rest on the rails by the canal gatehouse at Lucy Larcom Park, on route across country for the nation's 200th birthday.  (5-75)

2.

Federal authorities may want to canonize the locks and canals of the Mill Age and declare them to be St. Urban National Park of Lowell, Mass. Fishing trenches good for carp as big as tuna, splashing cannonballs of factory kids, and tires as smooth as honey-dipped donuts, earned a heavy-duty Congressional once-over physical inspection for the coming budget year. (6-75)

3.

Our Congressman, Paul Tsongas, said, “Don’t spend $40 billion for the B-1 Bomber made to unleash thermonuclear terror after the intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine warheads have destroyed the world umpteen times over.” His point being clear. We talked about such things at his regional town meeting, as well as about renewable energy breakthroughs and why political leadership sucks so badly nationwide. (8-75)

4.

Professor Chris Smith asked, “What makes one thing Art and another thing not Art?” My class is reading Plotinus, Kant, Plato, and Aristotle to find an answer. In another course, Aldo Leopold from the 1940s urged us to value where we live as much as he loved his Sand County in the Midwest, if you can love that way. For a while, the Cultural Revolution and Modern Chinese politics were coming out of my ears: Mao’s swim in 1966, capitalist roaders, the purge of Liu Shao-ch’i, “Bombard the Headquarters.” There's more on international relations and foreign affairs. At the Harvard Model United Nations, my campus club represented Iraq. I spent a night drinking with the pretend-P.L.O. delegation and challenging Oklahoma Jim of the Sri Lanka team about his critique of the social morality of utopias. Make-believe Greek delegates from Bryant College in Utah danced in the hotel lounge to a pop group called Ox until they achieved a sweaty mess. (10-75)

5.

Wearing a feathered wide-brimmed gray hat, Bob Dylan could’ve been a Mexican balladeer on a new Durango song, bouncing on stage and stamping his whole leg in time to the drum. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot dedicated “Me and Bobby McGee” to Jack Kerouac, who as a kid had played King of the Hill on the sandbank right across the way on Riverside Street. Roger McGuinn brought out his “Chestnut Mare” with its fifty-nine lines plus chorus. To finish, the entire troupe, not the least of which Joan Baez, plus Allen Ginsberg on jangling tambourine, sang Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land” with everyone (including my girlfriend after she had given tissues to a nosebleed guy she had dated one time in high school) -- all of us choir-ing and clapping until basketball game lights re-flooded the college gym. (11-75)

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Mammoth Road'

Where did this come from? Years ago, I walked about a mile on a road in the town where I then lived. I inventoried the things I saw on the roadside. When I read the list of trash afterwards, I thought it was worth keeping. Each one of these items contains a story. Who threw it away? Or dropped it or lost it? Who rode the bike? Who stepped on the beer can to flatten it? Who drove the Coke truck from Albany, N.Y., to Massachusetts? Except for the weeds, who made each thing in the first place, and what about that worker's life? I learned the term "hurt book" when I was a bookstore clerk. It was a classification used when returning unsold books to a publisher. The owner got less credit for a damaged or shelf-worn volume. Earl Wilson was not on the baseball card. I made that up because I could not recall the player's name. 

Mammoth Road

Rusty tin lids, cloth scraps, squashed cups, torn paper, a penny, pieces of metal, an old shoe, gum wrappers, cigarette butts, a roach clip, a slipper, one black rubber boot, broken pencils, rain-scarred magazine pages, crushed gold aluminum beer cans, broken brown and green glass, labels, a blue pen cap, hunks of wood, weeds, crinkled cigarette packs, empty matchbooks, tinfoil, an orange cardboard box top, screw-off caps, twist-off bottle tops, scuffed Earl Wilson baseball card, flat juice carton, smashed red bike reflector, corroded tail pipe, Styrofoam coffee cup, plastic six-pack holders, clear beer bottles, a hurt book, soft drink cans (Tab, Sprite, 7-Up, Diet Pepsi, Fresca, Mountain Dew), empty milk cartons, bits of sticky black electrical tape, a 6.5 ounce Coke bottle from Albany N.Y., red-and-white striped plastic straws, a temperature control knob printed Hot Warm Normal.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Via Galactica'

Via Galactica

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” 

—President John F. Kennedy, 1962, Rice University 

WHEN I TURNED 50 YEARS OLD, I decided to try to keep up with the Universe, that, and the world of high finance. It was time to take care of business and contemplate the long view. What is “This” all about?

I bought a subscription to Sky and Telescope magazine, which advertises “innovative astro-imaging gear for non-gazillionaires,” “Nagler Zooms,” “Dialectric Diagonals,” “Truss-Tube Dobsonians,” and the “Celestron sky-scout personal planetarium,” all this on pages between articles about Dark Matter, lunar seas, meteor showers, Sagittarius star clouds, black-hole jets, cosmological enigmas, and Mercury’s orbit. One of my neighbors has a telescope on a roof deck, but I didn’t go down that shopping road. I began reading more and watching “nature” programs on television.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston owns a painting by Paul Gauguin that has one of the best titles for an artwork: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? It’s one of Gauguin’s paintings from Tahiti. In 1897, he made the tropical tableau filled with native islanders, animals, and a statue of an Eastern deity. The artist said the visual narrative follows the journey of his life. The background is mountains, sea, and sky, the opening to space.

Before I had turned 50, I was clipping news articles about space and saving them in manila folders, which I marked with the year, thinking they would be fodder for later writing. Who is the great poet of space? Who is the Walt Whitman of the Milky Way, the via galactica or road of milk as the Romans named it? In the film medium, we have creative heroes of the Space Age like Stanley Kubrick, Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Steven Spielberg, Sigourney Weaver, Ron Howard, and George Lucas. Tom Wolfe made The Right Stuff sail as non-fiction. Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov gave us fictional space worlds.

In early 1997, the owner of a company where I live in Lowell, Mass., a company specializing in polymer-coated textiles, called me about a free-lance writing assignment. I wound up managing several days of media relations for the manufacturer of “the first man-made material to touch the surface of Mars,” when the Mars Pathfinder bounced down on Ares Vallis of the Chryse Planitia region on July 4, 1997. Bradford Industries, whose main business involved coating car airbag fabric with silicone, had been chosen by NASA to prepare material for a cluster of Vectran airbags that were deployed to soften the landing of the craft, which bounced 15 times. The bags didn’t rip.

There was even a quirky tangent: nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell of the “Lowell” Lowells in Boston made news in his day when he claimed to have spotted canals on Mars. He posited that the linear surface features had been dug by Martian engineers. Later critics suggested that Lowell may have over-interpreted his observations of natural depressions in the soil because he was familiar with the extensive power-canal system in the textile-factory city named for one of his ancestors. The Mars Pathfinder held inside of it a robotic vehicle, a rover named Sojourner in honor of the well-traveled African-American abolitionist and campaigner for women’s rights, Sojourner Truth. The rover talked to its designers on Earth for a long time.

On May 29, 1998, page one of the New York Times featured above-the-fold articles about Pakistan’s underground nuclear tests, calling it the first “Islamic bomb,” and a fuzzy digitized photo of radiating starlight above a small illuminated sphere described as “the first image of a planet outside our solar system.” The location is the constellation Taurus, estimated to be 450 light-years from Earth. The Hubble Telescope made the picture of the planet, which could be twice the size of Jupiter, at the end of a 130 billion-mile trail of starlight. The third story above the fold was a report about the federal Environmental Protection Agency announcing that automobile catalytic converters form nitrous oxide, which stokes global warming. Life is a chemistry set.

My son turned eight years old on February 9, 2003. When I was eight, Lt. Col. John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit the Earth, and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the edge of a nuclear war. Government officials advised average families to build concrete fallout shelters in their basements to be prepared for a missile attack. The father in the family across the street from my house constructed and equipped a shelter for the two parents and three children. The man worked for a local defense firm, a manufacturer of American missiles. I went inside the shelter once when I was at a birthday party in the cellar of the house. Blankets, water, canned food, tissues, toilet paper, a radio, and a small tool box were stored on shelves. There were seats that converted to beds. The same year, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, exposing the damage done to living things by the misuse of chemicals and probing the public conscience like a needle to the national brain.

Eight days before my son’s eighth birthday, a NASA spacecraft disintegrated as it sped back to the Earth’s surface. “The space shuttle Columbia, streaking across a bright blue Texas sky at about 3.5 miles a second, broke up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere,” James Barron wrote in the Times. Everyone on board died: Navy Commander William C. McCool, the pilot; payload commander Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson; Dr. Kalpana Chawla, an engineer; Navy doctors Capt. David M. Brown and Cmdr. Laurel Salton Clark; and the first astronaut from Israel, Col. Ilan Ramon.

—Paul Marion (c) 2003, 2018

'Soviet Poets Walk Barefoot on a Knife's Edge'

"Soviet Poets Walk Barefoot on a Knife's Edge" -- Vladimir Vysotsky

The following notes from a PBS television program, Inside Story, broadcast in 1983, blend exact words, paraphrase, and my commentary. 

PILGRIMS PLACE FLOWERS on the gravesite shrine of Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980), a Soviet-era poet who sang for the people of Russia. He was never directly condemned or persecuted. Seen first as an actor, he was officially unacknowledged by authorities, often appearing in unadvertised performances. He played the lead in "Hamlet" in an experimental theatre in Moscow. For 15 years, he performed on stage. Some KGB officers admired him, according to sources. When he died of a heart attack brought on by excessive drinking (the so-called "Russian disease"), his passing was ignored by the government. Apart from a brief obituary, newspapers did not mention his death. An admirer left a note on his guitar at his funeral: "You have no official title, but the people's recognition makes you great." More than 100,000 people gathered in a Moscow square to mourn him. The size of the spontaneous gathering stunned security officials. Afterwards, police removed photos of him and disposed of flower bouquets. The crowd yelled, "Shame!" 

"I hate the sound of iron on glass," he wrote.

When Vysotsky recited his poetry for audiences, he often accompanied himself on guitar. Across the vast country, everyone knew his voice from recordings, but many did not know his face. He shouted when he sang in a rough, fierce voice. He wrote 500 songs. His music was never played on Soviet radio. Songs were passed along from cassette recordings. Six albums were produced abroad. Finally, when the authorities could not ignore the public response to the poet, a book of songs and poems was published and a record album released -- but the approved work was described as "innocuous" by critics and considered harmless. 

"Soviet poets walk barefoot on a knife's edge and cut their naked souls to ribbons," he wrote. In the 1970s, "Vysotsky filled the role of poet-as-truth-teller." Historically, the Russian people feel passionately about the nation's poets, an intensity if not unique then rare. They believe the poet knows how to say what cannot be said in the open. One reporter explained that Russians are sentimental and emotional behind a stern facade. "You cannot understand what he meant to us," a woman explained to an interviewer. "There was no one loved as much. He was a terrifying lightning of a man." Some people were frightened by such "an incomprehensible person." 

His art was shaped by mixing with poets, painters, and musicians. Vysotsky stayed up night after night writing. He drank vodka "day and night like Balzac." He captured painful notions about the country and its people. He expressed the spirit of grace and mockery peculiar to Russia. His songs and poems covered the spectrum of life -- war, space, troubles after the world war, construction projects, soldiers, drunk tanks, greasy dives, workers -- from cosmonauts to criminals. He opposed cliches, habits, the status quo, giving voice to contemporary Russia. He wrote, "We were the first in line, but those who were behind us are already eating. It isn't fair. Let us drink to a time when there will be no jails in Russia, no camps in Russia." 

One day, walking down a street with construction workers, people opened their house windows and brought out their tape recorders to blast his songs for him. "You are one of us," they shouted. "He entered the town like Spartacus," one witness said.

—Paul Marion (c) 1983, 2018

Poets' Lab Journal (1976-79)

Poets' Lab members at Memorial Hall Library in Andover, Mass. (1977 or 1978). From left, standing, Kathy Aponick, Alice Davis, Florence Lieberfarb, Stephen G. Perrin, Annie Fleming, Charlie Brunault, Mary Lou Tremblay, Wayne Nalbandian; seated from left, Cindy Ward and Paul Marion. Missing from this photo are Ken Skulski, Rudy (last name?), Eric Linder, Helen Allen, Esther Weisslitz, Tom Mofford (who may have been the photographer on this day), and others.

From late 1976 through 1979, I was involved with writers in Andover, Mass., who called themselves The Poets' Lab and later the Merrimack Valley Poets. Other than one creative writing workshop in poetry at the University of Lowell (now UMass Lowell) in 1975, I had no experience in a writers' group. I didn't know published writers or aspiring poets. There wasn't a poetry scene in Lowell. People in the city"doing" history generated the literary energy -- fueled by enthusiasm about the U.S. Bicentennial celebration and the prospect of a national park commemorating Lowell's role in the Industrial Revolution. The Lowell Historical Society published a new history of Lowell. Activist women at the university launched The New Lowell Offering, a magazine named in recognition of the well-regarded Lowell Offering written by women factory workers in the 1840s.

I had published poems in the university's student newspaper and in an alternative newspaper, The Communicator, and had been to one poetry reading at Keene State College in New Hampshire, featuring three poets, one of them a Native American woman. Michael Casey, from Lowell and also from my university (he was a physics major), won the Yale Younger Poets Award (1972) for his book about the war in Vietnam, Obscenities, which I owned. Mostly, my models were writers I knew from books or those I had heard on radio or seen on TV. The timing of this opportunity was good for me. I was 22 years old with a bachelor's degree in political science and had recently published a pamphlet or chapbook of my poems, working with Northern Printing in Dracut, Mass. I thought that was the thing to do, get my work out there. I had read a lot about early 20th-century poets and the little literary magazines and independent small presses where their work often appeared first. I liked the entrepreneurial attitude of self-publishing. Joining a new writing group seemed a smart next step.

What began as an informal workshop whose members met every other Wednesday evening at the public library evolved into a collective whose writers gave readings up and down the river valley from Haverhill, Lawrence, and North Andover to Dracut and Lowell. One of the spin-off projects was a broadside series called LOOM that was the root of my small publishing company, Loom Press. The Poets' Lab writers represented the full spectrum of development, ambition, and accomplishment. Esther Weisslitz, who often signed her poems E. F. Weisslitz, had published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and was on a first name basis with then-poetry editor Howard Moss while other members like Charlie Brunault had only ever written for themselves. (Esther was so generous that she sent a batch of my poems to Moss with a note urging him to consider them for The New Yorker. I never forgot that kind gesture.) Dozens of writers filtered through the workshop meetings, the attendance sometimes exceeding the capacity of our second floor conference room. Ken Skulski had put out the call for writers in the fall of 1976, using the regional library network as an organizing tool. News of the workshop spread after the first few gatherings, drawing writers from close by and an hour's drive away. Ten or twelve writers formed the core and stayed together for the duration. Some of the friendships endure to this day. 

The Poets' Lab: Selected Journal Entries (1976-79)

October 13, 1976

Tonight I attended the first meeting of the Poets' Lab at the Andover, Mass., public library, Memorial Library, with 12 to 15 other writers representing a variety of ages and backgrounds. Several are good poets. One bubbly African American man, Rudy, is attuned to the sounds in poems. The moderator, Ken, is into audio poetry and reads dramatically. He's forceful, the leader there. He said he corresponds with poet James Dickey. Stephen, tall & bearded, about 15 years older than me, makes concrete poetry but also writes in traditional forms. A middle-aged man is highly opinionated and demonstrative. He's in love with poetry. There were several women, one with a British accent knitted during the meeting. Her poems are short but not strong. We had three or four college-aged men, one who works at a prison. They are energetic, sensitive, anxious. Four young women shared their poems. Their themes were not surprising. An older woman who had studied at Yale has aspired to publish for 30 years. Rudy is from Cambridge. The rest are from Andover and Greater Lawrence. I was the only one from my end of the river valley around Lowell. Many people seemed to be shy. As we went on the comfort level rose. Everyone read something. I said my poem "Meditation on Winter Trees" from memory.

October 28, 1976

The poetry group gathered again in Andover last night. I met Helen Allen, a poet in Lowell and director of the local YWCA. She liked my work and bought a copy of my chapbook, offering to take copies for the Y gift shop. When she reads her poems you feel a deep connection to her work. She's a passionate feminist. I got to know Tom better, an intense writer and archivist at Andover Town Hall, a former reference librarian. Cindy read two neat short poems. A lively discussion about poets and poetry arose with people talking about workshop groups, favorite poems, William Carlos Williams, the Beats, Gary Snyder, Yevtushenko, and more. It's fun being with folks who know something about poetry, like cooks talking food. Rudy has a fine sense of humor. He understands the subtleties in people's writing. Listening, he nods and says, "Yes," "Yeah," "Mmnn," and smiles a lot.

December 23, 1976

Last night I read "December Canticle" at the Poets' Lab, and Steve Perrin said it was the most positive thing he'd heard in a while. I introduced it as a kind of song, a hymn or chant, and after reading it said it is an affirmation that rides close to the Buddhist expression "Tat Tvam Asi," meaning "Thou Art That." A Portuguese priest-poet joined us. He has published books of sonnets in Portuguese. A professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University uses the books in his course. He's been told he's one of the most well-known Portuguese poets to come to the U.S. His recent book is called Sonnets from America. He read one in Portuguese, and then Ken said the English version in his marvelous way of speaking: "I hear your voice in the swallows on the wire."

Steve Perrin read several hard-hitting pieces written by children in a learning disabilities school where he teaches two writing classes. "I am a pistol that shoots off its mouth" began one poem. Another was by a girl who wrote that "a man in a white suit" gave her brain damage at birth, and that she wished her sisters would have brain damage too.

We had a man who teaches in Manchester, N.H., who read a narrative poem, "Hank and Alice" or something like that. In the poem a man chews razor blades to earn money to support his wife through the Great Depression and then gets hit by shrapnel in World War II, leaving the wife to run their restaurant alone and care for her broken husband. The poem was read in a matter-of-fact manner, reminding me of the painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. We had fewer people than usual because Christmas is almost here.

Ken Skulsk of Andover, Mass., instigator of the Poets’ Lab of the Merrimack Valley, 1977. To Ken’s right, blurry in the photo, is Anne Fleming of Chelmsford, Mass.

January 6, 1977

A good meeting last night that spilled over into a beer-pumping joint, Shag's, in Andover center, and then overflowed to photographer Lynn's house. Good talk and much fact-finding. Tom Mofford's been a teacher in Spain, the West Indies, and Japan as well as in this country. He was born in the last year of the Herbert Hoover administration. His wife, Julie, is a writer also. Ken is dedicated to writing "sound poetry" and has been around. He "knows people" and is informed about "the avant-garde scene," wherever that is. He sits in the seat of abdication as he chairs meetings. A lot of personal talk tonight. Here I sit in judgement of the asteroids in this galaxy.

January 20, 1977

Exciting meeting in Andover last night. There's talk of doing a public reading. People experimented this week. The group is evolving and showing more depth of talent each time we gather.

February 3, 1977

We will read for the public at the Andover library on a Sunday in April. We may go on the road and do one reading each month. Last night, Annie Fleming from Chelmsford joined us. She read a poem called "Jamie with the Swaggers" with this line: "That Jamie he had sounds inside him." Wayne the night guard read two pieces that reminded me of my work, going deep into place and ethnic identity. Mary Lou showed her pen-and-ink drawings of the group members, interpretations of our personalities as animals. I was a raccoon. Some of the others: Tom/ram, Steve/lion, Ken/timber wolf, Florence/cockatoo, Mary Lou/do-do bird, Charlie/monkey, Cindy/deer, and others. Steve read some one-line poems like "Black holes suck." He also read a 15-page tiny, one sentence per page book called Time Is. We did a group poem, titling it "No Constraints." Ken enjoyed the hell out of the impromptu composition. Each of us added a line to the preceding one. Cindy later read some warmly erotic poems. Florence read a poem about the group and in another compared a cloud to a long duck. Afterwards, we rushed over to Shag's across the street to carry on with talk, music, and general give-and-take and beer.

February 17, 1977

Ken & Rudy last night presented a taped piece called "Rampages"-- the first part of a trilogy based on Baudelaire's statement that there are only three professions, the priest, the soldier, and the poet. This section was on the soldier, a bold weird work. Rudy improvised on guitar. Thirteen minutes long. Sounded like "A Season in Hell," madman philosopher ranting in stark images: "Luminous objects pregnant with heat." Tom also gave us a long work called "Odyssey Since We Last Met," a collage poem of what bombarded him and filtered into him in the last two weeks. He goes on rampages, too. Rudy later read a poem about a February day teasing with Spring: "Birds withdraw their boundary of flight at the smell of our shadow." Wayne read a fine, emotional poem about immigrant ancestors and their life on Laurel Hill, as well as the suburban life of the present generation. We also did a second group poem, "No Constraints II."

From left, Tom Mofford, Mary Tremblay, and Lynn (last name?) in Lowell, Mass., for a poetry reading at Gallery 21 on Hurd Street, Winter 1977.

March 2, 1977

Doing the Beat poetry bit: Anne/Snyder, Tom/Ferlinghetti, Steve/Rexroth, Ken/Kerouac, me/Corso. Steve says to me, "You are so audial, you sound like a blind man reading."

March 17, 1977

St. Patrick's Day. An unpredictable meeting. Three new poets showed up, one, Esther, published in The New Yorker and The Nation in the 1960s; another, Paula, a near-psychiatrist, read richly worded persona poems about a carnival and Dancing Bear; and the third writer, a wacky talky woman calling herself the Erma Bombeck of poetry, jabbered at the podium and read a few things. Many of us went to Lynn's after the meeting, where we drew lots for the April reading: I will go 18th. Tom had all kinds of clippings and papers to show me. He is enthusiastic. A wild session.

May 1, 1977

To Tom Mofford, I wrote, "Saturday was a fine day. I said to Annie Fleming, 'I feel like an outlaw when I go into Cambridge like this.' We stopped to watch an inning of a pick-up softball game on the Common. Lilacs on residential streets. Tall walls of steel, blue steel & glass. Italian steeple, brown triple-decker tenement, Anglican church, white Episcopalians, full decks of apartments street by street. Thick sandwiches and chips, iced tea, at the Blue Parrot eatery. Because I don't go in often, the trip remains an adventure. I like being this type of cultural bandit. We went into Cambridge and got us some live Robert Lowell. An afternoon full house at Harvard. Lowell reading golden oldies and recent work. His over-the-counter furtive stare and understated mid-poem remarks. With his pushed-back white mane, he seemed aged and far away at the podium. He's some kind of world-class 'local poet' in this setting, almost like a family room but extra large. In the audience, wasn't it good to spot celebrities like one of our own, esteemed Andover poet Stephen G. Perrin, and that other important author, John Updike, with his ruddy mug? I keep seeing the remarkable colors of the day: beds of crayoned tulips, fat stars of Chinese cherry flowers, slippery dark cherry bark, pink crabapple blossoms. There was a woman in a silver space-cadet jacket and a known Irish scholar with manila curls wearing a slim red tie. Each sunny stained glass window in Sanders Theatre made a kaleidoscope. Thanks for introducing me to the Grolier Bookshop. Some men show younger men the way to cathouses or cheap whiskey, but you chose a gem of a poetry store." [Robert Lowell died on September 12, 1977, in New York City. The May reading at Harvard was his last appearance there.]

May 1977

"All words with Z in them are suspect," Steve Perrin announced. When he was a kid he was taunted by this in the schoolyard: "Perrin is a Huguenot, Perrin is a Huguenot." Just kidding. Back to Z: Bozo, Oz, Cardozo, zed, zenith, syzygy, yazoo, Zorro, Lazarus, gazebo, garbanzo, Boz Scaggs, ozone, Zebu, Zulu. Tom Mofford at times approaches angelic, his face nearly beatific hovering over a pizza pie. At the same time, Tom is tactile like Doubting Thomas who needed to probe the wounds of Christ. 

May 19, 1977

Great reading last night at the Parker Library in Dracut by the Poets’ Lab, nine of us. The audience numbered about 20. The poets read many very good new poems. We went out for pizza and beer @ the Walbrook restaurant after. I read “Smelling Like Childhood,” “Boys on Bicycles,” “Camille Flammarion,” and “Memorial Day Bridges.” For the intro to the reading I used e e cummings’ “Advice from a Poet” out of his biography by Charles Norman, which I had given to Steve to read in his class. Steve was written up in the Salem, Mass., newspaper—good recognition! He read a fine poem on “Responses.” Alice read a few moving grief poems based on nightmares and her husband’s death in London. Charlie read 4 pieces drawn from his anti-nuke stance and subsequent arrest and jailing in Seabrook, N.H. Cindy read a funny poem about eating out alone, reading a paperback. A marvelous reading all in all that went about 60 minutes. Tom made a flourishing finish. Too bad more people could not participate. When they hear it was so good, they’ll say, “Sorry we missed it.” That’s what the unicorns said to Noah as the Ark pulled out of the harbor.

October 5, 1977

Tom, Steve, Ken, Dave, Eric, Ruth, Cindy, Wayne, Eric, and three new people attended. Eric read his "Snadra Nad Our Pnats" poem. I don't know where he got the nutty idea of inverting the "n's" in this piece. But it's funny. Jersey Linder. Eric is from N.J. Cindy did a poem for me: "McDonald's  & Marking Fresh Ice," referencing my second chapbook. Wayne read "Cromwell Road" with "history mines" and "brandied eyes." Gave Tom a letter on his poetry. 7:30 to 8 p.m. for business; 8 to 9 p.m. for poems.

November 3, 1977

Cindy said her computer dating poem will be published in a local magazine. Eric read "The Pearl You Spit Is Ancient Fishbone." 

January 25, 1978

Alice Davis brought an anthology of Maine poets, Surf, Sand, Pine, which has her poem "Pink Trimline Telephone." A review of the book praises her writing as having "resonance." Alice also reported that she had poems accepted by North Shore Magazine and Dark Horse. Kathy Aponick had a poem accepted by Poet Lore magazine. Steve Perrin landed another poet-in-residence appointment at a school on the North Shore. 

February 23, 1978

Alice shared her poem from a recent issue of Maine Times and then read a powerful sequence of 10-12 grief poems based on her experience after the sudden death of her husband in London in 1968. Wayne read a poem in the voice of a black soldier in the Civil War, saying it was written in response to Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead." Florence had a poem evoking California's "golden magnet" and luscious oranges, while Mary read her version, comically fractured, of the legend of Passaconaway, regional Native American leader of the 1600s. Nine people showed up last night. 

March 15, 1978

I called Charles Simic to ask about the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He said to drive up to see him on March 28, Good Friday. 

March 28, 1978

Charles Simic said, "For me, writing poetry is like breathing. I have to write or I would die. I happen to be teaching now, but I'd be writing poems even if I was a street cleaner, sweeping the streets." I needed to hear a poet I admire say that. 

Steve Perrin working on the first poetry broadside of the group now known as the Merrimack Valley Poets. It would be published as LOOM 1 in December 1978.

That’s me working on the broadside at Eric Linder’s home in Chelmsford, Mass., in November 1978.

February 8, 1979

The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune reported on a reading by the Merrimack Valley Poets, formerly The Poets' Lab, planned for Valentine's Day at the Stevens Memorial Library in North Andover, Mass. According to the newspaper, "The group is the nucleus of a poetry revival in the Merrimack Valley, and nearly 50 poets have shared their works in the group setting since 1976....[T]he first major American poet, Anne Bradstreet, lived in North Andover, and John Greenleaf Whittier, famous for "Snowbound" and "Barefoot Boy," lived in Haverhill [and later in Amesbury] where he served as editor of a local newspaper....Robert Frost first plowed the literary earth in Lawrence....Lucy Larcom and Jack Kerouac of Lowell are part of that literary tradition....Members of the group include a social worker, a teacher, a bookstore owner, a computer programmer, and a gas station attendant....Their work has been published in books and in local and national magazines. The first edition of their own single-sheet publication called LOOM is available."

From left, Eric Linder, Florence Lieberfarb, and Steve Perrin at the Chelmsford Bookstore in Chelmsford, Mass., for the launch of the “New England Poetry Engagement Book 1980,” co-edited and published by Eric Linder, owner of the bookstore (1979).

To be continued . . .

—Paul Marion, journal and photographs (c) 1979, 2018

'St. Lucia Landing' (excerpt 3)

St. Lucia Landing (excerpt 3)

63

Flower Man

Hurt Not the Trees

Environment Man

Father Earth

55-year-old Cyril Cherry

In blooming hat says,

"I can spend twenty minutes

Admiring a tree. Like a man

Looks at a woman, so

I look upon trees.

As long as it is a tree,

I am in love with it."

64

"People cut trees because

They have no more love

In their hearts. If you love,

You protect, and the more

You love, the more you

Want to protect. Trees enrich

The soil and help keep the

Water in it, which makes streams,

Rivers, and falls. Plant trees

For good health. I'm happy to

Wake up and sell trees."

65

Man Job,

The Rastafarian,

Tells us the land is us,

We come from the soil,

Everything in the universe

Is part of us, and

Food is basic, he says,

If you live right,

You won't fall sick.

If you are born healthy,

And you don't eat rubbish

And you live naturally,

You will live a long life.

66

Jamaican ackee, orange, grapefruit, okra,

Sweetsop, cashew, golden apple, lettuce,

Taiwanese plum, soya, melon, cucumber,

Sweet pepper, cabbage, broccoli, corn,

Mung beans, cauliflower, tomato---

At Roots Farm, Mabouya Valley.

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

'Dick Van Dyke'

On the Amtrak Acela Express heading for Penn Station a few days ago, I noticed, not for the first time, the repeated machinery of our electrical grid along the railway between Rhode Island and Manhattan. Instead of a paper notebook, I used the Notes feature on my smart phone to write phrases taking shape in my mind. Outside New York City is a sign for New Rochelle, fictional home of Rob and Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show, the popular television program (1961-66) still in broadcast circulation. We wouldn't have those TV stories and all the other stories, news, and information without electricity and the grid, a scientific marvel easily taken for granted. Digital technology has made Dick Van Dyke endless in a way. I've had access to the characters here and there, now and then, for most of my life. The power generation sector gave me vivid words and robust terms, an industrial vocabulary, at times made up, that was fun to use even if not always accurately. I'm doing art here, not engineering, hoping the reader will "get a charge" out of the composition. Where does something like this fit? What type of poem? Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" came to mind, the language in that piece, like this: "... and bid him whip/In kitchen cups concupiscent curds." 

Dick Van Dyke

Around New Rochelle and the Pelhams another Erector Set substation,

Knob and tube components with radial ceramic insulators atop juice boxes,

The wound-up wires fenced off with heavy-gauge chainlink, a compact operation

Shipping a jillion watts to the citizens who pay transmission fees every day,

The lot of these energizers along the railway on the back underside of Eastman's

Corridor. Laura Petrie in her black capri pants needed the plug, the county lineman,

The steel twist, and coal-fired plant amps to fill her shape in the face of cathode ray-

Bathed pre-Moon flag sectionals propping up 2.5 average kids. Mel Cooley's after-image

Is tattooed on the inside back walls of our skulls. Over the world web, re-runs at 4 a.m.

Sourced in Metro New York City, says the seat-back screen looping cooked data

Radiating from a signal tower, its sleek vectone inscribers pulsing fast. In a skinny

Suit, soft-peak hat worn by dads to church in 1963, Oh, Rob, don't trip the circuit. 

—Paul Marion (c) 2018

Long Purples

This piece is cross-posted from the RichardHowe.com blog, where I am a regular contributor. One of midsummer’s visual signals in the Merrimack Valley is purple loosestrife. While some people frown upon its spread as an invasive species, I’ve always enjoyed the distinctive color in the landscape at this time of year. This sketch also appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print. There are used copies for sale on the web.— PM

Long Purples

PEOPLE WRITE LETTERS to writers, and sometimes the mail is a gift. Not long ago, Bill Martin wrote to tell me that he’d read a poem of mine that begins with an image of purple loosestrife growing between the stones in the Merrimack riverbed. He described the genesis of purple loosestrife in the valley, the flashy plant that runs wild every summer.

A beekeeper who worked in a local mill learned that bees were drawn to purple loosestrife. “When a large shipment of wool bales came from Australia, he knew it would contain loosestrife seeds,” Bill explained, “Australia being the only place on earth that grew this wonderful plant. He swept the floors after the bales were opened and washed, took home bags of dirt and seeds from the floor, and piled it around his hives. That year, plenty of loosestrife grew, and he sold the seed around the world through a beekeeping magazine, becoming quite famous in those circles.” The farm was in Chelmsford, near the cloverleaf of routes 495 and 3.

That’s not the only story of the origin of the loud purple flowers. Historians say the seeds were embedded in wool shipped from England to Lowell’s textile mills. Long purples, as they are known there, grow in the English countryside. Shakespeare mentions the wildflower in one of his plays. A writer in the Merrimack Valley says her mother calls the plant “millweed” and seconds the Australian wool story. My oldest brother swears he was told the seeds had come east on the wings of airplanes flying across country from California during World War II.

The Latin words for the plant are Lythrum salicaria. Loosestrife itself is a translation of lysimachia, a genus of plants named for Lusimakhos, the Greek doctor credited with its discovery. The plant was used as a tranquilizer for animals and a nerve tonic for people—a remedy for stress. North American field guides call it an “alien plant” or an “imported European.” The sturdiest type thrives in southern Canada, the American Midwest, and throughout the Northeast. Local naturalists despise the invasive loosestrife for the way it crowds out native species.

When a friend of mine from Los Angeles visited Lowell in deep summer, she praised the strange, prolific plant. Seeing the rocky bed of the river streaked purple, she said the city should put loosestrife on its official seal. Some folks consider loosestrife a weed, not purple tuning forks vibrating with the memories of no-school seasons. I know a teacher who says the ugly color signals the end of vacation.

The flowers rise in July, just before native corn hits the stands. Patches decorate side roads. Purple veins trace a brook into the woods. Like dog-day torches of summer, loosestrife ignites the ditches and flares across fields of wild grass and brush. I almost expect to hear the sirens of fire engines rushing to extinguish the blazing color.

The mill that beekeeper worked in was the same mill in which my father worked as a wood grader for most of his life. The mill was a hot, stinking place in July. When I was eighteen, I tended machines in the basement for two days before quitting. My father brought home colorful foreign stamps torn from sample bags of wool shipped to the mill. Another man found the seeds of purple loosestrife.

—Paul Marion (c) 2006, 2018