Poet Louise Glück: Expanded Recollections & Thoughts

Poet Louise Glück, Nobel Prize Winner

This post appeared on the popular blog RichardHowe.com on October 24, 2020 

Today, we have two posts about recent Nobel Prize-recipient Louise Glück of Cambridge, Mass., who won the award in literature for her poetry. There has been a flurry of reporting about her success by media outlets in Boston, the nation, and the world. We’ve got a more personal angle. I had the great good fortune to be in a graduate writing workshop with her about forty years ago. When I learned that my former teacher had won the Nobel Prize, I asked three friends who had been with me in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, to share their recollections. Dana White’s extended remembrance deserves its own post, just below, while comments by writers Juan Delgado and Shawn Levy are integrated into my longer piece about the Nobel Laureate that follows. 

Dana White is a writer, editor, and a former Village Historian in Ossining, New York, where she is a Democratic candidate for the Board of Trustees (similar to a town council). We wish her good luck. She’s working on a historical novel, too.—PM

‘For Louise Glück, Poetry Was Survival’

By Dana White

WHAT WAS THE YEAR? 1983? I hadn’t been a poet long, but long enough to know that Louise Glück was one of my idols. With Plath and Sexton, she fit into a type of brilliant, complex women I imagined myself to be. Without the transcendent talent, but good enough to fall into the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. When poet Charles Wright of the MFA program faculty announced Louise Glück would be a visiting professor, I couldn’t believe my luck.

She was tiny, and nervous. Charles Wright was very solicitous of her, almost gallant.  The students were in awe. By this time, she’d published three books of poems, Firstborn, The House on Marshland, and Descending Figure. Perhaps she saw in me the same tendency to place every word just so, the short lines, the near obsession with line breaks and oblique meanings and sexually charged imagery.

Louise Glück, c. 1977 (web photo courtesy of Wikipedia/Poetrycenter.org)

As the New York Times put it recently, “It’s part of her greatness that her poems are relatively easy to access while impossible to utterly get to the bottom of. They have echoing meanings; you can tangle with them for a long time.”

As a teacher she was never cruel or sarcastic in her criticism, but encouraging of everyone, regardless of style.

One day in class she said she needed a volunteer to teach her undergraduate workshop because she had another commitment. Only two of us raised our hands. She asked us for a few poems and then chose me, saying something like she felt more of a kinship with my work. I went home and cried.

On the last day of the workshop, I asked her to sign my copy of Firstborn. She literally recoiled, saying, “That book embarrasses me. I was so young!” Yes, a youthful prodigy who drew on her inner pain to produce breathlessly beautiful poems. “But I love it,” I said, and she acquiesced. She jotted an inscription and gave it back: “For Dana, with admiration for your sharp intelligence and gusto. Not many better combinations. Warmly, Louise.”

She threw a party at her house in Laguna Beach. I remember she wore a colorful off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and served a lovely tray of tomato and fish, maybe salmon. She put on music and danced and flirted, which surprised me, since her poems denoted someone who sat around all day smoking cigarettes and wearing black. Her poems were dark and stark, but she clearly relished life.

I didn’t stay a poet long enough to have early work to be embarrassed by. The poetic muse deserted me, though I enjoyed the entanglement while it lasted.

The summer before entering the MFA program at UCI, I interned at a big newspaper in Southern California. While there I dated, quite briefly, a reporter who told me, “Poetry always struck me as a parlor trick.” Perhaps he was right. For me it was. For Louise Glück, I believed, poetry was survival.

I ended up a journalist of sorts. But over subsequent decades, every time Louise Glück released a new book, I bought it, and read it. These volumes occupy an entire shelf in my library, a testament to one who survived.

And now I can say when I was twenty I sat in as a teacher for a remarkable poet who went on to win the Nobel Prize forty years later. Which is something, I guess.

Web photo courtesy of achievement.org (American Academy of Achievement)

Louise Glück Wins One for the Home Team

by Paul Marion

WHEN THE WORD CAME DOWN that Louise Glück had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Jack Mitchell, conductor of the Lowell Live Feed chat-page orchestra on Facebook, asked me to write something for the civilians who may not know this writer. Jack said he always roots for the home team and was pumped about the global announcement. In the moment, I dashed off a long paragraph with basics, but there’s more to say.

Which American poet is a household name, living poet that is? Robert Frost left the Earth in 1963. Famous Seamus Heaney, a Nobelist, taught in Cambridge, at Harvard, but he’s Irish. The inaugural poets of presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have drained from the headlines—the exception being the late Maya Angelou. But now we have a bonafide Massachusetts person getting this grand prize, same one that Bob Dylan earned a couple of years ago. People new to this author start with her name, the two-dot umlaut over the second “u” like a speed bump slowing down the uninitiated. How do you say that? It’s Glück like “Glick.”

This news is special for Massachusetts and New England, places with strong connections to the poet over decades. The selection committee praised her poems whose “austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

As it happens, I studied with her for a term in the master of fine arts program in writing at the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1980s. In class, she paid close attention to the student work and made constructive comments. Beyond her award-winning writing, she has been an inspiring teacher to a legion of upcoming writers. At Irvine I tested myself in a professional setting and came away encouraged to keep going after being in workshops with her and another poet, Garrett Hongo (The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays, 2017; Coral Road, 2011).

Many recent media reports mention Louise Glück’s passion for teaching. It’s not a one-way deal. She speaks about what she’s gained from the years of working with emerging writers. She has judged manuscript contests, served on prize committees, and nurtured writers who have made a serious mark in the culture. Her latest collection of prose, American Originality (2017), includes a group of essays introducing books by young poets. Few established authors would use pages in a book of theirs to give this visibility to writers coming up the ladder. It says a lot about her kindness.

I asked three of my workshop comrades to send their initial reactions to the prize news.

Shawn Levy of Oregon is a film critic and author of many books including his latest: The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont (2019). He recalls Louise Glück’s energy, joy, and generosity. “She was tiny but spry and could alternate between intense focus and absolutely crackling interest, engagement, participation.”

The sound of a composition and its architecture are integral to a well-made poem, one that can bring a reader back time and again.

One of her teaching methods was to require students to memorize a poem and recite it—to put the poem in the air and in everyone’s ears. One of my poems was “Blackberry Eating” by Galway Kinnell ( “. . . the ripest berries/ fall almost unbidden to my tongue,/as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words/like strengths and squinched, / many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,/ . . .”). Shawn brought John Berryman to the table with one of The Dream Songs. Juan Delgado (see more below) offered Langston Hughes’ “Little Lyric of Great Importance”: “I wish the rent/Was heaven sent,” and got busted for brevity. He gave us another poem the next week.

She lived outside of Irvine and spent full days on campus when her classes were on. “Always open and available, she kept lengthy office hours,” Shawn says, which the writers in the program appreciated immensely.

As Dana White mentions in the essay above, Shawn also remarks on her liveliness. “You wouldn’t necessarily know it from her poems,” he says, “but she loved to laugh and chat and even–at a daytime potluck lunch party at someone’s house in Los Angeles–dance, about which we all gossiped astonishedly later.”

Juan Delgado lives in Southern California, where he taught for many years at California State University, San Bernardino. A poet with several books to his name (Vital Signs, 2013) and an innovative visual artist, Juan remembers Louise Glück saying that poets are writing a single poem throughout their lives. “She advised us to collect fragments, passages, and lines as a way to find insightful ways to construct poems.”

Sometimes the small particulars of memory are most revealing or at least most intriguing. “One day in the workshop she went around the room asking us to name two things that we loved. When it was her turn she said she loved American soap operas and Neil Young. We didn’t ask her which soap operas she watched.”

Juan’s remembers her attending a literature seminar on James Joyce’s Ulysses taught by poet James McMichael. She would just show up. “A couple of times she sat next to me,” Juan says. “After one long discussion about narrative, she leaned towards me and whispered, ‘Jamesy, what a nut.'”

This Nobel Prize puts her in legendary company of poets from our region and state, especially the women writers, from the first notable poet in America, Anne Bradstreet of North Andover, to Phyllis Wheatley of Boston, first African-American poet in the nation; from Emily Dickinson, the incomparable, to the under-appreciated Lucy Larcom, poet, memoirist, and abolitionist with Lowell links; and then later Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Marge Piercy, and Adrienne Rich, as well as the very popular Mary Oliver.

It’s worth noting that several major poets of the modern era, white men, in Massachusetts and New England whom we think of as top-tier are not Nobel laureates: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell, for example. T. S. Eliot, who won the Nobel in 1948, touches Harvard University and Cape Ann on the north shore of our state, but he’s from St. Louis and moved to England. Who would be a contender in the region today? Again, among men. Charles Simic, perhaps, in New Hampshire. Martin Espada, long-time faculty member at UMass, is still building his body of work. Robert Pinsky has a strong record as an engaged poet and has been the national poet laureate. Now, women writers and writers of color are ascendant in American poetry. Rita Dove, Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Jorie Graham, Juan Felipe Herrera, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Terrance Hayes, Kevin Young.

Louise Glück writes beautifully about the natural world and goes deep into the interior, where it can be dark, as she makes sense of the human condition. The poems are often informed by classical myths and religious sources. She bridges the time gap, writing about contemporary life in the context of ages-old experience.

My friend John Suiter in Chicago tells a story about pitching a big-time literary agent in New York City for a book he proposed to write about Gary Snyder and other poets. The agent said, “I don’t know Snyder.” John pointed out that Snyder had won the Pulitzer Prize some years before. The agent asked John, “Do you know who won the Pulitzer for poetry this year?” John didn’t have the name at his fingertips. “Louise Glück,” the agent replied, adding, “These people are a dime a dozen.” Well, the Nobel Prize in Literature is not a dime a dozen.

Louise Glück has been a poet’s poet with a substantial readership, and now, I hope, she will break through the pop culture noise to gain an even larger audience. She told the New York Times that she’d prefer not to become as popular as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century, concerned for what that might mean about the depth of her art.

It’s not “easy” poetry even if it looks that way on first encounter, but if people give her writing a try they can find something of lasting value, a fresh insight or memorable observation, a sliver of light in the night, or as Robert Frost said, “a momentary stay against confusion.”

Here’s a poem from the collection Averno by Louise Glück, which was published in 2006.

The Night Migrations

This is the moment when you see again

the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think

the dead won’t see them—

these things we depend on,

they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won’t need

these pleasures anymore;

maybe just not being is simply enough,

hard as that is to imagine.

Nobel Prize for Poet Louise Glück

Web photo courtesy of achievement.org (American Academy of Achievement)

Louise Glück has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is outstanding news and very special for Massachusetts and New England, places with strong connections to poet Louise Glück over the decades.

As it happens, I studied with her for a term in the master of fine arts program in writing at University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1980s. In class, she paid close attention to the student work and made constructive comments. Beyond her award-winning writing, she has been an inspiring and kind teacher to thousands of upcoming writers. At Irvine I tested myself in a professional setting and came away encouraged to keep going after being in the workshop with Louise Glück and another teacher-poet, Garrett Hongo.

This Nobel Prize puts her in legendary company of poets from our area, especially the women writers, from the first notable poet in America, Anne Bradstreet of North Andover, to Phyllis Wheatley of Boston, first African American poet in the nation; from Emily Dickinson, the incomparable, to the under-appreciated Lucy Larcom, poet, memoirist, and abolitionist with Lowell links; and then later Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich as well as the very popular Mary Oliver associated with Cape Cod.

It’s worth noting that other major poets, white men in particular, in Massachusetts and New England whom we think of as top-tier are not Nobel laureates: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell, for example. T. S. Eliot, who won the Nobel in 1948, touches Massachusetts, Harvard University and Cape Ann, but he’s from St. Louis and moved to England. And who would be a contender in the region today? Again, among men. Charles Simic, perhaps. Martin Espada is still building his body of work. Women writers and writers of color are ascendant in American poetry.

Louise Glück writes beautifully about the natural world and goes deep into the interior, where it can be dark, as she makes sense of the human condition. The poems are often informed by classical myths and religious sources. She closes the time gap as she writes about contemporary life in the context of ages-old experience.

A lot of people don't know her name, not surprising for any poet in America. My friend John Suiter in Chicago tells a story about talking to a big-time literary agent in New York City about a book he proposed to write about Gary Snyder and other poets. The agent said, “I don’t know Snyder.” John mentioned that Snyder had won the Pulitzer Prize some years before. The agent asked John, “Do you know who won the Pulitzer for poetry this year?” John did not. “Louise Glück,” the agent replied, adding, “These people are a dime a dozen.” Well, the Nobel Prize in Literature is not a dime a dozen.

She's been a poet's poet, and now, I hope, will break through the pop culture noise to gain a wider audience of readers. It's not "easy" poetry, but if people give her writing a try they can find something of lasting value, a fresh insight or memorable observation or as Robert Frost said, "a momentary stay against confusion."

"German Easy Rider"

Here’s a poem from the Rhine River trip that Rosemary and I enjoyed in late summer 2019. The poem appears on RichardHowe.com today as part of Germany Week on the Howe publication. In three days, October 9, John Lennon would have made it to 80 years old. Around the world people are offering thoughts of peace. Coincidentally, John’s mentioned here.—PM

German Easy Rider

 

On the ship TV with Rhine River black outside closed drapes

Film scenes shine like colored LIFE magazine hippie news

From 1969 reporters following a tie-dyed trail and grass scent

To communes like the desert crib which Peter Fonda studies

As closely as a Margaret Mead-detective, but in his back yard

Not the South Seas, the natives this time with blond hair, and

He’s curious about the sex part of the cave arrangement—

His hopped-up Hopper sideman leering and lapping it up,

Twirling in Davy Crockett buckskins, fringe doing a little dance

For the women of the house. We don’t see Jack N. in this bit,

Being featured tonight as a link to Fonda’s recent death,

Fifty years to the movie’s summer and moon-men landing,

Just in time for Woodstock tales (the anniversary concert

Plug pulled last minute), same theme now in the Museum

Of Amsterdam, a media piece bragging on the loose vibe

Peaking when San Francisco and Amsterdam were twin capitals

Of Freak World, the Netherlands famously drawing the famous

Two Virgins for a Hilton Hotel bed-in ad for peace, same Fonda

Who told John (you know) at an L.A. party that he, Peter, knew

What it’s like to be dead, which we later heard about on Revolver,

That party just before hyper-alert Joan Didion sensed the

American Center was not holding, although she may have been

Melodramatic given what we know fifty years later—that the music

Really had a hold on us and hasn’t let go, the music beat time and

Has been the glue, witness Zap Records in downtown A-dam

With its fat bin of Beatles vinyl, first on the left when you enter,

A fact to like in the German night cruising the Rhine towards

Dusseldorf and watching Easy Rider dubbed and without

English subtitles, which doesn’t matter—just look at the picture,

Wait for the sticky music and bloody ending, no translation needed—

No director’s-cut resurrection for Wyatt and Billy in the re-run.

Poem in SO IT GOES journal of Vonnegut Museum

Happy to be in this issue of SO IT GOES, the annual journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis, Indiana. The contributors include Nikki Giovanni, Gary Soto, Martin Espada, and others, including a number of military veterans, a special concern of the Vonnegut center.. The theme this year is civic engagement. I’m very impressed by the activities of the center.

American Art

We were up to the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass.,

Enjoying famous Homer seascapes in the collection,

The black-and-yellow log cabin canvas by alum Frank Stella,

And a small Louise Nevelson with halved stair spindles,

As well as the model ships in the crypt, the lot of them

Like doll houses for men, precise and climate-controlled

In their jumbo cases, craft-works by retired captains,

The mother ships built in Boston or Newburyport,

Running the lanes from Liverpool to East America

Or down to Venezuela and back through the Antilles—

Before we stepped left into the library of blond wood

Whose walls held photo-documents of the nation’s race

War of the mid-20th century, pictures by Gordon Parks,

James Karales, Ernest Withers, Stephen Shames: a young

John Lewis getting in the way just as he urges us to do;

Men in suits with Allah placards; a pained Rev. King

Waiting to speak at the memorial for four girls murdered

At the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham;

One African-American soldier on his way to Vietnam;

And an image of a white woman in a dress outside a diner

Who is scolding a bunch of white men tormenting Black

Human rights defenders sitting in the street, a drama

Photographer Danny Lyon saw only once in those years,

According to Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

When the white men taunted: “Why don’t you marry one?”

She sat on the ground with the freedom fighters.

So It Goes annual journal, 2020

College Credits, 1970s

Here’s an excerpt from a memory book I’m writing. Some sections are built on related, even if partial, recollections—in this case experiences during my college years. At times, memories can be like bits of mica shining in a chunk of stone you pick up. The word mica comes from the Latin for crumb and relates to another Latin word meaning “to glitter,” according to web sources. As a kid with my friends, we’d often see rocks with tiny mirror-like flakes of mica embedded.

The Seventies has been called the Me Decade, but I dispute that casual label. Every decade is complex with high and low periods. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, but the nation celebrated its Bicentennial. It was my coming-of-age decade, and life in America was churning. In some cases my personal story wove into the public story, such as being spared from the military draft as the U.S. was beginning to withdraw from the Southeast Asian war zone. I write about that elsewhere in the manuscript. A lot of people were moving in a communitarian and not exclusively individual way, including in Lowell where activists with local support combined to reframe the city as a national historical treasure. 

The Freedom Train photograph below appears in my book MILL POWER: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and should also be credited to Marina Sampas Schell with a hat tip to Tony Sampas for getting it to me.– PM

Semesters Incomplete

by Paul Marion

One (3/74).

The Cherry & Webb Company of New England operated a women’s clothing store on the corner of Merrimack and John streets in Lowell for decades. The store had an alligator. I ran the alligator two nights a week and on Saturdays when I was a college sophomore.

Cherry & Webb store at far right, no date. (Web photo courtesy of Lowell National Historical Park)

Henry David Thoreau gives this advice: “If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.” Every person at some time or another examines his or her work to determine whether or not such work is meaningful. By what yardstick does one measure such qualities? Should we ask ourselves if the job makes us happy? Is the end product or service useful to society? Does it make people’s lives better? Does the work degrade either producer or consumer?

It’s not unreasonable to aspire to doing work that is simple, useful, personally rewarding, and in harmony with the universe. Operating a manual-system elevator meets the conditions above. The work does not require deception in order to be successful. There’s no laying mega-waste to natural resources. Self-degradation is not necessary. It’s a service job—transportation. You meet people. Between rides, there’s time to meditate and do isometric exercises. With an empty car, sometimes I turned to face the back and ran the elevator blind.

All kinds of people walk into the elevator. Whether an aged woman with drab cloth coat and large shopping bags held by the handles or kids asking mummy to take them for a ride in “the alligator,” they all want to go either up or down. Among the characters who frequented the store was a burly dame who once wrestled one of our clerks to the floor and another time pushed a middle-aged drugstore manager through a plate glass window and onto the sidewalk. She crossed my threshold one afternoon, asking to be delivered to the “loose cloth” department. We had no such thing, but I quickly slid the door shut and deposited her on the third floor (Coats, Dresses, Foundations)—and descended.

Customers demanded to be taken to the TVs and record players. Sorry. A popular request was “Take me to the Basement, please.” They knew discounted clothes were on the lower level. But I can’t hear “Basement” without thinking of the nuns in Catholic grade school handing out a “basement pass” to a student desperately seeking a toilet.

As in most occupational cultures, the elevator business has its own jokes. The three standards, ranked, are 1) This business sure has its ups and downs; 2) You can go to great heights with this job; and 3) This job must drive you up a wall. Once in a while a too-serious person showed up and asked, “How many times a day do you go up and down?” I never counted. Most people were friendly and respectful.

The only real danger in this work is machine failure. The vertical up-down running in an interior shaft has many moving parts. Luckily, the elevator never quit on me, although it could be temperamental. In the corner of the passenger car I kept a T-shaped tool that was meant to be used if the car got stuck. The end of the tool fit in a round inlet on the floor. The problem was that I would have had to pull up two layers of rugged carpet covering the emergency disk. Passengers had the real answer to being stuck, of course. “Just bang like hell on the side of the elevator until rescuers show up.”

There were times that the elevator rode too high on the fourth floor and the motor stopped. In this situation I climbed a steel ladder on the outside of the building and walked across the gravel-over-tarpaper roof to a wooden shack that housed the engine. There, I took two lengths of 2 x 4 wooden stud and forced an electrical contact that set sparks flying and re-engaged the engine.

The roof is about twenty-five yards square. An assistant manager once said to me that it is the perfect spot to meet King Kong but let me say this is no skyscraper at four floors. I can picture the scene, with a little effort. The puny alligator man confronts the giant monkey on the sticky tarpaper roof above the ashen city below.

It was also on the roof that a cranky French-Canadian maintenance supervisor observed that all the TV antennae in sight were “arse-in-two,” that is, oriented to Manchester, New Hampshire, instead of Boston where the big stations were broadcasting signals. I couldn’t tell the difference. I think he was wrong. Why would he be the only one who was right? You can imagine what it was like to work with him. One summer when I was promoted to shipping clerk, he ordered me to sweep the stairs leading to the second floor. I said, “I don’t work for you.”

Two (9/74).

We asked if the political system had worked when it was through. The drumming of Washington Post reporters in 1972 had White House bag-men scrambling in the stew. Instead of counting dead Viet Cong, they dreamt pay-off sagas, talking “stonewall” and “tossing out the big enchilada.” Credible John Dean blew a factual whistle for Senator Sam Ervin. Richard Milhous squirmed, but knew Spiro Agnew had slipped “the pen.” The Saturday Night Massacre of Archibald Cox and company drew mail by the tons. Oval Office lawyers and crooked priests trotted out candid lines. Tricky-Dick televised his edited transcripts and said he wasn’t lying. But Judge Sirica persisted, the full Supreme Court said, “Give,” and New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino, red-eared from screening tapes, found the high crime. Impeachment’s Goliath Sword sent Nixon scuttering west in a dethroned whirlybird.

Three (5/75).

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 a downtown 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.

Four (6/75).

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 government physical exam in the coming budget year.

Five (8/75).

Speaking at a town meeting in Dracut, our Congressman, Paul Tsongas, said, “Don’t spend forty 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.” We talked about such things at his regional town meeting, as well as renewable energy breakthroughs and why political leadership sucks so badly nationwide.

Six (10/75)

Professor Chris Smith asked, “What makes one thing Art and another thing not Art?” My class read Plotinus, Kant, Plato, and Aristotle to find an answer. In another University of Lowell 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 came out of my ears: Mao’s swim in 1966, capitalist roaders, the purge of Liu Shao-ch’i, “Bombard the Headquarters.”

At the Harvard Model United Nations, my campus club represented Iraq. In Widener Library, I spotted law professor Archie Cox getting a book. He had the same Special Prosecutor crew cut as he did on TV when Nixon ordered his firing. 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 of Utah danced in the hotel lounge to a pop group called Ox until they achieved a sweaty mess.

Mao’ s back in the swim, Yangtze River, 1966.

Seven (11/75).

In Costello Gym on campus, 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 was Joan Baez, plus Allen Ginsberg on jangling tambourine, sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with everyone (including my girlfriend Marie 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 space.

“Lowell State University” [wrong name] concert flier; Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, 1975

After an overnight in the Holiday Inn near the Pancake House at the junction of Rte. 495, Dylan and crew with movie cameras went all pilgrim on the Jack Trail led by one of the surviving brothers-in-law, Tony the Elder, who took them to the Franco-American School, a former patent-medicine king’s mansion and later a school that was once visited by a campaigning Jacqueline Kennedy, and adjacent small-scale Lady of Lourdes Grotto topped by a monumental Jesus-on-the-Cross under which Dylan stopped to be photographed in color for Rolling Stone magazine (the river sounding behind him), pictured not for the cover but a long splashy story (“The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave”)—there’s that pilgrim word again in New England context.

Dylan at the Grotto crucifix, 1975 (web photo courtesy of Ken Regan/Camera 5)

Early-November maples blazed gold and crimson. Bob and Allen G. sat cross-legged on the sun-warmed earth before the simple flat stone in Edson Cemetery, talking about the writer in the ground right there and the words “He Honored Life” cut into the tablet by the erudite school teacher and stone-carver Victor Luz of the monument company across the street. Allen read a bit from Mexico City Blues, whose choruses had rung in young Bob’s brain back in Minnesota and Greenwich Village, all those years ago. He was here to make a statement, to see for himself the place in the books, the land of origin.

Eight (11/75).

The Marlborough woods. Brown in their winter skins, they stand, lean pointers, borders of the wilderness. Glass branches dip and sway, and in the chilly distance across the top of Mount Monadnock, under a white flannel sun, wind blows the snow like cold smoke in the air.

Mount Monadnock, southern New Hampshire (web photo courtesy of N.H. State Parks)

Nine (12/75).

The good way Dan turned his head and dropped three nickels into the bent tambourine of the Salvation Army-man between sips of twenty-five-cent draft and bites of pretzel at the Old Worthen in one of the high-backed booths with his three friends who had stopped the cribbage game when the deaf Frenchman in a blue-green overcoat came to the table with eyes of a saint and handsome brown gloves that held the jingling pan so our good Christmas will would get us to push a few coins his ever-loving way.

“The Old Worthen” by Richard Marion, litho print, ink drawing with watercolor, c. 1975, Reprinted by permission of the artist.

‘What’s the Fog Like?’

On a high hill in Amesbury fog rises from lower woods

Like it’s coming to get us with a gauze net made of dew,

So fine that it floats, but that’s not the exact word for it, so

Fine that it’s another form of air, revealing the air otherwise

Invisible around and through us, the fog standing but not in

Fact standing, more like hovering and at the same time just

Inching up the long-gone ski slope, subject of this week’s

Guest-speaker at the Italian eatery at the bottom of the hill,

On the edge of the cozy preserved red-brick downtown,

The event hosted by the Bartlett Museum on Main Street,

Named for Josiah Bartlett, a doctor who was born here,

But is better known for being governor and chief justice in

New Hampshire after signing the Independence Declaration,

Which is why in his hometown there’s a taller-than-life

Bronze statue whose butt-end faces one-way traffic due

To a revised road pattern that made a loop of the flow—

The fog like a lace curtain, a shroud, a weightless mist,

All the clichés in a million mediocre poems launched by fog

Banks, harbor fog, foggy bottoms, Foghat, and Sandburg,

The fog like my sight blurred, losing the long view, an eye

Or two scaled over, straining to see past a skim-milky filter,

The fog draining color from the enduring pines and firs.

For ten dollars anyone can buy a ticket to the ski-hill talk

Coming up Sunday, by which time this morning’s fog

Will have crept up and over our hill and been vaporized

By the guaranteed return of sun rays, if not today, then

For sure tomorrow, as April moves towards May and the

Days of longer, stronger sunlight, the power that pulls

Buds out of winter sticks and green from the smashed

Bland grass on the favored powder-trail of past pale winters.

— Paul Marion, 2019

Atlantic Forests Ski Area (or Locke’s Hill or Amesbury Ski Tows) on Powwow Hill in Amesbury, Mass. (web photo, undated, courtesy of newenglandskihistory.com). The hill is 330 feet high, and for a time drew as many as 1000 people per day with its four tows, lights for night skiing, and well-maintained trails. The area is now the site of a small townhouse condo cluster called Atlantic View, built in 2005. My wife Rosemary and I live here, and this is the view, minus skiers, from our back windows.

'Paris Glass'

Composed in 2017 after my first trip to Paris and Normandy with Rosemary. She had seen a lot of France on a bicycle in college years. We were on vacation in the fall, traveling by small ship on the River Seine towards the English Channel. I didn’t make a lot of notes once we left Paris, but these impressions, images, and illuminations below gave me enough to build one poem. Posting here for Bastille Day, 2020, in solidarity with my ancestors from northwest Normandy who made the jump to New France/Quebec in the mid-1600s. Immigrants in North America.

Paris Glass

1.

Near Sainte-Chapelle, a seated old woman with short black hair shows us two fluffy rabbits, white-and-brown, on leashes at her spot of sidewalk mid-bridge where she has a pile of greens, two cups of pellets, and water in a shiny silver bowl. 

2. 

On a black iron church fence on Blvd. St.-Germain a poet-painter offers a line of monotypes, colored abstractions, stylized landmarks accented with words by Apollinaire, Neruda, Rimbaud, Rilke, lyric slivers of emotion and insight, his pop-up gallery in the boundless market.

3.

Making our way down the guidebook trail past the Voltaire statue, house of George Sand, and then the toy store linked to Le Petit Prince and Babar the Elephant, the hand-written notice: “Fermé Lundi,” dark interior, select playthings on the inside window ledge, plastic city figures, firefighters and soccer stars.

4.

Palais de Justice surrounding virtuoso stained-glass, and the Gendarmerie forces all about the wide courthouse steps close to St. Louis chapel with its high windows as bright as diced fruit at mid-morning.

5. 

See-through boats as long as trains filled with white cloth-covered tables for four going north on the Seine, greenish brown, sliding past the bookstalls where casual tenders hawk vintage film magazines, fugitive pop culture posters, tiers of paperbacks in French and Euro languages, the stalls like big lidded tea tins mounted on cement walls above the river, the shelves, racks, and spinners dense with Marlon Brando, Picasso, Led Zeppelin, Camus, Baudelaire, and Monet prints, portraits of Princess Di, limited-edition Simone de Beauvoirs, cat postcards, Napoleon pennants, stained cookbooks.

6. 

Icy green-glass bottles of Coca-Cola delivered two and four at a time by waiters to smoking models, lunch loafers, and graybeards in jeans and leather waist-jackets, sitting side-by-side, drinking wine and touching shoulders like men in Omaha, Nebraska, would never do, all the citizens tucked into their Café Palette tables filled with plates of sumptuous roasted whole legs of chicken on rice beds, the couscous special, yolked ham-and-cheese croque-madames, baby spinach with a mustard-honey dollop, and sparkling water, not still, this fizzy afternoon on the Left Bank.

7.

Nine hundred years, Notre Dame de Paris, in a land where eight of ten churches are tributes to Mary Mother of Catholic-God’s Son; the hard gargoyle, hands a-ears, won’t hear St. Denis’s severed head scream to warn about the devil’s movement on Mary’s shoulder; a fair sample of the world lined up outside, Swedish and Chinese guests doing the selfie thing at Point Zero, brass disk from which radiate concentric cultural waves.

8.

La Tour Eiffel, tan as a desert rat and peeling on the sun side from a bad and outsourced paint job, the surface muted in daylight, matching neighborhood architecture, sand, earth, stone, olive, gray, a blend of neutrals almost like a trick in the City of Light, as subtle as the Sahel peddlers with dozens of small twinkling towers spread on sheets which get hauled up by four corners and slung over shoulders in two seconds when the police pull up, the vendors all of a sudden just St. Nicks in Nikes, “Nothing to see here, move along, nobody selling, displays only, no problem, everybody wants a tower, everyone needs a light.”

9.

Figs and mushrooms and strawberries displayed like museum pieces that can be touched. Brilliant oranges from South Africa piled up for squeezing, orange oil perfuming the intersection. Baguette sandwiches in hashtag stacks. The cheeses sit by their names, waiting to be called on and not saying a word to the salamis.    

10.

Hemingway’s favorite writing place in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There. No, over there. No, no, it’s across the street for sure. He drank there all the time. 

—Paul Marion (2017)

Hampton Beach, New Hampshire (1999-2000)

Rosemary and I spend time at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, near the state park, a beautiful stretch of sand and sea on the short coastline of N.H. In the 1930s, her mother’s parents bought two cottages close to the ocean on a parcel of land on Boston Avenue. The front cottage, the Pinehurst, more like a house (4 bedrooms upstairs), burned around 1960 and was rebuilt. The back cottage was damaged but not destroyed. It’s called the Sadie B. (3 small bedrooms). We rent to tourists in the summer, but there are weeks in the spring and early fall when we can go there. The water is turned off in mid-October because neither cottage is winterized. There have been times when I’ve taken a watercolor paint set and colored pencils to make pictures during a stay. I’ve made pictures since I was a kid, no doubt influenced by my older brother Richard who graduated from Massachusetts College of Art in the early 1960s. As part of my university studies in Lowell, Mass., I took a watercolor course with a prominent New England painter, Carlton Plummer, who lived in the area and had a studio on the Maine coast. One of his go-to instructions was “Think like a turtle and paint like a rabbit.” A watercolor painting must feel fresh and not overworked. He also took pleasure in “happy accidents” that occur when pigment meets wet paper. The pictures that follow date from 20 years ago. I don’t draw well, but I enjoy playing with the colors and trying to capture scenes and objects. These are done on sketchbook pages not loose sheets, the size being 11 x 14.

Deep-Sea Fishing Boats Loading Up, Hampton Harbor, N.H., watercolor, 1999

At Rest, Hampton Beach, N.H., watercolor, 1999

“Ellen Dane” at Hampton Harbor, N.H., watercolor, 2000

Underwood Drawbridge/Rte. 1, Hampton River, Hampton Beach, N.H., watercolor, 1999

'Slumgullion'

Slumgullion, goulash, American chop suey, Johnny Marzetti, macaroni ‘n’ hamburg (web photo courtesy of clivesdrive)

Slumgullion

In the time of the virus,

Every other Wednesday

Marie concocts pasta stew

With ground beef, elbows,

Chopped tomatoes, onions,

Green peppers, crushed garlic,

And a jar of branded red sauce,

Filling a deep skillet to the brim.

This favorite will last the week,

Better reheated on the stove

Or given a second life topped

With sliced cheese in the oven.

We’ve all been home-cooking

In the long months of lockdown,

Whipping up crowd-pleasers by heart

And re-thumbing Julia’s recipes,

Watching Jacques Pépin’s quick

Casual videos on the laptop, lifting

Tips from the Globe food writers.

Our sharp knives get a workout.

We don’t count the dirty pans.

No need to rush. This dish

Could use a little hot sauce, too.

—Paul Marion

'Tom & Me': A Blog Post from 2011

In a Google search for a detail about labor activist Sarah Bagley of nineteenth-century Lowell, Mass., this item popped up, a 2011 post I wrote for the RichardHowe.com blog in Lowell. The Tom here is poet Tom Sexton of Anchorage Alaska and Eastport Maine. He was born and grew up in Lowell.

Poet Tom Sexton (web photo courtesy of Northern Essex Community College)

Tom & Me

(RichardHowe.com, April 3, 2011)

Arthur’s Paradise Diner is tucked in along the canal in the shadow of the Boott Cotton Mills. Eating there is like eating inside an old wooden toolbox that is perfectly designed, without an inch of wasted space between the griddle and the booths. Tom ordered the cheese omelet and gave in to the cook’s urging to have just a minor pile of home fries while I chose the “small” French Toast breakfast (That’s three pieces for small; the large is six, can you believe it?) with potatoes on the side, which I didn’t finish. I think he said he hadn’t eaten in the diner since high school. I don’t imagine the decor has changed much since the late ’50s. The place was busy on Saturday morning even though Bridge Street was quiet at 8.15 a.m. It was a good morning for a walk.

From the diner we headed up the Eastern Canal with the sun at our backs, admiring the craftsmanship in the preservation work and new construction at the Boott, the restored boarding house (Mogan Cultural Center), not-so-new Boarding House Park pergola/performance pavilion, Robert Cummings’ three-part sculpture, Canalway path and railings, all the improvements in the area that says “National Park” more than any other except for the Lower Locks Complex between Middlesex Community College’s main building and the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center. Tom recounted stories of his extended family that are filled with enough drama for a family saga trilogy. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to see the drama in your driveway.

We crossed French Street at Lucy Larcom Park and paid our respects to the poet, editor, teacher, abolitionist who had her own park before Jack K. got his in 1988. Ellen Rothenberg’s serial public art installation in the park includes an unforgettable quote from Sarah Bagley, editor of the fiery Voice of Industry pro-labor newspaper of the 1840s: “Truth loses nothing upon investigation.” That would be a good slogan for a politician trying to beat back opponents who treat facts like a twistie that you use to tie up the bread bag. No photo or illustration of Sarah Bagley exists. She was a pioneer among women working beyond the farm and village, and became the first female telegraph operator of her day.

Our path turned up Merrimack Street, through Monument Square and the Ladd & Whitney tribute (Luther Ladd was 17 years old when he died on the street in Baltimore on his way to help protect Washington, DC). We stopped to take a good look at the Smith Baker Center, whose exterior red glowed in the early morning sun. I told Tom about the plans for the Kerouac Creativity Center and the prospects for a high-energy community arts program in the building. He liked the location, right across the street from Pollard Memorial Library and City Hall, and within sight of the Whistler House Museum of Art. We kept going up Merrimack, where he pointed out the same liquor store that sold him beer when he was in high school and way under 21. He said he had heard from someone that the pizza was tasty at Brothers Pizza at the corner of Cabot and Merrimack. We cut up Cabot and curled back on Market, passing the CCA, one of the stalwart social clubs that dot the city. It strikes me that most of these gathering places are primed for a generational turn. Maybe with an influx of new members these clubs can be re-energized as the vital “third places” that younger Lowellians say they are looking for.

When we got to Nick’s barbershop across from North Common Village, the owner I presume was dozing in one of the swivel chairs. Somebody has got to document this fantastic shop in photographs and/or video while it has its amazing interior. The walls are completely adorned with posters, snapshots, polaroids, news clippings, tickets, stickers, you name it. No fine artist could do a better job with an installation evoking time and place and culture. There’s a strong Sinatra thread, but so much more. It’s a time machine and wall-mounted archive. My friends at the National Park Service should certify this as a historical site and work with the owner to save it as is to show what Lowell culture is like in this long moment. And let the haircuts continue.

We crossed Market and stepped behind one of the brick housing units at North Common to get in back of Holy Trinity Church, where there was still a topping of snow on the faux temple ruins in the newly landscaped and paved parking lot. From there we headed toward the Whistler House Museum, which has a Lowell-theme art exhibition this month. The opening reception is next Saturday. Tom said he’d wander back in the afternoon to see the show. We looped back on Dutton and turned south on Market to get back to the ICC where he is staying. Tom said the downtown looks wonderful compared to the business sector he had driven through on Rte. 38, going from Lowell to Tewksbury the day before. He said that mishmash of commercial sites, shopping strip, parking-lot heavy parcels, fast food drive-thru’s, and auto service outfits of all kinds reminded him of nothing so much as Wasilla, Alaska, home of she-who-must-be-heard. Although he winters in Maine now, Tom’s permanent address is still Alaska, and he has his own view of what you can see from there.

—Paul Marion ( 2011)

'St. Lucia Landing'

“Hibiscus Lane, St. Lucia,” watercolor, January 2000.

St. Lucia Landing 

All night the sea rolling its dough—

Near imperceptible thrust squeezing

A white curl from the end of its flat blue.

Moon’s going to three-quarter, the stars sparse

As clouds push through the Lesser Antilles.

Fragment of one constellation—jagged line

Of light like decorated trees at Papa’s Taverna.

The noontime sea will be such crystal aqua

All I’ll be able to do is look, which is enough,

Not an easy thing, to sit and look—

Even now I’m scribbling for you.

High on a volcano, cloud shadows shift.

Where the neck shot fury, cold rock ages

On jungle trails in Soufrière.

—Paul Marion (2000)

Listening to George's 'All Things Must Pass'

Windjammer, St. Lucia, colored pencil (January, 1999)

Listening to George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’

I’m on the balcony notched into the rain-forest hill

Where the foil-blue sea seems to slide through railing posts,

The steep angle tipping me toward the Caribbean,

Blue like the blue in my son’s eyes that he got from grandfathers—

The bay-caught blue smoothing west to the horizon,

Which is no end at all, just the curvy Earth meeting sky

To join dark and light blue, a line that convinced early lookers of far danger,

The end beyond which the old maps warned “There be Monsters,”

For the edge appears to be there, even if always advancing,

So the best sailor never falls off but will forever wrap navigational yarn

Around the blue-green ball, this sphere holding its own in bottom-free space,

The forces and counter-forces swinging the unhinged globe

About the hot-spot Sun in a delicate yet titanic dance among moons,

Broken asteroids, and fiery projectiles—the Sun the same and never the same,

Not stopped in time like my recollection of Sunray Bakery,

Whose short, fat, crusty loaves my mother bought each week and brought home

In a white paper bag printed with the name of the shop in a red sunburst logo,

Humble homage to our star, not so different from desert Sun worshippers,

The Sun that does not rise or sink but flames in a self-published burn,

Flares leaping from the atomic pot, crackling enough to scramble radio waves,

Sun no more gold than the sky is blue.

—Paul Marion (1999)

Collages: Early 1970s

“War, Riots” (1974)

“Nixon, Gatsby” (1974)

“Three Girls” (1974)

“Sixties-Seventies People” (1974)

“Sports—detail” (1974)

“Sports” (1974)

“Blue Planet” (1974)

Ladd & Whitney of the Civil War

Cross-posted from the RichardHowe.com blog (4/20/20)

Ladd & Whitney Monument

Yesterday was the anniversary of the deaths of Luther Ladd and Addison Whitney, two young mill workers from Lowell who died in Baltimore on April 19, 1861, while serving with the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. (See yesterday’s post for the story of the Baltimore Riot). The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the city of Lowell honored Ladd and Whitney by erecting a monument that bears their names along Merrimack Street in Lowell. The monument was supposed to be dedicated in 1865 on the anniversary of their deaths, but the ceremony was postponed due to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a few days earlier. The monument was finally dedicated on June 17, 1865 (Bunker Hill Day). 

Ladd & Whitney Monument

The Lowell Monument

By Paul Marion

LUTHER LADD WAS SEVENTEEN. Seventeen years old when he was killed by a “Secesh” mob. On his way to shield Abe Lincoln from rebel soldiers within reach of the nation’s capital. Luther Ladd was seventeen. A boy from Alexandria, New Hampshire, the Granite State. He followed his three sisters to Lowell, classic Yankee mill girls. He found a job in the Lowell Machine Shop, a high-tech lab. Luther joined the City Guards. He was ready to go when the fire bell called citizen-soldiers to the armory in the Market House Building on Market Street. It was April 17—the country headed for the worst. He had drilled three times a week. The special bell meant “war.” Luther Crawford Ladd was 17 years old. Addison Otis Whitney from Waldo, Maine, was 22. Both were in Company D of the Massachusetts Sixth. Whitney had been in Lowell two years, working in the Number 3 spinning room of the Middlesex Corporation, one of the thousands of New England migrants in the city.

Ladd and Whitney, Sumner Henry Needham of Lawrence, and Charles A. Taylor of Boston, died on the street in Baltimore, Mary-Land. Protestors killed the men from Massachusetts. The first soldiers of the Union Army to die in “the great rebellion,” as Mass. Governor John Andrew called it in 1865 at the dedication of the Lowell Monument. Gray Concord-granite monument. Twenty-seven-and-a-half-feet high. Same look as Washington’s Monument, the shape of Cleopatra’s Needle, 3,000 years before. In June 1865, the Monument anchored Merrimack Square and gave it a new name: Monument Square. Later, a castle-like City Hall added an epic backdrop.

Luther Ladd was seventeen. What did he think? What made him a patriot? We don’t know enough about him to say. He was born three days before Christmas in 1843, and was named for a local minister. His biographer tells us he admired Alexander the Great and our nation’s Founders. “He delighted in farming and nature,” wrote a fellow New Hampshire citizen. He was not tall. We know him by his deeds. He volunteered. He trained. He answered the call. He was killed on April 19, 1861, while passing through Baltimore with his comrades. They wanted to defend Washington, D.C., from secessionist troops of the new Confederate States of America. He showed up to fight in a civil war. He was 17. He was a boy. He was an only son. Mother died when he was seven. Did he admire President Lincoln or was he moved by the Governor’s anti-slavery speeches? Historians report that he praised the U.S. flag with his last words. We have his likeness, an ambrotype made before he boarded the train for Washington. He wore a “tall bearskin hat and a long frock coat with black braid.” He carried a Springfield rifle. One of his sisters kept the original picture . . . which was printed in his biography that sold for 25 cents in 1862.

Dedication of Ladd & Whitney Monument, June 17, 1865

At the Monument’s dedication, the governor called Luther and Addison “martyrs” and described them as “two young artisans” from the city whose motto is “Art Is the Handmaid of Human Good.” More than 4,000 people attended the public tribute. On the day they had left Boston for Washington, one of their fellow soldiers said, “We shall have trouble today, and I shall not get out of it alive.

Two Poems in Cafe Review (Portland, Maine)

Big thanks to the editors at The Cafe Review in Portland, Maine, for accepting two of my poems for the Spring 2020 issue. The journal, established in 1989, is a quarterly whose current volume is No. 31. The editors publish poems, art, and book reviews by contributors across the country and around the world. Check the website for information on ordering copies, subscriptions, and submissions. My poems in this issue draw on a recent trip to Europe.

'Voices of Dogtown' by James Scrimgeour Named 'Must-Read' in Massachusetts Book Awards

Massachusetts Books Awards Must-Reads 2020 announced. Loom Press thanks the Massachusetts Center for the Book for selecting James Scrimgeour's VOICES OF DOGTOWN as a "Must-Read" book in the poetry category for 2019. On behalf of the author and our small publishing company we offer our gratitude for this outstanding recognition. Easy to order the book at www.loompress.com

Duomo di Milano

Web photo by Alessandro Grassani courtesy of The New York Times

Duomo di Milano

Early during the Covid-19 quarantine, a news photo

of the plaza fronting the Milan cathedral, the Duomo di Milano,

shows a masked man with two dogs and many birds,

maybe the same pigeons Rosemary and I saw last summer

landing on the arms of tourists to eat popcorn sold by hawkers

who work with pickpocket pals, expert at the bump-and-run

just as the pigeon-mass wheels up, bursting like a grenade

when one acute flier among them signals “Go!”

Chased by a strong germ, the local citizens

have scattered back behind doors, some nights singing

with neighbors through open windows or on balconies

above empty streets. The tourists went away

and may not return for a long time. In the chorus,

the spunky servers, barista, and chef di cucina

from the trattoria where we lingered one night.

On a plaza as wide as the church is tall, we joined sightseers

mixed with believers, moving but almost not moving, so packed,

across the paving stones. For three euros women choose scarves

draped over forearms of vendors outside pay-as-you-go toilets

alongside the cathedral, only one euro for a flush and hand gel.

Women cannot enter the Duomo with bare shoulders

even ten centuries after the marbled “failure” of mottled white,

(Oscar Wilde’s take, not mine, but I get his point),

a pile-up of steeples, flutes and flourishes, holy figures,

angels on high, Mary-tributes, stacked tip to top,

a giant gaudy birthday cake studded with candles

from which has dripped chalky coating, time-stopped,

one thousand years of prayers, and still standing,

a disco diva outside La Scala singing to the soft blue sky

when we returned in small groups to our air-conditioned bus.

—Paul Marion (2020)

'The Modernistics in Newburyport'

ENJOYED A LATE AFTERNOON performance by the Modernistics at the Fire House arts center in Newburyport, Mass. I went with Rosemary and a neighbor couple, Carol and Bob, from the high hill here in Amesbury. The quintet played tunes from the American Songbook, leaning toward early to mid-20th c. numbers including some swing and bebop as well as Ray Charles's "Georgia on My Mind" and mid-century pop tunes by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. 

The Modernistics

It was a music-museum experience for about 100 "seniors" in a 190-seat theater. Ken Burns would have appreciated the live history tour by the artists who matched the age of the audience, all highly skilled players (double bass, flute, two acoustic guitars with alternating ukulele, harmonica, stand-up bongos, and assorted percussion). The two front persons, a married couple named Powers, also tap-danced on a third of the numbers, with Mrs Powers and Mr Powers singing solo or together—it was like a cabaret show. One impression I had was that the music was just so musical and not assaultive at all in loudness or lyrics. They whipped up the energy on the swing pieces. Something pure about it. Also something lost and found about it.

When we got home, I put on The Killers Live at Royal Albert Hall followed by The Very Best of the Rolling Stones, 1964-1971. Just sayin’.

—February 15, 2020

New Essay in Franco-American Online Journal at UMaine Orono: "Ste. Therese"

The second issue of "Resonance," a bilingual online journal at UMaine-Orono has an essay of mine about growing up as a French Canadian-American Catholic. The issue has familiar names, including two others linked to Lowell, Mass., Emilie-Noelle Provost and Charles Gargiulo. Among the other contributors are novelist Ernest Hebert of N.H., historian and writer Bob Perreault of Manchester, N.H., and poet Bill Tremblay, who grew up in central Massachusetts and has been in Colorado for a long time. Kudos to the editors and publishers, particularly Rhea Cote Robbins and Steven Riel, who worked on my piece. To read a selection, click on the link and download.

My essay “Ste. Therese” about growing up in a French Canadian-American family in the 1950s and ‘60s in northeast Massachusetts is available here.

Ste. Therese of Lisieux, France

Patti Smith's New Book

Patti Smith’s New Book

BACK FROM THE DENTIST in the city where I used to live, I checked my mailbox and found Patti Smith’s new book that I had ordered from amazon.com, the big river of products seemingly in the sky overhead. Year of the Monkey from Knopf publishers is a far flight from her start in poetry with Seventh Heaven from Telegraph Books, a short, skinny book that I looked at fifty times but did not buy when I was a part-time clerk at the big yellow bookstore in Chelmsford, Mass., one town away from where I lived and had grown up. I was out of college a couple of years and had met the owner, Eric, as a customer, and we would chat at the counter, which led to a friendship, he from New Jersey like Patti, having bought the store after seeing a newspaper notice and being eager to try something new after doing ads for Macy’s.

Patti, a public-college student in New Jersey because that’s what her family could afford, was a classmate of a writer-friend of mine, Nancye, a longtime arts-and-entertainment reporter for the Lowell Sun, who now freelances from her house on the Maine coast, theatre her specialty. In college she and Patti said Hi to each other in the student publications office where Patti volunteered for the literary magazine and Nancye edited the yearbook. They didn’t engage, which Nancye regrets, now that we all see what happened. Patti tells interviewers she wasn’t outgoing at that age. She wanted to be a writer, she was writing, but Nancye didn’t save any of the early work if she had copies.

The monkey in Patti’s book makes me think of the Monkey Bridge in Heidelberg, which has had a sassy bronze animal on a wall near the bridge entrance since the 1400s. Custom has it that a person who rubs the monkey’s fingers is destined to return to the city on the Neckar River, which felt like Germany to me, having been in Germany only a few days and seen a couple of other cities, like Dusseldorf. Heidelberg has a warm tone, perhaps set by the romantic castle high above the historic business district, or maybe it’s the beer halls. One of the souvenir shops outside the castle had a large Ben & Jerry’s ice cream poster covering half the front door. The city is a short bus ride from the Rhine River for travelers like my wife, Rosemary, and me, who spent a day there last August, late in the month, when many of the locals were on holiday in Switzerland or France. A popular “old town” site is the antique student jail once used to lock up drunks who managed over the years to turn the holding cells into a geode of cartoons executed with surprising proficiency. Did the warden hand out brushes and paint pots to the blitzed scholars?

The monkey story reminds me of the picaresque scenes of Mark Twain in action or that he reports observing in his book A Tramp Abroad, something like autofiction if you wrote it today—This is what I did, this is what I’m thinking, but not really, not exactly, because I can’t show you a movie of my every moment, each of the supersonic messages in my brain. Germans have a word, kunstlerroman, for a book about a writer coming into his or her own as a person and an artist, but that’s not what Twain was doing. He spent the summer of 1878 with his family in Heidelberg, Zurich, and Florence, and fashioned his experiences as a long walk, the “tramp” being the excursion, not a reference to himself as a hobo. Tour guides in Heidelberg tell Americans that Twain may have chosen “Huckleberry” for a character name after learning that the city was built on what was called Huckleberry Hill for the area’s robust blueberry-like bushes. Records show that Twain was already writing the Huck Finn book and had the name. But it’s a good story for the tour guides.

Twain hiked with a make-believe friend, twinning fact and fiction, dreams and reality, not unlike Patti Smith’s method in the new travel book that takes her from San Francisco to Kentucky to other places, in her case usually solo, unusual for a celebrity but she seems to get away with it, all the while slightly destabilized by a friend’s dire medical condition and the declining health of playwright Sam Shepard, one time her boyfriend and now a cosmic always-friend. From the first friend’s bedside in S.F., she heads south to L.A. and San Diego, wandering, I could say sauntering in the old sense of the word, a saunterer being a searcher on the road to the Holy Land, sainte terre. Think about Patti’s road, St. Francis (a favorite city of her Beat favorites), St. James (Diego), City of Angels, St. Ann (Ana) the sainted cross (Santa Cruz), down along the loaded Mission Trail on the coast of the Golden State, not to overlook San Juan Capistrano where Rosemary and I toured the restored mission last winter, taking a photo of the Royal Road (El Camino Real), six hundred miles south to north from San Diego to Sonoma. Patti takes photos all the time when she’s on the move. Some of the images are reproduced in her book.

On her somewhat random journey, Patti meets brain-tunnel types who talk about Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 and mason jar-canning entrepreneurs. An ethereal Japanese cook materializes and makes soup for Patti’s scratchy throat. Like Twain, she’s in the moment as well as around and above the moment, making the moment that she composes later for the finished story. I don’t know how many of these scenes along the road are straight from her notes or jump shots of mind that come later—remembered fragments, some of the passages voiced like clipped Sunset Strip crime noir while other segments are outtakes from her brain-movie, Alice from Wonderland and peppy Pinocchio in key roles coming back from girlhood.

Patti’s is a dream book but not another Book of Dreams like Jack Kerouac’s (1960), published by City Lights in San Francisco (there’s that place circling back), his strange volume with eight years of transcribed fantasmic overnight features in Jack’s noggin, the cinematic shorts in his own private movie-house all “auteur”-like and highly plastic in their reality like the reports from Patti’s dreamscape that enter her book. When she came to Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell, Mass., in 1995 to celebrate and thank, I think, Jack-in-heaven, Patti read poems and prose and then sang with musician-friends, including an earthy “Dancing Barefoot” in bare feet on a cheap Persian rug covering the makeshift stage at Smith Baker Center, an abandoned Congregational Church across from City Hall, the same stage that Allen Ginsberg and colleagues, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure accompanied by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, had performed for the benefit of Mr. K. in late June 1988, surrounded by one thousand people, a full house, the night before the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative sculptural tribute at French and Bridge streets downtown. Lowell Franco-American operatic bard Gerry Brunelle and I read that night also but we were like Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock the raggedy morning after, not much crowd left when we took our turn after the stars, squashed cups in the aisles, forgotten jackets on seats.

Smith Baker Center, named for Rev. Smith Baker, not for two guys like the Smith Brothers on a cough drop box, is caving in but could be preserved and made to look like a smaller version of Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry country-music temple. Kerouac writes about walking home after school past the church’s “profound bloodred bricks . . . the brown lawn, the jag of snow, the sign announcing speeches” in his love-and-loss youthful romance Maggie Cassidy, another town-and-city story by the master of dualism. McClure would later tell California Magazine that the group reading in Lowell was the most important poetry reading of the year in America, and that says something doesn’t it? Manzarek read Mr. K’s words sandblasted into polished red-brown granite at the Commemorative and declared the whole thing “subversive.” He and McClure agreed that such paragraphs and poems are never cut into stone for the ages, and that this treatment had up to then been allowed only for politicians and generals, maybe a minister here and there or even a god. Thousands of words in granite pillars for as long as they can resist the acid rain.

My friend Nancye had a family event the night of Patti’s gig at Smith Baker, so didn’t attend the show, but her pal at the Sun, Dave, music guru in his own right, was on assignment and carried Nancye’s college yearbook to the show for Patti to sign, which she did, remembering their student times. I think Patti knew that Nancye had been dancing more than once on the American Bandstand TV show in Philly with host Dick Clark. The loop closed for a time machine-second. Patti was coming off a long absence as a performer as well as the recent passing of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, a musician also, and gave Dave a lot of time in a pre-show phone interview, reflecting on music and the world at large. Dave wrote later that the interview was his favorite in twenty years.

A week after Patti’s new book arrived, I ordered an expensive, sun-bleached, thumbed copy of Seventh Heaven from a rare book dealer in Chicago because I just had to have the book after all the years. I don’t like the poems nearly as much as I like Patti’s memory books, Just Kids and M Train, with their smooth revelations and sure sentences, but that’s not a fair test to apply to someone who was just a kid making those early poems. I have a line in my notes that may be a quote from Nancye or Dave or a comment of mine about the Monkey book. Could be from a dream: “Patti lets you feel like you’re a sparrow on her shoulder, seeing and hearing as she moves, even as she sleeps.”

September 30, 2019, Amesbury, Mass.

Paul Marion (c) 2019