Thanks to the Café Review in Portland, Maine, and respected critic Carl Little for a favorable review of my Lockdown Letters & Other Poems (Loom Press, 2020) in the recent issue. A couple of the European travel poems in the collection first appeared in Café Review, double thanks to the editors. I am grateful because reviews are hard to get in the independent, small-press sector. Carl got the sense of the book as well as anyone might. (This is not a complaint, but please note that there’s a tiny typo in the section about the surfer poem mentioned by Carl. It should read “surfers do the surfer trot …” Also, he mentions that the surfer poem is printed smaller than the rest of the book. That’s because I wanted to keep the long lines as is and not have the lines wrap around in some cases. The long lines in pairs are meant to mimic the waves rolling in.)
San Juan Capistrano Mission, Easter 1984
Rosemary and I recently returned from a week in Southern California, our first trip in three years after being confined to Amesbury, Mass., where we are fortunate to have a fine place to live, and trying to avoid the coronavirus. We went back to an area that is familiar to us from previous visits, and for me from my time living in Dana Point when I was a graduate student in the MFA writing program at UC Irvine. We spent half a day in San Juan Capistrano, touring the historic mission dating from the 1700s and the funky arts district of Los Rios Street (oldest continuous neighborhood in the state, close to the mission) and exploring the shops and eateries nearby. When we got back home I was reminded of the Easter Mass I attended at the Father Serra Chapel in the mission on Easter morning, 1984, just before I headed back East to start a new job as cultural affairs director at the Preservation Commission in Lowell, US Dept. of the Interior. I wrote about that Easter in my journal.
web photo courtesy of rcbo.org
April 22, Easter, 1984
Woke at sunrise and stayed up. A clear blue sky, bright sun. Drove to San Juan Capistrano for the 7 a.m. Mass at the mission. There was very little traffic, and only one other car was parked near mine on the main street. I thought I was too early, but when I walked around the corner, down the side street towards the chapel entrance, a steady line of people were going in. At 6:45 a.m. the chapel was full—I stood in the back with others. The chapel is four times as long as it is wide, an old structure, part of the mission complex. Twenty rows of benches run up each side, straight-backed wooden benches that seat five persons across. Another 25 people stood behind. The altar in the dark chapel was decorated with potted lilies and small red glass candle holders, lit and glowing. The white adobe walls showed their uneven texture. Large green beams run crosswise on the ceiling. On the beams are painted symbols, not Christian symbols, I don’t think, more closely resembling ethnic designs—flowers, swirls, and the like. The modest gold-gleaming altar stands before a back wall painted gold. The priest wore gold and pink vestments.
I was surprised when the old priest pronounced the first words of a Latin Mass. I had not heard that language in 15 or 20 years, since the reforms of Vatican Council II, when the English Mass was permitted. And the altar was turned round to have the celebrant face the congregation. I was in grade school at Ste. Thérèse church in Dracut, Mass. The Catholics answered the priest in Latin. Kyrie, alleluia, agnus dei, the mysterious words of the ceremony.
Readings this morning from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul to the Colossians, and Matthew were in English as was the simple homily read with difficulty by the priest. His message: Because Jesus fulfilled his promise to rise again, we must believe everything He is reported to have said. And, Easter is the most important date on the liturgical calendar.
Then came the crucial part of the Mass, the transubstantiation. Mystery. Faith. Ritual. I was moved.
Reading from his missal, the priest raised and lowered the chalice and ciborium, containing the wine and bread. Bells chimed. People kneeled, stood, voiced responses.
On both walls, between windows, were framed depictions of the Stations of the Cross, faded by time. Outside, where the ushers earlier counted people on the way in, is a sign: Maintain Strict Silence. But I heard the ushers talking and laughing during Mass. Collection baskets were handed from person to person for dollar bills and coins.
Many people rose to file ahead for communion. At that point I excused myself, walking past a long line of people waiting outside for the 8 a.m. Mass. I went across the street to break bread and crack eggs at the Café Capistrano with another group of the faithful.
Cruel vs. Kind, Not Red vs. Blue
web photo courtesy of fisher.osu.edu
CRUEL vs. KIND, NOT RED vs. BLUE
I wrote the response below for a closed group on Facebook called Election Support Group, but it deserves a wider airing. It’s a rant, so a lot more could be said in an extended argument. The gist of the complaint is that the Democratic Party is not answering Republican opponents in form and not taking the argument to the Republicans with enough energy and imagination.
The group coordinator posted the following to get responses from members of the group.
Did you stand up and cheer after seeing any of the following viral videos? -Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) taking on MTG and referencing the "Trump-Putin axis" -Sen Brian Schatz (D-HI) calling out the hypocrisy of Sen. Josh Hawley in no uncertain terms -State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) standing up against homo- and transphobic bullies bent on destroying public education? Do you wanna see more of this? Are you baffled why this kind of approach isn't at the center of the midterm election strategy? If so, you can call the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee @ (202) 863-1500 and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee @ (202) 224-2447 to share your feedback.—A.H.
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I want to know why most of the media reporting is about the dastardly actions of card-carrying Republicans and their allies? Day after day, we get reports of various government actions being taken that are either anti-democracy or anti-human dignity. Where are the counter-balancing government actions, especially in the states, with Democrats expanding liberty, protecting constitutional rights, and making the voting process easier and safer?
I'm thinking the Red and Blue color-coding of politics has become a big negative. What's really going on inside the various political maneuvers and legislative activity is about cruelty vs. kindness. That ought to be the labeling, not Red and Blue, but Cruel and Kind. There's nothing kind about the political hostility on the Right (these terms Right and Left are pretty useless also, from long-ago framing). The Democrats and their allies need to get in gear and start giving their supporters reasons and opportunities to show what they value. Why not rallies on the progressive side? Let people shout, LOCK THEM UP!, referring to the Trump Traitors, and KEEP TRUMP OUT! Make it simple and repeat it. There's no regular outlets for values display at a large scale on the Democratic side. Unleash Bernie and Elizabeth and Cory and AOC and Beto, people who have a track record of drawing crowds. Pair them up with Kamala and Joe. Get the young Democrats on stage. Do something with emotion!
'The Last Supper' (from 'Lockdown Letters & Other Poems' [2021])
The Last Supper
We arrived after dark in a group twice the size of the Apostles,
Not more due to controls, like an airlock to dehumidify us,
Precautions for the painting, its supper table more like a stage
With figures stopped at the words being said in that district,
Challenges to the oldsters and guides used to owning the show,
Not thrilled with an interloper, holier-than-thou, said to have
Powers of a comic-book hero, a carpenter’s kid from Nazareth
Sitting in the center with companions leaning in and away,
Triggered by what he has said, the forecast of betrayal;
One will front-stab, and the men, middle-aged or younger,
Followers of this new form of man who told loaded stories—
These guys had no idea about was coming.
What was I doing in front of Leonardo’s masterpiece?
Just outside, people walk their dogs, ride bicycles,
Chat in pairs. There’s no sign with an arrow aiming at
An icon of Western Civilization, no line-up of armed cops,
No landscaped entrance. Inside the simple meeting hall—
With a Crucifixion scene on one wall, not by famous Leo the engineer,
Who messed up the paint mix on his late-delivered tableau
And caused endless restoration—inside we looked and looked
And took phone-photos before exiting to the sidewalk, weaving
Between residents with loved pets and bags of supper food.
— Paul Marion, 2021
The Story Behind an Essay: Cut From American Cloth
The South Common, Lowell, Mass., the view today (Wikipedia image)
The Story Behind an Essay:
Cut From American Cloth
By Paul Marion
MY FRIEND Dick Howe reminded me that 2022 is the tenth anniversary of the chapbook or pamphlet with my essay “Cut From American Cloth,” in which I use the South Common in Lowell, Mass., as a window to look at the American experience—from Native tribes to twenty-first century urban pluralism. The essay is included in my book Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017, Bootstrap Press), but had previously appeared in other places. (The essay follows on this blog.)
Around 2003, I had an idea that I thought might generate interest from one of the major publishers. I had edited the early work of Jack Kerouac for Viking/Penguin in New York with some success. Kerouac’s Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writing (1999) sold well in hardcover and paperback and was translated into Italian and French for release in Europe. I was eager to follow up with another book in New York. My idea was to write a biography of Lowell, the story of the city as a quintessential American place. The elements all seemed to be there, from a Native American village at Pawtucket Falls to the hub of the Industrial Revolution with the first large-scale textile factories and on to a distinctive role in the Civil War and later a microcosm of immigration and Americanization. Household and near-household names in U.S. History had roles: F. C. Lowell, Larcom, Dickens as visitor, Emerson, Poe, Crockett, Douglass, Butler, Lincoln, and others in the nineteenth century. For the twentieth century, I had a cast of known figures and lesser knowns who made distinctive contributions, up to and including author Jack Kerouac and U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas running for president in the early 1990s.
Before that plan had come together in my mind, however, I envisioned a different book, one with a tighter focus. I would take the park across the street from my house in the middle of Highland Street and use that as the setting for an extended essay or short book that would be a deep investigation of the South Common, twenty-two acres of open space set aside in 1845 for the public good. I began thinking about the South Common as my urban Walden Pond. But instead of H. D. Thoreau writing about the virtues of withdrawal from society and contemplation of the woods, I would explore the notions of community and social engagement as evidenced in and around the common. The very idea of a common was an embrace of one’s neighbors. The South Common book would be an anti-Walden story about joining, not quitting the civic scene. Surrounded by the building blocks of a city, the common is a representative setting with school, church, courthouse, businesses, transportation hub, homes, and playing fields, most of the component parts of a functional community. This was Wamesit territory before the colonizers came in the 1600s, and the approximate square of land was part of the farm-to-factory development in the region. After considering how to approach the tug-o-war with Thoreau, I didn’t do a deep dive on the anti-Walden theme, but rather wrote about the character of the common and some of the notable people associated with it, such as longtime Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers. Kerouac makes a cameo appearance as does one of Babe Ruth’s mentors who taught at the Catholic boys’ high school Keith Academy overlooking the common.
The essay “Cut From American Cloth” was first published in the UMass Lowell Literary Society’s annual journal, The Offering, in 2007. Lloyd Corricelli and David Daniel, editors of River Muse: Tales of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley (Sons of Liberty Publishing, 2011), reprinted the essay in their anthology. Feeling good about the composition, I asked Ryan Gallagher and Derek Fenner at Bootstrap Press in Lowell if they would like to publish the essay in a letterpress form, a limited-edition chapbook, maybe four hundred copies. We didn’t do the letterpress printing, but they designed the book, which was released by my Loom Press in 2012. I kept the craft aspect of the publication by doing a hand-sewn or tied binding with waxed linen thread. The essay would appear again in 2017, reprinted in my collection Union River: Poems and Sketches, which Bootstrap did publish.
On a somewhat parallel track to the writing and release of the essay, I was working with my then-literary agent in New York, Sterling Lord, on a book proposal for the Lowell “biography” that he could offer to trade publishers in New York and elsewhere. The proposal was titled “Cut From American Cloth: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lowell, Massachusetts,” which is wordy but says what I wanted to write about. At the time, we were seeing books about discrete subjects like cod and longitude. Doing a book on Lowell seemed plausible.
Lord shopped the book around in the early 2000s, sending the proposal to Doubleday and other major publishers. The Globe Pequot Press, which does a lot of New England titles, gave us the most positive response, but the acquisitions editor could not get the approval of her acquisitions committee. Other publishers decided that Lowell was not a large enough subject or a sufficiently known quantity to warrant its own book. Sterling Lord would later get a contract for Stephen Yafa, who grew up in Lowell, for the book Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber (Viking, 2006), with much about the Lowell mills, which has the single-subject focus as mentioned above in books of this type.
In 2010, I was approached by the National Park Service in Lowell, Superintendent Michael Creasey, about writing the story of Lowell National Historical Park for publication. Each park is required to have an institutional history on record. Sometimes these documents live in a file cabinet or online folder, and other times the park history makes it into book form. Creasey wanted an authoritative, reader-friendly narrative, the story of an innovative national park that helped spark a city’s comeback. Many dozens of magazine and newspaper articles about the Lowell renaissance had been churned out in thirty-plus years, but there was no book tying together all the facts and implications. Creasey pictured a regional and national audience of park professionals, preservationists, public history scholars, folklife researchers, industrial history geeks, urban planners, fans of Americana, and tourists in Lowell who would pick up this book in the gift shop at the Visitor Center.
The Park Service gave me free hand to write the story as I understood it without leaning on me in any way to shape the account. We were fortunate to find Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, known for issuing books by scholars and museum professionals. I wrote the story from 2011 to 2013, and the book was published in hardcover and paperback in 2014: Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park. Covering the revitalization of the city from the 1970s through 2010, with a re-cap of the full history of the city up front, this book wound up being a version of that city biography, the later years, that I had imagined. Like a lot of academic publications, the hardcover is wildly expensive, however, the Park Service offers the paperback edition at a fair price. UMass Lowell has used the book in some sections of its Honors College first-year seminar on Lowell. The book has been a regular seller at the Park gift shops at the Market Mills Visitor Center and Boott Cotton Mills Museum on the other side of town.
So here we are ten years after the chapbook-length essay, which has found readers locally and beyond. Thanks to Dick Howe for asking me to describe the back story. The larger narrative of Lowell and pre-Lowell has yet to be written, something to consider with the two-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Lowell due in 2026. In whatever way the story is told (print, website, exhibition) the new, broader consciousness in the history field will require that a full account of the land, river, and people be told without any bias in the before-and-after bracketing of a timeline. The “Lowell” story doesn’t begin with investors from the Boston area aiming to build a a factory complex. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., recently reorganized its presentation of the history of northeast Massachusetts and the nation, integrating the experience of original inhabitants of what we call New England and the United States into a comprehensive story of all the people who have been and still are on this land.
2022
Cut From American Cloth: An Essay
Ten years ago, in 2012, this essay was published in a pamphlet or chapbook form after having appeared earlier in a journal and an anthology. The backstory of the essay is in a companion piece on this blog. Here’s a view of the South Common from a vintage postcard.
The South Common, vintage postcard
Cut From American Cloth
By Paul Marion
IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, workers in the red-brick mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, each year produced enough cotton cloth to wrap the world. More importantly, the city known for manufacturing textiles produced the stuff of America itself: ideas and merchandise, entrepreneurs and generals, politicians and artists, religious leaders and labor champions, sports heroes and movie stars, inventors and criminals, and a multitude of citizens from the immigrants, refugees, and migrants who crowded its streets.
To understand America, a good place to start is where you are. In my case, it is Meetinghouse Hill, the rise on the far side of the twenty-two acre South Common opposite my house. City leaders set aside the land for the public good in 1845. With my wife and son, I live at 44 Highland Street in Lowell. In 1880, my great-great grandfather Marion trekked from Canada to find work in this burgeoning northeast Massachusetts mill city, and I was born in a neighborhood across the river nine years after my father returned from World War II. Like my father’s people, my mother’s ancestors traveled the Normandy-Quebec-Lowell route. My wife’s heritage is Irish on both sides, with Lowell roots winding back to the 1870s. Our son is named for the original Marion in Lowell, a carpenter, and her grandfather, a longtime jeweler in the city—all Josephs.
Built in 1860s, my family’s house was once owned by the Appleton Manufacturing Company, which was formed in 1828, five years after the first mill began producing cloth in Lowell. The Appleton’s managers who lived in the house through the late nineteenth century could see the tops of their factories from the second-floor windows. Our house was bought in the 1930s by my wife Rosemary’s grandparents, the jeweler Joseph Foley and his wife, Gertrude O’Neill Foley. Joe Foley’s mother scrubbed floors and washed dishes in the mansion at 42–44 Highland Street not long after she emigrated from Ireland. Imagine the satisfaction and sense of class revenge in Joe’s heart as he signed the purchase papers.
On special occasions, when we sit for dinner in our elaborately detailed front room, I picture a scene in Doctor Zhivago, the one in which the poet-physician returns to Moscow from his forced service with fighters in the hinterlands only to see that the Bolsheviks have confiscated his family’s house. When he looks up at the scruffy crowd hanging over the upstairs banister and asks what is going on, one of the comrades tells him the arrangement is “more just.” In the moment all he can do is agree. “Yes, more just.”
From my bedroom window, I look across the Common to the red-brick Eliot Presbyterian Church atop Meetinghouse Hill. In 1930, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Commission installed a bronze plaque near the church, marking the location of Reverend John Eliot’s log cabin chapel in 1648. Adventurer Simon Willard, who had clashed with local peoples since arriving in the colony, built the cabin to use as a frontier court—it was the first structure built by Anglo settlers in the place that became Lowell.
A graduate of Jesus College of Cambridge, Eliot started out as a school assistant in Chelmsford, England. After converting to Puritanism, he fled to Massachusetts in 1631 to avoid persecution. Eliot was the first Christian preacher to journey from Boston to the village of Wamesit, named for its tribe, at the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord rivers. Beginning with a first trip to the northwest woods in 1647, Eliot often traveled with Major General Daniel Gookin, Superintendent of Indians in the colony, who “saved Eliot’s neck more than once,” wrote Rev. David Malone, former pastor of the Eliot Church.
In 1653, colonial officials designated the broad wedge of land bounded by the Concord and Merrimack for the Pennacook peoples—to be their property. Everything around them had already been signed away by Passaconaway, leader of the local tribes who has come down to us through European accounts as a shaman who could set water aflame, generate a live snake by rubbing its shed skin in his hands, and make trees vibrate. Passaconaway deeded to the English a vast tract of land between present-day Newburyport, Massachusetts, and the Merrimack River. Fifteen years later, he committed his people to the governance of the Bay Colony. His strategy of accommodation hardly satisfied the settlers’ appetite for land and control. By 1660, English settlers had moved deep into the interior, and all evidence suggested more of them were coming. Passaconaway gathered his people for a farewell address—the substance of which was reported by an English observer with partial understanding of Algonkian. “I am going the way of all the earth,” the sachem began.
“I am ready to die and not likely to see you met together anymore. . . . Take heed how you quarrel with the English. Hearken to the last words of your father and your friend. The white men are the sons of the morning. The Great Spirit is their father. . . . Never make war with them. Sure as you light the fires, the breath of heaven will turn the flame upon you and destroy you . . . .”
According to legend, Passaconaway withdrew to the northern mountains and some years later was swept into the sky in a huge maple sleigh drawn by flying gray wolves.
The area to the right of my house steps down to the western bank of the Concord and until recent times was called Wamesit Hill, though the only Native American in sight now is the one positioned at the center of the state emblem that appears on the Tercentenary plaque on Meetinghouse Hill and on the flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts displayed outside the Superior Court House nearby and at the Gallagher Transportation Center a block away.
In the early winter of 1943, twenty-year-old Jack Kerouac had a night job parking cars at the Hotel Garage on Middlesex Street, on the back slope of Meetinghouse Hill. He was in sight of a handsome brownstone train depot, since demolished, a short way up the tracks from Gallagher terminal. Long before he composed his signature “October in the Railroad Earth,” he sketched the local scene during down time in the garage office, itself now gone:
“One night, returning from work in the casual, squalid atmosphere of railroad yards, warehouses, switch towers, idle boxcars, and one lonely little lunch cart across the tracks, as I was approaching the rail crossing near the old depot that we have in my home town, I had to lean against a sagging fence (black with soot-years) for fully ten minutes while a mighty locomotive went by freighting ninety-six cars: coal cars, oil tanks, wooden boxcars, all types of commercial rolling stock. While I loafed there with a cigarette, watching each car rumble past and checking the cargoes, a thought came to me with swift and lucid impact, with the same jolt of common sense and disbelief in the scantiness of my own intelligence that I had felt when first I understood the working of a mathematic equation. ‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘does not this rich cargo, these cars, that terrific locomotive belong to me? . . . and to my fellow men? . . . Why are they not, like my trousers, my property? Who covets these great things so that myself and my fellow men are not heir to their full use?’ Then I asked myself, ‘Are we not all men living alone on a single earth?’”
The morning freight train slides behind the long red flank of a former patent medicine lab and continues past the terminal while passengers wait for the 9:07 a.m. run to Boston. Copper flashing gleams on the adjacent roof of gray granite Keith Academy, once the turreted city jail and since renovated into upscale apartments. The boxcars are blocks of American place. Appalachicola, Port St. Joe Route, Soo Line, Maine Central, Rio Grande, Milwaukee, Santa Fe, Illinois Terminal, Penn Central, Southern Pacific, Bangor and Aroostook, Atlantic and Western, Boston and Maine—national freight, movable goods, raw material, made things—the weight that spreads cross country. Everything seems to come through Lowell. Burlington Northern, Springfield Terminal, Canadian Pacific.
What happened to the Canadian Sausage Company of Lowell? The red-and-white trucks scooted around the city, delivering fresh meats to grocers and butchers. Like the freight cars of place, the sausage trucks stood for the French-Canadian presence. If you were French Canadian, you noticed when the truck passed by. You saw that word “Canadian.” It was like seeing maple leaf cookie packages in the crackers-and-cookies aisle at the market. And it made you think of grandparents, who served plates of maple leaf cookies and offered Christmastime gift boxes of painfully sweet, grainy, creamy maple candies.
On a siding just north of the station, there’s a scrap train—ground-up fenders and stoves and corroded pipes en route to the smelter, the chopped ham of American industry. In the rail yard, freight-car murals in graffiti code, the blocky colored letters like harsh plastic alphabet-magnets on a refrigerator door.
Next to the train station stands the ugly mill building on Thorndike Street that you cannot miss, if you listen to local cable tv commercials from Comfort Furniture. The wavy wooden floors of the four-story complex creak and squeak when customers wind through aisles between the tons of sofas, recliners, dining room sets, lamps of all types, coffee tables, bunk beds with matching desks, and assembly-required home entertainment center shelf units. There is only a hint of the patent medicine production plant that thrived in this factory. Running sideways up the tapered brick chimney is the word “Hood’s,” for C.I. Hood & Company, one of the city’s two massive patent medicine operations of the nineteenth century. Cartons of vegetable pills, tooth powder, olive ointment, and syrups promising cures for everything from rheumatism to syphilis filled the loading dock. When it was built in 1893, the Hood laboratory was the world’s largest medicine manufacturing building. Charles Hood’s specialty was a bottled syrup called Sarsaparilla, which promised to “cure neuralgia pains.”
Lowell’s patent medicine firms helped shape the future of not only entrepreneurship, but also mass advertising in this country. Pill-making and bottling plants were combined with on-site printing shops. Hood’s main competitor in Lowell was J.C. Ayer and Company, which, at its height around 1900, published promotional literature, especially American Almanac, in various languages around the world—15 million copies. Master salesman Ayer showered emperors, pashas, and even the Czar of Russia with fancy cartons of his Cherry Pectoral respiratory elixir. The medicine industry picked up some of the business slack when textile manufacturing sagged. One of its lasting effects is that people in this region still ask for a “tonic” when ordering a soft drink. Outside the office, on the second floor of Comfort Furniture, the owners have a display of colorized postcards, a “Sarsaparilla Rainy Day Puzzle,” and crinkled photographs from the Hood firm.
For the first 17 years that I lived on Highland Street, every weekday at 3 p.m. during the school year a dozen or more yellow buses pulled into the semi-oval driveway in front of the Rogers Middle School that faces my house. The school was a microcosm of New Lowell, with Cambodian Americans making up more than half the building’s population—the rest were Portuguese-American kids from long-settled families around St. Anthony’s parish in the Back Central section and newcomers from Brazil, Cameroon, and Guatemala, along with the third-, fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-generation Lithuanian-, Greek-, French Canadian-, and Irish-American youngsters. The descendants of the native peoples and early English colonists are as scarce as heirloom species in the flower boxes under the windows on Elm Street a block away. In the school lobby students with newcomer DNA could read about Edith Nourse Rogers, who still holds the record as the woman who served longest without interruption in the U.S. House of Representatives (1925 – 1960). The Great Recession of 2008-09 claimed the Rogers as City Hall budget cuts led to its closing—despite the “Rogers School Rocks” protest signs waved by kids and their parents.
“Congresswoman Rogers was a liberal and an internationalist,” writes Mary H. Blewett, longtime professor of history at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell, “typical of successful Republicans of the northeast. She voted for most of the key New Deal programs of the thirties—the Wagner Act which protected union organization, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the minimum wage law of 1938—in line with the needs of her Lowell constituents, if not with the Republican leadership.”
A Mainer by birth, Rogers married into a wealthy textile industry family in Lowell, where she had studied in a private girls’ school. She succeeded her husband, Congressman John Rogers, when he died in office. “Mrs. Rogers” became the veterans’ best friend, her experience with the military having begun with agencies serving the wounded in France during World War I. In 1939, moved by reports of abuse of German Jews, especially the brutality of Kristallnacht (the sanctioned night attack on Jews in their homes, shops, and synagogues), she and Sen. Robert F. Wagner of New York filed a refugee aid bill that would have allowed 20,000 German refugee children into the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld his support, and despite lobbying by children’s advocates across America, the bill was defeated at the committee level. Mrs. Rogers backed laws creating a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1941 and the G.I. Bill of Rights, the latter providing a range of social, financial, and educational benefits to World War II veterans. She was 79 when she died in 1960, in the midst of a re-election campaign.
Mrs. Rogers was in the middle of a line of Republican U.S. Representatives from the Lowell area who controlled the seat from 1859 to 1974, with the exception of a single two-year term for Democrat John K. Tarbox (1875 – 1877). It took a man who grew up on Highland Street to break the Republican streak.
Sitting at a desk in his father’s dry-cleaning shop on Gorham Street in June 1968, just days after Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated, 27-year-old Paul Tsongas wrote a letter to the editor of the Lowell Sun:
“I read with dismay your editorial attacking foreign reaction to the tragedy of Robert Kennedy. Your advice for them to ‘keep their stupid mouth shut’ is not the kind of reasoned awareness for which these times call. No one has much patience with those who allege conspiracy in the murders of President Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and whoever should follow them. Certainly, many foreign capitals wish us ill and will resort to misrepresentations. This however should not obscure the fact that the world beyond our borders, including our closest friends, stands horrified at our shoot-em-up mentality.
“I was in a small village in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps when President Kennedy was slain. My grief and agony were shared by the Ethiopians among whom I lived. They shed tears over the senseless death of such a ‘Tru Sew’ (good man). They felt that he belonged to the world and the promise of a brotherhood, and his death did indeed diminish us all. This was at the time when Time magazine would arrive with graphic pictures of Bull Conner and his dogs brutalizing Southern blacks. We did what we could to defend America. It became very difficult when four of my Ethiopian students came to the United States and received the stinging backlash of racism. They returned to Ethiopia forever disillusioned with a nation that professes to believe that ‘all men are created equal.’”
The next year he won a seat on the Lowell City Council and set out on his own “journey of purpose,” to quote the title of a book of his speeches and essays.
He and his fellow Democratic members of the “Watergate Class” dominated the 1974 election and took office the following January with a mandate to reform the government. The son of a Harvard-educated small-businessman, Tsongas was raised in a large white house on the corner of Highland and Thorndike streets. He caught the public service fever from President John F. Kennedy and, ultimately, as a former U.S. Senator challenged Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton one-on-one in the 1992 presidential primaries, winning New Hampshire and eight more state contests before an empty war chest forced him to withdraw. Through his Washington years he had a red-phone connection to Lowell’s City Hall and made the city’s rebirth his passion. It became an article of faith with him that one must honor the toil of past generations and respect the potential of future generations.
The reclaiming of Lowell came to symbolize that faith. Tsongas embodied the “Don’t Quit” character of Lowell that explains in part the community’s resurgence. He wrote the legislation that created Lowell National Historical Park in 1978, adding his hometown to the list that includes the Grand Canyon and Statue of Liberty. The cradle of the American Industrial Revolution would be preserved. The renaissance sparked by the park made Lowell a model of urban regeneration. In the last 13 years of his life, he was as well known for his high-profile fight against cancer. He died of pneumonia in 1997.
Places change, people enter and exit the stage—we won’t see Paul Tsongas jogging through the South Common, we won’t see Brother Gilbert who taught at Keith Academy after mentoring the young sportsman George Herman Ruth (the “Babe”) in Baltimore or Ruth Meehan who organized U.S.O. shows around the world and drove a candy apple-red coupe out of the driveway at 48 Highland.
Some buildings are lost entirely. The Commodore Ballroom, later Mr. C’s Rock Palace, once commanded the middle of Thorndike Street. The big bands and blues greats made it the favored nightspot. In the ‘60s, major acts like Paul Revere and the Raiders and local phenoms like Little John and the Sherwoods headlined on weekends. You have to find it in pictures on the web now.
Somewhere in my local travels I heard a story about Jim Morrison of the Doors arriving early for a gig at the Commodore in the fall of 1967 when “Light My Fire” was still torching the competition. He had heard Kerouac was living on Sanders Avenue, about five minutes away by car, so he got a ride over to see the 45-year-old author who by all accounts was in serious physical decline. When he got to the house, Mrs. Kerouac refused to let him in. Ragged young visitors materialized on the doorstep all the time. There would be no grand encounter of bare-chested pop poet and booze-bellied Beat Pop. Jack was sleeping.
From my front porch, I can take in the site of Simon Willard’s court at Wamesit Village and the present Superior Court of the county, where Daniel Webster argued cases and then stayed for dinner. With St. Peter Church razed, only one of Highland Street’s great gray bookends remains, the sturdy Lowell Jail that became a Catholic High School for boys—which, to some graduates, was not a substantial change of use at all. On mornings when I circle the track at the bottom of the Common’s green bowl, I scan a roster of names tied to the ridgeline of buildings—Rev. Eliot, politico Charles Gallagher, Hood the Medicine Man, theatre-magnate Keith of the Academy, and Congresswoman Rogers.
These names are entwined in history like the signature grapevines of the neighborhood, hundreds of them planted through the decades by Portuguese immigrants—green signs marking the presence of people who turn open space around their modest homes into miniature farms along the narrow, hilly ways. In the right season, waiting a minute before starting their cars for the drive to work, my neighbors, gardeners like Joe Veiga and Natalie Silva, hear the larks and the locomotive pulling toward Boston.
2012
Broken Through
Ukraine under fire (Web photo courtesy of Euronews.com)
The world has a compound fracture.
We are a body in pain.
Bone broken through skin in a vital part.
My Boy Scout Handbook described first aid for this wound.
End of a snapped white bone, ragged as a snapped pine branch.
Bloody punctured flesh, the victim in shock, semi-conscious.
Rub the arms and legs towards the body core.
Warm with a blanket, offer water, hot tea.
An extreme injury a scout hopes not to see.
The Handbook shows what to do:
Splint and bandage, the picked-up wood and torn-off shirtsleeve,
First response,
Step-by-step.
Now.
—Paul Marion, March 8, 2022
The Sherwoods Rocked the House
Little John & the Sherwoods Rocked the House
By Paul Marion
“. . . the most exciting and memorable days of my teenage years . . . .”—David Arsenault
When “Light My Fire” was number one nationwide in August 1967, the Summer of Love, the Doors played the Commodore Ballroom, a performance and dance hall with tremendous entertainment bones near the Lowell train station. The earlier iteration of the Commodore, which had opened in 1924 as the Kasino, brought Count Basie and Duke Ellington to the city. People came from all over for the big sounds. The modern Commodore presented Jimi Hendrix, Peter and Gordon, the Jeff Beck Group featuring Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart, and the Kinks. Fans saw Cream, Vanilla Fudge, Moby Grape, Ultimate Spinach, and the 1910 Fruit Gum Company—note the food trend in names. Tickets ran from $2 to $3.50. [Sold in 1973, the renamed Mr. C’s Rock Palace lasted ten years, during which fans experienced Cheap Trick, B. B. King, the Ramones, Foghat, Orpheus, and others.]
The Sherwoods
The Sherwoods opened for the hottest bands.
Poster from the Mr. C’s Rock Palace years.
In the 1960s, Canobie Lake amusement park over the state line in Salem, New Hampshire, showcased Sonny & Cher, Brenda Lee, the Supremes, and many others. The record stores in Lowell, Garnick’s and Record Lane, stocked the latest music. The five-and-ten stores on Merrimack Street, Giant Store on Dutton Street, and Beaver Brook Department Store in Dracut carried 45 records and albums that kids heard about on TV shows like Shindig, Hullabaloo, and the long-running American Bandstand with host Dick Clark. Local garage bands played at high school dances and parties. Battles of the Bands sprung up in parish halls and the Grange Hall in Dracut. The music never stopped.
Two AM radio stations, WLLH and WCAP, served the region, especially WLLH, with its pop music format in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1971, WLTI FM radio (for a time WJUL and now WUML at UMass Lowell) gained a studio in the basement of UMass Lowell’s Lydon Library and aired performances by Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa, Cheech and Chong, and others along with music consistent with its “underground radio” slogan.
The Commodore’s popular house band in the mid-1960s was Little John & the Sherwoods, like Paul Revere and the Raiders in name and energy. They rocked the house with covers of top hits and a steady stream of Beatles’ numbers, with a few original songs mixed in. Band member Ed O’Neil told the Lowell Sun: “We’d rehearse forty to sixty hours a week. We’d go in sometimes at eleven in the morning and rehearse until eleven, twelve at night. Plus, we’d play there three times a week.”
The Commodore Ballroom in Lowell.
The Sherwoods sometimes practiced a few houses away from mine on outer Hildreth Street in Dracut, a couple of miles from Lowell. Drummer David Arsenault’s house was on New Boston Road, two curves past the Shaw Farm dairy cows. The road runs parallel to Hildreth for a stretch. I could see his family’s home across old farmer fields that had begun to sprout small houses in a development marketed as Raven Acres (Oriole Drive, Blue Jay Avenue, Raven Road). I was a Beatles nut, too, and would sit on the cinder-block front steps and listen to the amped-up guys slinging fists across steel strings and banging the snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The five-man band surfed on the British Invasion wave led by The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Hollies, Freddy and the Dreamers, Kinks, and Animals. American groups pushed forward, too. The Beach Boys. Mitch Ryder. The Four Tops.
In December 1965, the Sherwoods cut a single for the Fleetwood music company with two songs they had written in a flash, “Long Hair” on one side and “Rag Bag” on the other. By March 1966, the record ranked third on the list of Top 45 Hits at Record Lane stores in Lowell and Lawrence, after Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” (1) and “You’re My Soul & Inspiration” by the Righteous Brothers (2) and ahead of Nancy Sinatra (“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”), Cher (“Bang Bang”), and The Beatles (“Nowhere Man”).
Charlie Gargiulo of Lowell was a young teenager when he saw the band a couple of times. He says, “They took on near legendary status when they put out a single, an honest-to-God record. I bought it and had it for a long time. The fact that a local group had a single was a near Jackie Robinson-like moment for us Beatles-worshiping kids who could picture scruffs like us having a chance to become genuine recording artists someday.”
A thousand kids would pack the Commodore on weekends at the height of the rock music explosion in the 1960s. Larger venues drew up to 3,000. David Arsenault told talkingteenbeat.com, “our manager [Commodore owner Carl Braun] got us booked at other venues, mostly colleges, and the ballrooms at the beach resorts throughout New England.”
The Sherwoods had chances to tour with the Beach Boys and Young Rascals when they were hot, but honored the house-band contract that kept them home to open for the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page, Neil Diamond, and other chart-toppers. Just before Arsenault got drafted into the Army in 1966, his bandmates cut his long hair on stage at the Commodore. “They threw locks of my hair to the screaming girls in the audience,” he said.
When he returned from his Army service in Germany, his bandmates had split up. He kept in touch with them and played for his own enjoyment. In addition to Arsenault on drums, the band members were John Harrington (guitarist and singer), Barry Blufer (bass player and singer), Bob Star (singer), and Bob Rock (guitarist) who was later replaced by Ed O’Neill (guitarist and singer), and later, Ronnie Gagne (drums) and Dave Sloan (keyboards).
[For background facts and images, thanks to Merrimack Valley Magazine, talkingteenbeat.com, Music Museum of New England online, The Sun newspaper, concertarchives.org, wikipedia.org for local radio history, and rateyourmusic.com]
Poets on Craft: Dual Interview with Poet Chath pierSath
Thanks to Bunkong Tuon, writer, critic, and professor at Union College in New York for hosting this interview of Chath pierSath and me on the topic of the craft of poetry.
Here’s the link for the interviews in the Cultural Weekly/Next Echo, an online publication.
Chath pierSath
Roger Brunelle: Teacher, Citizen, Lowell Bon Vivant
An appreciation of Roger Brunelle for Dave Moore in the U.K., all-around Kerouac wiseman and founder of a large Kerouac Group on Facebook.
Au Revoir, Roger Brunelle (1934-2021)
By Paul Marion
Au revoir, Roger. Let’s hope we do see you again in some other cosmic zone or time-travel hotel. Across Lowell in Massachusetts, New England, in America, and within countries afar, Canada, France, the UK, Italy, and others, people heard the news that Roger Brunelle has passed and felt sad. Born twelve years after John Kerouac, Roger was the last linguistic link (with deep knowledge of Kerouac’s writing) to the author’s generation in his hometown. Roger’s special understanding of the French portion of Kerouac’s soul and mind gave him an advantage in presenting the essence of the author to curious pilgrims or well-read scholars. Formally educated in languages, Roger honored the distinct French shaped by the Quebec immigrants and their descendants making their way in a new nation. He was the last witness from his time to testify. Now, we take what we learned from him and carry it forward, spreading the word to new readers.
Kerouac had something to say about geniuses, born or made. The difference was about invention. Roger looked around his city in the mid-1980s and decided it was time to take Kerouac to the streets. He invented the guided tour to Kerouac places in Lowell, and through decades led hundreds of walking and bus tours for thousands of people of all ages. He researched carefully in designing his tours. What one got on a tour was enthusiasm. Spiritual inspiration. The facts and the stories. For Roger was deeply spiritual while being thoroughly of the Earth. He understood the innate spirituality of Jack Kerouac. He conveyed it.
And Roger loved his city, for all its small glories and stubborn imperfections. He was not going to let Lowell get away with not claiming Kerouac. He preached the word in his own earthy way. He might surprise his tour members by reading from Visions of Gerard in the pulpit of St Louis de France church of Kerouac’s boyhood parish after getting the key from the pastor. Or he might take them into the back room of the Rainbow Café on Cabot Street with its makeshift shrine to Jack behind the pool table.
Roger Brunelle stood up for French Canadian-American culture in Lowell, the ocean in which the SS Kerouac sailed. He was a memory worker as one woman in Little Canada called herself when interviewed about the songs she knew from her youth in the city. He was a cultural conservationist, preserving what was known about his people. But he was a thoroughly modern man, freed from the ropes of superstition and cold hearts. He shared the Beat vibe.
As a teacher he encouraged countless students in his French and Latin classes (48 years). Roman history was living history for Roger. He held a master’s degree in Linguistics from Middlebury College in Vermont. He studied French literature in Paris. He served in the US Army and had tattoos long before body art went mass-culture. He was happy to meet a breakfast pal for beans, toast, and coffee at Vic’s diner near his house close to Beaver Brook.
We will miss him, but his wife, Alyce, and children and grand-kids will miss him more. I’ll miss him as a friend and co-conspirator. The international Kerouac community lost a passionate member on February 10. All hail, Roger. We are grateful for all the good you brought to this life.
Revisiting a Poem---for the Biden-Harris Administration
Web photo courtesy of viator.com
Web photo courtesy of nps.gov
Checking the Property
by Paul Marion
My nine-year-old son says, “I’m going to read the ‘Gettysburg Address.’”
What’s the Lincoln shorthand? Freed the slaves, saved the union.
People crowd the marble steps at dusk. A sign asks for silence.
When he sees her lining up a shot, a guy in a straw cowboy hat
Offers to take a picture of my wife, our son, and me.
Climbing the stairs, I had caught sight of the figure behind columns,
And then lost him due to the steep ascent,
Only to come upon the sculpture again near the top,
Where visitors gaze at the huge seated president,
Whose massive square-toed boot juts out, looking as if it could kick
Jefferson Davis’ football the length of the Reflecting Pool
And onto the white spike of the Washington Monument,
At late day reflecting sun off its narrow western face,
A glow-stick numeral standing for the first president,
Who set the constitutional republic in motion,
The stone blocks a different shade on the top half,
Marking a stop in work and return, a monument telling its own story,
One in which protestors rolled cut stones into the drink
In a struggle for control of the civic project,
Foreshadowing later conflicts and comings together
On this electric stretch of public land without timber or copper,
A wide open space in which to make a verb of America—
To recall and exuberate and to do democratic research-and-development
In a red clay-lined lab, crowded with evidence of an ongoing experiment,
And bearing key formulas and equations inscribed in stone.
(2004)
from Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017), available at www.loompress.com
Review of Tom Sexton's "Cummiskey Alley"
Dan Branch reviews Tom Sexton’s “Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems” in 49 WRITERS, a collaborative blog. The organization 49 WRITERS supports the development of Alaskan writers. Read the review here.
"Lockdown Letters" in SpoKe Seven (Boston)
In July 2020, I composed “Lockdown Letters,” drawing on email messages I had written to friends in the early months of the pandemic. I wanted to write something about the virus while experiencing it, and realized I had been writing about the public health emergency for months. I admire the work of Robert Lowell in his Notebook or History and the Maximus letters of Charles Olson. In that spirit, I began making irregular sonnets, a long sequence. Given the randomness of the virus in finding victims, I leaned into form for the poems even if not keeping to strict construction. Thanks to Kevin Gallagher at SpoKe, a Boston-based poetry annual, for taking four of the poems.
Crowdsourcing the Storm Boards: Facebook Talk
Stuff You Know But Can’t Name
I’ve been meaning to get to this material. On February 13, 2019, I asked friends on Facebook if they knew the name of wooden panels that for decades were installed in the late fall on city bridges in Lowell, Mass., to shield pedestrians from snow and wind coming in the months ahead. I once knew the name, but had since forgotten. By the end of the day, the dialogue had 165 comments by dozens of people. The following is composed of excerpts from the long discussion thread, which has been slightly edited for easier reading. The selected comments are presented unsigned to emphasize the collaborative effort to answer the question and accept the result. Contributors are acknowledged at the end. My apology to anyone whose name slipped by. Special thanks to Greg Marion, a far-flung cousin of mine, for the photographs.—PM
The gray storm boards are on the right side of the Cox Bridge or Bridge Street Bridge (photo credit: Lowell Heritage Partnership)
Question for Lowell folks. Asking for a friend. What is the name of the wooden panels that used to be installed on city bridges to protect pedestrians from snow and high winds? Storm boards? Snow barriers? The Dept. of Public Works had a name for those panels.
I wrote a newspaper story about the ones at Pawtucket Falls decades ago, and I think they were called flashboards.
No, flashboards are on top of the stone dam used to keep water high and flowing into the canal there.
Was it wind something? Wind barriers? Wind breaks?
Speaking of Lowellisms, the mounds of snow are called “snow bankins” instead of snow embankments.
Is “bankin” a Lowellism, and how is it spelt? I just now realized it means “embankment.”
“Bankin,” n., North of Boston. Embankment. The septic tank is at the top of the bankin, the leach field is below it.
Yup. The bankin was what the kids in Dracut said when we first moved there as kids. I thought it was weird.
Are you looking for what people called the wood? There was a name for the panels used by local people, something like storm barriers, but that’s not it. I thought it would be easy to get the answer. People don’t seem to have it.
Night view of the storm boards on the Cox Bridge (photo credit: Greg Marion)
Detail of the Victorian figures silhouettes on the Cox Bridge storm boards (photo credit: Greg Marion)
Me and my father say wind breakers. Thought they were ugly and useless and hated it when the City forgot to take them down.
Often painted gray.
Except for a few years recently when black silhouettes were stenciled on them. People in Victorian outfits.
Storm boards rings a bell.
How about “smutters,” an invented word?
I remember when the boards had silhouettes of Victorian figures on them.
“Stohm Bahrias.”
1920s Lowell Textile School Alumni Association newsletter called them wind boards.
Thanks for the research. How the heck did you track it down? We have a minor trend for boards.
Just a simple Google Advanced Search with keywords wind + boards + Lowell. Also tried wind boards and storm boards. Love this thread.
Of course, a scientific inquiry. I’m amazed it came up. Someone has to write about this, you or me or anybody on this thread. This is folklore, the lingo of River People, what we call stuff by custom.
Have we got a winner?
I remember those. Someone in City Hall must know. Can they make a ruling?
I’ve been racking my brain. I just came up with wind blocks. Wind shields?
City of Lowell spokesperson says wind barriers. Does not sound familiar to me.
I’m going with storm boards.
I think storm boards.
My dad was a cop in the city. He called them storm boards.
A second opinion from City Hall: storm guards.
You’re over-thinking it. Just go with boards.
What about storm barriers?
A lifelong bridge-crosser must know the answer.
I remember them being called wind panels because they were put up on the windy side of the bridge.
Wind panels seems too technical a term for people talking about this in a diner with winter coming.
Panels is a smart word.
The storm boards were like the first robin in the spring, except for winter.
When I was eight years old, I would take the bus to go downtown, from the Highlands, every Saturday morning, for my clarinet lesson in the Lowell High School basement and then walk over the Bridge Street Bridge to spend the weekend with my grandparents. My Gramps called them “the storm boards,” and they made a huge difference while crossing the Merrimack River in winter months. Those winds were STRONG, but of course I was little. I still call them storm boards and so did my grandmother who walked across the bridge daily.
I keep hearing “storm boards” in my head.
At the club, the members would talk about the wind panels, in French: panneau de vent.
To protect “the walkers.” I love that term. We had “walkers” in elementary school. They got to leave before the bus kids. “Line up,” the nuns would say. “Walkers in front, two by two.” Ring the bell, and they’re off.
Boards. In the Heritage Partnership article: “Boards went up each winter to protect pedestrians from cold blowing winds.”
I loved how the boards went up on the Moody St. bridge on the west side, when all the college students hiked over on the east side.
My uncle Ray was in charge of getting those up. He had an office way up in City Hall. Nice view.
What did he call them?
Went to the grave with him.
Some people.
Storm boards. Happy Valentine’s Day.
That’s what my Gramps called them, and he was one of the smartest people I have ever known.
I campaigned on bringing back the wind barriers when I ran for City Council. Downtown needs more foot traffic coming across the river from Bridge St.
Bring back the bridge boards!
For several years the City workers reused one gray panel on the Moody or Textile or University Avenue bridge that had graffiti on it that read “We Luv You David Jo,” which must have been spray-painted by someone who went to a New York Dolls concert on campus.
Those boards kept the kids from Ste. Jeanne d’Arc parish from being blown into the falls whilst walking to St. Joseph High School.
Gray storm boards on the left side of the University Avenue Bridge (Moody Street Bridge, Textile Ave. Bridge), now demolished and replaced by the Richard P. Howe Bridge (Photo credit: Greg Marion)
Lowell Sun, April 2, 1952, p. 6: “It seems only a short time ago that we were urging here that storm boards be erected on the various bridges throughout Lowell. And now it’s just about time they came down. The proverbial March winds have blown their last, and the almanac tells us that mild April showers are now in store for us. The storm boards certainly serve a worthy purpose in preventing snow drifts during the winter. We have traveled throughout New England and have seen storm boards on only a few bridges.”
1952. Storm boards. How great is this? Super research.
We always just said, “The boards are up.”
I called them: “I walked the Bridge Street Bridge to high school past the wind boards.”
Wind breakers!
Weren’t they called wind screens?
Windscreen is a British word for a car windshield.
Somebody else said storm guards. Or snow guards.
This could show up on Jeopardy.
The Lowell Public Works Department called me and said the name is wind barriers, which have not been used for at least fifteen years.
Wow. OK. That sounds official. It’s not what I remember, but I accept the answer. Thanks.
I love this. You should do this once a week. Make it a challenge to identify things in Lowell.
I’ll think of something for next week.
Stuff you know but can’t name.
I’m going with storm boards even if it is not accurate.
Storm boards sounds best to me. I’d buy something that sounds better if it comes from the city’s ancient and honorable sources.
Maybe there was an official name within City Hall but people used another term by custom. Not the first time.
I believe it was boards and don’t think barriers was a term used by real people.
This is about the ways in which we all remember stuff that is mostly community talk and not things written down: traditions, customs, local lore.
This is the coolest thread. A 1920s reference also. There’s the official designation and the popular history from those who crossed the bridge every day. I think of them as being on the Bridge Street Bridge or Cox Bridge. Were they on the Aiken Street Bridge, too, the Ouellette Bridge?
In their heyday, the storm boards were on all the bridges, four bridges from Mammoth Road to Bridge Street.
Say what you want about the storm boards, just don’t forget the “wrinkly tar sidewalk” on Riverside Street.
You’re going deep into Lowell Mythology now, all the subterranean secrets in the Dracut diorite under the topsoil full of mammoth femurs and arrowheads and colonial coins.
Speaking of subterranean, the Richardson Farm on Mammoth Road in Dracut connects with the Pawtucketville neighborhood in Lowell by way of old granite quarries and catacombs.
I’m going with storm boards.
Thanks to Pat Cook, Jamie Patrick Lewis, Joe Boyle, Mike Casey, Diane West, Joan d’Arc, Greg Marion, Susan April, Christina Nikitopoulos, Theresa O’Beirne Barr, Karen O’Beirne, Lynne Lupien, George Proakis, Donna Spellissy, Martha Hayden Burns, Patti Kirwin-Keilty, Brenda O’Brien, Henri Marchand, Sean Thibodeau, Marie Sweeney, Joe Smith, Dick Kenney, Russ Vivier, Marie Louise St. Onge, James Koumpouras, Stephen Conant, Paul Trudel, David Blackburn, Corey Sciuto, Dave Ouellette, Susan Sadlier Hrastinski, Curtis LeMay, Peter Aucella, Martha Mayo, Joseph Donahue, and Pauline Golec.
‘Atlantic Corona’ (John Suiter’s Version)
My friend John Suiter in Chicago sent his own take on my new poem “Atlantic Corona,” which offers a fresh visual experience.
'Atlantic Corona'
Atlantic Corona
I only stared
and did not
count the stars
above our high
hill at five a.m.,
the air chilled
and ground clear
after straight rain
at year’s end,
but it’s no
ending for the
crown’s spiky fit
here, eons from
traveling light.
—Paul Marion
December 27, 2020
‘Catching Perfect Spirals’
Catching Perfect Spirals
Trees change at night to yellow, orange, brown.
On warm afternoons my friends and I, boys and girls,
Raced downfield to catch every perfect spiral.
We tackled each other as if trying to hurt one another
When all we wanted was to be good at what we knew.
Red-gold leaves circled us. Our jeans got stained green.
We flung ourselves into the test, trying to prove our worth—
Each one measured against the other, but all stacked up
Against the worst the world could toss at us.
It’s not enough to say it was a game in a farmer’s field.
It was about order and chaos, playing by rules,
Teaming up to do a job, using strength and brains.
To call it joy makes it sound a little fancy,
But I still see shining faces and hear voices exploding
In the open air each time something went right.
We ran as if our lives depended on it, and who can say they haven’t?
The moves I learned back then still drive me through the day.
—Paul Marion (c) 1993, 2020
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.