Pure and Applied Poetry: A Personal Journey
By Paul Marion © 2005

In Democracy and Poetry , Robert Penn Warren argues that individuals with a strong sense of self are critical to the functioning of democracy. Warren spells out the connection between poetry and civic life: “But how does poetry come into all this? By being an antidote, a sovereign antidote, for passivity. For the basic fact about poetry is that it demands participation, from the secret physical echo in muscle and nerve that identifies us with the medium, to the imaginative enactment that stirs the deepest recesses where life-will and values reside.”

Poet Lynn Hejinian holds a similar view: “To engage with art as the artist has done is to take an inventive and activist role rather than a passive and consumerist one.” Challenging the assumption that poetry is mostly a solitary experience, she writes, “…[T]he life of poetry is highly social; every poem acquires its meaning (and its meaningfulness) within communities of those who care enough about it to consider it and converse about it.”

Editor and poet David Lehman writes, “[A] published poem creates a place where the private consciousness of the creative mind intersects with its most generous impulses toward community.” About the place of poetry in our lives, Lehman adds, “It is important that poetry have a base in the university. It is even better to find poetry in shops, cafes, bars and clubs; spilling into the street; entering people’s lives.”

—PM

Pure and Applied Poetry: A Personal Journey

Finding a Path

Browsing in the stacks of a college library in early 1974, I noticed a book— I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet by William Carlos Williams. The quirky volume, a “talking bibliography,” introduced me to modern poetry, especially the Imagists of the early twentieth century. All of a sudden I was reading poems written for the American voice, a voice like the one in my throat. The doctor-poet who made house calls in Rutherford, New Jersey, was a general practitioner of literature. Williams wrote poems, stories, essays, and accounts of American history. He described poetry as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” Into his poetry processor went the plums in the fridge, paper bags from the street, a red wheelbarrow, a young housewife, and the local waterfall.

When I was six years old, I watched the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on tv . With the young President stood white-haired Robert Frost. Kennedy had invited Frost to read a poem for the ceremony, at the time a rare example of poetry being included in a national event. The iconic pairing of a political leader and a poet stayed with me.

Enthralled by The Beatles from the time I was ten years old, I must have been developing an affinity for lyrical writing through all the hours of listening to British Invasion hits. When two of my teen-aged cousins and I pretended for a few months to have a rock band, I dashed off song lyrics. We made the best of a snare drum, a cast-off schoolroom piano, and a thrift shop tambourine.

Poetry wasn’t part of my high-school world. Jack Kerouac died in October 1969, when I was a sophomore. The coverage in the Lowell Sun and a course in local history brought him to my attention, but I started with his Lowell novels, not Mexico City Blues , the poetry book Bob Dylan credits as a major influence. My senior year I wrote a parody of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and titled it “The Politician.” Poetry looked like an individual sport. I preferred teams. I played baseball for four years with guys who didn’t talk about Carl Sandburg. A radiant girl and modern poetry helped me find my emotional voice.

I was also late in learning that a Lowell-born writer had won the Yale Younger Poet award in 1972, the year I finished high school. Michael Casey’s book of poems about his time in Vietnam, Obscenities , was a publishing phenomenon. Yale University Press sold the rights for a mass-market paperback to Warner Books, which meant the book was available everywhere. In March 1974, in Prince’s Bookstore in Lowell, I bought the pocket-sized book with a color cover photograph of Casey and two friends in Army gear. The poems were interspersed with black-and-white UPI photos of scenes from the war zone. Yale prize judge Stanley Kunitz called Obscenities , “…the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam….”

In college I wrote essays, short stories, and letters to the editor of the Lowell Sun . While studying for a bachelor’s degree in political science, I opened a door onto writing, only to find poetry slipping in through the window. Later, I would joke that I was content looking for a form.

I favored the compressed structure, heightened language, and imagery in poems, all of which intensify the effect of a composition. I was interested in the visual aspect of a poem, the architecture of an object made of words. As much as to be moved by the artful use of language, I read poetry to enter conversations that I wasn’t finding elsewhere. Poetry became a way for me to organize my response to the world.

After Williams, I pored over the works of Sandburg, e. e. cummings, Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. I moved back and forth through American poetry, finding, among many others, Gary Snyder, Robert Lowell, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Forché, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Charles Olsen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and old Walt Whitman. Beyond the Americans, I read Dylan Thomas, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, and Shakespeare.

Steeped in their music, I absorbed the words of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Carole King, Paul Simon, Harry Chapin, and Bruce Springsteen. Among the prose works that were important to me early on were Thoreau’s Walden, The Enormous Room by cummings, Camus’ Notebooks (1935-1942) and The Plague , the Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, John Didion’s essays, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Snyder’s essays in Turtle Island , Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America , Michael Herr’s Dispatches , Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s fiction, and Kerouac’s Lowell books, especially Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy for the poetry in his prose. Each writer gave me something. Kerouac’s lesson? Write your own story. Lennon’s lesson? Produce your own dream.

Why did I choose the poetry path? In 1978, I asked the same of Charles Simic. He had agreed to see me one spring day at a time when I was adrift. The University of New Hampshire campus in Durham was deserted on Good Friday when I pulled into the parking lot near Simic’s office. I found him at his desk and stammered something complimentary. It was the first time I had sought out a writer whose books were on my shelves. I was unsure about applying for entrance to the Master of Fine Arts poetry program at UNH.

Simic said, “Going through a program like ours won’t make you a poet. That’s up to you. In my case, I might have had a choice when I was 18. Now, writing poetry is like breathing. I happen to be teaching here, but I would be writing poems even if I were sweeping streets to make a living.”

I passed on UNH, but five years later I was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Poets James McMichael, Garrett Hongo, and Louise Glück took turns leading the workshop sessions. I had hoped to study with Charles Wright, but he had lit out for the University of Virginia a few months before I arrived. Several of my workshop compadres have put some fizz in the literary waters: author and critic Shawn Levy, editor Dana White, and poets Juan Delgado and Maurya Simon.

As valuable as the workshop was, perhaps as useful was my teaching assistantship at Irvine. I taught composition to freshmen for three semesters, and learned again how to write a solid sentence. Living alone in a studio apartment off Pacific Coast Highway in Dana Point, I composed poems and revised old work. The move to the West Coast, the immersion in literature, and the isolation amounted to a recommitment to writing. Within a year, weighing a job offer back east against my shrinking savings, I left the program to return to the Merrimack Valley. From 1984 to 1989, I managed programs and projects for a federal agency in Lowell, helping to create a national park that tells the story of the process and consequences of industrialism.

Lowell stands for a large piece of the American and human experience, the transition from agrarian to industrial economies, the move from farm to factory, the change from life cycles organized around the sun to new ones controlled by the clock and bell. Out of Lowell came mass production in the nation’s first “industrial park,” breakthroughs in the science of power, and a dramatic change for women in the workplace. An early version of globalization and our multicultural society are seen in Lowell, with the movement of capital to a source of cheap labor and energy and subsequent movement of peoples from around the world to these first factories. “Until the Civil War, Lowell was the largest concentration of industry in America,” writes historian Thomas Dublin. Later, Lowell’s industrial system was replicated and fine-tuned by competitors, leaving Lowell in the ditch with its dated, lower yielding model. The environmental and social costs of a hundred years of rough industrial and corporate activity set Lowell back for five decades.

The community has re-imagined and largely rebuilt itself since the mid-1960s. Urban affairs specialists consider Lowell to be one of the world’s best examples of a revitalized gritty city. Lowell’s people have been engaged in a massive recycling effort. The challenge today is to take a multi-ethnic, post-industrial city that reclaimed its past and shape it into a pluralistic, productive, creative, green, wired, waterfront hub whose hallmarks are social justice and sustainable development.

Poetry and Community

In The White Album , Joan Didion wrote about the connection between novelist James Jones and Honolulu, especially Schofield Barracks: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he makes it in his image….” In the early 1970’s, I set out to write about my time in the place I call home. While much of my work since then has ranged beyond the concept of place and the region I know best, I kept drawing on Lowell during its transformation.

Writing about Frost, Archibald MacLeish observed that poetry “makes the too familiar, visible.” Frost himself said a poem yields “a momentary stay against confusion.” Beyond these notions, poetry can be a means of cultural conservation. While preservation is more familiar in the forms of architectural restoration, folklife research, and public history programs, writing is its own preservation method. A folklorist told me about a French Canadian-American woman who was a living repository of songs from her people. She called herself a “memory worker.” There’s a place for poetry as a documentary medium.

In the mid-1990’s, the Hub City Writers of Spartanburg, South Carolina, began publishing books by writers in their region. They believed “memory and good writing would help restore Spartanburg’s soul.” Robert H. McNulty of the Washington, D.C.-based Partners for Livable Places says, “Culture is not only a problem solver and a resource, but a glue to mend the shredding fabric of our communities.”

Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, a native of St. Lucia in the West Indies, reflected on the strong attraction of his homeland: “…the fact that I was writing about a place that had never been written about before, to any extent. Sharing in the creation of something is very exhilarating.” In such a place, he says, “What resonates are individual stories….” Walcott told the New Yorker , “I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society…. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.” He aims to “finish” his “incomplete culture.”

For ecological survival, Gary Snyder declares that we need “people who live where they are and work with their neighbors, taking responsibility for their place, and seeing to it : to be inhabitants, and to not retreat.” About Snyder’s ideas on poetry and community building, editor and critic Bernard Quetchenbach says, “[His] concept of the contemporary poet informed by science but functioning as community shaman provides an illustration, a working example, of how such a ‘hybrid’ mode of thinking could work. The resulting poetry is Snyder’s major contribution to what he sees as ‘the real work’ of building sustainable, ecologically viable communities of ‘natural’ individuals.”

I’m interested in both pure and applied poetry. Countless poets have tried to define poetry. Simic offers this: “A poem is an organism. It is a projection of our existence, a cosmology of a particular experience. It is a sequence imposed on the simultaneity of that experience in order to recreate it.”

Emily Dickinson is dramatic: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there another way?””

Some readers and writers believe that “poetry makes nothing happen”—and should not try to make anything happen. The counterpoint is Shelley’s claim that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” If technology is the practical application of knowledge, especially science, to commercial goals, then applied poetry would be the application of poetry to social objectives.

Experience tells me that writing, publishing, and reading poetry can help strengthen a person’s sense of belonging in a place. From the start of Lowell’s comeback, activists and planners saw Lowell as a place to explore new approaches to teaching and learning, starting businesses, delivering social services, re-using historic buildings, and forming partnerships—all directed toward creating conditions that would allow people to make a decent living, enjoy good health, and have a chance to pursue happiness. Many initiatives succeeded. In that same urban laboratory, I’ve looked for innovative ways to build a stronger sense of community.

Lowell’s city seal has a motto encircling an urban scene featuring a cornucopia floating in the sky above a smoking locomotive and factories, all set against a background of a river, hills, and beaming sun. The motto reads: Art is the Handmaid of Human Good. In the early 1800’s, the founders of this industrial city were referring to the work of artisans, craftsmen, the skilled workers who manufactured textiles. When I was in public high school, the course we called “shop” was officially listed as Industrial Arts. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the root of “art” as “ar,” meaning “to fit together.” The word comes to us through Old English, German, and Latin. The source is language for “arm,” “joint,” “shoulder,” with a link to the Greek “harmos,” related to “harmony.” The Latin “ars” points to “art, skill, craft,” and a variant connects to the Latin “ordo, order (originally a row of threads in a loom).” The Latin “ordiri” means “to begin to weave.” The etymology comes full circle to Lowell’s textile heritage.

Last year, French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy retraced the 1831 expedition of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, reported in Democracy in America . Among the aspects of America Levy ponders is “Why the arts in America are more concerned with utility than beauty?” In Democracy in America , de Tocqueville defines poetry as “…the search after, and the delineation of, the Ideal.” He continues: “The object of poetry is not to represent what is true, but to adorn it, and to present to the mind some loftier image.” The poets in democracies, he suggests, in contrast to those in aristocracies, are free to write about “the destinies of mankind” rather than the experiences of individuals. His musings on poetry follow his assertion that democratic people “will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful be useful.” De Tocqueville’s assessment of the character of the new United States (which may still hold true) and the lofty city motto chosen by Lowell’s founders provide a context for considering the usefulness or application of poetry in a community. This kind of thinking is in the American grain.

Researchers seeking to understand concepts such as “a sense of community” or “community-building” have turned to surveys, focus groups, and others means of gathering data that will help them demonstrate these concepts in a practical way. Defining terms is fundamental. In a study of a town in England, the interviewers interpreted community identity as statements that indicated that people felt a connection to their town. The results of the study showed “community identity in the region is focused primarily on a sense of belonging to a particular geographical area, long-term residence, and family ties.”

Can it be proven that poetry contributes to that sense of belonging? The concept of a sense of belonging shows up as the first element in a standard definition of “sense of community,” one of the core values of community psychology as expressed by James H. Dalton, Maurice J. Elias, and Abraham Wandersman in their text Community Psychology: Linking Individuals and Communities . (The other core values are individual wellness, social justice, citizen participation, collaboration and community strengths, respect for human diversity, and empirical grounding.)

It’s helpful to look at the concept of “sense of community” through the filter of poetry (writing, reading, or performing poetry). The notion of a sense of belonging is related to the idea of “membership,” wherein the members of a community feel invested in it, committed to it, and attached. Writing about a community or encountering it through reading can lead to a sense of connection. Joan Didion says this about James Jones and his Hawaii.

Next is the notion of influence within a community, meaning the power dynamic flowing back and forth among people in a community. Publishing and reading poems in public are expressions of power that evoke responses from audiences. Putting poems in social play is having influence.

Element three in “sense of community” is “integration and fulfillment of needs.” For writers this would suggest a process in which the loop closes. Feedback from readers and fellow members of the community would be critical to developing that sense of being fully integrated and would help validate the creative, intellectual, and emotional investment in the composing of the work.

The fourth element is the idea of a “shared emotional connection,” perhaps the most difficult element to pin down. The Hub City Writers allude to this when they say their writing will “restore Spartanburg’s soul.” The shared stories, familiar voices, recognizable language, cultural references—all these can function like thin colored wires that twist into thicker cord.

Environmental activists and researchers are probing similar issues. Vincent Cotrone of the Penn State Cooperative Extension suggests “trees grow stronger neighborhoods” and “urban greenery provides another remarkable level of social services to residents.” He cites studies at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana in which researchers determined “the more trees and common green spaces a community had, the more they were used by residents for social interaction. In other words, relationships between neighbors are made stronger simply through the presence of trees.” Substitute poetry for trees in this statement, and one does not have to stretch too far to see community-based poems as a kind of cultural parkland open to all and public poetry readings as occasions for the kind of social engagement engendered by the presence of trees—trees that provide shade, shelter, aesthetic pleasure, and sometimes food.

In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America , poet David Whyte makes the case for bringing “the insights of the poetic imagination out of the garret and into the boardrooms and factory floors of America.” He writes, “Corporate America desperately needs the powers historically associated with the poetic imagination not only to see their way through the present whirlygig of change, but also, because poetry asks for accountability to a human community, for rootedness and responsibility even as it changes [emphasis added].”

If we think of poetry as a form of social action, we can see how it fits into what Murray Levine and David V. Perkins describe as the work of the community psychologist, which is “to help build competent communities.” They define a competent community as one with “ (1) power to generate alternatives and opportunities, (2) knowledge of where and how to obtain resources of all kinds, and (3) self-esteem in the form of pride, optimism, and motivation.” The authors explain that communities can achieve this level of competency “through community development or through social action.”

Concerning poetry or literary action, it’s evident that writing, reading, performing, teaching, and publishing can affect the effort to attain characteristics (1) and (3), especially. Writings offer stories, scenarios, memories, accounts, and testimony based on real or imagined events that embody lessons, models, and alternative life paths. Reading and hearing narratives and charged compositions like “the poetry of witness,” in the words of Carolyn Forché, can empower those encountering the writings. Lucy Lippard addresses the power of culture as a counter-force to alienation. Robert Penn Warren argues poetry is “a sovereign antidote for passivity,” while Lynn Hejinian sees engagement with art (poetry) as “inventive and activist,” which relates to the “optimism and motivation” in Levine and Perkins’ definition above.

In a healthy democratic society people feel a common bond, believe in a shared fate, and act accordingly. Establishing that spirit in the community close at hand is the necessary first step toward nurturing a greater empathy for the global community, whose survival is our ultimate concern.

2005

References

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Cotrone, V. (2005). Adding more green can make life more manageable. Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust Newsletter , Spring 2005.

Dalton, J. Elias, M., & Wandersman, A. (2001). Community psychology: Linking individuals and communities . Stamford, CT: Wadsworth Thomson Learning.

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