On this day – January 19, 1809 -  American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe poularized the short-story and his tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Among his best known works are his short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and his poems “The Raven,”  “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells.” Poe died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore at the age of 4o. As I noted in a blog post last fall – Poe visited Lowell,  Massachusetts in the Spring before he died – to lecture on American poetry. See the blog post here. Read more about Poe here at wikipedia.com.

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Checking the Property

My nine-year-old son says, “I’m going to read the ‘Gettysburg Address’”—on the other side is the lesser-known second inaugural speech. 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 my wife lining up a snapshot, a guy in a straw cowboy hat offers to take a picture of my brother’s family, my wife, son, and me in the glow of the civic temple. Climbing the steps, I caught sight of the figure set behind the columns, and then lost him because of 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 Jeff Davis’ football the length of the Reflecting Pool and onto the white spike of the Washington Monument, which, in the after-supper hour reflects sun along its narrow western face, a mighty glo-stik on the national common, a staunch obelisk, a big white 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 resumption, the monument telling its own story, one in which protesters rolled cut stones into the drink, foreshadowing later protests and rallies and comings together, like the 1963 March on Washington that brought Martin Luther King to these same steps to declare his dream of a nation at last free for all, the same steps where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang for justice and where Dylan returned to sing for Bill Clinton’s booming inaugural, the same steps movie-land Vietnam vet Forrest Gump spoke from and from which he spotted his life-long love and source of ache splashing toward him, the same pool in which the spaceship crashed in the Planet of the Apes remake, 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 celebrate and to do democratic research and development in this red clay-lined lab, bordered and crowded with evidence of the ongoing experiment, and bearing key formulas and equations inscribed in stone.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2004

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South Common Haiku Set (III)

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Who has not looked up

and seen the long white jet trails

that fade in seconds?

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Never get used to

seagulls on the soccer field,

far from Hampton Beach.

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Train horn, no whistle,

long sound in the Thorndike dark.

The line ends, starts here.

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Large-to-small branchings,

fundamental nature form—

veins and river paths.

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Over the low hill

whiff of Owl Diner bacon—

they sell oatmeal, too.

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Night street sounds and news.

All the people dying on

the old radio.

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Joel-Lowell rhymes.

Billy could like the Common

just the way it is.

—Paul Marion (c) 2011

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Red bow on blue door

sunlit beyond the frost park

on a new-year day.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2012

A New Year’s Eve tradition was popularized on this day – December 31, 1929 – when band leader, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played “Auld Lang Syne” at the stroke of midnight in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.  “Auld Lang Syne” is a poem written by Scotsman Robert Burns – set to a very old tune – played and sung on New Year’s Eve and also when appropriate to remember and honor old friends and past times. Many use this lyrical tribute as a toast.  Loosely translated it means “days gone by” or “old times”.  Here’s an “English” translation of the Burns poem:

“Auld Lang Syne” 

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS
And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

More here at wikipedia.

A Happy, Healthy, Peaceful New Year my friends – but always remembering “auld lang syne.”

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South Common Haiku Set (II)

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Common sky in place,

planetarium-vivid.

Double solitaire.

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Maple, pine, and birch,

easy to name in a crowd—

what of the others?

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Not Carl’s cat-feet fog.

More, you can see the park’s breath—

just this side of mist.

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Under the chipped bench,

empty plastic vodka nips,

lottery tickets.

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Far east down South Street,

violet and pink sky lines.

Shirtsleeve November.

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Red bird in the pine,

a small thing, considering.

Overnight rain due.

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Motorcycles rise.

The ugly furniture mill

beautified at dawn.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2011

Under the title “Dissolves,” the new sections of Joe Donahue’s long poem “Terra Lucida,” are due in January from the publisher Talisman House in New Jersey. Joe is on long-term leave from Lowell, based at Duke University, where he researches eternal questions. The reading public rarely catches up to a visionary poet in the author’s moment, so it’s safe to say that Joe is one for the ages—which is a good thing. When a critic uses the phrase “unmatched by any other living American poet” related to an aspect of a writer’s work, that’s a signal to take note. Here is the ordering information. 

Here’s advance praise for the new volume:
“If one thing characterizes the active imagination Donahue brings to bear on his poem, it’s his desire that the visionary reality he has entered not be merely some dream, but a place of absolute reality. His skill at conveying this feeling seems unmatched by any other living American poet, such that parts of his poem exhibit a simultaneous lightness of touch and gravitational pull, where surrealistic follies vie with imaginal intensities.” —Peter O’Leary

“This is an episode of high romance and mystical compassion within Joseph Donahue’s on-going long poem — with the intertwining of love of the luminous earth, the erotic transformations of muse-love, and the maternal gift — the love of vocation and of the prophetic name of the poet all unrolling in an elaborated strand of meditation. The work has medieval motifs (like those of Duncan or of H.D.) reanimated in our time: forbidden lovers, lyric folds inside songs of three cultures (Christian, Jewish, Muslim), the garden, the shock of desire, the shock of science that extends mystery, the shock of death and transfiguration, all compelling in their endless aftermath. This is a book of continuous yearning, a book of cosmic creation, a book of spiritual meditation all saturated by Donahue’s angelic ear and eye.” —Rachel Blau DuPlessis

“Picasso said that whenever he painted there might not be an object, but there was the fragrance of an object. In Dissolves, Joseph Donahue combines something like an object with something like a fragrance. His cubism, unglazed and personal, produces magical other dimensions.” —David Shapiro

MassMoments reminds us today that the Puritans of Massachusetts led by minister Increase Mather thought the celebration of Christmas a vulgar, pagan-like and “profane and superstitious custom.”  Over those early years the custom was never totally stamped-out. In the early 19th century when the revelry – especially drinking and merry-making  that some associated with Christmas – was claimed to pose a threat to public order, middle- and upper-class Americans moved to re-make Christmas as a family holiday. The appearance of the poem – “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” by Clement Moore -presented an idealized, child-center Christmas. Santa Claus became the image of Christmas.

An 1856 Massachusetts law accorded legal holiday status to Christmas, Washington’s Birthday, and July 4 ^th. The success of including Christmas in this measure was due to the growing number of Irish Catholics in the electorate. To this day, Christmas Day is one day when public offices, government and most business shuts down.

On this day

      …in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Christmas Day was deemed by the Puritans to be a time of seasonal excess with no Biblical authority. The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.

Read the full article here at MassMoments.com.

 Happy Christmas to All!

I wrote the first draft of this poem in 1976, and worked on it on and off for a long time. I had in mind the extensive outdoor lighting displays in Dracut (the town) and Lowell, but, especially as it evolved, the dense array of Christmas decorations in Pawtucketville, between Mammoth Road and University Avenue (Textile Ave/Moody St). The image of the Martians came in a late revision and seemed to be just what the poem needed to knock it a little off kilter.—PM

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Patterns of a Prayer Town

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Our Lady of the Bathtub shines white.

A flagpole becomes a stack of gold eggs.

The small dogwood vanishes—in its place a floating rosary.

There’s a chain-link gate festooned with gaudy bulbs,

shrubs lassoed blue, dormers outlined in radiant jelly beans—

every other house turns into a birthday cake.

City folk do it for you and me, for their kids and kids of passing strangers.

But what do the Martians think,

gazing at us through super-powered telescopes?

What do they make of this season

when it looks like a carnival has spread like flu through the neighborhoods?

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—Paul Marion (c) 2006, from “What Is the City?”

This, then, is Lowell,–a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint. Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways of this new world Manchester glares the inscription,
“Work, or die”…

There is one beautiful grove in Lowell,–that on Chapel Hill,–where a cluster
of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, in close proximity
to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of their leaves with the din of
machinery…  Long may these oaks remain to remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty in the old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but, like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics nor in art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever “Onward.” 

 The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; but there are representatives here of almost every part of the civilized world…

But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous. Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental love of  hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the “ould mother of him,” sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father’s blessing and a sister’s farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard far beyond the “wide wathers” has an eternal greenness in his memory; for there, perhaps, lies a “darlint child” or a “swate crather” who once loved him. The new world is forgotten for the moment; blue Killarney and the Liffey sparkle before him, and Glendalough stretches beneath him its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshine rest upon and hallow alike with Nature’s blessing the ruins of the Seven Churches of Ireland’s apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, and the round towers of the Phoenician su-worshippers; pleasant and mournful recollections of his home waken within him; and the rough and seemingly careless and light-hearted laborer melts into tears. It is no light thing to abandon one’s own country and household gods. Touching and beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:  “Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of the stranger, seeing that ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” 

Taken from an exerpt on the UML/Center for Lowell History website here:  http://libweb.uml.edu/clh/all/jgwhi.htm