Galway Kinnell and other poets in Pawtucket

Reading Rick Benjamin's essay in today's PROJO about the Pawtucket poet, Galway Kinnell,  made me think about the poet and also the times that my mother, Margaret Coleman, who also wrote and published poetry met his mother in local stores or  at the  library.  She would come home and tell me of the meeting  and of the growing fame of Galway.  She loved his Irish name  --that his mother  had dared to name him for  a city in Ireland.  And reminded me that   she had thought if she had  a son to name him after her native county, Tyrone,  like the actor Tyrone Powell.
I took umbrage and  wondered out loud what county or town she might have named  me for-- she answered without a pause   "MAYO--that  would suit you."

  Tonight I am thinking of Galway and of the  wonderful  directness and romance of his works--how much he wrote from daily life. How he dared to describe the details of pain and suffering that are part of all love. How poetry is a  way of  understanding and  responding to daily trials and joys.

Here is a poem he wrote on   the care of an old father with Parkinson's

Parkinson’s Disease

BY GALWAY KINNELL

While spoon-feeding him with one hand   

she holds his hand with her other hand,   

or rather lets it rest on top of his,

which is permanently clenched shut.   

When he turns his head away, she reaches   

around and puts in the spoonful blind.   

He will not accept the next morsel

until he has completely chewed this one.   

His bright squint tells her he finds

the shrimp she has just put in delicious.

Next to the voice and touch of those we love,   

food may be our last pleasure on earth—

a man on death row takes his T-bone   

in small bites and swishes each sip

of the jug wine around in his mouth,   

tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt   

this supper out of him. She strokes

his head very slowly, as if to cheer up

each separate discomfited hair sticking up   

from its root in his stricken brain.

Standing behind him, she presses

her cheek to his, kisses his jowl,

and his eyes seem to stop seeing

and do nothing but emit light.

Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,   

of remembering the knowledge

flesh had from flesh? The flesh

of his face is hard, perhaps

from years spent facing down others

until they fell back, and harder

from years of being himself faced down

and falling back in his turn, and harder still   

from all the while frowning

and beaming and worrying and shouting   

and probably letting go in rages.   

His face softens into a kind

of quizzical wince, as if one

of the other animals were working at   

getting the knack of the human smile.   

When picking up a cookie he uses   

both thumbtips to grip it

and push it against an index finger   

to secure it so that he can lift it.

She takes him then to the bathroom,   

where she lowers his pants and removes

the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle

to his old penis until he pisses all he can,

then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants.   

When they come out, she is facing him,   

walking backwards in front of him   

and holding his hands, pulling him   

when he stops, reminding him to step   

when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.   

She is leading her old father into the future   

as far as they can go, and she is walking   

him back into her childhood, where she stood   

in bare feet on the toes of his shoes   

and they foxtrotted on this same rug.

I watch them closely: she could be teaching him   

the last steps that one day she may teach me.

At this moment, he glints and shines,

as if it will be only a small dislocation

for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

Galway Kinnell, “Parkinson’s Disease” from Imperfect Thirst. Copyright © 1994 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

I look forward to next Sunday and the  presentation as part of the Pawtucket Arts Festival of the winners of the Galway Kinnell  Poetry contest.  Hope to see some of  my blog readers there and to meet Rick Benjamin.

Statues at Saint Joseph's Church and Flavius Boucher

FLAVIUS BOUCHER and his GIft to Saint Joseph Church

MY FRIEND'S FATHER WAS A  SELF TAUGHT SEMI-LITERATE ARTIST IN PAWTUCKET

NOTE:  a version of this blog entry was published  on this blog on August 1, 2015,  I am reprinting it because  A reader asked if my friend Lucille spoke French at home. She certainly did. In those years many schools in Central Falls had half days in French. I learned my first French  by picking up their phrases --so I only knew the familiar forms.  But I learned so much more  from this family.

 Reading recently of  the theft of a small statue of Saint Joseph that was  adorning a small garden in the  yard of Saint Joseph's Church on the corner of Walcott Street and South Bend in Pawtucket  made me instantly  think of  a person who had once also created a statue for that same Church yard.
I pity the thief who took the  small, mass made object and only hope he did it out of  an overflow of devotion.
I want to recall the fact that once that Church yard held  original  artwork of a pious parishioner.
 I am thinking of  Flavius Boucher, he was  a semi-literate French Canadian  who was the father  of my best friend Lucille Boucher. He was also a self-taught genius of a sculptor in  granite.  Flavius was  an  extraordinary  human being with a  natural talent  for  cutting stone. Professionally he was a mason and stone-cutter. but he  went further.

 In the 1950s when  I was  visiting  his family  home on  Columbus Avenue everyday, he began  a miraculous self transformation to an artist in stone.  I could  not believe the  long hours he spent patiently finding the  forms and faces in the great blocks of granite that he  brought to his workshop  garage. He rigged a  hoist and  would  create statues  especially busts of such historical  figures as Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Pope Pius, and  even  heads of his three  children, Arlene, Lucille and Raymond. He would use a caliper to  measure their  noses and lips-- I was so  envious of  those  lovingly crafted images of his children.

 In my my eyes Flavius was  an ideal father.  He enlisted my  help  in his enterprise in an original and creative way.  Since he could not  read or write beyond the most basic  English, he asked for my help  because I  was known as  someone  who read obsessively and liked to write   poems. He instructed me  to read  aloud to him the  histories he found of the figures he was  drawn to recreate in stone.

Then after he had listened to me read and reread the encyclopedia entry he had found, he would try to create aloud a  brief  history of the  person and also a history of his own interest and of the stone itself to accompany the work he was  creating.  He would talk to me about the person, his interest in the person, and the special characteristics of the stone itself. Then I would  frame sentences  that  reflected what he was telling me.

  Remember--I was in grade school at the time.   I would read them back to him repeatedly until he was satisfied.  When  he liked the  way I had expressed his ideas, he would thank me and ask me to  write in print a copy of what we had  composed together.  Then he would  place that on a  cardboard and stand it next to the  bust he had completed.  I  never heard what  became of all the things he  carved  so  perfectly.  I know that he sold some of them,  I know that he  got orders  from some people  for specific  subjects to be carved,  I also know that many of his finished works languished in the stone dust of his work shop.

But he worked on--- and one of his works, a statue of Saint Joseph, he contributed to Saint Joseph's Church.  That statue is not where it used to be, and I am not  aware of how it was  moved or when, where or why.  I walked around the  church grounds that I had known since childhood. One day  several decades after I left Pawtucket, I drove to  my friend's old three- decker on Columbus  Avenue and walked around the large yard and tried to  see into the garages.  I could find  no trace of  the old stones or  the workshop. I don't even know when Flavius died because all of his children left Pawtucket and went their separate ways.

I do know that he influenced me  because of his originality, his productivity and his fierce  persistence in creating his art in a world that was largely indifferent to him.  He and others that I knew and cherished in Pawtucket also modeled  for me the kind of dedication  to art and to their  creative genius that impressed itself on me as real artistry and real intellectualism.

 Those relationships guaranteed that  I would never make the mistake of thinking that education and intelligence are congruent:  that  just because  a person is educated means that he is intelligent or  just because a person is not educated maybe even illiterate meant that they are not intelligent.  No, intelligence and creativity  are  like  birds that  can alight on' the  branch of any tree.

Two People reading Ghazals in Homage to Ghalib

    I am home recuperating from thyroid surgery,  and that means even more silence than usual because it is  painful to speak.  Not to complain too much, but my husband  is an introverted silent person and I have always been willing to take up the slack.  But with that option gone, the hours of quiet became oppressive.   I cast about for something to  unleash  some words from  Yash and I  was thinking of his love the poetry of Ghalib and especially his  old delight in reciting Urdu  couplets. But  his memory loss is so complete that he cannot recall  them.  I  felt stymied by the fact that  most of my books have either been boxed up and stored  in the garage or  dispersed to various  book sales and libraries and the Salvation Army.

I decided to bite the bullet and re-buy them at the trusty Amazon and Alibris, and sure enough in two days  volumes of ghazals in Urdu and English  were at  our door.  I did not urge the books  on Yash--that is deadly. I just started   reading them and nodding and  smiling. Sure enough  within minutes  Yash picked up the volumes and started reading the Urdu aloud to just hear those wonderful sounds.

Then he started reading the  English versions aloud--and  that  seemed like a happy out come.
We both tried to memorize  couplets and have spent several happy evenings  exchanging ideas about such  lines as these:

When I describe my condition, you say "What's your point?"
When you talk to me that  way what am I to say?

 Your lover may not be faithful, but she is your lover.
We could mention the  sensuous rolling way she walks.

Spring doesn't last that long but  at least it is Spring.
It would be  good to mention the scented winds that move through the garden.

Ghalib, once the boat has arrived at the other shore,
Why go on and on about the wickedness of the boatman?

This is Robert Bly's translation and according to Yash he has gotten close to the  ironic and puzzling and puzzled tone of voice in the original.  There is something so direct and  funny about that voice that I love it.

How I wish I could find that tone of insouciance, idiomatic speech,  hidden depth  and surface charm for my own  poems.  Wish me good luck  with that dream.

WHERE THEY WORKED

My personal geography maps a Pawtucket childhood in the 1950s, and in that geography the places where I played are happy, but the places where they -- the grown-ups-- worked are legendary. I never visited the Corning Glass Works where my Aunt Anna Coleman worked, or the Coats Mills cloth room where my mother started when she was only 14 years old. Or the Saylesville Bleachery where my father worked, or Collyer Wire where my Aunt Grace and my father worked. I never saw them, but I knew them. I knew them from the effects they had on their bodies and spirits; how the hours they spent there left them wearied and worried. For example, my Aunt Anna, who worked at Corning Glass on Broad Street in Central Falls, would sit out on the porch of our second floor tenement at 130 Englewood Avenue through a hot, breathless summer dusk combing her hair with a fine tooth comb. I heard the sprinkles of glass fall to the newspaper she spread to catch them. She showed them to me glistening in the light, –“Imagine if these are in my hair, what the inside of my lungs must look like?” She urged. And I could only imagine -- her time spent working beside furnaces on sweltering July days, inspecting hot tumblers that passed her on the line, and after eight hours of that she came home with her long black hair glistening with glass particles. I marveled that they could bear such things. 

My Aunt Anna Coleman died this past year -- September 18--  and in the last year of her life she had acute respiratory problems  that  eventually led to her admission to Memorial Hospital and the Respiratory Intensive Care.  Her  lungs were so badly damaged she could not breathe  deeply enough to supply oxygen for her brain.  After that and for the first time in her 95 years she showed confusion and   some loss of cognitive function.  Her doctors questioned me about her  smoking  habits and I had to tell them that she was a  person who never smoked in her life.  My mother, her sister, smoked and like all of us in those years she was exposed to the constant  secondary smoke of co-workers and friends. The doctor asked if she had  worked in a  place where she had exposure to  some  contaminants and suddenly those hot nights on the porch in Pawtucket came back to me..  And I understood that  her  refusal to smoke  or drink  was her way to stay as  healthy as possible in an environment that was  harmful.  Those glistening pieces of glass had come back to haunt us both.

Pawtucket at its Best

Maybe because I am a grandmother trying to help  and advise and  comfort a teenage grand daughter  who lives far away and I rarely see,  I find that I am thinking a lot about my grandmothers. Jane Conlon and Ida Mowry-- neither of whom I ever met.

Around 1906 when Jane Conlon first came from Ardboe, County Tyrone, Ireland to Cumberland to live in the Ann& Hope Mill Village, she worked in the Ann& Hope Mill as did so many of the new Irish immigrants. One of the experienced workers, from a local Yankee farming family also worked in the mill, helped her and instructed her in her new job and her new life. That teacher was Ida Mowry-- and I sometimes think of the two young women forming a friendship across the divides of origin, and religion and ethnicity. I am grateful for that meeting for reasons that they could not know: for they would share more in the unfolding of time. They would share grand-daughters: me and my sisters, when Jane’s daughter Margaret married Ida’s son Norman. I did not meet either of my grandmothers; for Ida Mowry Jenckes died in the terrible flu epidemic of 1919 and Jane Conlon Coleman died in 1942, but I celebrate those two women and their friendship.

They show  Pawtucket at its best.

Let me leave you with that image of what is possible in Pawtucket. More than  100 years ago in 1906 an experienced and kind American worker turned to a younger and frightened Irish immigrant girl –as they used to say–just off the boat. That woman from the old RI family that had founded Pawtucket befriended and helped the Irish girl, a girl raised on the Banks of Lough Neagh in County Tyrone, whose daily routine, until she left, was lived to the rhythms of fishing and nets and boats and eels, a girl that was frightened by the screeching mill whistle. That girl stood now for the first time in a noisy textile mill with rows of deafening whirling machines, and Ida Mowry reached out to her the hand of friendship and helped her to understand her new world . And 100 years later their grand daughter celebrates them today.

In these troubled and troubling times, where there loom so many causes to despair, I draw hope from that history: the hope that perhaps, this very day in some work place in Pawtucket or the Blackstone Valley a worker turns with compassion and friendship to a scared immigrant and guides her to a new and better life. Who knows--perhaps a century from now in 2106, their grandchild will bless them for it.

DIVERSITY  IS STRENGTH

Pawtucket has always been the gateway to a new life; this small, important city on the banks of the Blackstone where people come to find places to work and play. When we welcome newcomers and make room for their children and grand children to grow in body, mind and soul, when we safeguard and improve places of work and play, we are building a rich, creative life of work and play– a vision of human possibility much too large to be written on the back of a dollar bill. 

Thinking of LeBron

HOW HAS LEBRON HELPED ME?


 I watched replays of the scene of LeBron James expressing his confidence in the eventual  victory of his team the Cleveland Cavaliers after they lost game 5 and needed to win games 6 and 7  to clinch  a national championship, their first since 1964. Hailed as the greatest player on the planet, he  repeated that phrase of self-empowerment and proclaimed his confidence in the outcome of the next game. He threw that  confidence in the teeth of defeat  and that refusal of the label "underdog" that the media and the Vegas odds makers  gave him.

 I must admit that I was moved  and I immediately felt a quickening of my own confidence.  If you are confident, LeBron, then I  too will keep confident as I approach  surgery in the next weeks. Now the dream of a national  championship in his first year back in Cleveland with a team  missing two All Star players is over.


 BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CONFIDENCE--MY OWN ESPECIALLY. LeBron's confidence had given me  confidence and calm as I went to meet my surgeon. An athlete whom I had never met had so impressed me  that I  followed his example  in my own little way.  His dedication to his sport, his devotion to his community  and his determination to win as a team not as an MVP--all are rare  wonderful traits.

I noticed  a certain regal demeanor about the  man they call KING JAMES most evident in the courtly  form of respect he paid to James Brown who was  watching the game. How often have we seen a player in his prime pay such homage  to an older retired  star of another sport.  
That was a moment of GRACE.

JOIN THE EVOLUTION

Join the evolution is the new slogan for Pawtucket and I like it. I like the way it expects change and  for the better even if it comes slowly. And I like the  invitation that  seems so inclusive and so in the spirit of  --Pawtucket  JOIN-- as an imperative.  Don't be alone or isolated be part of a community that is changing maybe  slowly and is  expecting the changes to be improvements.

Those of us born and raised in Pawtucket know that all the  changes have not been for the better but they were meant well. When I drive downtown I can't help but long for what is no longer there--Shartenbergs, The Peerless, Grants and Woolworths and  the Fanny Farmer candy store and the wonderful Bridge Bakery.  But then I  try to correct my mood and say --they meant well --they were part of urban development.
I recall going downtown decades ago  to see the unveiling of the   pedestrian mall that was downtown Main Street. Now I cannot believe when I drive  down Broad Street in Central Falls that there is more life, more energy, more shops, more diners, two Dunkins and more foot traffic than Pawtucket. I am glad  that Central Falls   has some  life and Pawtucket can learn from that as we  "evolve."