Issues → November/December 2009 → Features →

Lowell, MA: Poet Paul Marion

Poetry, community outreach, and a great love for his city

by Geoffrey Douglas

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

SHARE

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES

X

•  del.icio.us
•  Facebook
•  Google
•  StumbleUpon
•  Yahoo!
•  Windows Live

EMAIL

PRINT

Credit: Dana Smith

Paul Marion

Mr. Alphonse Hudon, / wearing a blue parka and dress hat, / leans on his cane on Pawtucket Street, / checking the freshly tarred walk / and grove of short pines / along the Northern Canal. / "Looks good, doesn't it?" I ask. / And he says, "I liked it better the way it was," / which opens up a line of talk ...

The poem goes on to tell of the conversation the two men had that day: Mr. Hudon, the older man, telling the younger one--the poet--how he used to know his father, and his grandfather before him, and an old neighbor named Mr. Marquis, who, 60 years ago or so ("before the wrecking cranes pulled up"), owned a filling station near the spot where they're talking. The young man recalls a house he knew as a child, a block or two away, with a tree growing through its porch roof. "Oh yes," the old man remembers, "that was Mr. Marquis' house. / And there was a monkey there, too ..."

Mr. Hudon is probably gone by now. He was old already then, and those lines were written years ago. And the village he remembers has been gone now more than 40 years--its only memorial a bronze plaque on a granite slab squeezed onto a narrow spit of grass a block south of the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, a minute's walk from where he and the poet had their talk: "On this site grew the heart of the Franco-American community. Hard-working French Canadians came to fill the mills of Lowell ..." The granite was cut "from one of the last blocks ... to be torn down." And around the plaque's sides, a border of street names, a fleur-de-lis at each corner, and two dates: 1875-1964.

It was the poet himself who first brought me here, on a summer day more than a year ago, to deliver on his promise to show me the city of his poems. He's been writing them now going on 35 years, since before he finished college: poems about bars and laundromats and textile mills--"cotton was king" here, but there were wool mills, too; about boxers and politicians, God, death, young lovers, work, baseball, the weather. Nine collections--Strong Place, What Is the City? and more--plus essays, co-authorships, and editing several titles, including Atop an Underwood, a popular collection of Jack Kerouac's early writings. And at the heart of nearly all of it is this city where he was born. It is both his muse and his dearest subject, and the cause around which he builds his working days. His devotion to it defines him. I may never have known anyone who loved any place more.

His name is Paul Marion. We'd come that day from our offices at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where Paul wears a suit and tie and plans community outreach projects, and I write and teach part-time. For more than five years, we'd worked in the same office--although we didn't anymore--and I had come to value his warmth and wit, his vast knowledge of the city, and his love of the Red Sox.

And at least once every summer for the past eight years or more--because as much as he follows the Red Sox, he loves the Lowell Spinners more--we've sat together in the box he rents for the season at LeLacheur Park on Aiken Street, just three rows back from the field, and shared beer and kielbasa while the sun drops behind the scoreboard.

It was around that time last summer, a week or two before our Spinners outing, that I went with him to the little granite memorial. Our tour had begun several days earlier, when we'd met after work at his house. It's a grand house, in an un-grand part of the city, a mile or so south of the memorial: six bedrooms, Italianate, all brick and stone and high windows, built 150 years ago at the peak of Lowell's textile ascension, home to the agent of the old Appleton Mill, the city's largest at the time.