Issues → November/December 2009 → Features →

Lowell, MA: Poet Paul Marion

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It's bifurcated today--with Paul, his wife, Rosemary, and their 13-year-old son, Joseph, in one half; the other half the home of his in-laws, who have lived there 50 years. Rosemary grew up in the house; her great-grandmother once worked there as a maid, before her son, Rosemary's grandfather, bought the place nearly 80 years ago. Joseph, both parents tell me proudly, is the fourth generation of their family to live there.

They explained all this to me over beer and peanuts in the oversized dining room, while Paul--who seems alternately proud and embarrassed by the grandeur of the home he's married into--came and went with family photos: of his grandfather the butcher, pictured in an apron in front of his market; his father the mill worker ("People always said he looked just like Sinatra"); Doris, his mother, who sold coats and dresses for 25 years in a women's department store downtown. He was in his element, and it showed: telling stories, shuffling photos, eyes alight, between what may be his two favorite subjects in the world, his family and the city of Lowell.

He talked about his father's job in the textile mill--the filth, the long hours, the years and years of daily drain. "I don't know how he stood it," he told me. "I got a job there one summer as a kid, cleaning the drains in the scouring plant--where they scour the dung out of raw fleeces with nothing but hot water and lye. The stink was unbelievable. I think I lasted two days." This took him to the subject of Lowell's mills in general--the wool uniforms for World War II soldiers, for the Union Army the century before--and from there to the immigrants who manned the spinning machines and the looms.

"The Irish were the first ones," Paul said. "Then the French, the Canadians--my great-grandfather, Joseph, in 1880, he was one of the early ones--and then the Greeks after that. But the Irish ran things for a pretty long time. The French were second. It wasn't till '36, I think, that we had our first French mayor ..."

The talk turned more personal later that evening, over dinner at an Irish pub downtown, where he shared with me, between interruptions (you can't sit down with Paul for long in many places in Lowell without someone calling his name), some of the quiet sadnesses his family had borne: his shopkeeper mother, Doris Roy Marion, who had never finished high school but who once boarded a silver railcar from Boston for a training program with Charles of the Ritz in New York, then caught the flu and came home ("I found the training manual years later cleaning out her dresser"); his father, a shy, quiet man who mapped out retirement trips to California and watched symphonies on TV ("kind of a closet intellectual without the education"), but gave his whole life to his mill job and died of cancer at 62.

"They were good people," he said to me. "Good working people. They dreamed dreams. But all they ever knew of life was work."

It was a side of Paul you rarely see, outside of his poetry. He's an affable man, very gentle in his ways, with wide brown eyes, a round face, and a story or clever remark about almost any subject you could name. There's a dreaminess about him, too, that comes across the first time you meet him--from his eyes, his slight smile--it's hard to know from where. You have to make the time, and do some digging--or hit just the right nerve--to get to where the poems come from.