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Lowell, MA: Poet Paul Marion

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(page 3 of 5)

I remember the first time I saw this. It was four or five years ago; I was teaching a class in freshman composition and had assigned a Paul Marion poem, "Majestik Linen," about a worker in an industrial laundry somewhere in Lowell, seen through a window on a Sunday-morning walk: "She turns back to her work, what most of us won't see / unless we're in the Flats at the hour of the early Mass, / following the drone of automatic washers / to a sunrise service recognized worldwide ..." A student in the class, a boy of 18 or 19 who rarely if ever shared his thoughts, raised his hand to tell me, with what seemed like genuine wonderment, that he recognized in the poem--he was very sure of it, he said--his mother's place of employment.

I told Paul about it the next time I saw him. His delight was as plain as a child's. "That's wonderful," he said. "He saw through the poem to his mother. He saw that place as a subject of literature. That made it matter for him. That gave it dignity."

Around that same time, I moved to Lowell from a small town in New Hampshire about an hour away. I had worked at UMass Lowell nearly five years by then, and had a pretty good sense of the city's past and present: the mill girls and millionaires of the 19th-century boom years; the slow obsolescence; the bottoming out through the '60s and '70s; the wax-and-wane cycle that followed; the flood of Cambodians that followed the Khmer Rouge genocide.

I knew about the blight, the muggings, and the gang violence, but also about the galleries, the small museums, the repertory theatre, and the artists' lofts downtown. I knew the city had been down and up and down again enough times to develop a sense of tragedy. But I liked that you could sit in deep cushions in the Caffé Paradiso and eat Italian pastry at 11 o'clock at night, and that there were real-imitation gaslights on Palmer Street, and that you could go to a pro baseball game for eight dollars, and that some of the streets still had cobblestones.

I liked what the city was on its way to becoming: a place where people honor the past but don't cling to it, and where a future is unfolding as you watch. Half a mile from the cobblestones is the 6,500-seat Tsongas Arena, spanking-new, of brick and glass, which has hosted Bob Dylan, Liza Minelli, Van Morrison, and the Boston Pops, along with Serena Williams, the World Wrestling Federation, and the World Men's Curling Championships. The old mills and boardinghouses are today's condos and artists' lofts. Walk a mile along the river and you'll see everything from the ruins of 100-year-old coal sheds to the site of the UMass Lowell's new nanotechnology center. Something exciting is happening: a newness, a kind of hipness peeking out from under the drear, that makes you want to be a part of it.

Part of Lowell's appeal, too, was Paul and other people like him--other artists, because the city is full of them. I was hoping that I might find some of the same gritty, life-grounding energy he was always talking and writing about. I did find the energy, but in the end it wasn't enough to hold me--other things came along--and I left after only two years. I've sometimes wondered since, though, whether I gave it enough of a chance.

It's several days after our pub dinner. We're standing now on the little grass island, deciphering the memorial, talking about the city's immigrant past. On one side is a company parking lot, mostly vacant now; on the other, the rear wall of the university's glass-and-concrete recreation center. It's late afternoon, warm and nearly cloudless, but even now the sidewalks around us are empty. It seems an unlikely place, I tell Paul, to memorialize anything. "Yes," he answers, "but here is where it all was."