Etheridge Knight, photo credit: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press

Behind the Beat Look is a Sweet
Tongue and a Boogie Foot
(for those who see me as a tragic figure)

There is glee in my teeth, and mirth in my mouth.
My birth under the Mississippi sun so a boast,
A toast to my Black Daddy, Gandy-dancer, Master of the
Buck and Wing.  The Skin and Grin.

But what you see might not be what you get.

Etheridge Knight, The Worcester Review, XIX, 1998, p. 131

A brief biography of Etheridge Knight (1931-1991), including his ties to Worcester, was written and published by David Shaw as part of an interactive student project. The biography is available here.

A more comprehensive look at Etheridge Knight is featured in The W0rcester Review, Vol XIX 1&2 (1998) including his years in Worcester.  The introduction by Editor Rodger Martin also lays out how his military record can not answer the question of Korean War service one way or another because  a Vietnam War protest fire set at the Army Record Center in St. Louis destroyed significant portions of Knight’s military record.  http://www.theworcesterreview.org/

Visit the Poetry Foundation page for Etheridge Knight

Worcester Telegram article regarding an event.

Stanley Kunitz in his Provincetown garden. Photo by James Laughlin

The Testing Tree

1

On my way home from school
  up tribal Providence Hill
     past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
  I scuffed in the drainage ditch
     among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
  rolled out of glacial time
     into my pitcher’s hand;
then sprinted lickety-
  split on my magic Keds
     from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
  with my flying skin
     as I poured it on
for the prize of the mastery
  over that stretch of road,
     with no one no where to deny
when I flung myself down
  that on the given course
     I was the world’s fastest human.  
     
       2

Around the bend
  that tried to loop me home
     dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
  riddled with rabbit-life
     where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
  and a stringy old lilac
     more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
  remembered a door in the
     long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
  brushing the stickseed off,
     wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel’s hair,
  spotting the print of the deer
     and the red fox’s scats.
Once I owned the key
  to an umbrageous trail
     thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
  gave me right of passage
     as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massassoit
  soundlessly heel-and-toe
     practicing my Indian walk.
     
       3

Past the abandoned quarry
  where the pale sun bobbed
     in the sump of the granite,
past copperhead ledge,
  where the ferns gave foothold,
     I walked, deliberate,
on to the clearing,
  with the stones in my pocket
     changing to oracles
and my coiled ear tuned
  to the slightest leaf-stir.
     I had kept my appointment.
There I stood int he shadow,
  at fifty measured paces,
     of the inexhaustible oak,
tyrant and target,
  Jehovah of acorns,
     watchtower of the thunders,
that locked King Philip’s War
  in its annulated core
     under the cut of my name.
Father wherever you are
   I have only three throws
      bless my good right arm.
In the haze of afternoon,
  while the air flowed saffron,
     I played my game for keeps—
for love, for poetry,
  and for eternal life—
     after the trials of summer.
     
     4

In the recurring dream
  my mother stands
     in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
  with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
     Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
  she is wearing an owl’s face
     and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
  I pass through the cardboard doorway
     askew in the field
and peer down a well
  where an albino walrus huffs.
     He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
  staining the water yellow,
     why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
  That single Model A
     sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
  where the tanks maneuver,
     revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
  the heart breaks and breaks
     and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
  through dark and deeper dark
     and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
  Where is my testing-tree?
     Give me back my stones!

by Stanley Kunitz, read at The Higgins House, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1972

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), twice named Poet Laureate of The United States, was born in Worcester in 1905 and has become one of the most celebrated poets in the United States.  He once said, “Worcester provoked me into poetry.”  Regardless, we can savor the brilliant work those provocations created.   His childhood home is a poetry mecca for poetry lovers over the world.     

He has been featured numerous times in The Worcester Review and the WCPA has honored him first as one of the initial poets invited to read at its founding in 1971 and with many celebrations since.

Learn more about Stanley Kunitz by visiting the following sites:

Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home

The Poetry Foundation Stanley Kunitz Page

Stanley Kunitz on Wikipedia

Literary Landmark: Boyhood Home of Stanley Kunitz

the Paris Review interview with Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz Obituary in the New York Times

Poetry Everywhere with Garrison Keillor on PBS “Touch Me” by Stanley Kunitz

Charles Olson and his major work.

That’s all. I said. I promise to witness.
Charles Olson, Interview, 1970

To build out of sound the walls of the city
And display in one flower the wunderworld so that
By such means the unique stand forth
Clear itself shall be made known.
Charles Olson, Unpublished Fragment

Excerpt from The Charles Olson Sympsium:

Charles Olson’s inventiveness as a poet and scholar, as well as his engagement in community and national politics, have rendered him an American poet who continues to be an originating influence in our times.
Please join us as we mark the centenary with a challenging few days of poetics, friendship, and exploration.

We welcome the participation of poets, presenters, scholars and participants. Contact the WCPA or Olson Centenary Chair Mark Wagner at markgwagner@charter.net for additional information.

COMMUNITY EVENTS & OLSON SYMPOSIUM
SCHEDULE & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Charles Olson photo courtesy of Charles Olson Papers,
Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

A Brief Biography

Charles Olson was born in Worcester, December 27, 1910, the son of working-class parents, a Swedish immigrant father and an Irish Catholic mother. They lived on Mitchell Street, moving in 1912 to 6 Norman Avenue. In 1914 his family settled in a third-floor apartment at 4 Norman Avenue, where he was raised. Throughout his youth and into his years at Classical High School Olson struggled to overcome his consciousness of his size and height. He went to Wesleyan College in 1928.

Olson has strong association with two places other than Worcester: Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where in the 1950s Olson was a teacher, rector, advancing alternative ways of thought and verse; and Gloucester, Massachusetts, a north shore fishing community where he spent his childhood summers and a place that would provide the major background for his epic work, The Maximus Poems, which are rich in myth, full of geography, history, architecture, and personal reflections. Though his poetry may not be focused heavily on Worcester, in 1965 at a public reading in Berkeley, California, after reading a poem titled “An Ode on Nativity,” a poem set in Worcester, Olson blurted out, “Gee, I’m moved. Wow, I never write about Gloucester like this. Do you think? I’ve been wrong all this time… My subject is Worcester.” Though these words may have been spoken in jest, some of Olson’s finest moments are Worcester ones. Three stories about his boyhood in Worcester are “Stocking Cap,” “Mr. Meyer” and “The Post Office,” each a loving tribute to a father who took his young son berrying in the summer, gathering walnuts and wild grapes in the fall, and fishing through the ice on Worcester’s lakes in the winter. In “The Post Office,” Olson describes his father’s mail route in Worcester:

It stretched along the lake which bounds the city on the east.
Originally the route ran on both sides of the lake south from the
bridge which carried the road to Boston. The bridge alone, and the
other wooded side (where nothing much was but the city’s amusement
park and some summer camps) were enough to make the route what
my father would like. Just to cross the bridge a winter morning…
or to be a part of the boating around in the summer and the fall,
gave his workday a freedom…

Before Olson left Worcester in 1928 to attend Wesleyan, as Classical High School’s star speaker he had won a summer-long trip to Europe, top prize in a national oratory contest. He received a BA at Wesleyan and stayed on to earn an MA in 1933, writing his thesis on Herman Melville. Olson returned to Worcester to teach at Clark University. He was a favorite among the freshmen students he taught and proctored. He received two Guggenheim fellowships and a grant from the Gren Foundation to study Mayan hieroglyphics.

During WWII, Olson worked in the Office of War Information, then in Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election campaign. Finding no place for an artist in such pursuits, Olson left politics and began writing poetry seriously in the period during which he served as informal secretary to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. In 1950 he stepped out of the footsteps of Pound and began the development of post-modern free-verse with Robert Creeley.

In 1957, Olson retreated to Gloucester to concentrate on his own poetry, emerging occasionally, the leader of anew poetic counterculture. He taught briefly in Buffalo and at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He died in 1970 at the New York Hospital and is buried in Beechwood Cemetery, West Gloucester. Charles Olson was an extremely influential poet. His stature did not lie merely in his physical size but in the mythic dimension of his work.

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally

so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”

“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt” the Sun said
petulantly. “Most people are up
already waiting to see if I’m going
to put in an appearance.”

I tried
to apologize “I missed you yesterday.”
“That’s better” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d come out.” “You may be
wondering why I’ve come so close?”
“Yes” I said beginning to feel hot
wondering if maybe he wasn’t burning me
anyway.

“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.

Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.

If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
“Oh Sun, I’m so grateful to you!”

“Thanks and remember I’m watching. It’s
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don’t have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.

And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.

Maybe we’ll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
“Who are they?”

Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara’s early life hinted at American themes of mobility, touches of the rural upbringing, and a first rate education. Born to Russell O’Hara and Katherine Broderick in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 27, 1926, Frank and family returned to 12 North Street in Grafton where he grew in the embraces of his parents, brother John (Phil) and sister Maureen. O’Hara’s father and his Uncle Leonard ran a family business comprised of a dairy farm, a John Deere agency, livestock dealership, and a small hardware store for farmers. The family also owned many farms, a lumber mill in Northbrook, and a 1,200 tree apple orchard in Milford.

The O’Hara household was lively, with artistic parents. Russell was a pianist, and both parents were involved with community activities. A great part of their lives included love of music, books, art, theater, movies, and politics. (Members of the family still claim to be Democrats.)The welcomed lively discussions and differences. As a teenager Frank talked about returning when older and raising dogs on Tower Hill Farm on Sibley Street, one of the three farms the family owned. Though time crafted other plans, O’Hara spent many summer days at Kitville, a town beach on Route 140 East toward Upton. During later summers, Frank virtually lived at the Red Barn Summer Stock Theater in Westborough, a bit to the east of Grafton. Other influences shaping Frank’s aesthetic sensibilities included livestock and apples, St. John’s High School in Worcester, the colorful, mellow, seven hills on which Worcester and the surrounding towns stand.

O’Hara’s travels began with his studies of piano at the New England Conservator of Music between 1941-1944. Then the wider world and its complicities landed him on the USS Nicholas, where he worked as a sonar man in the pacific Theatre during World War II. He returned to attend Harvard on the G.I. Bill, meeting up in Cambridge with John Ashbery, a poetic kinship that will anchor, along with Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, the New York School of Poetry. But first came the University of Michigan, where he earned an MA in English Literature.

While the restless world called him, Grafton and family life are found in Frank’s short, surrealistic plays such as Try! Try! and Change Your Bedding. And where O’Hara’s poetry is not confessional in the way of Kunitz, where he does not catalogue his places and thoughts like Olson, nor revisit key events in childhood like Bishop’s strong work, childhood is there in “Poem (There I Could Not Be a Boy),” “Memorial Day, 1950,” and an early poem he wrote for his sister, “The Spoils of Grafton”:
Oh piano! Hire a moving van!
Put down the Mendelssohn and run!

The tension between what shaped him, and the need for distance from what shaped him, also turns up in “Autobiographia Literaria,” Here, O’Hara speaks of the alienation he felt in schoolyards as a boy, and yet,
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

O’Hara’s love of the place and the people of New York defined his mature life. His work a MOMA, criticism for Artnews, and the poems – sometimes scribbled at lunchtime – cemented his place in the pantheon of New York artists during the turbulent late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1960, O’Hara was named Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions. He curated and wrote the catalogues for four major shows at MOMA. Yet for all his love of the visual arts, O’Hara’s poetry is what summons us.

With the publication of Meditations in an Emergency (Grove, 1957) he began to share with a wider public the brilliance and spontaneity of his thought and writing. He called his method Personism, which he defined as writing that addresses a poem to one person, creating a tone that involves a powerful inclusivity and love. In poems such as “Having a Coke with You” and “The Day Lady Died,” we enter a living world at times comic, burlesque, political, full of anxiety, difficult to summarize. The poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (dated July 10, 1958) captures both the guises:
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.

O’Hara died on Fire Island in 1966.