Home
About the Program
PPLP Calendar
Building the ARTS Community
Hoot Night
Poems From the Hoot
Meet the Poet Laureate
Esther Buffler Residency
Poet Laureates - Past
Board of Directors
Contact Us

Back to Meet the Poet

Thoughts From the Poet Laureate

From Dividends, (Greater Portsmouth C of C), June 2003

It is difficult/to get the news from poems /
yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.

                                         -- W.C. Williams (physician & poet)


 …I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

                                                                           -- Walt Whitman

In his April Dividends message, Peter Hamelin paints us a picture in words:  a Portsmouth dawn—lights flickering in a coffee shop, trucks idling at the curb, boats firing up on the river.  We see him walking through the middle of it—he’s upbeat.  We know it from the rhythm of his lines (things are starting to cook—coffee’s brewing—the city’s waking to work.).  We know it from the bite of his boots on the snow (no scuffer here).   And we know it from the image of his “favorite” coffee shop.

Notice it is a coffee shop, a cafe, a poet’s haunt—the kind with paintings and photos on the wall.  The kind the tourists love for looking so European.  The kind of place the locals come to talk, write, and sip great coffee.  Notice too that word, “favorite.”  That means more than one.  And the clear implication is he likes them all—but this one especially.  Mind you that he’s walking, and we know which way:  northwest, into the wind.  You know that wind, whipping the Piscataqua with the frayed end of a Canadian rope.   But we don’t hear any complaints—no mention of the wind.  No moaning over April snow as he crosses the Square, moves down Market, passes the salt piles, heads for the Chamber.  He’s soaking up the city at dawn; he likes what he sees, hears, smells, and he’s not afraid to get wet.

What words do for us!  The way we talk with one another.  Write to one another.

The way we do business.  Every day, technology tosses us one more sophisticated tool for communicating.  What it doesn’t throw in—can’t throw in—is the human voice:  warm, cold, clear, bold, creative.  We have to provide that ourselves.  And that voice at full throat is at once idea and emotion—thought and feeling.  Poetry is the truth of that voice.

              Last December, John tabor, writing in this space, celebrated the inauguration of Portsmouth Listens, “an innovative public-private effort to sustain our area’s quality of life.”  That quality is generated by the “livable size” of our communities, their “arts and culture, appreciation for entrepreneurship, (and) responsive government.”   That arts and culture are at the front of his list is not surprising.   No one can dispute the valuable contributions made by seacoast artists to our communities, especially in the fields of the performing and visual arts.  But what of literature—and poetry in particular?

            This is the lonely art.  The one tucked into the pages of a closed book, leaning on a shelf in our well-stocked, over-crowded library.  The one scribbled into a loose-leaf, shyly shared with a few friends over a cup of tea.  This is the art Doctor Williams warns people wither and die without.   Is it not significant that after 9/11 this is the art we turned to in our confusion, grief, anger, and fear?  The art that mattered most when we looked into the darkness?  Into our own hearts?

           “Poems are snapshots by others we find ourselves in,” says Charles Simic.  And what we may find is that we’ve been looking for ourselves out there, in that “quality of life” Tabor talks about.  Might we consider the possibility that all quality of life is, in the end, interior—in the mind, in the soul?  Poetry speaks to those places.  If Portsmouth is to really listen, perhaps her attention could be turned, on occasion, in the direction of her poets.  These folks, after all, are taking care of business for us—keeping the word on a taut line, winding the ends with their means.  They mean to throw us a life preserver when we’re too far out and sinking.  What can a saving word be worth?

            Tonight, after work, shall we join Peter on his walk home “through the living room of our community?”  Join our neighbors in their lamp-lit room, their bookstores, cafes, and libraries, snuggled in a corner, searching a poem for a familiar face?  Shall we dare catch sight of ourselves through the open window, heading for the banks of the river, gazing “up in perfect silence at the stars”?

                                                                                                --JP, May 28, 2003

                                                                                                Copyright John Perrault, 2003

Back to Meet the Poet