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Portsmouth Poet Laureate - John Perrault's
Acceptance Remarks to the Mayor, April 14, 2003 

"What can this mean?  To be a poet laureate?  We’ve had but three:  Esther, Robert and Maren.  Let me think…”Laureate,” from the laurel tree in ancient Greece.  A branch tossed in the Aegean, floating into the Mediterranean, out through the Strait of   Gibraltar, across the broad Atlantic, around the Isles of Shoals, up the Piscataqua to Puddle Dock and ferried here to City Hall.   Proof we are not alone!  Proof we are connected to all the distant lands and peoples surrounded by seas on this great blue ball of earth.  Proof our mighty River takes its water seriously—knowing, as it does, that its briny mix containsthe very elements that once bubbled in a bay bathing the Levant—knowing it carries the branch of the laurel on its rippling back.

For Apollo, you see, god of the lyre, of poetry, had longings for Daphne—who, after being chased up and down the Peneus and round about Attica, just at the moment he caught hold of her sleeve, turned into a laurel tree.  From that moment, Apollo took the laurel as his emblem, decreeing that the laurel branch would forever be the prize of honor for poets.   Not money, mark you, but a bunch of leaves.

Kings and lords of the ancient realms required verse makers at their courts and halls—skalds for the Scandinavians, bards for the Welsh, skops for the Angles and Saxons.  In England, this led to the official Versificator (sounds like a sin), and a good deal of ridicule by his peers—for how could one be a poet if, at the same time, he was being paid to sing the party line?

The first formal poet laureate in England was John Dryden, 1668.  The office has been held by hacks and greats, including William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson.  At the least, they were expected to compose lines to memorialize significant events—the passing of a hero, the crowing of a queen.

In the United States, we have had an official poet laureate since 1986—prior to that, the position was known as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.  That position was inaugurated in 1937, the year the Legislators surmised, probably erroneously, that poetry couldn’t hurt them.  Billy Collins now sits in the chair, as he strives to make clear that even in the public sphere, poetry does matter.

Closer to home, New Hampshire’s poet laureate, Marie Harris, is, as we speak, forcefully engaged in the production of the first nation-wide public conference of state poet laureates.  They will be focusing on the very question before us today:  what is the role of the poet in public life?  What place does the poet have in the vital cultural/ethical/political conversations going on across this wide land?

So we come to the term now linked to laureate—the poet.  What is a poem anyway?  Taking life by the throat, says Robert Frost.  Finding yourself in someone else’s snapshot, says Charles Simic.  Emotion recollected in tranquility, says William Wordsworth.  Perhaps all would agree with T.S. Eliot that at the very least, poetry must produce pleasure, but at the same time must also expand our consciousness and reawaken our hearts to the pulse of the soul in the every day things of this world.  A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom, says Frost.   You see, it is not just a matter of scanning lines and rhyming words.  (Though lines and rhymes may count for everything in a particular poem:  Tell all the truth, but tell it slant/Success in circuit lies, says Emily Dickinson.   then quickly adds:  Too bright for our infirm delight/The truth’s superb surprise!   Not to argue with Emily.)  Not merely meter, but a meter making argument. (Frost again.)

My predecessors have poured their hearts into a poetic foundation that every contractor would be proud of:  Esther Buffler’s CD, High on Poetry—compact, audible, tangible.  But the words—the poems—touch us in the place where the physical merges with the metaphysical, the body with the spirit.  Robert Dunn’s lyrical lines nesting on the parking garage walls.  We see them there, suddenly, unexpectedly, as we climb the concrete stairs, slightly out of breath, only to find—surprise!  The words flying off the walls, circling our heads, dive bombing our hearts.  Maren Tirabassi’s anthology of new poems for an old city—Portsmouth Unabridged—the title taking us over the spans that link us to the world.  Reminding us that we live on water, by water, from the gundalow on the cover through the pages pulling us out to see our neighbors from off shore—giving us a new perspective on the people that make this city hum.

It is time, now, to start building on that foundation."

                                                                                                 --John Perrault

c 2003 John Perrault

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