Recently--I caught up with the poet J.D. Scrimgeour, the current poet laureate of Salem, Ma. He has a new collection of poetry/prose out " Poet in High Street Park: Prose & Poetry for Modern Salem" (Loom Press).
According to his website: " Poet in High Street Park is a love song to Salem, Massachusetts, by a writer who has grounded himself in the everyday realities of living in the city for the past 30 years, from playgrounds to classrooms to ballfields. It is testimony that, beneath the Halloween hoo-ha and the historical tours crowding the sidewalks, people live here. Finding the universal in the local, this book asks who we are and who we want to be.
Do you feel your book has the same sensibility of William Carlos Williams, " Paterson" Were you inspired by it?
Smart question! I actually wrote a Masters Thesis on Paterson, and so I’m sure that it influenced my book. The life that Williams lived inspired me as much as Paterson itself. Williams, while having cosmopolitan interests in art and literature, remained attached to a place. He worked among the people of that place, and he accepted that he wasn’t writing about a major metropolitan area. Paterson, in its own way, mixed prose and poetry (in fact, that’s what my thesis was about), and my book includes different genres, too. Another important influence was Langston Hughes and his book-length poem on Harlem, Montage of a Dream Deferred. I used it as the model for the poetic sequence, “Montage of Brick and Water,” which opens the book’s first section. Both Williams and Hughes respect the everyday people of their cities. I hope my work does that as well.
This book of poetry is like a love affair or marriage that has glaring flaws, and ugly/beauty, but in spite of it all it is embraced and cherished.
Interesting. I think of the whole book as a kind of answer to the oven bird’s question in Frost’s poem: “what to make of a diminished thing”? Salem will never be a center of commerce and civilization, as it was once. When I moved here, it felt like a backwater. It still does, but it has experienced a renaissance in the past two decades. I hope my book traces some of that movement in the city’s life, and in my feelings toward it.
Why did you make High Street Park in Salem the focal point of many of your poems?
High Street Park is a little grassless park tucked behind the homeless shelter in Salem, two blocks from my house. I took my sons there when they were little, and I still go there, some 25 years later, to shoot baskets every now and then. It’s where I have met several different types of people, had plenty of encounters, and witnessed some moving acts of kindness, from a group of young teens putting a baby bird back in its nest to a group of twenty-somethings playing basketball to entertain their wheelchair-bound friend. It’s a humble place, and not particularly beautiful, but it has come to represent community to me.
In the poem " Family" you personify Lynn, Peabody, Salem and Beverly. There is a hierarchy among the 'families' as you would find in any family or families. Do you think this hierarchy is still true? Or was it ever really true? Is for instance --Lynn-- the city of sin, and so on?
I wrote that poem over 20 years ago. It was inspired by Aloysius Betrand’s prose poem, “The Five Fingers of the Hand,” which is a kind of grotesque, and that probably explains the rather unflattering image of all the cities in it. As for hierarchy, yes, the piece suggests there are class differences among the cities, but, really, it’s more about the imaginative relationship between them, and how they view themselves.
At the risk of not answering your question, rereading the piece, I’m most intrigued by the weirdness of the Salem description (a senile grandmother who speaks no English and supposedly strangles babies in the night), which seems a mysterious comment on Salem’s unique history.
There is a beautifully written piece about Bingo played by seniors in Salem. You didn't take the banal game at face value. It proves that anything thing as humble as this game, has layers of meaning. This is indeed-- an example of the examined life.
Thank you. That actually came from an exercise I gave my students in a nonfiction class and which I tried myself: Go to a place you’ve never been and write about it. Two elderly Polish sisters, neighbors of mine, took me there. That piece makes me think of how many things in my book have disappeared: the coal-burning power plant, the Salem State library where my office was, the senior center, the sisters.
There is a lot of history in your work. How much research was involved?
The two historical essays, one about the Great Salem Fire, and one about the Peabody sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann, were both written when I had the time granted by a sabbatical to really devote myself to reading about them, and they involved a fair amount of research. There really wasn’t a lot of scholarship about the fire that destroyed a third of the city back in 1914, so I found myself reading contemporaneous reports about the fire and its aftermath. The poems certainly were informed by tidbits of Salem History, too, and the short story at the end of the book, “Prospect,” involved interviewing someone who played baseball in the Dominican Republic and learning about that experience as a way to acknowledge Salem’s Dominican population.
LAID-OFF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LIBRARIAN
When the new principal
under the direction
of the educational
consulting company
asks you to train
your minimum-wage replacement
and the local papers
praise all the “reforms”
and even your friends
move to the suburbs and believe
the brown skin of the children you teach
must be avoided,
when your Saturdays
buying used books for those children
and the darkening afternoons
putting those books away
so they can check them out again
seem a lost, wasted life,
remember your walk
to and from school
through the downtown
that’s still your downtown
and the way your students
wrap their arms around your leg
when they see you on the street
and how the older ones
from years before—
even, sometimes, the boys—
hug you in Market Basket
or at the Halloween Parade
and pronounce your name
wrong, like they used to,
Mizgerald, Mizgerald!
and then tell you
what books they’ve been reading.
