The coverage in the Lowell Sun and a course in local history brought him to my attention, but I started with his Lowell novels, not Mexico City Blues, the poetry book Bob Dylan credits as a major influence. Jack Kerouac died in October 1969, when I was a sophomore. Poetry wasn’t part of my high-school world. We made the best of a snare drum, a cast-off schoolroom piano, and a thrift-shop tambourine. When two of my teen-aged cousins and I pretended for a few months to have a rock band, I scribbled music lyrics on loose-leaf paper. The iconic pairing of a political leader and a poet stayed with me.Įnthralled by the Beatles from the time I was ten years old, I must have developed an affinity for lyrical writing through all the hours of listening to British Invasion hit songs, three-minute singles like short lyric poems later. With the young President stood white-haired Robert Frost whom Kennedy had invited to read a poem for the ceremony, at the time a rare example of poetry being included in a national event. When I was six years old, I watched the inauguration of John F.
He described a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” Into his poetry processor went the plums in the fridge, paper bags from the street, a red wheelbarrow, a young housewife, and the local waterfall. Williams wrote poems, stories, essays, and accounts of American history. The doctor-poet who made house calls in New Jersey, was a general practitioner of literature. Suddenly, I was reading poems written for the American voice, a voice like the one in my throat. The quirky volume, a “talking bibliography,” introduced me to modern poetry. BROWSING IN THE STACKS of a college library in 1974, I noticed a book- I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet by William Carlos Williams.
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