After completing school I spent about 2 years running a food coop near the campus ("Kneecap Natural Foods"). I was trying to keep literature and poetry at bay - like Rimbaud, I guess, I had very mixed feelings. Then I got tired of working behind the counter, and signed up as a VISTA volunteer, working for grassroots community organizations.
In those days (late 1970s, early '80s) community organizing was more of a working-class thing. It was not so ultra-hip & posh as it is today. Yet I was not a working-class kid. I was from an old Minneapolis well-to-do family (but in Minneapolis that means "regular folks" and "civic-minded"). I was trying to escape my Ivy League background.
I had the usual idealistic biases against business, money, capitalism. But you have to admit, they can be boring. People are seeking wholeness - this is why the transactional give-&-take of capitalism alienates many of our yout'. It's impersonal, and it's not about love : it's about money.
Most of these attitudes, nevertheless, are sheer luxury. Anyone who has grown up poor understands this. Work is the only solution - not feel-good economics, not abstract self-righteousness. "You shall judge them by their works.".
But then... we do have to work together.
Sometime in the late 1980s or early 90s I attended the funeral of Joe Vanni - an activist I had worked with in the early 1980s (before retiring to librarianship). It was a crowded ceremony - Joe Vanni was much-loved.
The poem is about the special parochial-corrupt-familial atmosphere of Little Rhody, Rogue Island (already perhaps fading into the historical distance) - the era of Buddy Cianci, Raymond Patriarca, Matty Smith... all the parochial power-players, who kept the state in a muddle of corruption.
I drove around Providence & environs all day today, a beautiful last day in July, taking photographs. Something ironic about all this. I'm leaving, sharing the faded photos, torn anew. I never made a dent : never helped anyone much. The neighborhoods of greater Providence & satellite towns remain crowded, poor, and incredibly ugly in a physical sense (not the people!). Something still needs to be done about this apartheid of lush suburbs and grubby towns, rich & poor. Of course individual people are doing beautiful things. But it doesn't show yet in a physical setting. The towns are impoverished; the roads are battered, horrible; the neighborhoods are cramped, a jumble of cars, roadsigns, power lines, noise, glass, metal, rubber, garbage. Bleak, bleak. I drove around through them today, feeling ashamed of myself.
from Shakespeare's Head
13
If you stand at the terrace, on the cliff above town,
the clay forms a bowl, clay lips' parameters;
and I'm going beyond you, city fathers. . .
– I'm moving toward stone.
Stone troubles my lips – a far-off circle, fractured now.
I'm going beyond you, deep into the fosse,
a mutterin' snail or ostentatious ostrich feathers'
bowler. . . down the incline, slowly. Tubular.
*
I drove once in the rain (a midsummer ghost)
to the other side of town, to the West End.
To the hulking catholic church – a fortress, suspended
over pastel tenements, tending their untold past.
To attend Joe Vanni's funeral.
A slight and motorcycled crippled man,
a loco-honey man, who lived to lion-
tame the hometown carnival.
The workers were there, the volunteers –
nurses, charity cases, activists
(that green and negative network persists
and persists – hauling the yoked pails of tears).
I was there on the sidelines,
asleep in my circulating book dream.
Closed my eyes, and suddenly there came –
a ship! Her prow was here – and her stern,
her stern was – Shakespeare's Head! There,
those city-minded wasps – buzzing at the axis
of yesterday. And here, at the sleepy matrix,
the grave and cloudy promise – of a figurehead. . .
*
Between prow and stern of the immaterial vessel,
within the perimeter of the muttering, droning bowl,
at the bottom, in the stone caverns and tall
fingers of windows goes – the big buy and sell.
Crawl toward the rotten deck the whole fifty-two
pick-up weeks now, Hamlet, boy-o –
down below the mates will check you
and even their odd scores. You'll know
you know too late. The high arched eyebrows,
the vainglorious attitude stabilizes there in the arena;
the swarms have their bull, their turf, their see-saw
way of saying yes, no – like maneuvering crows.
And the high school's painted brown and gray
so that you can sock away three retirement plans.
Your ghetto farm's run out of helping hands
to pay for riding lessons for little Fauntleroy.
Your idea of the city is not my idea, fellas.
You're caddies for some suburb golf protection racket.
You guard your perks like Midas fingers his pocket
money. Everything in vice clamps for this cruise!
The week's meal is gruel and baked beans again
so you can fly your cronies to San Jose.
Children muddle through under the mediocrity
of well-schooled flunkies, so you can be a football fan.
Downtown is a quiet graveyard of wind-driven stores
so you can play polo in Newport with a movie star.
And everybody knows just what you are!
They're your cousins, after all – no one cares.
But I'm whispering beyond you, philistines.
My eyes are in the clay. I'm shaping the rim,
I'm dreaming, I'm looking for the trim
sail. Wind sighs through the pines.
"The Hannah", a ship sculpture in Burnside Park
Church of St. Mary, Providence
