Left In Lowell

I’ve been meaning to give ample attention to something I think is really great - Lowell is to be the host of the first Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Lowell is a festival town. We have lots of ethnic festivals, the Folk Fest of course, and a lot of visual art events. This covers a lot of ground in regards to the creative economy. What was missing were the arts of the written word. Though poetry has found a home in some of our coffee shops on open mic nights, poetry as part of our lives is lacking - as it is in most places in the US.

PaulM on richardhowe.com first wrote about this, and I’ll just quote myself from comments:

One thing that I regret in our society is that poetry is relegated to the classroom and not the living room or coffee shop. In order to thrive as a medium, poetry needs to live in the world…be read out loud to an audience. Unlike writing a novel, poetry can be a public performance, and though writing a poem is often a solitary act, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

If there were more ways to incorporate poetry in our lives, I think there’d be more poets and more poem appreciators. Like visual art, it takes understanding and the desire to engage to create an audience for poetry.

When the average person thinks about poetry, they are likely to believe it inaccessible as modern visual art. That’s not really true. While poetry can be as obscure as any art form, more often it is an intimate, compact, visceral experience. Particularly when the poem is read aloud to an audience.

I concentrated in creative writing for my English degree, and for the last two years of it, in poetry. I had two of the most amazing teachers, including Charles Simic, who was US Poet Laureate for 2007-2008. Not only was he an accomplished poet, but also a great teacher and poetry critic. (To this day I don’t know how UNH managed to land him.) Since then I have found it hard to remain in touch with both reading and writing poetry, which is highly unfortunate. My experience in poetry had a huge impact on my life. It is for this reason that I’m so pleased that Lowell will become, for one weekend, a center for poetry.