LAWRENCE — The 2024 Community Poetry Read opened and ended with teachers.
In between, at the Robert Frost Foundation event, came poet laureates, a city councilor, a historian, a workforce development director, a longtime therapist and two audience members.
They read lines on roads and resolve. Loss and land. The seen and unseen.
Together, the poetry, timeless and topical, unrolled like a single poem in the Sargent Auditorium Thursday night at the Lawrence Public Library.
Lawrence High School English teacher Richard Gorham, a Frost Foundation board member, introduced the readings by local leaders who had gathered, brought in by a shared passion for poetry.
On Gorham’s and other readers’ minds were our divisive and unsettling times – natural disasters, warfare and injustice.
Mark Bohrer, a former North Andover poet laureate, read “Song of the Open Road,” by Walt Whitman in his poetry book Leaves of Grass, published July 4,1855.
It was a time of national division. The Civil War approached, unforeseen in its magnitude. Yet Open Road brims with optimism, lends assurance and never fails to uplift him, Bohrer said.
It reads, in part, “Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,/I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.”
Bohrer’s wife, Debbie, said that on the ride to the library, she decided to read a hopeful, prayerful poem by Emma Lazarus called “The New Colossus.” It’s about the Statue of Liberty, a symbol that conveys the strength of America’s open arms.
It includes the lines: “From her beacon-hand/Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command/The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”
Two-time North Andover Poet Laureate Gayle Heney recognized the violence in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine.
She read Julia Copus’ poem, “The Back Seat of My Mothers Car,” about a child in a car as her mother leaves her husband.
Groundwork Lawrence Director of Education and Workforce Development Jorge Hernandez read a poem by CMarie Fuhrman, “A poem to acknowledge that the land itself — along with the people whose language, culture and religion were born of it — is rarely acknowledged.”
It reads, in part: “Read me your Declaration of Change. Detail your Plan of Procedure. Show me your Map to Equality. and then, just maybe then, I might be convinced that your Land Acknowledgment is not but another broken treaty.”
Marc Laplante, Lawrence City Council, visited the former concentration camp Auschwitz on a family trip to Poland this past summer.
He read two poems, both titled “Auschwitz.” The second poem was by Seymour Joseph, written after he toured the death camp in 1955.
It reads: “This ground has kept its secret/As a sheet covers a corpse so time and grass/have conspired to mask the crimes committed here.”
The Greater Lawrence community read was started years earlier by longtime Frost Foundation director Mark Schorr. He did so after going to a community poetry read in Boston where he was surprised to hear local leaders including the Boston police chief for whom poetry was essential, said Gorham.
Schorr died in 2017. He, like many in the room Thursday, held Robert Frost’s poetry close.
Frost, a plainspoken poet, liked to roam Lawrence in his youth. He lived here 15 years, graduating from Lawrence High in 1892. He was voted class poet, served on the debate and football teams, and was co-valedictorian with his wife-to-be, Elinor White.
His mother was a teacher. So was he. Frost Elementary School in Lawrence is named for him. He was at the original buidling’s dedication in 1962. A year earlier, he spoke at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Frost died in 1963 at age 88.
Frost knew grief and loss and depression. Four of his six children and his wife died before he did, two children before age four, one from cholera, the other a day after birth. Another child, at age 29, died giving birth. A fourth committed suicide, at age 38. His wife died in 1938, at 64, of heart disease after having breast cancer.
At the Lawrence community read, Amita Kiley, collections manager at the Lawrence History Center, read a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, “Don’t Quit,” including the following lines:
“Success is failure turned inside out—/The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,/And you never can tell just how close you are,/It may be near when it seems so far
Karen Kline, Robert Frost Foundation board member and former North Andover poet laureate, championed the history of poetry in the region.
“That we are living in the Valley of the Poets, and it is North Andover for Ann Bradstreet, John Greenleaf Whittier for Haverhill, Harriet Beecher Stowe for Andover — and she did write poetry — and the last, of course, is Bob Frost, and these four towns or cities were really the birthplace of most of the poetry in America,” she said.
Kline read “Fire and ice” by Frost.
Gorham’s students in his Grade 12 Lawrence High advanced placement literature class will soon read and analyze Frost poems including “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
“It’s always exciting to say, ‘This author went to Lawrence High,’” Gorham said.
On Thursday, Gorham read “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by English poet John Keats (1795-1821), including the lines:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
Harry Durso, who taught school for 30 years and wrote television scripts, grew up in Lawrence and walked everywhere as a youth.
He read a prose poem, he wrote, “Walking in Lawrence.”
His favorite place as a teen was Broadway, home to a row of movie theaters. His favorite theater was The Palace.
It was where he was determined to get his first kiss on a date with a girl named Patricia.
He studied beforehand. Learned a formula taught him by two teens with slicked-back hair and wearing Italian horn pendants.
They outlined, with chalk on the wall behind his grandfather’s barbershop on Newbury Street, the history of the world.
Young Harry learned five distinct moves to a first kiss: the yawn, the arm stretch, the squeeze, the whisper and the kiss.
He wore Brut cologne, bought candy at Louis Pearl’s store and paid for his date.
During “Mary Poppins,” released the summer of ‘64, Harry put the five points into action.
They worked perfectly. Rapture.
Durso left the Lawrence library room with a last thought on the role poets play.
“We see the truth and people hear it,” he said.