I first met Tom Sexton sometime in the mid or late 1950s when we were playing
Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) basketball, he for the affluent Immaculate
Conception Church in the Belvedere section of Lowell, Massachusetts, and
I for the Holy Trinity Polish Church. His parish was predominately middle
to upper class Irish.
On the basketball court neither of us was a very imposing figure. We were
playing for the fun of it while attending Lowell High school from which
we were graduated in 1958 both as average students. I remember Tom as being
quiet and enormously shy. He had a mischievous grin, an ironic sense of
humor, and eyes like Coleridge's ancient mariner.
During his high school days Tom spent considerable time at a billiards parlor
frequented by unsavory characters on the second floor of a brick building
on Central Street near the intersection of Merrimack Street in the heart
of the by then dead mill town of Lowell. He was a bit of a hustler. "One
guy named Willie controlled the head table near the window," recalls
Sexton when we spoke recently by phone. "He was in his seventies and
had to use a magnifying glass to see the numbers on the balls. You could
win or lose a week's pay in a hour." In Poolshark from A
Bend Toward Asia, he writes: We came ducktailed and dumb from school
to lose at nineball to that dank and wrinkled shark who held a dime store
magnifying glass against his eye to line his shots before he cleared the
table. "I never played Willie. I never made it to the table near the
window. You had to work your way there. I was never that good. I did okay
at my own level, though." Sexton continues" There's no small change
in this Alaskan city where I live. You can see earth's inviting bend toward
Asia, and at times the coastal mountains buckle clouds that form a vast
and empty moonlit tent above us. At times I long to shine like bait in Willie's
hand.
He also worked at the A&P supermarket on Rogers Street, and he caddied and
played golf.
Born in Lowell in 1940 to Raymond and Harriet (Quinn) Sexton, Tom and an
older sister Raeanne lived during his teens at 126 Pleasant Street on the
border line separating wealthy upper class Irish Catholics and old time
Yankee families from a ghetto of poor Polish and Portuguese families. Two
blocks away the Concord River flows, and Sexton spent much of his early
adolescence fighting with neighborhood bullies and fishing along the riverbanks.
"One side of the river, going away from the center of Lowell, the neighborhood
was really wealthy and nice. On the city side of the river were slums, a
very poor section of town. I hung around with kids from both sides. Some
of those kids, he notes "were really tough." Sexton knew a lot
of really tough kids, but he would later go on to write a poem about receiving
his First Holy Communion.
Tom attended parochial school at the Immaculate Conception and entered Lowell
High School as a freshman in 1954. His father, a skilled tool and die maker,
worked at the General Electric plant in Lynn during World War II, commuting
to Lynn for 12 years after he moved his family back to his hometown around
1942. From 1954 to 1968 his father worked for the Raytheon Company in South
Lowell. Tom describes his father as "a shy man who kept very much to
himself. He was very much subdued and a loner. He never bothered anyone."
His mother he says, "mostly stayed at home, though she did work some."
It was not a happy home.
Tom's 1958 Lowell High School yearbook picture in The Spindle
carries the caption, "Future: College." But he took a circuitous
route getting there. He started out in the college preparatory course, "but"
according to Sexton, "my grades were low so I transferred to the commercial
course. Everybody seemed to be getting out of Lowell. The town was dead.
After graduation I worked odd jobs for awhile and then joined the Army Infantry.
In January of 1959 I was in boot camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I learned
to be an office clerk. That's where I learned to type." In 1959 his
mother at age 42 died of a heart attack.
Sexton spent three and one-half years in the army, two of them while stationed
at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, and one year at an Air Force Station
in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was assigned to an Army Nike missile battalion.
He was his company's personnel clerk. In the spring of 1962 Sexton was honorably
discharged at the rank of an E-4 corporal.
In the fall of 1963, Sexton attended Newman Prep in Boston, but he ran out
of money. The next fall, he enrolled in Northern Essex Community College
in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a newly established institution of public higher
education. He worked there part time as a security guard. "Being an
army veteran I was a little self-conscious about going to college and being
older than most students. Once there, it seemed that Northern Essex had
been created for me. I felt relaxed, and I guess I started to gain confidence.
I began to develop an interest in poetry thanks to the efforts of teachers
like Marlene Mollinoff Sexton says. "I left three credit short of an
associate's degree."
In the fall of 1966, Sexton transferred to Salem State College where he
and I crossed paths again. I was beginning my first year as an instructor,
and Tom was continuing his college career as an English major and a fledgling
poet. He was also pushing a mop down the college corridors while working
as a part time and summer janitor. I, on the other hand, was pushing a bleeding
red pen across the pages of student essays as a full-time member of the
English Department. One day we sort of bumped into each other, and after
a few awkward moments of stumbling over what we were each doing at Salem,
we settled into easy conversation as fellow high school alumni, a glue that
will bind even the most unlikely of characters.
Sexton says he came to Salem State College "first of all because I
could afford it, but no less important to me was the fact that the state
colleges were beginning to expand from teacher training into the liberal
arts. Salem was offering a B.A. in English, which is what I wanted. Salem
also accepted my credits from Northern Essex Community College. I guess
today I would be called a nontraditional student."
While Sexton was attending Salem State College from 1966 though 1968, the
school was not yet fully liberated from the regimen and constrictions of
college life as it was in the 1950s. Attendance was taken during each class
and absent students were reported to the office of academic affairs. Three
cuts meant an "F" for the course and male students with long hair
were told to get a hair cut. But the curriculum was expanding, enrollment
was doubling , buildings were on the rise, and in September of 1966, fifty-five
new, full-time faculty and administrators, I among them, were introduced
at the opening day convocation.
Meanwhile that same year Tom Sexton began to emerge on campus as a quiet
but influential English major. In the spring of 1967, he and a few other
students decided it was time for their voices to be heard, and the voice
that emerged was the voice of a poet.
"I had taken 18th Century, neoclassic poetry with Pat Gozemba"
Sexton says, "and learned to appreciate the rigid structure of rhyme
and meter in the works of writers like Dryden and Pope. I was also taking
a class in Modern Poetry with George Groesbeck. He exposed me to poets like
Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings. I was also fascinated by
Charles Olsen who was living in Gloucester. He used breadth stanzas to regulate
verse. I guess I was learning how to combine craft and creativity in the
writing of poetry. I also used to clean the office of Neil Olson the Director
of the Library. He know a lot about the Cambridge and Boston poets of the
fifties and early sixties people like Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell [See
Sextant Vol IV, No. 1]. He encouraged me to write. You and Henry
Burns were influences and your enthusiasm for literature was picked up by
the students. So the emerging poet in me, and in some of the other students,
decided to create a publication for poetry."
With the encouragement of Professor Groesbeck, who served as its first faculty
advisor, Sexton founded The Penny Sheet, a weekly, mimeographed,
eight-to-twelve page broadside with poems of poetry by students, faculty,
and anyone else who cared to submit work. This pamphlet would have a profound
influence on Sexton's future. "I was inspired and still am by the notion
of blue collar, working class people writing poetry. I guess I got the idea
from Jack Kerouac whom I read because he was from the same background and
also from Lowell. I remember reading him during my senior year in high school
right after On the Road came in 1957. I had an immediate identification
with him. He was a vagabond and so was I."
Sexton and his volunteer crew of editorial and production assistants settled
into a small cubicle erected in the corridor next to Room 205-A on the second
floor of the administration building later to be named the Sullivan Building
after a long-deceased former president. The cubicle became vacant when The
Log, the college newspaper moved its headquarters to the new Student
Center.
The walls of the cubicle stood about five feet tall, and entrance was gained
through a swinging door which was never locked, an invitation to free verse,
as it were. Inside were a portable radio, student textbooks, scarves, jackets,
dirty ashtrays, two manual typewriters, a mimeograph machine, reams of paper,
bookshelves, file cabinets, and two old wooden desks.
The most important item in this little corner of creativity was a metal
basket labeled "IN." This was for the submission of poetry, and
it was usually filled to overflowing. Some of the poetry was submitted anonymously.
Some poems carried only the author's first name. A cross-section of the
student population submitted poetry. "We were open to everybody. Nobody
ever bothered us or took anything," remembers Sexton. "I guess
it was a reflection of the sixties."
Around noon on Fridays, Tom Sexton, the poet, and his band of volunteers,
including office manager Bonnie Andres (SSC '68) and his wife-to-be, Sharyn
Hulquist (SSC '68) would carry copies of The Penny Sheet through
the same corridors that Tom Sexton, the janitor, had swept clean the previous
day. "We would go into the main cafeteria, various dining areas, and
student gathering spots on campus with The Penny Sheet in hand, and
we would hawk our wares for 'a penny a sheet'," recalls Sexton.
"We probably sold around 150 to 200 copies an issue. We sold them for
whatever people wanted to pay. We didn't care. We called it The Penny
Sheet, but some people would give us a quarter or a dollar. They liked
it, students faculty, and staff. "Then says Sexton, "we would
use the money to buy coffee and printing supplies."
Once a month after several issues of The Penny Sheet had come out,
a group of ten to fifteen students and faculty would get together for a
poetry workshop usually on the second floor of the Student Center.
"I guess it was our version of a literary salon," says Sexton.
"We would read individual poems as requested and give critiques of
one another's work. That's when I really began to learn how verse works,
and how poetry should sound, and how it should be read. That's the first
time I heard my voice as a poet, both when others read my poetry and also
when I did. Sometimes it was embarrassing, but mostly it was delightful.
We were reading and performing as well as writing, and we had a listening
audience. It was great to have faculty there, outside the classroom, subjecting
their own poetry to student criticism.
"I remember one poem I wrote called 'Racafunt.' This was during the
Vietnam protest era, and I was trying to make a point about how our entire
civilization, ancient as well as contemporary could be destroyed by a nuclear
war. All that would be left from the devastation after the bombs dropped
would be the lowly 'Racafunt,' which is a nonsense work derived from combining
'raccoon' with 'elephant.' Like a cockroach only the 'Racafunt' would survive
in the desert of the Almagordo, New Mexico, the proving grounds where the
atomic bomb was developed and tested. It the racafunt would have 'no bombs'
no planes, no dames /no chocolate pompons to ease his pains/...Man don't
cry for the Racafunt.' I ended it with the lines from Shelley's 'Ozymandias':
'Look on my works ye mighty and despair.' It was a parody. Someone recognized
the line and said the poem was plagiarized. For a moment I, not civilization,
was the one who was devastated. But only for a moment, of course, because
being together and discussing poetry was fun."
Sexton's poetry in those days was different from that of most others because
it was bare boned, usually short, not superfluous, not wordy, not selfindulgent,
and not solipsistic. It was a clean, crafted, and disciplined expression
without self pity or self induced venting of false emotions. Nor did it
feature any heightened sense of self-importance. His writing was sometimes
caustic, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic. It sometimes rhymed and
sometimes did not. But he never got in the way of his craft. He never stumbled
over himself. His persona never got in the way of his poems.
Sexton was graduated from Salem State College in June 1968 with a B.A. in
English and with acceptance in hand to the Masters of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
program at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He received a $3,100 stipend
and free tuition for work as a graduate assistant. "I applied to three
schools but I really wanted to go back and see Alaska because of my Army
experience there," says Sexton. "They offered me an assistantship,
so that was that. Believe it or not, the reason I was accepted to the M.F.A.
program was The Penny Sheet. I sent them copies with my application,
and they liked what I had done and wrote. Those little 'penny sheets"'opened
the door to graduate school for me."
In August of 1968, Sexton headed for Alaska with his wife Sharyn. They lived
in a log cabin that had no running water, but it did have, for convenience,
an outhouse in the back. During his first year as a graduate assistant,
Sexton graded papers for composition classes, and during his second year,
he taught writing courses. After two years Sexton completed his requirements
for the M.F.A., a terminal degree. His thesis was a collection of his poetry
with an introduction of about thirty pages explaining his poetics, both
style and theme.
Sexton immediately joined the faculty as an assistant professor at the University
of Alaska in Anchorage, where he taught graduate and upper division undergraduate
courses in literature and creative writing. Moreover he was appointed Director
of the newly established Creative Writing Program, a position he held until
1985. Sexton also established the curriculum and designed the requirements
a new M.F.A. degree at the Anchorage campus.
In 1970 Sexton returned to Lowell to attend the funeral of his father. His
The Bend Toward Asia is dedicated to his father's memory.
Also during that year, Sexton became editor of Raven magazine,
a position he holds to the present.
In 1972 the career of Tom Sexton the poet began to sprout when Unicorn
Journal published some of his poems in an edition that included
works by Gary Snyder depicted as Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's The Dharama
Bums and Philip Levine both of whom had achieved notoriety in the late
fifties and sixties. This exposure led to by Solo Press in 1974 of Sexton's
first book, Terra Incognita. Many of the poems were written
by Sexton as part of the requirements for his M.F.A. Terra Incognita
received good reviews, and according to Sexton, sold about one thousand
copies. It was also nominated for the National Book Award.
Following the publication of Terra Incognita, Sexton experienced
"a bit of a lull." He says, "The demands of teaching and
administering the Creative Writing Program were overwhelming, and I guess
my poetry was sacrificed for about ten years." He also began to teach
the history of photography and started to publish in that field and exhibit
some of his photography.
In 1981 Sexton became the poetry editor for the Alaska Quarterly Review
a position he held until the end of 1994. "Around 1982 I realized that
I had probably made a mistake in not continuing with my poetry, so I started
to make time to write." His poetry re-emerged, and his work was published
in various literary journals and magazines throughout the 1980s.
In 1991 Limner Press in Anchorage published Sexton's second book of poetry,
Late August on the Kenai River, a collection of twenty-four
poems. "It was a hand-set and limited edition of about 500 copies,"
says Sexton, "and, much to my surprise and delight, it sold out in
less than a month. A lot of people it seems wanted more poetry about the
Alaskan landscape and the Alaskan experience."
In 1994 Sexton retired from his position at Anchorage as an Emeritus Professor
of English, but he continues to write and publish. A Blossom of Snow,
another collection of poems is scheduled for release in April of 1995 by
Mad River Press of Richmond, Massachusetts.
Sexton's poems are a poetry of place and his craft is that of an image maker.
They are inspired by memories of childhood locales and experiences in Lowell
as well as by the Alaskan landscape, native culture, walks in the woods,
and the geography of wherever he is. He owns a solitary one-room log cabin
in Hurricane, Alaska, about 180 miles from Anchorage. "It's my country
house," he told me. "I can see the whole Alaskan Range when it's
not fog bound. That's where I get in touch with nature. Sometimes I feel
I should write more about my family and friends from Lowell. People seem
to like those poems as narratives, but I feel so distant from Lowell now.
I have to feel connected to write about things. I feel connected to Alaska."
Sexton describes his first book as "imagistic." "Later then
I started writing narratives. Now I'm kind of combining the two. I spent
about eight or nine years reading Chinese poetry in translation and learning
what can be revealed by a striking image drawn from nature. The ancient
Chinese writers would enter the world of nature and become part of it. Then
their observations would be sharpened and enhanced. Individual feelings
become insignificant, and the poet becomes one with nature. I try to create
the image, and then I add my personal voice at the end of the poem. I want
to convey a deep feeling kept free of emotion or personal intrusion. The
'eye' is not an autobiographical 'I', if you'll excuse the play on words."
In "On Reading Wang Wei," Sexton writes:
Spider webs are on the grass
for the first time this summer.
Highbush cranberries hang
like delicate lanterns on their stems.
For a moment
I am too insignificant to be unhappy. (The Bend Toward Asia, p.66)
Sexton's "Crows on Bare Branches" is addressed to a Japanese haiku
painter Suzuki Koson. Sexton says, "There was a school of Chinese and
Japanese landscape artists in the early 1900s who would make paintings based
upon reading a haiku. They would paint them in about two or three minutes."
He writes:
Our small book of haiku painting
is open to your crows.
Weightless on its black branch
one tilts its head
towards something beyond the frame.
Perhaps it is only the sound
of riffling water in the mountain stream
where you have paused to clean your brushes.
Beyond mist rising from the river,
Denali seems as fragile as a paper lantern.
You would be so happy in these winter mountains
watching a raven shaking light from its feathers.
Like a haiku painting, Sexton's poetry is free from lavish ornamentation.
Restraint and the enjoyment of things create the aesthetic. The voice of
the poet is that of a barely conspicuous figure who like a dwarfed hermit
in an oriental painting simply blends into the awesome landscape of Nature's
vast realm with all its implications.
Many of Sexton's Alaskan poems are set along the water's edge, be it a stream
or a pond or a river. The geography of those places is just as important
as it was in Sexton's neighborhood of Lowell not, far from where the peaceful,
slow current of Henry David Thoreau's lazy Concord River flows into the
rapid, swift current of Jack Kerouac's mighty Merrimack. His poetic images
are like jagged ice floes from glacial droppings. They are deposit along
the shore, moments of reflection: ice crystals; begot of winter; gone with
the spring thaw; swept downstream by the ebb and flow of time, season, and
memory. Their jagged strength and life--like the narrator's--a mere illusion
in the fragile, temporal reality of seasonal comings and goings. In "Pleiades,"
he writes:
After several days of snow,
we go outside to watch the sky
as we have done for many ears.
Am I getting old: A falling star
can make me melancholy, the Milky Way
become(s) a fading blossom on a branch,
but tonight I am content
knowing that you are beside me
as we name the constellations,
the two of us turning with the earth.
(A Blossom of Snow, forthcoming)
As it was when he was a student, Sexton's craft is clean and sparse. Like
oriental line paintings his visual images are clearly outlined and deceptively
simple. He is somewhat pantheistic in the best sense of the word, in the
Wordsworthian sense of the it. Nature is observed and appreciated. An effusion
takes place, but the narrator is not intrusive or overindulgent. Personal
feelings and emotions are conveyed quickly in crystalline utterances. Then,
like chunks of ice along a river bank at springtime, they simply melt into
the steam of things and float away.
Sexton's "Father" in The Bend Toward Asia reflects
upon his return to Lowell in 1970 to attend his father's wake. Sexton's
father died alone in a seedy, rented room in downtown Lowell, in a building
across the street from where the Jack Kerouac memorial was erected in 1988.
His father lay dead for some time, "almost too late/for the undertaker's/gaudy
art" before someone forced open the door. In the poem, Sexton recalls
the "night a bartender/told me my father wanted to be a tenor./I never
heard him sing." Sexton goes on to remember the time he caught a fish
in the Concord River. A friend, Roger Paradis, named "Paradise"
in the poem, insisted it was a trout, an unlikely catch in that locale.
But the trout shook free:
...slipped the hook
and fell back to the sluggish water.
A speckled fish that made me want to sing.
Father, soon I will believe that fish was you. (3)
And so the voice of Tom Sexton the poet did sing and continues to sing,
giving song to the muted voice of childhood and the muted voice of nature.
In December of 1994 he was nominated by the Alaskan State Council on the
Arts to be designated the poet laureate for the state of Alaska. The state
legislature is expected to approve the nomination in the spring of 1995.
Not bad for one who began his career as a poet by hawking The Penny Sheet
through the corridors of Salem State College.
Jay McHale is an associate professor of English at Salem State College.
His undergraduate degree is from St. Anslem's Colelge, and his graduate
degree is from Northeastern University. He enjoys sailing and local history.
From 1988 1993 he co-chaired the city of Salem's Witch Trials Tercentenary
Committee.