A Poet Is Honored: Director of the Joiner Center Receives National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship

By Jeffrey Mitchell

"Most of the stuff I've been writing is about a sense of place," says Kevin Bowen. His poems spring from "the resonance of place and identity in memory," he says. They are a kind of "reclamation," a way of "naming places where I was, and recuperating them in memory and for posterity." Often those places are in Vietnam, where Bowen went first to fight in the American army, or the west of Ireland, where his grandmother came from, or the old West End of Boston, where Bowen grew up in the days before urban renewal caused his neighborhood to disappear.

Bowen, who heads UMass Boston's William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, has just been awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. It's a real distinction. More than 1,600 poets competed this time for the fellowships, which are given every other year, and only 38 received them. The judging panel included former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

To be eligible, poets must have a strong record of publication (Bowen himself is the author of two books of poems"Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong and Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison, both published by Curbstone Press"and Dedalus Press will soon issue his New and Selected Poems). But the awards are based solely on the merits of submitted manuscripts.

Bowen's $20,000 fellowship will give him more time and space for poetry. In recent years, he has become a regular visitor to Ireland. Now he has begun a group of poems exploring the often painful history of his grandmother's native village of Carraroe, and the stories of family members who left or stayed behind. The fellowship will help to support this work.

Through Joiner Center–sponsored exchange programs, Bowen also returns to Vietnam, a source of many poems. Often these poems are about "going back to a place and rediscovering it," sometimes through what he learns about its role in Vietnamese history and legend. They become "a sort of archeology" that can "connect you to the past in a different way, place you in the present in a different way."

Bowen speaks of "the love of poetry and music" in Ireland and Vietnam, "where I can sit up all night and listen to people tell stories and recite poems by heart""and "the sense that the power of the king ends at the city gate. Out in the west of Ireland or the countryside of Vietnam, no one can really tell people what to do," he says. "There's this incredible freedom, and there's this incredible sense of the individual and the community, and the individuality of the community. Being in those places, I can feel the blood coming up from the soles of my shoes."

Struggles to maintain a culture against overwhelming forces, from colonialism to modernization, are also common to both Ireland and Vietnam, as are histories filled with violence. Like his travels, Bowen's Joiner Center work constantly reminds him of "the effects of war and displacement," which he often encounters in personal testimony or in Vietnamese and American writing brought to him through the center's translation and publication programs. Yet "that witness act is part of an affirmation of experience," says Bowen. It is also undertaken "to make sure that the experience isn't erased as history gets rewritten"rewritten from the top."

Here is one of the poems Bowen submitted for the fellowship:

White Horse at the Ho Ferry:
Co Loa Revisited

White horse at the Ho ferry
crossing the wide river
pulling a heavy cart,
every one at the river bank
turns to the clatter of
your hooves,
in the dust. They all wait
your wild dash down the slope
the way you gather yourself,
for that last leap
across the tin barrier,
the long pipes hanging from
your cart,
almost slipping
in that moment just before you stop,
to nuzzle in quietly behind the green
truck.
At the open skied poolroom
on the opposite shore,
young men lift their cigarettes
to heaven, pray
so patiently for your arrival.
How many of them to carry
you victorious across the fields?
White horse at the Ho ferry
the goddesses of the wind and clouds
look down on you with pleasure.
Did you know Mai Chi
is killed again today,
her arrogant head thrown
into the well
once more?
White horse at the Ho ferry,
you are
the only faithful one.