Before we moved into a house in Worcester, off Pleasant Street, my husband and I made sure that there were green spaces nearby to walk our dogs. The closest place was Newton Hill, which rises above Newton Square, a roundabout where Pleasant meets Newton Avenue and Highland, June, and Coolidge Streets as it twists sideways toward downtown. Two decades later, I read Christopher Gilbert’s poem “Pleasant Street” and was astonished to realize that he had lived near Newton Hill. Eventually I established Mapping Worcester in Poetry to document local sites associated with Gilbert and other poets. Not long afterwards, Karen Durlach, who had been Chris’s partner during the 1970s and early 1980s, reached out to me to offer information. Over email, she shared memories of specific places and addresses of apartment buildings where they had lived in Worcester. As soon as she mentioned 588 Pleasant Street, I jumped into my car. I was disappointed to find no such building, only a parking lot between two triple-deckers. On another visit, however, I discovered a third triple-decker at the back of the lot, built directly behind 586 Pleasant and thus difficult to glimpse from the street—but still there.
Two months later, Karen kindly traveled to Worcester to help with my research. We spent an entire day just driving around and talking. Karen and Chris had lived in apartments all over the city, usually near Clark University—where he earned a PhD in psychology—but always close to parks where they could walk their dogs, Ebony and Kodac. They did not own a car at first, so they walked everywhere (Interview). Being with Karen as she rediscovered places where she had lived fifty years earlier or reconstructed her route home from work was a remarkably intimate experience. By the end of that day we had become good friends, finding that we had many things in common besides having read Chris’s poetry, including a fondness for ceramics and an acquaintance with the same teacher at Worcester Center for Crafts. Even Karen’s time together with Chris, spending her twenties in small apartments all over the city with dogs and often no car, resembled my own life in Providence a decade later.
gs and often no car, resembled my own life in Providence a decade later. My discovery of 588 Pleasant Street, thanks to Karen, still reverberates in my readings of Gilbert’s poetry. His poems often mention streets, yards, stores, and domestic interiors, and I keep wondering how many are set in that building. When Preservation Worcester proposed an illustrated lecture on Worcester’s three-deckers, I gave docents Jan Parent and Marilyn Polito information on such buildings associated with local poets, including 588 Pleasant; later, Jan said she thought that she and her husband might have owned it at the time, although Karen wasn’t sure. Karen herself was so moved by seeing the building again that she wrote a poem, “Pleasant Street Rehab,” about her tactile and auditory memories of leading Ebony and Kodac down the stairs from that third-floor apartment for their daily walk across the street at Newton Hill.
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Gilbert’s poem “Pleasant Street” appears in his final collection, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation (Music of the Striving That Was There), which was published posthumously, along with a reprint of his first book, Across the Mutual Landscape, as Turning into Dwelling. As these titles suggest, he was interested in tracing the process of being, and thinking, across both time and space. In “Pleasant Street,” Gilbert’s speaker describes his precarious position in a neighborhood where other residents seem to feel a greater sense of shared history and belonging:
Playing cultural solitaire in Worcester near Newton Square, I’m
the ersatz narrative clerk, doing time on a block where I am
the only black and all my neighbors swear in a Greek or Irish brogue
that their fathers rode here on the Mayflower. (129)
The metaphor of “cultural solitaire” conveys the considerable effort, often lonely, of trying to fit into a system that organizes people by categories such as number value and color. By calling himself an “ersatz narrative clerk,” the speaker hints that he is skilled at detecting whether his neighbors’ identities are authentic, either because of his double consciousness as a Black man, according to W. E. B. DuBois’s definition, or because like Gilbert himself he is a therapist. He worries, however, that authenticity is in short supply: “Even the smock my priest neighbor wears / is a brand he buys to say the right thing” (130).
The poem focuses on fatherhood, especially in the first stanza, as a mutable, even specious way to claim ownership of a contested space. Ironically quoting his neighbors’ boasts that “their fathers rode here on the Mayflower,” the speaker reminds us that this place, here, belonged to other people before the Pilgrims landed. Indeed, Pleasant Street itself had been a Nipmuc footpath. In addition to citing the Pilgrim fathers and a Roman Catholic “Father,” Gilbert mentions that
Across the street in the country’s first public park
the city fathers’ misanthropic sons lose their way
to the local high school. (129)
Reading those lines for the first time, I felt a thrill of recognition. Between Newton Square and Park Avenue, one side of Pleasant is lined with houses and side streets; on the other rises Newton Hill and beyond it the campus of Doherty Memorial High School, all within the borders of Elm Park. (Although Boston Common, established in 1634, is the nation’s oldest public park, Elm Park represents “the first purchase of land for a public park in the United States,” in 1854, as stated on a plaque at the entrance.) The speaker adds that the city fathers’ teenaged sons have become “honors students at angel dusting,” “gouging graffiti into the [park’s] trees” and staring at “broken bottles littering the ground” (129). Today, forty years after Gilbert wrote this poem, the path leading up the hill from Newton Square still sparkles with shards of glass, although the park is otherwise well-maintained. When I bring my dogs there, I lead them carefully around the glass. Karen told me that Chris also walked their dogs at Newton Hill (Interview), and disliked the “glittering,” “glistening” “debris” left by the city fathers’ sons for the same reason (129). The speaker sardonically calls these boys “literati,” a pun that leads him to invoke another kind of father, his own literary ancestor in the neighborhood:
… A short walk down
the old Swedish area that Charles Olson grew out of is, now,
a margin to his instant, a feeling on the senses like—
a shadow’s effect on those days where there was no sun. (129)
A short walk indeed. Just a few houses down from 588 Pleasant, where Karen and Chris lived, is Norman Avenue, a tiny dead-end street backing onto what is now Beaver Brook Park. It contains only six buildings, all three-deckers; Olson grew up in apartments at 6 Norman Avenue and later 4 Norman Avenue, next door. Gilbert may have been wrong to call it an “old Swedish area.” Most Swedes lived in Greendale or Quinsigamond Village, although by 1920, during Olson’s childhood, a fifth of Worcester’s residents were Swedish-American and resided throughout the city (Salomonssen 51-55). Even so, Olson’s mother was Irish, not Swedish, and the family lived across from Blessed Sacrament Church at 555 Pleasant, which had a mostly Irish Catholic congregation. At any rate, Gilbert could have considered Olson a close neighbor, in space if not in time. The speaker’s account of such oblique proximity—an eerie “feeling on the senses”—exactly expresses how I feel, inhabiting the same location as Chris Gilbert forty years later. He calls the neighborhood “a margin” to Olson’s “instant,” like a shadow on “days where there was no sun,” conflating references to space and time to convey this uncanny sensation (129).
In naming Olson as his literary forefather in an alternative history of the neighborhood, Gilbert must have been aware of Olson’s closeness to his own father, as described in his memoir, The Post Office. Karl Joseph Olson was a mail carrier who loved retracing his route around Lake Quinsigamond each day, greeting customers and watching the seasons change. Olson also tells how he and his father would take a trolley from Newton Square along Pleasant Street to Tatnuck Square, and then further north, to gather mayflowers in the spring and walnuts in the fall. This childhood memory reappears in Olson’s “The Twist,” which begins:
Trolley-cars
are my inland waters
(Tatnuck Sq. and the walk
from the end of the line
to Paxton, for May-flowers
or by the old road to Holden
after English walnuts (104)
“Inland waters” were once Worcester’s primary means of transporting goods (Menides 50-51). Presumably, Olson was thinking about the old canal and “the buried Blackstone River the city / had hidden under itself,” as he puts it in “An Ode on Nativity” (43). Later in “The Twist,” he returns to the notion of trolley tracks as inland waters flowing through Newton Square:
Between Newton and Tatnuck Square the tracks
go up hill, the cars
sway, as they go around the bend
before they take, before they go around to
the outer-land. (105)
In “Pleasant Street,” Gilbert’s only other explicit reference to Olson, after mentioning “the old Swedish area that he grew out of,” is this sentence: “I’m blind from the tan on the skin of his archaeological children” (129). The adjective “archaeological” is further evidence of his deep familiarity with Olson: Archaeologist of Morning was the title of a collection of Olson’s works that came out soon after his death in 1970.
Olson’s “archaeological children,” however, recall the city fathers’ sons, gazing at their own reflections “staring back from the broken bottles littering the ground” (129). That Gilbert’s speaker is blinded by the white children’s suntans suggests a sardonic rejection of their privileged posturing and destructiveness. One can sense his disappointment, akin to Olson’s, at a culture that seems to be shifting away from art, curiosity, and community toward a kind of shallow commodification. The second stanza goes on to describe the 1980s as a time of secondhand memories, numbing drugs, nostalgia for the conformity of the 1950s, and various “gone experiences” in which “the ‘I’ is somewhere else” and “what is real is whatever / a sign buys” (129). At a corner drugstore, the speaker buys his daily Boston Globe and chats with the Jewish pharmacist, “thirty years [his] senior, / a repository / talking about his younger days” and another father figure. The pharmacist, telling “tales about the times,” hints at Worcester’s declining fortunes, talking “as if in our speech the USX on the front pages / becomes, across town, US Steel again—just like that.” Outside the drugstore, perhaps at the intersection of Pleasant and Park Avenue, “the twin screaming signs of Amoco / and Exxon bitch at what’s happening” (130).
In the poem’s last lines, “the traffic on Pleasant Street, / a parade of impatient MBAs, pushes on downtown to the bank / and its wages” (130)—the opposite direction from Olson’s trolley in “The Twist,” headed toward innocent delights. Reading this cheerless ending, I imagine Gilbert yearning for the faith in new beginnings that Olson mustered up in “An Ode on Nativity,” the sense that we all wish “to be born / in ways afresh, aside from old narratives” (45). And yet, as Olson explains, we must choose our own direction out of these shared places:
Any season, in this fresh time
is off & on to that degree that any of us miss
the vision, lose the instant and decision, the close
which can be nothing more and no thing else
than that which unborn form you are the content of, which you alone
can make to shine … (45)
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Six weeks after that day I spent with Karen Durlach in April 2022, a new sign appeared on Pleasant Street: the marker for a Newton Square stop on the Worcester Black History Trail. A century before Gilbert’s speaker in “Pleasant Street” said he was the only Black man on his block, Isaac Mason—who had escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1850—lived and worked on Newton Hill as a farmhand for Rejoice Newton, whose farm gave the hill its name. We know this because Isaac Mason also became a writer. His autobiography recounts how he settled happily at Newton Hill but then fled to Canada after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A few months later, Mason returned to the United States and made his way, mostly on foot, back to Worcester—which became his permanent home because, he said, he never found a better place, with “plenty of good employment and benevolent sympathizers” (66).
“Pleasant Street” describes instead an old neighborhood in a declining, post-industrial city, where some residents may feel that they belong more than others. Gilbert also conveys his skepticism about such claims in “Kodac and Chris Walking the Mutual Landscape,” a poem where the voice of the speaker, “Chris,” seems to channel his dog’s imagined thoughts:
No neighbor’s yard is a boundary.
Don’t you got this earth in you?
And I’ll be damned if it divides
into yards of different kinds. (87)
Indeed, if the speaker in “Pleasant Street” had headed downtown himself, he might have ended up at Circe’s Bar and Grill, the restaurant and jazz club at 74 Franklin Street where Chris Gilbert and Etheridge Knight established the Free People’s Poetry Workshop. Once a week, a random group of writers, readers, and curious strangers met in this public space, which had been chosen to encourage interactions among poets and other customers. Gilbert said in 1978 that on any Monday “you might have fifteen bodies in the place, it gives you fifteen different views of the city” (qtd. in Bonina 76). Despite our divisions and our differences, through poetry we can become true neighbors, sharing views of the same landscape across time as well as space.
Works Cited
Bonina, Mary. “Our Mutual Landscape.” The Worcester Review 33, nos. 1-2 (2012),
pp. 72-79.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards, Oxford
University Press, 2009.
Durlach, Karen. Interview. Worcester, Mass., 19 April 2022.
Gilbert, Christopher. “Kodac and Chris Walking the Mutual Landscape.” Across the
Mutual Landscape, Graywolf, 1984, pp. 87-88.
———. “Pleasant Street.” Turning into Dwelling, Graywolf, 2015, pp. 129-30.
Mason, Isaac. Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave. N.p., Worcester, Mass., 1893.
Menides, Laura Jehn. “Charles Olson and the Blackstone Canal.” The Worcester
Review 31, nos. 1-2 (2010), pp. 49-54.
Olson, Charles. Archaeologist of Morning, Cape Gollard Press, 1970.
———. “An Ode on Nativity.” Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley, Centennial Books,
1997, pp. 42-47.
———. The Post Office: A Memoir of His Father, City Lights, 1975.
———. “The Twist.” Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley, Centennial Books,
1997, pp. 104-109.
Parent, Jan and Marilyn Polito. “A Closer Look—Three Deckers.” Preservation
Worcester, Worcester, Mass., 3 May 2023.
Salomonssen, Eric J. The Swedish Heritage of Greater Worcester. History Press, 2015.