From the Yangtze to the Mississippi Delta

There’s no way of explaining it: how can a state like Massachusetts, with perhaps the most storied literary tradition in the country, become one of the very last to establish the official position of Poet Laureate to serve our Commonwealth?  If I were to list all of the acclaimed poets who’ve lived and worked here over the centuries, the small space allotted for my commentary would contain nothing else: from Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, through Emerson, Dickinson, Longfellow, Frost, Cummings, Bishop, Lowell, Plath—and enough contemporary luminaries to populate the grandest of anthologies.  But fortunately, Governor Maura Healey recently corrected that oversight—and I could not imagine a more perfect selection with whom to inaugurate that position than Regie Gibson: impassioned poet, dynamic performer, musician, actor, educator, community activist.

Let me underscore that last item, a central concern within this poet’s life: community.  All poets and artists are engaged in a complex experiment where the I pronoun is pivotal.  Alone at the desk or in their studio, each is engaged in that most individual and inward of enterprises: mining the emotional and imaginative ore within the recesses of consciousness.  But unlike some, Regie has demonstrated the deepest of commitments to We, that foundational understanding that we are inextricably woven in community, and that artists’ work ought to celebrate and invigorate those bonds.  Regie is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin, and the creator of the Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy —a theatrical/musical/literary performance focusing on the enduring influence of William Shakespeare. He’s lectured and performed widely in the US, Cuba, and Europe.  Among a long list of honors, Regie has received the Walker Scholarship from the Providence Fine Arts Work Center; multiple Mass Cultural Council Awards for poetry; the YMCA Writer’s Fellowship; the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) grants for the production of his first musical, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae.  He has served as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “How Art Works” initiative and the “Mere Distinction of Colour”—a permanent exhibit examining the legacy of slavery and the U.S. Constitution at President James Madison’s home in Montpelier, Virginia.   He teaches at Clark University in Worcester and is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music.

Today’s offering is the embodiment of that impulse toward artistic commonality.  Some time back, Regie had the chance to work with renowned Chinese instrumentalist WuMan—she plays the pipa, an ancient lute-like stringed instrument, with the Silk Road ensemble.  She later sent him a recording of a solo piece inspired by Regie’s poetry. Her enthusiasm fired up his own, and the poet composed the piece featured above.  Thank goodness poetry is not hemmed in by political borders, or even the laws of time and space.  Not only did Regie’s poem bridge the distance between their homes and their separate cultural backgrounds, but it opened a path back to 8^th century China where its most famous poet, Li Bai (formerly known in the West as Li Po), could remind them both of the primal poetry and art-making impulse that unites them across millennia.  I was even fortunate enough to see a video Regie created where poet and musician, in their separate studios, could at least seem to be performing this duet side by side.  WuMan’s sometimes frenetic strums on the pipa are wonderfully echoed by Regie’s invented word-compounds and long, spirited lines.  Rereading the poem, the mind can’t help but stop and linger on such marvelous phrases: the “acrosswater call” of the music; the musician’s fingers “sorrowwise on the pipa’s strings”; and, in a metaphor I think every poet will relate to, “the faint camphorsmoke of that song” rising into the sky of an attentive mind.  This epistolary poem is not only directed to his literary forebears, its aim is to conjure the sort of muse that could have as easily visited Homer’s cottage as Li Bai’s—been as welcomed in WuMan’s living room as Regie’s, yours, and mine, accompanied perhaps by the scent of rice wine warming.  In such consciousness, all the rivers by which civilization was created flow from one into another.  At a time when the political discourse across the planet seems more determined to divide people than discover their shared purpose, the gift from artists like Regie is considerable and utterly necessary.