Poet, author and master writing teacher Charles Coe traced the history of poetry as an agent for political and social change at Sunday’s Monadnock Summer Lyceum at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church.
After a glowing introduction by moderator Stephen Schuch of Hancock, Coe joked: “This Charles Coe fellow sounds like a really interesting guy – I would really like to meet him sometime.”
Coe, who grew up in Indianapolis, is the author of five books of poetry: “Picnic on the Moon,” “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents,” “Memento Mori,” “Purgatory Road,” and “Charles Coe: New and Selected Works,” all published by Leapfrog Press.
Coe is also the author of “Spin Cycles,” a novella published by Gemma Media. “Peach Pie,” a short film by filmmaker Roberto Mighty, which has been shown in film festivals nationwide, was based on Coe’s poem “Fortress.” Mighty also produced “Charles Coe: Man of Letters,” which was named “Best Short Documentary” at the Roxbury (MA) Film Festival.
After noting that he “did not want to go too deep into the current political situation,” Coe related a recent story about a Christian minister reciting a passage from the New Testament (1 John 2:40): “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen; cannot love God whom he has not seen.’ ”
“After the sermon, people in the congregation came up to this minister to complain that his words were ‘woke,” and that he was too liberal,” Coe said.
Coe went on to say that when the minister explained that the verse was the words of Jesus Christ, the complainers said, “Well, that’s all outdated now.’”
“In the eyes of the world, America is in great danger of losing its reputation as the keeper of the dream, the place where people can reach their dreams,” Coe said. “We are in danger of scrubbing the words of the great poet Emma Lazarus from the base of the Statue of Liberty….it is a sad and tragic irony that we are now deporting people who came here as refugees after having been displaced by effects of US foreign policy.”
Coe recited “The New Colossus,” the poem Lazarus, a Jewish writer who aided refugees fleeing pogroms in Europe, wrote to raise money for the Statue of Liberty in 1833. The poem includes the famous lines:
“Give me your tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Coe then read a recent poem of his own, “Nightbirds,” about the experience of a woman trying to come to the U.S. to escape the violence of the drug cartels in Central America and Mexico.
Coe’s poem concluded:
“But in spite of everything she has seen, she still believes in the power of prayer. She prays to be invisible from the men from the drug cartels, who sell those they kidnap into forced labor and prostitution. She prays for a home with a warm bed. She prays there is still goodness still to be found in this world, and that those she meets at the end of this long journey will be generous and kind.”
Coe said that any history of America’s social protest through poetry “has to begin with poet Phyllis Wheatley,” who was kidnapped into slavery as a young child, survived the Middle Passage and was sold to a family in Boston at the age of seven.
“The family who bought her named after the ship she came on; her true African name was discarded and lost on the waves,” Coe said.
Wheatley’s enslavers, realizing she was a prodigy, taught her to read and write, and Wheatley could read in both Greek and Latin by the age of 12. Her poem,”On Being Brought from Africa to America,” inspired abolitionist poets William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, and William Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote “The Witnesses,” about the African people who survived the Middle Passage.
Coe then read his own poem about the Middle Passage, an homage to African people who have committed suicide by jumping off the slave ships en route to the New World.
“ ‘The crew of the ships would mourn…as each death meant less profit’ ,” Coe read.
Coe told the story of Langston Hughes, who wrote “I, Too,” in response to poet Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” which celebrated the voice of American laborers but excluded African-American people.
Coe then shared a poem by convict turned poet Etheridge Knight, “Hard Rock Returns to Prison From the Hospital of the Criminally Insane,” and related his own experiences working with incarcerated people.
Reflecting that most of the Lyceum audience were “people of a certain age,” like himself, Coe ended his talk on a hopeful note.
“It is hard when so many of the rights we have fought for over so many years are now being turned back,” Coe said. “But to quote Joseph Campbell, we must choose to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.’ ”
The August 17 Lyceum was sponsored by Rivermead. Music was provided by the Tara Greenblatt Trio, and flowers were provided by Rosaly’s Farmstand.
Next week’s speaker, Sarah Bronin, wraps up the Summer Lyceum for 2025. Bronin will speak on “Key to New Hampshire: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
For more information about the Monadnock Lyceum or to donate, go to https://www.monadnocklyceum.org/index.php/.