PORT TOWNSEND — On March 8, 1964, Ulysses S. Grant stepped off a train in Washington, D.C., where he had been summoned by President Lincoln.
The reason: to authorize Grant to take command of the Union armies, considered by historians to mark the beginning of the end for the South.
It is also the starting point for Mike O’Connor’s poem about Grant, which O’Connor will read at the next First Friday Lecture at Port Townsend’s historic City Hall, 540 Water St.
Sharing the podium this Friday with O’Connor will be another Port Townsend poet, Gary Copeland Lilley, whose work also offers personal encounters with people and events that affected the course of history.
“Writing poems about history allows you to take on personna of other people,” O’Connor said. “You can get out of your own skin.”
The great-grandson of a Union soldier, O’Connor, who grew up in Montesano and Port Angeles and now lives in Port Townsend, wrote “Orion’s Sword” after being intrigued with what preceded that moment in history when Grant arrived in Washington, D.C.
It is part of a collection, When the Tiger Weeps, that includes “Song of Ishi,” which O’Connor wrote about a Native American who wandered out of the hills in 1911, unaware that the traditional life he was leading had all but disappeared.
Another section of the book is “Requiem for Tiananmen Square,” poems written by people in the pro-Democracy movement and posted in the square before the massacre.
O’Connor, a noted translator of Chinese literature, was granted permission to translate and publish the poems in the United States.
The title of the collection is from a Chinese saying: “Looking from a distance at the world of humankind, even the tiger grows compassionate; even the tiger weeps.”
“You choose subjects that you have an emotional or visceral reaction to,” O’Connor said.
Wilmington Insurrection
For Lilley, one such subject was the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, in which white supremists took over the city government of that North Carolina town from elected officials.
Misleadingly dubbed a race riot, the illegal act reversed civil rights established after the Civil War and led to Jim Crow laws and voting restrictions, causing a ripple effect throughout the state and the entire country, Lilley said.
That a large section of Wilmington’s population had not been disenfranchised until that decade caused a major shift in Lilley’s mindset.
“I was born in that part of the country, I was raised in that part of the country, but I had never heard about it until four years ago,” Lilley said.
“I wanted to speak to this event. I wanted to get the facts, to step into what really happened.”
In his research, he learned that many of the buildings on Wilmington’s main streets were named for people who participated in the coup.
One of the projects Lilley assigns his students at Jefferson Community School, where he teaches humanities: choose a building in Port Townsend and learn the history of it and the person it was named for.
“The students should not walk past these names and places and not be aware of them,” Lilley said.
Farm in upstate New York
Lilley’s and O’Connor’s interests in 19th century American history intersect at a farm in upstate New York that Lilley came across during a trip a few years ago.
On the farm is the grave of John Brown, the abolitionist who picked up the sword to end slavery, putting his life and the lives of his family on the line for his beliefs.
As a poet, the goal is to discover who John Brown really was, as opposed to the way that history has used him, Lilley said.
That perception was shaped by American writers of the time, O’Connor noted: Henry David Thoreau wrote a defense of Captain John Brown after his execution in 1859, and 50 years later, civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Brown’s biography.
In 1928, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote “John Brown’s Body,” considered the only true epic American poem, and in the 1970s, Robert Hayden, who studied with Benet, was commissioned to write a poem to go with an art exhibit, “The Legend of John Brown.”
Lilley, who can sing field chants passed down in the family by ancestors born into slavery, sometimes incorporates the songs into his poetry readings.
He is also writing poetry related to the six trips he made to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to help with relief efforts.
The experience left him with the knowledge of how to gut a house and the memory of voices of people he met who were putting their lives back together from nothing.
“They call,” he said.
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
