“Everyone has a story.”
So says Paul Mariani –– poet, biographer, and Chair of Poetry at Boston College –– this semester’s visiting writer in the Wilmer Mills Visiting Writer program. His most recent collection of poems is titled “Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems,” and he has written the biographies of many great writers, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, and recently completed a biography of Wallace Stevens.
As a young boy growing up in New York City who learned to read from comic strips in the Sunday paper, Mariani began writing in first grade.
“I remember being in Kindergarten,” Mariani said. “And I really didn’t like Kindergarten because I wanted to learn how to read right away. I built the empire state building on the floor, and while we were taking a nap, I put my foot under it and collapsed the whole thing. And the teacher said ‘I don’t know if I want this boy in my class.’ So I talked to my mom and said, ‘Mom, I want to go to school to learn, but we’re playing not learning!’ and they skipped me into the first grade.”
From first grade onward, Mariani continued to write. At 17, he wrote a poem for which he won an award of 10 dollars.
After graduating from Manhattan College and receiving his Masters from Colgate University, Mariani wrote his dissertation on Gerard Manley Hopkins and received his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
“Hopkins is, for me, someone in the room,” he said. “His poetry is transformative. The younger poets like W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop said his work was revolutionary. John Berryman and Robert Lowell were influenced by him. I’ve been deeply influenced by him in terms of not only the poetry and the poetics but his faith, at the heart of it.”
Mariani’s writing is deeply influenced by his faith, and through his narrative poetry, he holds a deeper conversation. His poetry has a narrative character; “Epitaphs for a Journey” is divided into eight sections, each one covering a span of his lifetime.
“There’s always been something about narrative,” Mariani said. “Even my poetry is largely narrative — it tells stories. And I’m also a biographer, so I tell the stories of poets. I’m still to this day fascinated with stories.”
Senior Hannah Strickland, who introduced Mariani at his poetry reading on Tuesday evening, explained that Mariani saw “every person as a poem.”
“There’s an honesty in his writing that I really appreciate,” Strickland said. “He doesn’t skirt around anything. He does a really great job of balancing the honesty and the beauty in his writing.”
This beauty is something that Mariani considers incredibly important in poetry, something he says will “never be a waste.”
