Preface to A New Edition of The Buffalo Sequence

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I knew from the very first that I was Polish, but I didn't realize I was working class until long after I had left Buffalo to attend college. Polish was spoken all around me as a small child by my extended family of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, and by the neighbors and the local shopkeepers. At home my father and mother spoke an English liberally peppered with Polish words and phrases, except when the topic of conversation was not meant for children's ears, then they reverted to speaking Polish. Strangers and acquaintances were identified as being like us, meaning of Polish extraction, or different: German, Irish, or Italian. Wealth or status were seldom talked about in the parochial world of my childhood where everyone was more or less the same. The men of my acquaintance in thriving, industrial Buffalo of the 1950s were blue collar breadwinners; that is, shift-workers in the steel plants and auto plants, in the General Electric factory and the New York Central Railroad switching yard. They were assembly workers, foundry workers, boilermakers, welders, mechanics, brakemen, plumbers, carpenters, janitors...and a few were unskilled laborers.

Even in college (I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a scholarship student), awareness of myself as someone who grew up working class was slow dawning. At first, I just felt out of place--out of my place--among my college classmates. Material differences were the most obvious. Some of them had their own apartments. Some had their own cars. One or two even had sports cars. Extensive wardrobes were not uncommon, but what set me apart from the rest had less to do with the number of items hanging in my closet than with the labels they bore. I was outfitted each new school year at Sears, J.C.Penny, and A.M.& A.'s (a chain where my mother worked as a sales clerk and got an employee discount). My classmates frequented more exclusive shops. Their apparel was stylish, sometimes tailored, and put together in tasteful combinations. They always appeared comfortable in whatever their attire, and they carried themselves with confidence whatever the occasions; whereas I often felt oafish, either under-dressed or over-dressed, ill-at-ease whenever I had to put on anything more dressy than jeans or slacks.

As I got to know individual classmates better, I learned about their families and their schooling, and I began to mentally catalog the ways that I was different from them; but I still did not have a name to give to the sum of our differences. With rare exception, their parents had gone to college. In contrast, I was the first in my immediate family do so. (I did have older cousins who'd gone to college before me, who were held up to me as role models. I also had an uncle who'd gone to college and who became a pharmacist. He was the one among my mothers seven siblings selected by her parents to obtain an education leading to a profession, while his brothers were slated to follow their father--my grandfather--into jobs on the railroad, and his sisters to become secretaries or housewives.)

My college classmates were different in another important way: their fathers were either professionals--engineers, doctors, dentists, lawyers--or they were businessmen. My
father in contrast started out as a grease-monkey and welder, and then, after a series of unskilled and skilled jobs--and years of correspondence classes--achieved his "career" goal of radio technician for the Buffalo Police Department. And my classmates, I learned, had had superior educations. Many had gone to prep schools. The rest had gone to well appointed public schools in upper-middle class suburbs, or had attended elite city public schools such as Bronx High School of Science. This helped to make their adjustment to the rigors of college education at MIT considerably easier than my own. Another thing I learned was that my classmates had, on the whole, been exposed to culture to a degree far beyond the limited range of my experiences that counted factory picnics, church bazaars, parish festivals, school theatricals, polka bands playing weddings in American Legion halls....

The late 1960s and early 1970s were for many people of my generation a period of intensive reflection and questioning. We had been deeply affected by the Vietnam War and the struggle for Civil Rights. The impact of Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation were beginning to be felt. Many of us substituted one form or another of social activism for the careers or graduate studies we had been groomed to pursue. And we spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about how we had gotten to the places in our lives where we then were.

So a few years out of college then, I came to realize two or three things: first, that I had grown up working class; second, that my blue collar, ethnic-American cultural heritage had effectively been educated out of me. I also discovered that this wasn't unique
to me, or particular to my Polish family background. Among my contemporaries working at that time as community and labor organizers, as housing, healthcare and welfare advocates, as teachers and social workers, etc., there was a contingent who became my friends whose backgrounds paralleled my own. I learned that they too had grown up working class, in eastern and mid-western industrial cities, of French-Canadian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latvian extraction; and I found that they had experienced and now felt much the same loss as I did. This became the consuming topic of our talk in barrooms, cafés and at dinner tables.

We came to the conclusion that our parents and teachers had inoculated us with the values, prejudices and aspirations of 1950s middle class America. We were taught subliminally that our future success required substituting for the ethnic breads of our childhoods the tasteless, bleached-white Wonder Bread, with its air holes of uniform size and distribution. To get ahead, we would have to shed the trappings of our blue collar, ethnic culture and substitute book-learning for streets-smarts. Getting a college education was de rigueur. Biligualism was anathema. (Despite my parents' aim to "blend in", they weren't entirely consistent in this effort, for elements of my Polish heritage were held up to me as valuable: certain customs associated with family gatherings at my grandparents' homes, in particular at holiday times, chiefly Christmas and Easter.)

This self-awareness about my background wasn't an all-at-once flash of insight, but rather a gradual dawning. It occurred during the period of time when I was working as a teacher at an alternative high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My students were dropouts from the public schools. Their families lived in housing projects or in the surrounding working class neighborhoods. This was resonant for me, as I had grow up in a housing project myself, until fifth grade, when we moved into our own home, adjacent to the housing project, separated from it by only a high backyard fence. Part of my "teaching" responsibilities included street-work: hanging out in courtyards with my students in an attempt to persuade them of the long-term benefits of an education when compared to car-theft or burglary. The projects brought back vivid memories of my childhood: images, experiences, feelings that became material for the poems of The Buffalo Sequence, which I began writing at this time. The Buffalo Sequence was, in essence, my way to recapture, through the act of writing poems, what my "education" had suppressed. It was an exercise in self-discovery.

The first poem of the sequence begins with my feet firmly planted on the paved courtyard of the Jefferson Park housing project in Cambridge, and seeing in my mind's eye images of my childhood friends in the Langfield Projects of Buffalo. The sometimes hallucinatory juxtaposition of images from different periods of my life, the-- then--present with the past, seemed, at the time, a perfectly natural way to accomplish the task. I'm struck now by how surreal some of the poems are. One metaphor that is woven throughout the sequence is of feeling as a child that I was being pulled in two directions: one way pointed to escape from the provincialism and claustrophobia of my tightly knit ethnic neighborhood; the other, drawing me back in, away from the attractive, but unfamiliar and threatening, wider world with its new ideas, people and places. Another metaphor that occurs repeatedly in the poems is of feeling exiled from my past. The last poem in the sequence represents the resolution I arrived at at that time: after wrested my heritage from the limbo of consciousness where it had been relegated, it was now embodied within me; although removed in time and distance, I would, nevertheless, always be "walking a Buffalo street, a Buffalo sidewalk in Buffalo!"

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Four poems from The Buffalo Sequence

i.

never again Joey the cross-eyed
who in the church parking lot with magnifying glass
sentenced a regiment of ants to the fires of hell.
never again.
            and the nuns hurrying from the church to the school,
they churned up the air so
that behind them it congealed in a long wave of funeral cloth.
- the way they threw us against the walls, those holy women,
till we learned to be good: never again, never again.

never again Stephanie who hit the longest ball,
so quick on her feet
she beat the rest of us to teen age;
who had to get married at fifteen, - think of it,
and her father such a good man,
sweeping all night to keep the school clean of sins. no, never again.

Michael freckle faced
smaller than me but tougher;
he knew to keep his distance when i was mad...
upon entering whose house was a lancing odor
of eight children, the week's garbage,
and the parents are never home.
             never again to go into battle behind him
against other courtyard gangs
garbage can lids for shields, wooden arrows and swords
sharpened on the mortar of our brick fortress.

and Billy, first friend, who said the robin was only sleeping
and we should cover it with dirt to keep it warm.
never again, who grew up to be known throughout the projects
for a bully.

and Willie
his little brother stood forever in the doorway,
not entering, not leaving;
only his big bellybutton protruding from the house.
Willie visited by mail eight years later, and never again,
his black face torn from a newspaper
               - BREAKS RECORD IN HUNDRED YARD DASH -
whose eyes were coals singeing the paper
like in the picture of a black GI KILLED IN VIETNAM,
or a YOUTH FOUND BREAKING AND ENTERING SHOT BY POLICE.
Willie never again Willie.

...and here, as it was in Buffalo,
everyone is waiting for the brick of oblivion to descend.

meanwhile, as it was in Buffalo, living is carried on:
seen from the neighboring height of a 20 floor construction,
people, no bigger than rats, hurry between their slumped hovels
where the air is a stench.
ten years ago and ten years after and
never again,                                    never again.

...meanwhile,
the one slow to the race, who knew however,
every shortcut from mental anguish,
across shrinking eternity, from one street corner to the other
- Hey! has returned. -quieter, has come to make a home.
the learned one has come with his never agains pocketed,
with a lesson plan in his left hand, - the humbler to speak with;
and has plunked down his trunk full of books
on the exact spot
where ten years ago and ten years after
are shouldering for the same place and time.

                                                      right now,
he is keeping vigil with the violent carrots
over a loaf of good ethnic bread.
he finds here, that all the fractions of his soul
come to exactly 1.

iii.

I would paint childhoods of brick walls
and mothers' flowered red aprons,
red brick the houses;
brick communities
in which courtyards of paved-over grasses
it is evening
and the children are playing, among garbage cans,
hide-n-seek
from the shadows of squalor;
              and where the moon in a rage
is roaming the neighborhood
for a single tree to break against.

let them hang that in their museums!

ix.

who is this?
attends with his murky agitated waters
the reunion,
where the whole familiar generation
of settled and settling silts
picnics in the tall sweet grass
growing along the cheekbone of grandfather's grave;
and can't hold back, not with four hands,
what took him so long to tame:
who is this?
                                         says,
what a necklace of polished stones they make
around his grandpa's crude stone,
then rips the boards of the attic door
from behind which his childhood cries:
who is this?

who is this?
attends the table once again, prodigal and starving;
all of his absence come as a pained larynx to sit
beside his mother and dearly loved; and,
kiss kiss, she tugs the roots of his anguish
by its combed strands
asking what her son's losing so much hair about;
              after the meal, more hungry than before
and dumbfounded with talk,
whose feet lead him into exile again,
the arid climate of speechlessness;
artificial orchards beside the river of slag
and the oranges a desperate cry:
who is this?

xv.

...then let this
be the city, now i will call home.

             workmen on scaffolds with sandblasting equipment
are pointing up,
-does it matter what name in stone,
good as new, on the facade of city hall?

every step i take,
i am walking down a Buffalo street,
a Buffalo sidewalk in Buffalo!

. . . . .

there is one square-
an intersection of several back streets
which lead away from the main drag-
where i specially like to find myself;
where,
in the loose huddle
of rough-skinned old men around the newsstand,
there lingers and aroma
older, to my nostrils, than remembering.

             lips screw-up; they show their purple gums;
and pulling at suspenders,
brandish the juicy cigars of an argument:
-to hell with the big shots, the politicians!
-to hell with Big Bob Corcoran!
-to think a poor man,
for the daily bread on his table,
has to pay with
what he borrows from his death!
-dog's blood!
-to hell with them!

i used to, listen to
my grandpa talk this way
with the plumber from across the street,
with the one who in passing each morning
waved hello with his lunch pail,
grandma called the Irishman;
and with the other men,
like himself, retired from the railroad:
            grandpa, every fifteen minutes
pulling his gold watch out by the chain.

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The Buffalo Sequence, by Mark Pawlak,
with an introduction by Denise Levertov.
Copper Canyon Press, 1978. ISBN 0-914742-19-1
Copies available from Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff Street,
Brooklyn, NY 11217
http://hangingloosepress.com