“If to breathe means never to leave home and never to return, then proceed—without shame or caution—breathe.”
This is an excerpt from the poem “You,” by David Rivard. He read this poem to close a recent poetry reading in the Lanna Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Center. Rivard was there to receive the O.B. Hardison, Jr. Award, an honor dedicated to daring poets and teachers on behalf of the Folger Center.
Rivard, who teaches at Tufts University and Vermont University’s M.F.A. Writing Program, read his poems with compassion and love. It was easy to tell that he is passionate about his writings and that he uses this passion for so much more than entertainment. Each poem is a dedication, written for a reason. He writes vividly, with a sense of excitement and urgency to every poem.
The reading was performed at the Folger Center to showcase their pick for the Hardison Award. The audience could read Rivard clearly and see why the Folger Center was so proud: he is a skilled and truthful man, thankful to be honored for doing what he loves.
All of Rivard’s talents were on display as he read many poems from his new book “Sugartown”. He prefaced by describing this poetry collection as an analysis and descriptions of “characters” he had seen where he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The poems are a clever mixture of cynical analysis and sad truth. We see many faces, places and stories about the citizens of Cambridge. Everything depicted is included for a reason, for an effect. Rivard’s description is so detailed and fresh that readers can feel his characters’ joys and achievements, their pressures and anxieties.
An overarching theme of “Sugartown” is the idea of separation, the division of people. It is mainly illustrated through recurring lonely, helpless characters. In “Enemies of Enormity” and “The Benefit,” he describes the stark contrast between the luxurious world of the characters Chanel and Volnay and the sad plight of legless street beggars and lonely prison mates. Even a poem as sweet and endearing as “Parents & Children” carries an underlying theme of the unhappy reality of loneliness concealed by consumerism and shallow friendships.
“Parents & Children” holds the key to what is wrong with the seemingly idyllic “Sugartown”: “‘we look almost happy out in the sun,’ Tranströmer says,‘while we bleed to death from wounds we know nothing about.’” Rivard creates for us this “sugartown”—a place that seems to be hiding something, a place so rich in mind and spirit that something is obviously wrong.
This is the essence of Rivard’s work, dedicated to the seemingly pleasant Cambridge, Massachusetts. Every city is wounded, but most have no idea that they are. Rivard succinctly piques his reader’s interest in this land: we want to see it, feel it and even help it.
The book’s theme is epitomized in the poem, whose namesake is the collection’s title—“Sugartown”: “and it’s nice, what it’s doing/what it’s done too/to that popsicle stick/it’s licking./But what it said earlier,/it hurt,/I can’t remember the words/exactly/but they hurt.”
David Ricard’s Sugartown is an exploration of a pained city, a city that stands for most American cities and even for America itself. Sugartown is a wounded soul who was hurt by its citizens—citizens who are either too self-absorbed or helpless to lead the city to a healthy resurrection.
