JOHN J. RONAN

 

John J. RonanJOHN J. RONAN ( 1944 - ) is Professor Emeritus at North Shore Community College and a versatile and accomplished writer living in Gloucester. John writes poetry three hours a day and has published two books, The Catching Self (1996) and The Curable Corpse (1999), with Folly Cove Books, a Gloucester publisher, and two books, Marrowbone Lane (2009) and Taking the Train of Singularity South from Midtown (2017) with The Backwater Press of the University of Nebraska. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Scholar.

John Ronan has had success both as a playwright and filmmaker. His comedic play, “The Yeats Game” was produced in New York and his one-act play “The Early Bird Special” was an award winner. His n“The Yeats Game”on-profit company, American Storyboard, created two award-winning films that have been shown on PBS: the first, “Gloucester’s Adventure: An American Story,” is a film about Gloucester’s celebrated schooner, which he scripted and produced, and the second movie, “American Women in Horse Racing,” which he also scripted and produced, ran state-wide on Kentucky public television.

John Ronan is a prominent literary presence in Gloucester. He served as the city’s Poet Laureate from 2008 - 2010. On his weekly public access cable tv show, 1623 Studio’s “The Writer’s Block,” John has been interviewing writers about their craft since 1990. Most importantly perhaps, John can be considered a civic poet, someone who writes about civic pride and history. His poem, “Good Harbor, Home” was read at the 2002 mayoral inauguration. His latest civic poem is “Hymn for Gloucester at 400,” composed for the celebration of Gloucester’s 400th Anniversary in 2023. The first draft of the poem was written in 2018 and the form is loosely based on what the English minister and hymnologist Isaac Watts called long hymn meter. In the poem, the man in the iconic Gloucester statue, “The Man at the Wheel,” surveys four centuries of Gloucester history with pride.

            GOOD HARBOR, HOME

                    (Gloucester inaugural poem, January 1, 2002)

 

Waves break on outcrop rock: granite,

fire-formed and hard, headland granite -

no coddled cape, no sandbar,

and nothing soft in her city, no knickknack,

Gloucester-by-God, attitude granite.

The beaches are broken by wetland, woods of oak

and pine, grace in paintscape chasms, coves,

the harbor of ships, sailboats, a fishing fleet

today inner-harbored, home from the beat-broth

sea, moored safely to the Cape.  And continent:

cookie-cut, cradle states of the seaboard,

rust-belt, Bible-belt, rivers

and plains, pitch of the Mississippi, Missouri,

corn of Illinois and Iowa, the Dakotas, Kansas,

squared-away states stretching west

to the Rockies, Cascades, a rival coast and ocean -

our daily wake, the entire, entrained nation.

Its originals: Ojibwa, Pequod, Agawam, Pawnee.

Later, tribes of Irish, Latinos, Italians,

Poles and Portuguese, Africans, Asians...   We

are the potluck people, power in this rare republic,

experiment America imagined on the land, artless

or brilliant, bums or brains, but rulers by right

and by law, the law of nature and of nature's God,

true believers in clamor and compromise, believers 

in reason, and so debating rights, wrongs, damning 

terror and terrorists in just seething sorrow,

yet protecting loudly law, the process of law,

stunned as the young to stagger and strut at once.

 

The noise of debate makes music.  Now 

playing in this sacred city hall - haled 

for its mellow music - oaths of public office,

friends elected in a free, local vote

to swear, and serve, under one weathervane,

minded by bright murals of good government,

nothing abstract, far away or federal,

servants and citizens balanced in the same boat.

 

The ship of state's a schooner, game as Gloucester,

seaworthy, wise in the rhythms of salt water,

and tied today in the good harbor, home.

What matters happens here!  As we -

each of us proud, elect - the people of Gloucester,

by law and by luck neighbors in a great nation,

trust power for a term to others, themselves

strong in our common strength, the idea democracy

in time and tide, a city's lapstraked lives.

And so blessed, confident of grace and granite, bear

witness to America on the deep, abiding sea.

 

    courtesy: John J. Ronan