Looking for ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’
Meriden poet Paul Scollan worked for 35 years as a licensed clinical social worker in community health, and with his wife he raised five sons. For many years, his habit was to get up very early and, assisted by strong coffee and the serenade of birds, spend some time writing before the workday began. He has published three collections of poetry. Many individual poems have been published in literary journals. Publication is not the primary motivation for his writing, however. He writes with family and friends in mind, as well as for the individuals he’s counselled over the years, whose stories have greatly affected Scollan.
He often writes about people who do not usually get much attention: the overlooked, underappreciated, or those who have endured and overcome suffering and hardship. Scollan also looks to the natural world. He says that in his poems, he tries to “craft lines that will take the reader over the unstable rope footbridge between us as we are and as we wish to be, between the body that will eventually leave and the spirit always yearning for some greater meaning.”
He strives to make his poetry accessible to all, not just to academics or people who have spent years studying poetry. And he often uses humor in his work, as it lends balance, perspective, and a bit of humility. Scollan says his biggest wish is for any one poem of his to carry enough weight so that “the reader will sit back in the chair, stare blankly into nowhere for several seconds, and take longer than usual to move on to the next thing.”
He believes that poets search for truths that hide below the surface of things, and that “there will always be a need for poetry simply because it feeds and fortifies the heart, mind and spirit. It finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, the transcendent in the commonplace, and the back-shadows in the animate and inanimate.”
Turn to Scollan,
So far from home and in a place where natives wished us gone, or dead — the latter granted all too often — at least we had our homesick selves.
And on that Christmas Eve were some who went back home inside their heads, while others held to one another such as families do, like us the buddies four gone forth for rounds of caroling, our mugs filled up with each recital, best as I recall. I awoke beside a pile of sandbags by a bunker,
blinked back sun and found my head and feet,
and shrugged it off as countless others hadn’t —
woken up, that is.
Playing Cyrano, Fort Dix, ‘69
He begged me to write his girlfriend a letter for him. Owen was from the West Virginia “hollers,” and illiterate. How he got
into the Army was anyone’s guess, but there
he was, a bunk away in basic training. Could
be the military had been getting less fussy,
so as to feed more to the war. Owen couldn’t stay out of his own way, flubbed most training exercises, marksmanship being his only skill,
not with guns, mind you, but spitting chawin’
tobacco for accuracy and distance. The drill
sergeants rode this poor hillbilly pretty hard.
I sat on Owen’s bunk and asked what he wanted
me to write. First, I had to tell Lavinia about what
it was like at Fort Dix: marching drills, crawling
under barb-wire, hurling grenades, all of that. Then
he paused for some time, dewy-eyed, and started
to blush, before stammering something about his
feelings for her, that he didn’t have the words. I said
don’t worry, I’d write he missed her, hoped she missed
him, and please wait as he’d be home soon. I asked if
I should also say I love you, but he backed off on that.
Truth be told, I added a line or two of my own, about
the October hunter’s moon peeking through the shelterhalf over his foxhole on maneuvers, and how he swore
he caught the image of her face in it, veiled purest white,
radiant, and heard a voice soft and gentle murmuring,
Stay strong, my love, I’m waiting Yours truly, Owen.
Too late to retrieve it. The letter went out next morning.
Owen and I soon parted ways—different assignments.
Word was, from a former fellow Dix trainee, Owen had
passed basic, and days after getting home, tied the knot.