“I loved the overlap of generations,” said Dave Livewell, “We had old Irish, German, and Hungarian folks mixed with Glam Rockers. We also had immigrants from Saudi Arabia, Greece, and Puerto Rico. It was a great melting pot.”
David Livewell holds the neighborhoods of his youth in high regard, and they inspire the work he does today. Recently, Livewell won the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry sponsored by Truman State University Press, a very prestigious nationwide award with 450 manuscripts in the competition. “The prize, established in 1996 in honor of Missouri native T. S. Eliot, is an annual award for the best, unpublished book-length collection of poetry,” said Dave of his award. His winning collection of poetry, “Shackamaxon”, will be published later this year. Here is a sample of Dave’ work:
STICKBALL AT ST. MIKE’S
We strained to follow hits to the top story.
The traceries were triples, grounders strikes.
A homer had to clear the slated pitch.
Like Michael’s sword, our broomstick swung at strikes, as the church tower’s shadow draped each pitch and evening dimmed Good Friday’s stained-glass story.
All but the dusk was fair. Then, black as pitch, The sky obscured our vision and His story of a thrust spear and jagged lightning strikes.
A final pitch, three strikes…. That game is history.
“Half of the poems are set in the old neighborhoods of my childhood: Lower
Kensington, Fishtown, and Port Richmond,” explained Livewell of his future publication, “The others are miscellaneous poems about family and other interests.”
Livewell went on to reminisce of his youth, stating, “It was great that there were designated meeting spots: the playground, the corner, the bar, a certain step where old timers met, the German clubs, the barbershop, the beer distributor. You knew where to find people if you wanted to shoot the breeze and hear great stories about days gone by. I hear war stories, stories about concentration camps, about foreign countries, and about the depression. It was very entertaining, and there was such wit and intelligence in my neighbors and in their stories.”
Make no mistake – the T.S. Eliot prize is a huge deal to Dave, but he is no stranger to success in the field of poetry. For years, David Livewell taught poetry courses at his alma mater, La Salle University. His poems have been published in numerous journals. In 2005, he received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. In 2006, Dave was awarded a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Dave’s first influences in his chosen field include the voices of his neighborhood and his college instructors. “At La Salle, I had a professor who wrote about growing up in Germantown. That example showed me that I could write about my own neighborhood,” Livewell acknowledged.
“I knew I was witnessing a changing neighborhood and that I had to document all I saw in notebooks and in photographs,” Dave added, “I didn’t know how I would use the raw material, but I knew that one day I would need to look back at it.”
Dave spent his young life documenting his surroundings, taking it all in and processing his world around him as if it had as much historical significance as any event in American history. These days, he outputs those memories into words to be absorbed by a worldwide audience, getting them acquainted with the street corners of his youth.
“Philadelphia truly is a city of neighborhoods. My grandfather, who lived until he was 97, lived next door to me growing up,” Livewell illustrated, “The histories of my grandparents, parents, and siblings were set against the history of Philadelphia itself. Penn’s Treaty took place right in Fishtown. That layered history appealed to me. I often felt like an archaeologist. We are not Boston. We preserve history in a more veiled way here in the working-class neighborhoods. But it was the voices of my family and neighbors that stayed with me as ghosts of the past and characters in the landscape of my imagination.”
To understand a man like David Livewell is to understand true neighborhood pride. He takes our everyday lives and interprets these seemingly commonplace events into poetry – literally. In my opinion, people like Dave are as necessary to the Riverward neighborhoods as the priests, nuns, teachers, bartenders, candy store owners, roofers, landscapers, firemen, librarians, and city councilmen. We need people to document our lives as much as we need to live. Dave’s book, “Shackamaxon” will be published in September 2012. Make sure to pick up this collection to see our Riverward neighborhoods immortalized in print upon the book’s release.
