Kevin Riordan: A writer finds poetry in Kensington

David Livewell found poetry in Kensington long before downtown artists discovered that rough and resilient Philly neighborhood.

"As a poet, you're always looking for that right word," says Livewell, whose fondly remembered childhood in a Master Street rowhouse inspired many of the poems in Shackamaxon.

His manuscript won the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize from Missouri's Truman State University Press, which will publish the book in September. Shackamaxon takes its title from the Kensington area's 17th-century name, and many of the poems are enlivened by deeply felt scenes of the city.

A "flattened Schmidt's can," facades of Flemish-bond brickwork, trolley tracks reemerging from under layers of asphalt, the El - Philly-centric details permeate "The Fire Plug," "Panes of Gold," and other poems.

"Growing up in the '70s and '80s, I experienced a neighborhood that was changing very quickly," recalls Livewell, 44, an editor of medical journals who lives in West Deptford with his wife, Michele, and their two children. "I was seeing the last of something."

When potholes gape, they flash

A trace of vanished hooves or hobnail soles

He watched friends and neighbors move farther into the Northeast or to Jersey, factories fall silent, and drugs and gangs lay waste to the streets. The future author of "Stickball at St. Mike's" and "Sheet Metal Shears" took it all in.

Livewell's family had been part of the neighborhood for 80 years, and he felt connected to "layers of history you could peel back." He loved the voices on the streets; "they had a certain musicality and a very distinctive sense of humor."

The youngest of six children born to a sheet-metal worker and a homemaker, Livewell lived next door to his paternal grandfather, who spoke with "a certain lyricism."

The ductwork jottings Grandpop pressed and hid

Behind the flesh of Center City towers

Livewell was introduced to what he calls "serious literature" by Northeast Catholic High School teacher Francis J. Ryan, who became a mentor and is now an American studies professor at La Salle University.

"He was by far my best student," Ryan says. "He had an eye and ear for poetic language . . . a real feel for the nuances."

At La Salle, where Livewell earned a degree in English in 1985, he studied with fiction writer Claude Koch. An O. Henry Short Story Prize-winner, Koch inspired Livewell to write about the city he knew so well.