PEABODY — Jacquelyn Malone loves the poetic voice in John Berryman's "Dream Songs," and she wants her audience to love it, too.
As simple as that sounds, it helps to have a guide like Malone when listening to Berryman.
One of six speakers in a local series on "Groundbreaking American Poetry," Malone still remembers the impact Berryman's "77 Dream Songs" had when it was published in 1964. The title won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for that year.
"It was controversial at the time," Malone said. "To some, it's still controversial. That's because of the way he uses language."
The speaker series begins Tuesday at the Peabody Institute Library in Peabody.
Organizer Claire Keyes, professor emerita in the English Department at Salem State University, tapped poets who teach or work on the North Shore who will also be involved in the upcoming Massachusetts Poetry Festival at Salem State on May 13 and 14.
In addition to Keyes, whose talk will focus on the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, professor Dan Sklar from Endicott College will kick off the series next week with a discussion of Walt Whitman.
"He's the father of us all — or mother — as far as creative writing goes," Sklar said. "He broke open the formalist view of the old English style of doing it.
"He said his poems were not literature at all," Sklar said, "they were anti-literature."
J.D. Scrimgeour, an English professor at Salem State, will talk on March 1 about Langston Hughes, who embraced a range of art forms and subjects in his work and urged others associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African-American writers in the 1920s and '30s, to do the same.
Hughes' poems are "about sex, nightlife, and about the down and out," said Scrimgeour, who will focus on "a long poem about Harlem called 'Montage of a Dream Deferred.'"
"He's also connected to poetry's connection to music," Scrimgeour said. "He created the idea of blues poetry and jazz poetry. You can see the influence on poets down the road — (Jack) Kerouac reciting haikus to jazz, for example."
Keyes will discuss "Diving Into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich, which "was a breakthrough book, because of the power of her voice," she said.
Political and aesthetic power are intertwined in Rich's poetry, according to Keyes.
"She's interested in power as it relates to women," Keyes said. "The only true power is the power to transform our lives, the culture. Anybody can use a gun to force or coerce, but the only true power is to transform."
Keyes said that, following the publication of "Diving Into the Wreck," Rich's writing progressively "comes to assume the role of really trying to help other people, help them come to grips with their struggles in life."
That sense of breakthrough from art into life is shared by most of the poets in the series.
Carl Carlsen, for instance, who teaches at North Shore Community College and will speak on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," said, "It's a poem that gives you permission, so to speak, to go wild, and to put on the page what ordinarily might seem taboo.
"'Howl' and 'On the Road' (the novel by Kerouac) made us want to live our own version of that," he said. "He made me want to explore my relationship to America."
For Jennifer Jean, who teaches at Salem State and will discuss "Ariel" by Sylvia Plath, the artistic accomplishments of that book are matched by its depiction of motherhood.
"She freed her content to talk about more domestic matters in a more intense manner," Jean said. "With those images and those rhythms, she lets herself play.
"It was a dark kind of play," she continued. "But sometimes being a mom feels that intense."
The speaker series, which runs through March 15, begins Tuesday with Sklar, who teaches creative writing and often quotes Whitman in class to inspire students to "do it your way."
"The words of my book nothing — the drift of it everything" is one of Sklar's favorite Whitman quotes, from the poem "Shut Not Your Doors," which begins with lines that could also serve as a motto for the library's lecture series:
"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,/For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring."
'Groundbreaking American Poetry'
What: Free lecture and discussion series at Peabody Institute Library, 82 Main St., Peabody
When: Tuesdays, Feb. 8 to March 15, at 10:30 a.m.
Feb. 8, "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman, with professor Dan Sklar, Endicott College
Feb. 15, "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, with professor Carl Carlsen, North Shore Community College
Feb. 22, "77 Dream Songs" by John Berryman, with Jacquelyn Malone, poet
March 1, "Selected Poems of Langston Hughes," with professor J.D. Scrimgeour, Salem State University
March 8, "Ariel" by Sylvia Plath, with professor Jennifer Jean, Salem State
March 15, "Diving Into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich, with professor Emerita Claire Keyes, Salem State
