Gary Snyder Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

[photo courtesy of Shoemaker Hoard Publishing]

News just in from the Poetry Foundation -- here's the press release in full. Hurrah for a salute to this poet of the heart and the earth.


GARY SNYDER WINS 2008 RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE
$100,000 lifetime achievement award is one of largest to poets


CHICAGO — Poet Gary Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation's largest literary awards. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, made the announcement today. The prize will be presented at an evening ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Thursday, May 29.

In announcing the award, Wiman said: "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation."

Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder began writing in the 1950s as a member—with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—of the Beat movement. For most of the 1960s he lived in Japan and studied formally in a Zen monastery. Blending physical reality—precise observations of nature—with insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism, Snyder has explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose.

The judges issued the following statement in making the selection: "Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there's no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we've been reading Robert Frost."

"The selection of Gary Snyder as this year's winner of the Lilly Prize does honor to the tradition of excellence and importance that the prize has stood for since it was established over 20 years ago," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.

Snyder is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations. His poetry collections include Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country, Regarding Wave, No Nature, Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Danger on Peaks. His essays are collected in Earth House Hold, The Real Work, A Place in Space, and Back on the Fire.

A committed environmental activist who has received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing, Snyder has also been recognized for his contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, and the Shelley Memorial Award.

Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in northern California.

Judges for the 2008 prize were poets Eavan Boland, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Christian Wiman.

***


The Rabbit
A grizzled black-eyed rabbit showed me

irrigation ditches, open paved highway,
white line
to the hill.
bell chill blue jewel sky
banners
Banner clouds flying,
The mountains all gathered,
juniper trees on the flanks
cone buds,
the snug bark scale
in thin powder snow
over rock scrabble, pricklers, boulders,
pines and junipers,
singing.
The trees all singing.

The mountains are singing
To gather the sky and the mist
to bring it down snow-breath
ice-banners,
and gather it water
Sent from the singing peaks
flanks and folds
Down arroyos and ditches by highways the water
The people to use it, the
mountains and juniper
Do it for men,

Said the rabbit.

First published in Poetry, March 1968. © Gary Snyder

***


About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
American poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly. Over many years and in many ways, it has been blessed by her personal generosity. In 1985 she endowed the Ruth Lilly Professorship in Poetry at Indiana University. In 1989 she created Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, for $15,000 each, given annually by the Poetry Foundation to undergraduate or graduate students selected through a national competition. In 2002 her lifetime engagement with poetry culminated in a magnificent bequest that will enable the Poetry Foundation to promote, in perpetuity, a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Established in 1986 by Ruth Lilly, the annual prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. Over the last 20 years, the Lilly Prize has awarded more than $1,000,000. The previous recipients are Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Hayden Carruth, David Wagoner, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, A.R. Ammons, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, C.K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, and Lucille Clifton.

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.

Awards in Poetry: What Do They Mean?

On October 12, I posted the list of National Book Award finalists here. For a challenge to what the award represents, see the highly noticed blog article by Ron Silliman here: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/10/word-about-naming.html
Here's an excerpt from Silliman's contentious essay:

This past week’s National Book Award nominations for poetry are a scandal that should get somebody fired, not so much for the poets who were chosen – most are credible examples of the same small school of writing – as for the selection of the panel who did the choosing. Charles Simic, Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey may be diverse in terms of gender, race, even age, but all five represent the same neophobe movement in American letters. There is not one post-avant, not one third-way, visual, slam or other kind of poet. Imagine a National Book Foundation panel that included, say, Jack Hirschman, Antler, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Janice Mirikitani, all poets associated in some way with the Beat scene, and that they chose a list of possible recipients that included Eileen Myles, David Meltzer, Jack Foley, Michael Rothenberg & Amiri Baraka. There would be howls of outrage, as there were in 1979 when the National Endowment for the Arts attempted to redress that agency’s historic neglect of “marked case poets” of all kinds all at once. If there are not screams & speeches before Congress at the output of this year’s panel, it’s not because the panel represents a broader spectrum of the world of poetry, but only because it represents that tiny sliver that fancies itself as being “just poets.” This panel’s selections reflect not only aesthetic sameness, but all are white, four are published by big trade presses, all but Ellen Bryant Voigt have Ph.D.’s and teach for a living. Voigt, obviously the rebel in this scene, got her MFA at Iowa City. Oh, she too teaches.¹ At 57, Linda Gregerson is the baby of the group. As a cross-section of American poetry, this doesn’t stretch even from A to B.

And for a little news from the opposite front, I note that Alice Notley has won this year's Lenore Marshall Award in Poetry, announced by the Academy of American Poets:

ALICE NOTLEY RECEIVES THE LENORE MARSHALL PRIZE

$25,000 FOR THE YEAR'S MOST OUTSTANDING BOOK OF POETRY

New York, October 3—The Academy of American poets is pleased to announce that Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (Wesleyan University Press) was chosen by poets David Baker, Mark McMorris, and Marie Ponsot to receive the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year. The finalist for the award is David Wojahn for his collection Interrogation Palace (University of Pittsburgh Press).

About Notley's winning book, judge Marie Ponsot remarked:

These poems give us thirty-five years of political, personal, death-defying engagement. The nature Notley most loves is human nature. That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art. Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use. Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success.

Alice Notley
A prominent member of the eclectic second generation of the New York School, Alice Notley has published over thirty volumes of poetry, including Disobedience, winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize, The Descent of Alette; Selected Poems of Alice Notley; Waltzing Matilda; and Spring Comes, which received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Award. Notley has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Paris, where she edits the magazine Gare du Nord.

David Baker
The author of eight books of poetry, most recently Midwest Eclogue (W. W. Norton), as well as two critical books, Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement, David Baker has received fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mark McMorris
Mark McMorris's books include The Black Reeds winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series from Georgia University Press; and The Blaze of the Poui, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has been published widely in magazines and anthologies and teaches at Georgetown University.

Marie Ponsot
Marie Ponsot has published numerous works, including Springing (Knopf); The Bird Catcher, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Green Dark; Admit Impediment; and True Minds. Among her awards are the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

About the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize was established in 1975 by the New Hope Foundation in memory of Lenore Marshall (1897–1971), a poet, novelist, essayist, and political activist. Lenore Marshall was the author of three novels, three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and selections from her notebooks. Her work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Review, Partisan Review, and other literary magazines. In 1956 she helped found the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the citizens' organization that lobbied successfully for passage of the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty.

About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1934 to foster appreciation for contemporary poetry and to support American poets at all stages of their careers. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the most popular site about poetry on the web; the Poetry Audio Archive, capturing the voices of contemporary American poets for generations to come; American Poet, a biannual literary journal; and our annual series of poetry readings and special events. The Academy also awards prizes to accomplished poets at all stages of their careers—from hundreds of student prizes at colleges nationwide to the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement in the art of poetry.

Who Will Teach the Teachers? A Poet: Baron Wormser Steps Forward

With three books released this year, Baron Wormser is very much in demand -- which made it especially nice that he could speak today with the high school teachers at the Advanced Placement Institute in St. Johnsbury. He just completed his annual session at the Frost Place, where he directs the unique Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Today's session gave a taste of what he delivered on Frost's mountain earlier in the summer.

Long a Maine poet and now a Vermont resident, Wormser served as a K-12 librarian in rural Maine while also writing poetry and building, then living in, a one-room cabin "off the grid" with his family. One of his books this year is the softcover edition of his memoir of that life, THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING, which AP instructor Tim Averill calls "our contemporary Walden."

The teachers today were most sstruck by Wormser's readings from his book THE POETRY LIFE, in which ten fictional narrators talk about the influence of poetry in their lives -- part of the process that Wormser calls "the most important gift you can give your students." Each narrator has a special reason for being drawn to the poem and poet presented; for instance, a teenage girl offers her connection to Elinor Wylie's poem "Address to My Soul." After reading an excerpt, Wormser added, "So that's one way in." He had three more to offer in his challenge to teachers to connect their students with poetry.

For A SURGE OF LANGUAGE: TEACHING POETRY DAY BY DAY, Wormser and his co-author David Cappella made up a teacher, Mr. P., based on their wn teaching practice and opening with Randall Jarrell's poem "Big Daddy," about the football player Big Daddy Lipscomb. The book illustrates how to lead a discussion of the poem, beginning with syntax: "We always keepour eyes on how the poem works.... how the sentences are constructed -- poetry asks for that kind of attention and I think it carries over into how the students write prose."

Third came the memoir, THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING, where among other strands, Wormser follows his attraction to Robert Frost and to Frost's poem "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things." Wormser said, "That's a poem that's haunted me forever. I think one reason Imoved to the country was I wanted to be with the phoebes and find out who they were." He believed that writing poetry and living in the country were somehow the same tihing.

"Frost's example is an important one in our poetry because Frost is really the only American poet who is both popular and a great artist," he assered. He added that teaching poetry includes communicating who the poet was, in terms of the poet's spirit.

At last, Wormser read from his own poems in SCATTERED CHAPTERS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, which covers 30 years of his writing. Again referring to the demand for paying attention in poetry, he suggested: "Whatis that? -- that's the question poetry asks." Poetry tries to experience that questioning, through language. "That means that really the sources of poetry are in awe and wonder."

Between reading the poems "Falling" and "Shakespeare in Mud," Wormser reflected: "I think most poets have a totem from the natural world, because poetry comes to us from our feet, it doesn't come from our heads. It comes from the living earth." His own, he said, is snow -- as painted with words in "Falling."

Wormser's main teaching method is to dictate poems to his students -- he reads it, and the students write it down. He describes the result as "Better even than reading, because they experience the poem word by word, the wayit was written. ... How do you incite kids to ask you about the placement of a comma in a poem? That's one way. How do you get kids to ask you about word choice? -- By writing it down!"

The audience question that received the most intense reply from this "teacher of teachers" was, "Do we have to write poetry to be in the culture of poetry?" Wormser responded that the Greeks saw writing poetry as crucial to being human. "Almost everyone has written a poem in their life. Typically love and death produce poems. You go to one of those places, and that's all that's left standing." Poetry.

The Poetry That's Considered "Classic" by HBO

A news release from The Poetry Foundation came in today, revealing that the organization is working with an HBO show for children -- and it seems to me that the list of poems to be incorporated in the April 12 show gives a notion of what's now the "cannon." Note that Robert Frost tops the chart. Here it is:

Poetry Foundation Collaborates with HBO on
Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show
Latest installment of the Emmy-winning series debuts April 12

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, in collaboration with HBO, is pleased to announce the premiere of Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show, a television special for kids and their families about poetry. The latest installment of HBO's acclaimed Classical Baby series transports viewers into the world of literary arts, planting the seeds for a new generation to become lifelong lovers of poetry. Featuring classic poems by some of the world's greatest poets—including William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Christina Rossetti, and Federico García Lorca—the program premieres on Saturday, April 12, at 5:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, exclusively on HBO.

"We're certain that young children—and their parents—who are introduced to poetry via this enchanting program will be captivated by the beauty and wonder of the art form," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation. "Our research confirms that a positive experience with poetry early in life is the best way to create a lifelong reader of poetry."

An HBO original program produced in association with the Poetry Foundation, Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show introduces audiences to timeless poetry through animation and song. Featuring the voices of performers Andy Garcia, John Lithgow, Elizabeth Mitchell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Susan Sarandon, and Jeffrey Wright, and poets Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show consists of approximately a dozen short segments presenting well-known poems—and some surprises—in a delightful format. Between each segment, children—ranging in age from 4 to 9—offer commentary and muse on the meaning and mystery of poetry.

Poems featured in the program include the following:

* "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost; read by Susan Sarandon
* "The Swing" by Robert Louis Stevenson; sung by Beverly Gile and Frances Archer
* "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams; recited by Finn, age 7
* "Grassy Grass Grass" by Woody Guthrie; performed by Elizabeth Mitchell
* "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear; read by John Lithgow
* "Sonnet XVIII" by William Shakespeare; read by Jeffrey Wright
* "Mariposa" by Federico García Lorca; recited by Andy Garcia in Spanish with English subtitles
* "This Is Just to Say," written and read by William Carlos Williams
* "April Rain Song," written and read by Langston Hughes
* "A Very Valentine," written and read by Gertrude Stein
* "Who Has Seen the Wind?" by Christina Rossetti; read by child Maria Molloy
* "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; read by Gwyneth Paltrow

Calendar Alert: Brattleboro Poetry Event, 4/24

Just in from Dede Cummings, this info:

Poetry Series at the Dianich Gallery: A Poetry/Prose Reading to Benefit Brattleboro Climate Protection
at the Dianich Gallery
6:00-7:30 p.m.
Refreshments will be served

The “Poetry Series” at the Dianich will continue in April, and to honor National Poetry Month, with poet, and Dartmouth College professor, Cleopatra Mathis on Thursday, April 24th from 6:00-7:30, in the gallery surrounded by the artwork of Brattleboro-based artist, Myles Danaher. In addition to Mathis’s reading, local writer, David Blistein, will read from his novel in progress.

Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, of Greek and Cherokee descent.. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press. A sixth collection, White Sea, was published by Sarabande Books in 2005.
Cleopatra Mathis’ work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women, and The Practice of Poetry. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes: 1980 and 2006; The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; a 1981-82 Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council.
Cleopatra Mathis is the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where she has directed the Creative Writing Program since 1982.

David Blistein graduated from Amherst College where he studied under the novelist Robert Stone. Realizing he actually had to make money as a writer, he began a career as a freelance copywriter, eventually owning Church & Main, a regional advertising agency in Keene, NH. Since leaving the business in 2005, he has been writing an extended novel in which historical characters walk into (and, in most cases, out of) his everyday life.

Dede Cummings is a graduate of Middlebury College where she received the Mary Dunning Thwing award for creative writing and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop as a poetry contributor. She will read a few sections of poems (Chaucer and Elliot) in honor of National Poetry Month and serve as “poetic mistress of ceremonies.” Refreshments will be served and the artist, Myles Danaher, will be on hand to discuss his work. $5.00 suggested donation will benefit the “green” work of BCP.

Hosted by the Dianich Gallery in Brattleboro at 139 Main Street (down the side alley and through the glass doors), the reading is made possible by curator and gallery owner, Catherine Dianich and with thanks to Hooker Dunham building owner, Simi Berman (herself and artist and loyal patron of the arts in Brattleboro). Information: 802-254-9076.

To Be an American Poet: Reed Whittemore

[photo from Reed Whittemore's first stint as US poet laureate ("Consultant in Poetry") 1964-1965]

Why did you start writing poetry? Did you begin in school? At home, in "greeting cards" to family or friends? Perhaps romance -- that is, Romance -- pressed you to the page in the struggle to win someone's undying attention.

Whatever the reason, by age 18, most of us either "leave it behind" or make a commitment to it, measuring what we write against what we've dreamed a poet's life should become. Before the era of MFA poetry programs, it was far more rare to either enter poetry late in life, or stay with the early determination to Be A Poet -- which is what Reed Whittemore managed to do. And still does, at nearly 90, with some 20 books of poetry, criticism, biography, and "literary journalism" to his credit.

Whittemore's memoir AGAINST THE GRAIN: THE LITERARY LIFE OF A POET was released a few months ago by his old friend and sometime publisher, Merrill Leffler of Dryad Press (www.dryadpress.com). My copy arrived along with the holidays ... at 321 pages, plus gracious "front matter" and useful "back matter," the book is worth enjoying slowly. It rambles gently through Whittemore's New Haven, CT, childhood (he was born in 1919), then takes on friendships and literary collaborations and confrontations with the eagerness of a young man taking the world as his own.

The memoir's foreword comes from Garrison Keillor, and to the extent that Whittemore's poetry gets "discovered" by young poets and poetry readers today, it's often through Keillor's radio program, The Writer's Almanac. Keillor and Whittemore share Minnesota as long-time home, although for Whittemore the Minnesota years were from 1947 to 1966, as professor of English at Carleton College. And that's the part that sounds like a quintessential American-family-man-as-poet: steadily earning a living, taking care of his family, being part of the faculty.

Yet the before and the after make it clear that these years of "normal American life" became the tough, resilient central fiber for Whittemore's capacity to confront the world and insist on Poetry's mission as political rebel.

For his college years wrapped themselves around Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; his invitation to Washington, DC, as U.S. poet laureate (in those days, "Consultant in Poetry" to the Library of Congress) enabled him to gather the other rebels he knew so well as editors of small literary magazines; and by his second term in the leading national poetry slot (he's one of only four who have served twice), his office had become central for welcoming poets from other nations as well.

AGAINST THE GRAIN is a charming memoir of a well-mannered man whose photos generally featured the expected suit and tie, as well as family and friends. It's diffident, wryly humorous, even in its telling, which Whittemore does in the third person, commenting on what "R" is up to. In fact, it's so gentle and smooth that the outline it draws together -- of 60 years of writing and publishing poetry and establishing bibliographies of others, notably the poet/doctor from Paterson, NJ (WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: POET FROM JERSEY, 1975) -- becomes a towering mountain of detail that you've walked up so slowly that each vista is startling.

That's a lot like Whittemore's poems, which taste like the most secure and educated second half of the twentieth century. Whittemore wasn't immune from tragedy -- he and his wife Helen lost their son Jack at age 37, for instance -- but poetry wasn't where he painted that. Poetry instead was where he rebeled: against boredom, against national follies like wars (yes, even the one in Iraq), against what seemed outmoded in form. Founding the literary magazine FURIOSO with his Yale roommate Jim Angleton before 1940, and later establishing THE CARLETON MISCELLANY, he reached out to America's poets and their work.

Much of the detail in the memoir gained from publisher Merrill Leffler's fascination with "R" and his life and work -- Leffler dug through archives, reminded Whittemore about poets, asked for explanations. I suspect multiple readings will continue to delight most who've plowed all the way through. The index is workable, mostly useful for names (look up Joseph Brodsky, Howard Nemerov, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot) -- add your own side-notes for topics, though, in order to retrace things like the invention of the "Shaggy" poem.

I liked best the chapter on Whittemore's two-week visit to the Soviet Union, where he kept stumbling over his own sympathy with the literary rebels being silenced or ejected by the USSR at that time, like Solzhenitsyn. It's loaded with entries from his journal, as well as from the official report on how he'd done as an ambassador. Working on the memoir while agonizing about the war in Iraq, he retrieved some of his observations published in 1974:

Soviet defensiveness is hard for an American to understand because we this we have been defensively holding them off for three-quarters of a century. But it is obvious that they think they will not survive if they can't keep us out -- us in the form of our decadence, nihilism, immorality and anti-social individualism as much as our money and our prattling about the freedoms. Not just our soldiers and shekels but the whole capitalist "sickness" is what they fear, from modernism to Coca-Cola.

I've marked a dozen pages in the memoir that especially struck me, shed light on relationships of poets and politics, or revealed the "wry and deflating humor" that is Whittemore's (that's the phrase in his Wikipedia entry!). But let me wrap this up with one of R's most quoted poems, one that is sure to remain applicable to the nation's capital and its sense of self in the globe. Now that I've spent a couple of months immersed in this long tale of East Coast and nationalized American poetry, I'll be listening for more Whittemore material, and not just on Garrison Keillor's programs.

THE DESTRUCTION OF WASHINGTON

When Washington has been destroyed,
And the pollutants have been silting up for an age,
Then the old town will attract the world's Schliemanns.
What, they will say, a dig! as they uncover
The L'Enfant plan in the saxifrage.

So many plaques, so many figures in marble
With large shoulders and lawman lips
Will have to be pieced together and moved to the new
Smithsonian
That the mere logistics will delight vips.

For how can one pass by a muchness? There will be fund drives
With uplifting glosses,
Teams of researchers will mass with massive machinery
At the Rayburn ruin
To outscoop Athens and Knossos.

Dusty Scholars will stumble in, looking nearsightedly
At gray facades
Of pillar and portal,
And at curious acres of asphalt,
For clues to the mystery of that culture's gods.

Money of course they will miss,
Since money is spoke not at all on the plaques there,
Nor will they shovel up evidence
That the occupants of the chambers and cloakrooms
Were strangers in town, protecting their deities elsewhere,

But sanctums they surely will guess at,
Where the real and true pieties were once expressed.
If the Greeks had their Elusinians,
Surely this tribe on the Potomac had mysteries too?
--Having to do, perhaps, with the "Wild West"?

Like most of us sitting here now beside the Potomac,
They will find the Potomac primitives hard to assess.
Oh, may their ignorance be, than ours,
At least less!

Calendar Alert: Poetry, March 4, Shelburne Falls MA

The Collected Poets Series
Thursday, March 4, 2010, at 7:00 pm (new starting time!), poets Joan Houlihan and Deborah Bernhardt will read work from their books as well as new poems, in the Collected Poets Series at
Mocha Maya's Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 413-625-6292. $2-$5 sliding scale. Wheelchair accessible. See www.collectedpoets.com for more information. 

Joan Houlihan is author of three books, most recently The Us, from Tupelo Press (2009). The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Press Green Rose Award, was published in 2006. In 2003 Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays was published by Del Sol Press. She is staff reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review as well as author of a series of essays on contemporary poetry called Boston Comment. Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Intern ational, Fulcrum, Pleiades, Passages North, VOLT, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and in The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press).
Houlihan founded the Concord Poetry Center in 2004 and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference in 2006. She teaches in Lesley University’s MFA Low-Residency Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Deborah Bernhardt received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and fellowships and grants from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship), the Wisconsin Arts Board (Literary Arts Grant), Penn State Altoona (Writer-in-Residence), Writers@Work, Fishtrap, Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Hessen Literary Society, Germany. She received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and used the Second Year Poetry Fellowship (2008-2009) to work on her new manuscript. Her first collection, Echolalia, was published by Four Way Books in 2006 as winner of the Intro Prize for Poetry.

                           ___________________________________________
In honor of National Poetry Month, the CPS will be holding TWO events in April!

On Thursday, April 1, Lawrence Raab and Regie O'Hare Gibson will be reading from their work.

Thursday, April 15, Adrian Blevins and James Haug will read at a second CPS event.   Both events will take place at 7pm at Mocha Maya's Coffee House in Shelburne Falls, MA.

The Collected Poets Series highlights the work of established and emerging poets. Each event showcases the remarkable local poets of Western Massachusetts and the finest regional, national, and international talent.

Calendar Alert: Poetry on Thursday, Shelburne Falls, MA

On Thursday January 8 at 7:30 p.m., the Collected Poets Series presents Art and Poetry in Motion: Jeffrey Levine, prizewinning poet and editor, whose latest collection is Rumor of Cortez, and Patrick Donnelly, author of The Charge, from South Deerfield, will read from their work, along with an art opening by painter Liz Hawkes deNiord. Free. Mocha Maya's Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 413-625-6292. Wheelchair accessible. See www.collectedpoets.com or www.mochamayas.com for more information and directions.

Jeffrey Levine's first book of poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, won the Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press in 2001, and his second book, Rumor of Cortez (Red Hen Press, 2005), was nominated for a 2005 LA Times Book Award in Poetry. Twelve times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he has won the Larry Levis Poetry Award from Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Award from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Kestrel Poetry Prize, and most recently, the 2007 American Literary Review and the Ekphrasis Awards. Levine is the Founder, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, an award winning, not-for-profit independent literary press with offices in the Berkshires.

Patrick Donnelly's collection of poems is The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003), about which Gregory Orr wrote, “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books, and has taught writing at Colby College, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Hayden's Ferry Review, Slate Magazine, and many other reviews. With Stephen D. Miller he has translated classical Japanese poetry and drama, and their translations have appeared in numerous literary journals. He lives in South Deerfield, MA.

The Collected Poets Series highlights the work of established and emerging poets. Each event showcases the remarkable local poets of Western Massachusetts and the finest regional, national, and international talent. The series is usually held every first Thursday of the month. See www.collectedpoets.com for more info.

Vermont to California: Poetry Readings in St J, Summer Wednesday Evenings

The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum crafts a four-part poetry series each summer, and this year's roster of poets extends from East Coast to West. On Main Street at the top of the downtown, the 19th century art and architectural glories of the Athenaeum provide a striking backdrop to what is likely to be a far more modern set of poetics than its founders could have visualized. Caution: The building's not air-conditioned, and the turnout is sometimes huge, so dress for summer's heat, and arrive early to claim the best seats.

July 18, 7:30 P.M.: Ellen Dudley & F. D. Reeve

Vermont resident F.D. Reeve was once a Hudson River longshoreman and has spent years traveling the world from Mendocino to Moscow. He is the founding editor of Poetry Review and has received awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New England Poetry Society. His newest book of poems, The Toy Soldier, comes out in 2007.

Ellen Dudley is the founding editor of The Marlboro Review. Her poems have appeared in Agni Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Miscellany, Provincetown Arts, TriQuarterly, and other periodicals. Her most recent book of poems is The Geographic Cure (Four Way Books, 2007)

July 25, 7:30 P.M.: David Budbill & Jody Gladding

David Budbill is the author of seven books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories and several books for young adults. His Zen-scented collection While We’ve Still Got Feet was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2005. Budbill also performs with jazz musicians in a collaborative program of poetry and music. He lives in Wolcott, Vermont, with his wife, artist Lois Eby.

Jody Gladding is a professor, poet, and translator, and author of Stone Crop (1993; Yale Younger Poets Award) and The Moon Rose (2006; fine press work from Chester Creek Press). Gladding is the 2007 Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH this summer.

August 1, 7:30 P.M.: Michael Collier & Ellen Bryant Voigt

Michael Collier is the director of the Bread Loaf Witers Conference. His five books of poetry includes most recently Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and his translation of Medea (Oxford) appeared in 2006. A collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back (Michigan), will be published in 2007.

Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), Shadow of Heaven (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Kyrie (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. Voigt served as the Vermont State Poet from 1999 to 2003, when she was elected Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. With a residence in Vermont, she also commits mentoring time at Warren Wilson College, where she cofounded the noted limited-residency MFA program in poetry.

August 15, 7:30 P.M.: Jane Hirshfield

Californian Jane Hirshfield is the author of six award-winning collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The American Poetry Review. In fall 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor held by such poets as Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams.

Poetry: Why It Matters, and Who's Reading Next

It's National Poetry Month. Thank goodness, there's something to carry us through the uncertain weather of snow-rain-wind-sun ... wow, sun! Well, we're hoping for a few days of it. But while we're hoping, poetry carries that hope in a lidded basket, close enough to open and savor.

Here are some quick notes from today's immersion in the world of poets and poetry. Why immerse there, when mysteries are the focus of Kingdom Books? Well, as Gwendolyn Brooks said, "Poetry is life distilled." When grappling for the intense core of a book -- whether reading it or writing it -- poetry can be the flashlight, the pry bar, the watering spout.

A collection of poems that's been waiting for attention on my desk has been Laure Anne Bosselaar's 2007 offering, A NEW HUNGER (Ausable Press). It's so powerful that I've literally picked it up and set it down again over and over, and this evening I pushed to work my way once and for all through the entire book: its 12+ pages of opening poem "Against Again" that wrings my heart for the abandoned and abused child that Bosselaar suggests she once was, a child brought back into clear focus upon seeing a small girl on a train being ignored by a mother: "and look at her face: already courageous, defeated, / and old with it." Bosselaar writes of being delivered to a de facto orphanage by her beautiful and very much alive mother, who had no use for anything that didn't gratify and fawn over that angry, insistent, socially prominent woman. In the nunnery, the poet-child learns of her own ugliness and evil, of how unwanted she is ... so that every subsequent poem erupting in adulthood confronts the cruelty of that time. in "Man at the Museum of Modern Art" she marvels at the revelation that a stranger's presence can bring:

How horror stalks us -- as desire does,
or love. Or hunger.

In Bosselaar's presence among poets, in cities, in adulthood, there is a new answer forming, though. In the poem "Awe" she savors New York City and its mighty Hudson River, and concludes,

this ten-bucks-wave-rocker of a ride

is mine, and so is this million-windowed city,
trashed, ashed and gleaming, too busy

destroying then rebuilding herself to watch
the Hudson and me at the end of our journeys --

resilient and willing.

So it is that we rebuild out of ash, out of pain, out of torment, into life.

Hungry for more poetry, more powerful language? If you're in New England, consider visiting Dartmouth College tomorrow, April 7, for a Poetry and Prose reading presented by the English Department:

April 7, 4pm in Sanborn Library

There will be a reading by Todd Hearon and Michelle Hoover.  Reception to follow.

Todd Hearon is the author of STRANGE LAND, and is a poet, playwright, and fiction
writer.

Michelle Hoover is author of QUICKENING and teaches writing and Boston University
and Grub Street.

And if you can't get there, take a look at Hearon's surrealistic feast through his Poetry Foundation web page, and at this intriguing interview today with Hoover on the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene blog.

Back to mysteries tomorrow ... but watch for more poetry this month. It's a good spring tonic.

Calendar Alert, November 5, Poets Stewart, Waldor, Ossmann

THE COLLECTED POETS SERIES:

Thursday, Nov. 5th, 2009 at 7:30 pm, poets Pamela (Jody) Stewart, Peter Waldor and April Ossman will read from their work. Free. Mocha Maya's Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 413-625-6292. Wheelchair accessible. See www.collectedpoets.com for more information.

The Collected Poets Series highlights the work of established and emerging poets. Each event showcases the remarkable local poets of Western Massachusetts and the finest regional, national, and international talent. The series is usually held every first Thursday of the month.

Pamela (Jody) Stewart was born in Boston. She received her BA from Goddard College ADP and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Among her publications are four poetry chapbooks and five full-length volumes of poems: The St. Vlas Elegies (L'Epervier Press, l977), Cascades (L'Epervier Press, l979), Nightblind (Ion Books/Raccoon, l985), Infrequent Mysteries (Alice James Book, l991) and The Red Window (University of Georgia Press, l997). A chapbook, The Ghost Farm will be published by Pleasure Boat Studio in the spring of 2010. Jody has been included in the Pushcart Anthologies twice, won American Poetry Review's first prize for Best Poems of l980, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hawthorndon Fellowship and an MCC grant. She met her current husband Ed Cothey while traveling in Cornwall, UK. They returned to the States in l990 to Hawley, MA and formed Tregellys Farm. Jody is working on a New and Selected volume.

Peter Waldor was born in Newark, New Jersey. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. For the past twenty years Waldor worked in the insurance business in northern New Jersey where he lives with his wife and three children. Waldor's poetry has appeared in many magazines (both in print and on-line)such as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, theAmerican Poetry Review, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review and Mothering Magazine.Waldor's book of poetry, Door to a Noisy Room, was published by Alice James Books in January, 2008.

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009) and Contemporary Poetry of New England(UPNE, 2002). She has won several poetry awards, including the 2000 Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award. She is a publishing, writing and editing consultant (www.aprilossmann.com), and teaches poetry in private tutorials and at The Writer's Center in White River Junction, VT. She has also taught at Lebanon College and the University of Maine at Farmington and was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000 -2008. She lives in Post Mills, VT.

Irish Poet John F. Deane in Vermont, May 2

Irish Poet John F. Deane will read at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum (Main Street, St. Johnsbury, VT) on Friday May 2 at 6:30 p.m.
Deane, known as both poet and editor as well as novelist, was born on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland in 1943. After working as a teacher at St. Aidan's Secondary School, Whitehall, Dublin, for 10 years, in 1978, he founded the national poetry society, Poetry Ireland, and resigned from teaching in 1979 to develop the society and write full-time.
In 1979, Deane launched the poetry magazine The Poetry Ireland Review. Then in 1985, he founded The Dedalus Press, which he continues to edit and direct.
Noted in his work are collections of poetry and fiction. He has won the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature and poetry and prizes from Italy and Romania. In 1996 he was elected Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry.
Deane’s latest publications include a poetry collection “The Instruments of Art” (2005); “In Dogged Loyalty”, essays on religious poetry (2006); and “The Heather Fields and Other Stories” (2007). His forthcoming poetry collection, “A Little Book of Hours,” will be published in 2008. He is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Irish Arts Council to honor artists “whose work had made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland”. In 2007 the French Government honored him by making him “Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres”.
The program is free and handicapped accessible. For information call 802-748-8291.

Our Loss: Liam Rector, 1949-2007

He was Donald Hall's good friend. That's what I carry with me when I think of poet Liam Rector, as he sat on the stage with the newly named U.S. Poet Laureate at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, nearly two years ago. (see the blog entry from November 5, 2006.) The two men shared the podium with Rector's wife Tree Swenson, and they wrestled with what it meant to have an iconic poem for a generation -- as Ginsberg's "Howl" was, and (suggested by Hall) perhaps Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lions." Rector, after visibly thinking the question over, decided his own generation did not have such iconic poems.

Now, in the moment that it takes to pull the trigger -- but really in the much longer time that it takes to understand critical and chronic illness in one's body and choose a final line for the page -- Rector is gone. Whatever afterlife there is for him, we're not sharing it yet. But we have his poetry. And a visit to the monument erected to Rector by poetry and poetics blogger Ron Silliman provides five separate and impressive links to work by and about Rector. Go visit them to savor these achievements, connections, constructions, strength.

Meanwhile I offer one small further addition to the evidence Liam Rector left behind, from the web site of the Briery Creek Press:

WINNER AND FINALISTS FOR THE LIAM RECTOR FIRST BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY

At the inception of this competition, we wanted to provide a much-needed venue for poetry publication in an often-difficult market. More, we wanted to recognize and honor Liam Rector, a man who has dedicated his professional life to the success of American Letters. Mr. Rector has served as the executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and has also administered literary programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the founder and director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Through both his own poetry and his role as arts advocate, Mr. Rector has served the American arts community tirelessly, facilitating opportunity and access for countless emerging writers. This contest, we hope, will serve as a modicum of appreciation for that work, while also continuing his legacy of creating opportunities for writers.

We thank everyone who submitted for sharing their work with us. We received a fascinating range of poetry and found the decision-making process difficult. We left this process, however, reassured that the love of reading and writing poetry is alive and well in the American market.

We're pleased to announce that our first winner is:
Leaving Iowa by Michael Meyerhofer of Carbondale, Illinois.

Mr. Meyerhofer's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, and others. His chapbook, Cardboard Urn, won the Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest from Southeast Missouri State University. He is currently pursuing the MFA at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Of Mr. Meyerhofer's work, our final judge, Craig Challender, writes: "there's real voice here: an all-too-rare accomplishment in these days of gentrified poetry. The language here is consistently fresh--a volatile mix of humor and anger, spot-on pity and forgiveness--that gives the ears meangingful work to do."

And here, from his final collection, THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE FALLEN WORLD, are Rector's words for the approach of the end:

Now

Now I see it: a few years
To play around while being
Bossed around

By the taller ones, the ones
With the money
And more muscle, however

Tender or indifferent
They might be at being
Parents; then off to school

And the years of struggle
With authority while learning
Violent gobs of things one didn't

Want to know, with a few tender
And tough teachers thrown in
Who taught what one wanted

And needed to know; then time
To go out and make one's own
Money (on the day or in

The night-shift), playing around
A little longer ("Seed-time,"
"Salad days") with some

Young "discretionary income"
Before procreation (which
Brings one quickly, too quickly,

Into play with some variation
Of settling down); then,
Most often for most, the despised

Job (though some work their way
Around this with work of real
Delight, life's work, with the deepest

Pleasures of mastery); then years
Spent, forgotten, in the middle decades
Of repair, creation, money

Gathered and spent making the family
Happen, as one's own children busily
Work their way into and through

The cycle themselves,
Comic and tragic to see, with some
Fine moments playing with them;

Then, through no inherent virtue
Of one's own, but only because
The oldest ones are busy falling

Off the edge of the planet,
The years of governing,
Of being the dreaded authority

One's self; then the recognition
(Often requiring a stiff drink) that it
Will all soon be ending for one's self,

But not before Alzheimer's comes
For some, as Alzheimer's comes
For my father-in-law now (who

Has forgotten not only who
Shakespeare is but that he taught
Shakespeare for thirty years,

And who sings and dances amidst
The forgotten in the place
To which he's been taken); then

An ever-deepening sense of time
And how the end might really happen,
To really submit, bend, and go

(Raging against that night is really
An adolescent's idiot game).
Time soon to take my place

In the long line of my ancestors
(Whose names I mostly never knew
Or have recently forgotten)

Who took their place, spirit poised
In mature humility (or as jackasses
Braying against the inevitable)

Before me, having been moved
By time through time, having done
The time and their times.

"Nearer my god to thee" I sing
On the deck of my personal Titanic,
An agnostic vessel in the mind.

Born alone, die alone—and sad, though
Vastly accompanied, to see
The sadness in the loved ones

To be left behind, and one more
Moment of wondering what,
If anything, comes next . . .

Never to have been completely
Certain what I was doing
Alive, but having stayed aloft

Amidst an almost sinister doubt.
I say to my children
Don't be afraid, be buoyed
—In its void the world is always
Falling apart, entropy its law
—I tell them those who build

And master are the ones invariably
Merry: Give and take quarter,
Create good meals within the slaughter,

A place for repose and laughter
In the consoling beds of being tender,
I tell them now, my son, my daughter.

Liam Rector

Calendar Alert: Poets: Raab and Gibson, April 1

The Collected Poets Series celebrating National Poetry Month

Thursday, April 1, at 7:00 p.m. poets Lawrence Raab and Regie O'Hare Gibson read from their work in the first of two poetry events at CPS this April. Entry donation, $2-$5 sliding scale. Mocha Maya's Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 413-625-6292. Wheelchair accessible.  See www.collectedpoets.com for more information on all our poets reading in April.

Lawrence  Raab (right) was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Middlebury College, and his MA from Syracuse University. He has received the Bess Hokin prize from Poetry magazine, a Junior Fellowship from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His collection of poems, What We Don’t Know About Each Other, won the National Poetry Series and was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. Recent books include The Probable World, Visible Signs: New & Selected Poems, and his seventh collection, The History of Forgetting (2009), all published by Penguin. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

Author, songwriter, educator and workshop facilitator Regie O’Hare Gibson (above left) has performed, taught, and lectured at universities, theaters, and various other venues in seven countries, most recently Monfalcone, Italy where he received the Absolute Poetry Award for performance and writing. Both he and his work appear in the New Line Cinema film “love jones,” a film based on events in his life. He is a recipient of a Provincetown FAWC Herbert Walker Scholarship and is an instructor at Grubstreet Inc. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals including The Iowa Review, Poetry, and The Good Men Project: Stories from the Front lines of Modern Manhood, and others. He is a National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, has been featured on NPR, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and WGBH-2 Art Close-Up in which his performance was nominated for a Boston Emmy. His first collection of poems Storms Beneath the Skin received the Golden Pen Award and he received his MFA in poetry from New England College. In 2007 he founded Neon JuJu: A literarymusic ensemble which combines spoken word and poetry with music and electronica.

CPS also brings you a video archive that allows you to see footage from past readings: now on the site, readings by Galway Kinnell, Carey Salerno, Elizabeth Hughey, Lesle Lewis, and Nancy Pearson.

Also, watch for information the second April CPR reading on April 15 with Adrian Blevins and James Haug. The Collected Poets Series highlights the work of established and emerging poets. Each event showcases the remarkable local poets of Western Massachusetts and the finest regional, national, and international talent. The series is usually held every first Thursday of the month.

Calendar Alert: Poets at Shelburne Falls, Mass., Thursday February 5

Here's a warm invitation courtesy of Leah Banks -- if I lived just a little closer, I'd be headed to Shelburne Falls for the Collected Poets Series myself!

Come if you're near to hear pitch perfect poetry. If you can't, that's okay...did you say the next round of drinks is on you? Stay warm …

On Thursday, Feb. 5th, at 7:30 pm, the Collected Poets Series presents Mary Clare Powell, a Greenfield, MA native and author of several books, and Diane Lockward, a New Jersey native < ! > whose latest collection is What Feeds Us. They both will read from their work. Free. Mocha Maya's Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 413-625-6292. Wheelchair accessible. See www.collectedpoets.com or www.mochamayas.com for more information.

Dr. Mary Clare Powell is a professor at Lesley University, formerly Director of the Creative Arts in Learning Division. She is now an adjunct professor who teaches poetry to teachers across the country. She has published several books, including This Way Daybreak Comes: Women's Values and the Future, The Widow, Arts, Education and Social Change (editor). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Things Owls Ate, Academic Scat, and In the Living Room. She lives in Greenfield, MA where she works on the Franklin County Arts and Culture Partnership, and is on the Board of the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in South Hadley. She writes articles on integrated arts in education, and poetry.

Just a little taste of Dr. Powell:

“Making a fashion statement,/ refusing to wear sackcloth and black./ Everyday the sock queen delights your eyes,/ drawing them down/ to where foundations rot,/ exalting dying toes.” ~ from “Celebrating What Remains”

Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006) which was awarded the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003), and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR's The Writer's Almanac. She is the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. A former high school English teacher, Diane now works as poet-in-the-schools.

A little taste also of Ms. Lockward:

“I’m the screech of tires, slam of brakes,/ skateboard in front of wheels./Creaks/ in dark stairwells,/ a rock stuck in your cheek,/ I’m the bone that won’t heal.” ~ from “Fear”

Calendar Alert: Burlington VT, Dec. 3, Daniel Lusk and Angela Patten

This just came in from Major Jackson, who hosts the poetry series at the Fleming Museum called THE PAINTED WORD POETRY SERIES, crafted to highlight established and emergent New England poets whose work represents significant explorations into language, song, and art.

FLEMING MUSEUM, Burlington, VT, WED. DECEMBER 3
Daniel Lusk and Angela Patten
6:00 - 6:30 PM: Music
6:30 - 7:30: Poetry Readings

Daniel Lusk is the author of Kissing the Ground: New & Selected Poems (Onion River Press, 1999). His poems have been published in Poetry, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, North American Review, and other literary journals. A native of rural Iowa, Mr. Lusk has worked as a ranch hand, laborer, door-to-door salesman, preacher, clerk, sportswriter, jazz singer, teacher, and administrator. He teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Vermont.

Angela Patten is the author Still Listening (Salmon Press, 1999). A native of Dublin, Ireland, she emigrated to the United States in 1977. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Vermont in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Vermont College in 1996. Her poems have appeared in poetry journals, including Calyx, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review and others. Her work is included in Onion River: Six Vermont Poets. She teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Vermont.

Directions to the museum: http://www.uvm.edu/~fleming/index.php?category=visiting&page=directions

The Frost Place: Poetry All Summer

At the hillside smallholding owned by Robert Frost when he hit his poetic stride, centered on his white farmhouse and modest utility barn, is The Frost Place, a center for poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire. This summer the center offers three programs worth considering -- and all have an application deadline of May 15, so it's time to look them over and make choices. Here they are:

Conference on Poetry and Teaching
June 27 - July 1
Baron Wormser, Director
The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching brings together hard-working classroom teachers and highly skilled poet/teachers to share their experiences of how poetry is most effectively presented in the classroom. Faculty will present specific techniques for teaching poetry including sample exercises and prompts that teachers will be invited to try out and then discuss.

Festival and Conference on Poetry
July 8 - 14
Martha Rhodes, Director
The Festival and Conference on Poetry is a daily immersion in listening, reflection, and conversation about the writing and reading of poetry. The program will offer lectures, talks and craft panels by faculty throughout the week. Fifteen hours of workshops during the week: each workshop will have its own particular slant, the focus of your week together will be on your poems and on developing your poetic skills.

The Frost Place Advanced Seminar
August 8 - 13
Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Director

Spend five days with a select community of poets exploring your artistic work in the context of our enormous and complex literary tradition. This is a unique opportunity for dedicated poets to delve inensely into the poetic process. Seminar participants will have their poems-in-progress given generous and focused attention and will be invited to think in new ways about what can be accomplished in revision.

For general information and some great images and poems, check out www.frostplace.org.

Diversion: Tupelo Press "Subscription" for 2012 (Poetry)

"You know my methods, Watson," says my inner Sherlock Holmes in response to the sensible question, "Why are there poetry diversions on a blog about and for mysteries and their authors and readers?" Me, I enjoy the sharp difference of genres, and as a writer, I think poetry can sharpen descriptive skills, improve the "music" of the narrative flow, and prevent writer's block.

So for others who might want to sample some "new" poetry but don't necessarily know how to choose it, here's a great solution: Tupelo Press offers a subscription to its poetry books each year. For $99, you get nine books of poems, hot off the press, often signed by the authors. The editors at this Vermont publishing firm have good eyes and ears for what's fresh, vivid, and often provocative. I sign up for the year's worth, knowing I'll get surprised each time one of the books arrives. And this year's line-up of poets looks strong -- I actually would go way out of my way for anything by Ilya Kaminsky. Here's the Tupelo Press subscription link, making it easy.

Among last year's books were Atlas Hour by Carol Ann Davis (experiments with the line, reminding me of  M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!; wrestles with European artists and the Holocaust), Sanderlings by Geri Doran (lush narrative poems with strong ties to the landscape and to the senses), Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (surprising and delightful; ranges from the Philippines to India to the Ozarks), Manoleria by Daniel Khalastchi (poetry for liberal question askers!), Severance Songs by Joshua Corey (modern sonnets that explore hungers for faith, history, unrest), and Circle's Apprentice by Dan Beachy-Quick (award-winning and dense; builds outward -- or inward? -- from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay). And the 2012 list is here:

2012 Poetry & Prose Series Subscription
Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler	A God in the House: Poets on Faith	(essays/interviews)
Rusty Morrison	After Urgency	(poetry)
Alan Michael Parker	Long Division	(poetry)
James Friel	The Posthumous Affair	(novel)
Lee Upton	Swallowing the Sea	(essays)
Karen An-hwei Lee	Phyla of Joy	(poems)
Patricia Rosoff	The Innocent Eye	(essays)
CM Burroughs	The Vital System	(poems)
Kathleen Jesme	Meridian	(poems)

Calendar Alert: Frost Place Free Public Poetry

When the Frost Place opens for the season at Memorial Day weekend, two weekends away, my calendar turns heavily to poetry. Sure, it's my turn on the board, so that first weekend, I'll probably be at the house where Frost lived while he wrote his most noted poems ... except I'll be sweeping, raking, fetching trash bags, whatever the site stewardship team needs. Although I hope to take a few minutes to sit on that inspiring front porch and overlook the mountains in Franconia Notch, I won't be writing poetry just then -- or even reading it.

But the poetry unfolds from there. Here's the action-crammed schedule of free public poetry readings that executive director Jim Schley has planned, with an amazing group of top contemporary poets. I'll try to post reminders on the blog now and then, with some samples of their poetry.

And when do I write my own? Usually after one of these readings. They're so provocative that it makes my fingers itch to shape my own lines and stanzas. I figure it's a lot like going to church or synagogue: I disagree at least half the time with the sermon, which pushes me to realizing and putting into words what I really do believe. In the same way, once the elation of listening to strong poets mellows to plain ordinary joy, I find I want to get my own style working again on paper.

So in case you have the same pattern -- or just like to know what's hot in the poetry evenings coming up -- here's that list of dates. Hope to see you on the hill at The Frost Place this summer.

Frost Place READING SCHEDULE FOR SUMMER 2008

During the Conference on Poetry and Teaching
June 30 – July 4, 2008

Readings at 7:30 pm:
Monday, June 30: Shara McCallum
Tuesday, July 1: Mekeel McBride
Wednesday, July 2: Alice B. Fogel
Thursday, July 3: J. D. Scrimgeour

Frost Day
Sunday, July 6, at 2:00 pm: James Hoch and Sydney Lea reading,
and a celebration of Dave Schaffer, founder of The Frost Place


During the Festival and Conference on Poetry
July 27 – August 2, 2008

Readings at 8:00 pm:
Sunday, July 27: James Hoch and Cook Fellow from Dartmouth (to be announced)
Monday, July 28: David Wojahn and Linda Susan Jackson
Tuesday, July 29: Jean Valentine and Jim Schley
Wednesday, July 30: Festival Participants Reading
Thursday, August 1: Susan Howe and Ilya Kaminsky
Friday, August 2: Chase Twichell and Patrick Donnelly
Saturday, August 3: Cornelius Eady and Ellen Doré Watson

[at left, poet Cornelius Eady, co-founder of Cave Canem, and at right, Frost Place board member and poet Major Jackson]

Poetry and Politics: Martín Espada

Kingdom Books is honored to host Martín Espada on Sunday October 8, reading from his new collection, THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY. I thought I'd be ready to talk about it last week, but I'm still mulling it over.

The collection is both tight and intense. Its three sections take vastly different directions: The first, "The Republic of Poetry," addresses both Neruda and Chile, including Pinochet. The second, "The Poet's Coat," is elegiac. The third, "The Weather-Beaten Face," includes several anti-war poems and others that seem at first reading to be deeply personal.

All of the poems fit within the swathe that Espada's previous collections have swept: poetry as political artistry, poetry as resistance, poetry voicing the terrible wrongs of the world and demanding their redress. The fact that the "disappeared" cannot be returned to bodily life is only one more reason that their life as spirit, vigor, and beloved friends and family must find restoration.

Because THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY is so particularly tightly composed, I'm going to wait a bit longer before tackling a full review of it. Meanwhile I've read other work of Espada's -- TRUMPETS FROM THE ISLAND OF THEIR EVICTION, A MAYAN ASTRONOMER IN HELL'S KITCHEN, and the stirring foreword to POETRY LIKE BREAD. The name Espada means sword or machete to this poet; expect more metaphors of the blade to follow.

It is not necessary to be Puerto Rican or Nuyorican to forge a poetry of resistance; African Americans and every woman can speak to the same.

But to speak to the Latino resistance, from New York (or even Amherst, Mass.), to Puerto Rico, to Cuba, to Chile, to Nicaragua, even to Spain -- for this, Espada is powerfully called.

One last note: The reading we're sponsoring will be held at 3 p.m. at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, to have enough space for many listeners, but we'll host a small lunch here at Kingdom Books ahead of time. When I asked Martín Espada whether there were any particular guests he might like invited to the lunch, he listed Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Julia Alvarez -- then said, "I'd like to meet (Congressman) Bernie Sanders."

So we've invited Vermont's independent voice calling out for restoration in the halls of Washington, DC. I hope the Congressman will accept. I look forward to witnessing this connection and its fruits.