 Good evening. My name is Lisa Marcus, and I'm a program assistant here at the library. Welcome to this poem city event, What Inspires. I'd like to thank the sponsors of Poem City, National Life Group Foundation, Vermont Humanities Council, Hunger Mountain Co-op, and the Poetry Society at Vermont. And let me introduce the poets. We welcome Dee Dee Jackson, Major Jackson, Karen McCadden, Elizabeth Powell, and Diana Whitney. Please help me in welcoming them here. Hi, how are you all? Thank you for coming out in this rainy spring. Now I really understand the idea of April showers brings me flowers, right? Yeah, OK. So I am Dee Dee Jackson, and I thought I would read a few of my poems. But I might start with a poem of somebody who is very influential to me early on. And in my career as a young poet, I'm going to have to read it off my phone, and I left my glasses over there. So I'm sorry. Yeah, it's influential early on to me. And then I would like to just talk. I'm just going to read three poems, but each are influenced by something else as a part of my life. There are a few familiar faces I see. I spoke about Mary Oliver being a big influence in my life on Monday, this past Monday, on my birthday. But I am going to read somebody else today, because there's more than one influence, of course. And this is a poem by Leon Lee. And it's titled, Have You Prayed? When the wind turns and asks in my father's voice, have you prayed? I know three things. One, I'm never finished answering to the dead. Two, a man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father's voice, his mother's voice. Or maybe he's seven winds and 10 fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking. Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks in my father's voice, have you prayed? I remember three things. One, a father's love is milk and sugar, two thirds worry, two thirds grief. And what's left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread, the dead, and the living share. And patience, that's to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom, that's my father's face in sleep. When the wind asks, have you prayed, I know it's only me, reminding myself, a flower is one station between Earth's wish and Earth's rapture. And blood was fire, salt, and breath, long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It's just me in the gallons of the wind. Or my father threw me, asking, have you found your refuge yet? Asking, are you happy? Strange, a troubled father, a happy son, the wind with a voice, and me talking to no one. I just love how he never gets to the end of his lists, the one, the two, the one, the two. And that's so true. So there's so much I love about that. But I'm going to read. So for me, outside of, because we're reading our own work, but also maybe speaking a little bit of our influences, for me, the natural world, Lee and Lee came early to me because of his keen observation, his unabashed writing about love and the body and his beloved's body. And then here, not afraid of reaching into the spiritual. I mean, a little like, I guess, Mary Oliver in a lot of ways. I'm influenced by a couple of things. Whenever I travel, I feel very much influenced and feel inspired to write about the space I'm in. Visual art, I taught art history for like 10 years. And visual art finds its way into my work. And the natural world, the natural world, which moving recently from Florida to Vermont, has changed for me. But it's really been lovely because I've been able to have fun discovering all the new things of the north, all the new birds and such. So I thought I would read three poems. One inspired by each of those. And I meant to mark these, but I didn't have any of those little markers in my purse in my bag. Let me just find them real quick. The first poem I'm going to read is Listen, and it's influenced by the natural world. Like 100 gray ears, the river stones are layered in a pile near the shed, where morning doves slow their peck and bobble to listen to a chorus of listening. Small buds on the lilac perk up. A cardinal's torpedoed call comes in slow waves of four, round after round. It's a love call, a call to make him known to himself. The stones listen harder, decipher the song, attempt to offer back its echo, but fail. This is not a poem of coming spring. This is a poem well aware that gray flesh is dead flesh. All the right listening comes at a cost. The first sky is in all skies. The first song is in all songs. The next poem I'm going to read is in sections, and it's from my time that I was able to spend in Greece. And I was there recovering from a devastating tragedy in my life. I was my husband, my previous husband, had committed suicide. But also, I was doing that, but also kind of kindling a new love. So it's titled Raka Milo, which is a honeyed, warm drink that's delicious. And so I named it Raka Milo. One, Seraphos, on the Cycladic Islands, Seraphos Abad. At dawn, you might come to my doorway, framed and thirsty. On your lips, you'll keep a promise of apricots and the melatomy winds. My late husband couldn't forgive the morning, so he took his own life. What would you tell him? Would you speak of the sand in our sheets? We never know what comes next. The sun dusts off the moon, but only have heartedly, then kneels like a lover over the sea. By now, we watch the silhouette of a bird, absorbing the oarsman slowly, drawing him away from the shore. Two, Lea Beach. No galls arrive. The waves on the beach are fluted and clocked. Bathers stop at the edge, take off their clothes. A woman collects the trash. Nightfall will come, and the shore will close without leaving a message. I crouch in the perfect hour, but cannot decide what road to take. My neck is burnt from the day's sun. My shirt is bald and my fist. And I collect shells like a pilgrim, trying to buy my way home. But there is only one path, and there is no home. Three warning signs. The fringe on the malla beads frays after daily doses of short caresses and empty cloudless chants. They were made for use, utilitarian. I use that word in my art history class when I refer to the Minoan clay pots or the Merovingian fibula. I know my hands are utilitarian, too. But now I bring them together to pray. They become purely ornamental. Four, poem beginning with the line after Yuhada Imakai. Pass the window of the room where we make love. Waves follow one another like lines of laundry as the cliffs unfold, spilling like cloth into the bay. And it is the Anis, they say. The snails are after, defining the roads of seraphos, like small change coins curled and climbing, fierce as soldiers, up each stock in numbers so thick they could be plucked like white berries ripe with June. And they, too, would taste of licorice succulent in a time of honey and nettles. Five, in the morning. In the morning, the echo of the previous day lingers like a shadow on the kitchen wall. Someone will bring in the dead, will clean and mend wounds that will never heal, will set a table with cloth and silver for all to eat in memoriam. The silver will not be polished, and the dog will stare in the direction of the sea, where all the answers sink like lures, shiny and brilliant, uselessly swaying like slowly nodding heads. The monastery attackiarchists, you turn in your bed to watch the moon rise, and once more see what a small coin is against the darkness. Mary Oliver. In seraphos, I was sure no sky could be so bright as to trade the sparrow's incessant cherub against the heavens, which bore the bronze cliffs and sheets swollen with the ocean's humidity. Each night I vanished into you, only to find myself in the morning. New body, new dangers. The beaches were full of stones. Would I be only one of so many? At the monastery, the silence might lift like the moon, not with reassurance, but with familiarity, like small birds buoyant in fright, who circle back to the nest, revealing their young. Love hushed us into compliancy. The monastery's marble floor cooled us into shadows, small votive offerings, icons for the day, miracles for night. Techiarchists was an actual monastery that was just this beautiful white, of course, white plaster, you know, blue door building, father. Makari, you know, with Greta. It was just beautiful. And then last poem I'm going to read is an influence for me by a visual art. And so I've recently fallen in love with the moon jar, which is a Korean, and around the 17th, like the 18th century, maybe a little earlier, created in two halves, but beloved for its imperfection. And during its creation, it's firing, even what happens on the wheel. So it's a beloved piece of sculpture. But what's beloved about it is the acceptance of imperfection. And that really spoke to me. And so it's titled, and it looks like a moon. They're pretty round and symmetrical, well, awfully symmetrical in a way. So I just adored the idea of this, to adore something for its imperfection, moon jar. My wedding ring is missing one small diamond. And I like it that way, a reminder of the imperfect in all of us, like that keyhole size of grief that remains crystalline. In Korea, ceramicists for centuries have made moon jars, testimony to the virtue of modesty, asymmetrical warping on the wheel, slumping in the pine heated kiln, impurities when fired, black dots andpox on its surface, like freckles on skin. I have been kept awake so many nights by the moon. Its pull on the pines and night birds and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time. Never a perfect sphere, the milky moon jar joins two clay hemispheres into one. When the light of the moon finds me, I am the color of everything in the winter night. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you all for coming out. And it's a pleasure to read again in Montpellier, which I'm going to consider my second home city. Here's so many. Read so much. It's a good pleasure to read these fine poets. And to read under this question of inspiration, is that better? I can't hear myself. So I'm going to read a poet who I've read. Well, I think once someone decides that they're going to write poetry, they're also saying they are committing themselves to be a lifelong reader of the art and a lifelong student of the art. You kind of, like anything that one takes seriously, you submit yourself to a very long tradition and you study it. And so much of my growth as a writer has been to be open to various poets, even whose subject matter or subjectivity I do not share. So one such poet that was really important to me, particularly his early books, was the poet Seamus Heaney. And I was going to attempt to regal you with memorized poems from when I was young. This was a great party trick to do. Digging between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound when the space sinks into gravelly ground, my father digging. I look down till his straining rump among the flowerbeds bends low, comes up 20 years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug. The shaft against the inside knee was buried, was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops buried the bright edge deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked, loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle of cork sloppily with paper, he straightened up to drink it and fell to right away, nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sides over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peak, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. But I have no spade like them between my finger and my thumb, the squat pin rest. I'll dig with it. One of the gains of kind of submitting yourself to a tradition is you also kind of absorb, not osmotically, but you kind of absorb certain values of the art. And one of the values of the art that was important for me was to put in a word of Seamus Heaney's, one of his friends, is to make the language sing, to get so inside language that you can orchestrate the sounds that are underneath the meaning of the word so that those sounds and the rhythm of those words carry the meaning, what one poet described as getting inside language. And one such poem that does that for me early on that I read of his that I think captures it quite well, because a lot of people think maybe in a almost kind of boring didactic way that poetry, at least my grandparents generation, that what defined poetry was rhyme. But here in this poem, Heaney maps a different kind of purpose for rhyme. And one in which I believe follows this important kind of purpose of poetry, which is we, and maybe even Aristotle, we throw the poem up. We write the poem so that we can see ourselves. And so the writing of the poem becomes a way in which to interrogate, to come to understand the self. Often my students believe that they already know what they want to write when they go to write, sit down to write a poem. And then when they start writing, they discover that the poem wants to take them somewhere else. If they really are listening to the poem, personal helicon for Michael Longley, as a child, they could not keep me from wells and old pumps with buckets and windlesses. I love the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells of waterweed, fungus, and dank moss. One in a brickyard with a rotted bore top. I savored the rich crash when the bucket plummeted down at the end of a rope so deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch, a white-faced hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call with the clean new music in it. And one was scarceome for there, out of ferns and tall fox gloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, to stare, big-eyed, narcissists, and to some spring is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself to set the darkness echoing. Read two poems of my own, Song for Sacred Veins. Earth calls us the not-yet-born, the almost-dead, the Mickey D eaters, Fifth Avenue cheaters. I wrote this poem after we learned that very rich people pay for their children to go to college. So you can hear a little bit of my anger in there. And it's also about the land, the earth. Song for Sacred Veins. Earth calls us the not-yet-born, the almost-dead, the Mickey D eaters, Fifth Avenue cheaters. Those with Google eyes and robotic thighs. Earth calls us the broken and downtrotten, the papas and the mamas, the beautiful rotten scoundrels and scallywags and saints with the haunts. Earth calls us from Shanghai to Chinatown, from Key West to Biscayne to Beijing, by flowering plums, by bird squaw, by eagle's wing, by lapping waves on Champlain, by children's giggle, by every worm's wiggle. Earth calls us through spring thaw, through torch-like ferns, through creek and trickle, through eastern winds, through garden sickle, through cold grounds. Earth calls us and we who eat chanterelles, and we who lift barbells, we rising, and hotels are called by Earth. Our cries and laughter, our nouns and hereafters, our mental films, our private realms are called by Earth. Out of mosque and synagogue, we are called out of temple and steeple, we are called out of pew and up from pillow. We are called singing our prayers and chants. We are called whether on gurney or dentist's chair, whether on highway or town square, we are called sheeps and we are called we are called she says cherish this soil, this life. She says leave your styrofoams, your nuclear domes, your carbon footprints and aimless bullets, your kill zones, your anti-humanist chat rooms, your jail foams, your spirit-hating histories, your second amendment ministry. Earth calls us, she says lower your flags, smash your monuments, she says abandon your apologists of hate, she says abandon your apologists of hate. Earth calls us back to mud and bark and bud. Earth calls us back to one heart, one blood. Earth calls us tree, animal, flower, human, one heart, one blood. Beyond music, I aim to write a poem of courageousness where the unsaid gets, is utter. And I'm excited as much by the possibility of writing something, putting words together that in the history of human consciousness, no one has thought to put together before. And somehow I have a lot of thoughts and somehow I have this belief that it's a way of progress to find the various combinations of words and thoughts that push us forwards as a species. That's because I believe much of our lives are defined by cliches, cliches of how we treat each other, how we think about the other, how we think about people who are different than us. Poetry has that function of pushing us beyond our locked and imprisoned thoughts. This is called thinking of frost. I thought by now my reverence would have waned, matured to the temperate silence of the bookish or revealed how blasé I've grown with age. But the unrestrained joy I feel when the black skiing of geese voyages like a drop-string from God slowly shifting when the decayed apples of an orchard amass beneath its trees like eaves first parting when driving in the road, Vanna whites its crops of corn whose stalks will soon give way to a harvester's blade and turn the land to a man's unruly face makes me believe I'll never soothe the pagan in me nor exhibit the propriety of the polite after a few moons I'm loud this time of year unseemly as a chevron of honking I'm fire in the leaves obstreperous as a New England farmer. I see fear in the eyes of his children who walk home from school as evening falls like an advancing trickle of bats the sky pungent as bounty and chimney smoke I read the scowls below the smiles of my parents at my son's soccer game. Their agitation, the figure of wind yellow leaves make of quaking aspens. Thank you for your attention. Appreciate it. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I am one of my students, I'm Karen McCadden. One of my students today was jealous of the pile of glasses on my desk and said that they hoped that someday they could have three pairs of glasses. And I thought that was really charming, especially because I always forget the ones I need. So we'll see how I do. I'm going to talk a little bit about a poem by Sylvia Plath that has meant a lot to me. There's a lot of poets who have meant a lot to me through the years and a lot of movements in poetry that have been important to me. But this one poem is one that I have gone back to again and again and again so that when I read it, I recognize phrasing in it that it feels so familiar that I don't know if maybe I've stolen it by accident somewhere. It just feels like this got this musculature in it that is important to me. It's called Weathering Heights by Sylvia Plath. I'll tell you the way that she takes familiar materials, it's about being in the place I believe where Weathering Heights is written, the familiar materials of a story and turns them into her own. The way she feels the freedom to compare wildly across images and moments, and something can remind her of something that's completely unexpected. Major talked about cliche. I don't think there's a cliche moment in anything Sylvia Plath has ever written. And the authority she claims, even as her way of seeing seems wild and uncertain and unsteady, she, her authority is unshakable. I really admire that. And the way she gives knowledge and agency to inanimate creatures and objects feels beautiful and strange to me and God-like and prayer-like. It feels important to me as well. The permission she gives herself to decide to just jump cut into something else that turns, that she maneuvers in her poems and her tenderness at all times for what's difficult. So I'm gonna read this poem by Sylvia Plath and then read a few. I have plenty of poems that have nothing to do with anything Sylvia Plath has ever done, but I did find a few that feel like maybe the things I have admired forever in this poem are trying to find their way out a little bit. Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath. The horizons ring me like faggots, tilted and disparate and always unstable. Touched by a match, they might warm me and their fine lines singe the air to orange before the distances they pin evaporate, waiting the pale sky with a solider color. But they only dissolve and dissolve like a series of promises as I step forward. There is no life higher than the grass tops or the hearts of sheep and the wind pours by like destiny bending everything in one direction. I can feel it trying to funnel my heat away. If I pay the roots of the heather too close attention, they will invite me to whiten my bones among them. The sheep know where they are, browsing in their dirty wool clouds gray as the weather. The black dots, slots of their pupils take me in. It is like being mailed into space, a thin, silly message. They stand about in grandmotherly disguise, tall wig curls and yellow teeth and hard marbly boughs. I come to wheel ruts and water, limpid as the solitudes that flee through my fingers. Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass. Lentil and sill have unhinged themselves. Of people and the air only remembers a few odd syllables. It rehearses them moaningly, black stone, black stone. The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals. The grass is beating its head distractedly. It is too delicate for a life in such company. Darkness terrifies it. Now in valleys narrow and black as purses, the house lights gleam like small change. This poem is my poem, it's called My Broken Family. My broken family was a cooper in old times, knowing units of measure better than most. My broken family learned the trade of keeping things in, like shipwrights learn how to keep water out. A barrel floating, a bottle with a ship in it and a message in a bottle were all the same to my broken family. To calm my broken family, I leave scraps in the yard in an old bowl under the boxelder. My broken family doesn't like to beg, but it likes the edge in my voice when I walk my dog after dark, so tired from everything, I just want to sleep. My broken family doesn't like it when I forget. The sand that gathers after rain at the end of my driveway is like my broken family's calling card, saying things like remember and like once. My broken family is the railroad car ferry on the bottom of Lake Champlain. It's captain delusional from gout and morpheme, dive to see my broken family. Keep my broken family out of it, I say to people who ask, but it can't leave me alone. Once I gave my broken family a mason jar with holes in the lid for air. Once I put it in a shoebox with a nest, I fed it what I thought it needed. I think for any poet who writes in Vermont, the materials of this state are beautiful and strange. The places, the people, the animals that live here, the sounds they make in the night, there's so much beauty and there's so much difficulty. We all know there's so much difficulty in our state with poverty and with poverty, a lot of difficulty there. Spent a lot of time up in the north in Franklin County when I met my husband and this poem is called at Franklin County Airport. No air traffic control, the radio buzzes, call signs. You tie down your plane and come sit at the table where I write. I learn about near misses from you. Even when I tell you I have to work, you tell me the next story or nod across the table saying, Frank, it's true, right? You remember. You bite into your sandwiches like heroes. I think of the swans up the road, scrabbling inside their wrought iron fence as if this town were the center of anything, as if a case could be made for anything, by anything here for swans, for a town hall replica for them to shade inside, swans at the center of this place where people fall off the edge of the earth, walk away from their homes and never come back. Some of us up north have no idea where we come from, no idea what might come. Once here we risk losing ourselves, losing children in the school with no windows. At dusk here in the airport, I watch the sun go down and wonder what it's like underneath the flat earth, spreading away from me. The roots of all of us dangle in the dark, shrink back from the sun while we sleep. Our bad dreams pulled back inside the darkness, our children running amok to find their edges. I wonder what the swans have to do with anything, why I always think about them fenced inside the green, inside the rotary, cars driving circles around them, their beaks sifting water and mud, everything they do making circles, their beaks hammering the earth soft, their feet packing it down. Night comes and I watch the trees fade. I remember the time you pointed out the satellite, your arm a pointer I couldn't follow. Yes, I said, I see it, though I didn't. And now, waiting for you to finish work, the snow comes down like a single bed sheet over the north. I hold the swans out like a question I can't answer. I don't know what they mean any more than I know how to lift one of these small planes off the ground, but I know the growl of their engines, that standing behind one, its prop wash will knock me over. Years ago, a woman ran out to her husband's plane to ask him for something, and the propeller, still running, invisible as insects' wings, cut her down as fast as we swat flies. Some God must have felt like we feel then, taking aim. I wait for you to lock all the doors and check the tie-downs out past where she died, out past where you turned the door into a wall no one could ever walk out of again. You check and check every undone thing. The chair I love best faces the old door's frame just under the sheet rock, proof of nothing of where we go. One, two short poems and I'll be done. I wrote this poem, I was thinking about the strange materials that we can import into a poem and how sometimes the tension of something you choose to throw into a poem can make something happen, like you make yourself choose a word or you make yourself choose a kind of language. I decided to use the language of playing marbles to talk about feeling depressed, which makes no sense, but it's a fun way to begin a poem and see how that, see what happens. It's called Awake. This morning I bramble toward waking, alarm, alarm, alarm, snarling my dreams like little girls around a pile of marbles arguing quitsies, no quitsies. This morning I don't know. This morning I am lagging with my dead, reminding them they have already gone first. I knuckle down on the day, make strides and comebacks. I ride a train and write and keep crossing out the word rather. I never know what I want until afternoon and sometimes trim the walkway instead of thinking. I pull the curtain on who I am, keep shame from my sleeping like a terrarium of whistles. Somewhere, someone finds me phenomenal. I stand so tall and keep the future as a pet. We swim the headwaters like children who don't know the rules. I forget who is playing for fair and who for keeps. I actually forgot that I took most of the things about marbles out of that poem after I put them in. I was like, oh, they're not here anymore. I forgot I took them back up. Here's my last poem. It's called Late Winter. In a handful of seasons, water and cold and dirt get under the paint and it falls from our houses like old bark. The river sends smaller and smaller flows of ice downstream, crocus making their way up. Rocks are inside my shoes by the time I'm home. Five winters now, I run my hands under your shirts, start at the top to split the buttons from their catches and end the cold. My hands make a set of wings under the placket. Moth or hawk, I don't know which I am. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Liz Powell and a major source of my inspiration are the people here that I write with in community and that share so much of their lives with me through their poetry and their friendship. And I think it's really important to have that kind of community in order to write. On what I was realizing in terms of what inspires me, I noticed that there are a lot of very short prose poems that inspired me at one point and some very long narrative lyric pieces that are inspiring me now. What I thought I'd read first is a poem by Robert Lowell called Epilogue just from my office store because it's my arse boy to cut is what I really believe about poetry. Epilogue, those blessed structures plot in rhyme. Why are they no help to me now? I want to make something imagined, not recalled. I hear the noise of my own voice. The painter's vision is not a lens. It trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot. Lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All's misaligned. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name. I think also what's very inspirational to me is memory and the reverie and daydreaming that I've engaged in my whole life and that starts out in a lot of ways in my childhood. That sometimes I feel like Gaston Bachelard once said childhood can flare up in us again and an excess of it is the germ of a poem. And I had a lot of daydreaming as a child. I mean, I probably would have been diagnosed with epilepsy, you know, if I was a kid now, but they were always doing this to me. And I really feel like that is a lot of my inspiration, you know, in staring out the window of a car as a kid. And even as an adult, like, you know, my passengers will be like, hey, you know, because I'll be like, oh, that's a really nice tree or a nice house. And so I think that that's part of it. And I'll make my son is 16 and always on the iPhone. And I'm like, okay, we have to put that away and be bored and stare out the window. Because I think that that's what helps us to understand our own humanity and to sort of, it sounds kind of woo-woo, but to connect with this cosmic reverie, this sort of solitude that speaks to us. And if we can listen, we can speak back. And Gaston Bachelard was a literary philosopher that has meant a lot to me. One of the books he wrote, The Poetics of Space, is maybe the most important book I ever read. And there's a quote from him that I think is really important to what I believe about writing it and poetry. He says, the great function of poetry is to give back to us the situation of our dreams. I love that. Also, Rilke has been really influential to me. I can't tell you how many times I always tell my students, we must live the questions. And living the questions is not always fun because it's like living in the void. It's living in the darkness sometimes. But just to remember to live in them and to know this will pass. There's a poem that Galway Canell wrote in his selected poems. I wish I had remembered to bring it. Where it's a poem called Wait. He's like, wait for now, everything will change. And that was an early influential poem for me. It was in the book he won the Pulitzer Prize for. And I had gotten it from my grandmother for my 17th birthday. And I still have all my grandparents' letters. I keep them in that book. And it connects me not only to them and to that time where I was inspired by a poem so much that it made me want to be a poet. So Galway Canell certainly was one of those. Today I was talking to my students at Northern Vermont University telling them I was coming here to talk about inspiration. And they're like, well, why don't you talk about what you're always talking to us about? Like, what's your literary lineage? And I was like, who are you guys? Like, you know, and they're like, we're getting ready to graduate. So I thought, okay, well, what's my literary lineage? And of course, I always had to come back to Charles Simick because he was my professor. And so I thought I'd read one of his pieces called Primer. This kid got so dirty playing in the ashes when they called him home. When they yelled his name over the ashes, it was a lump of ashes that answered. Little lump of ashes, they said. Here's another lump of ashes for dinner. To make you sleepy and to make you grow. So I'll read to you a couple of poems influenced by him if I can find them. I don't like paper. Okay, hi. Okay, so the new book I'm working on is a book about love in the 21st century and online dating is a part of it. And Alain Bado is a French philosopher, a current French philosopher. He has a book called In Praise of Love that's been really influential on me and I'll read a quote from him. It sort of sets up my poem that was influenced by Simick. And that's right. Paris is plastered with posters for the Matique internet dating site, which is like match.com, whose ads I find really disturbing. Get love without chance. And then another that says be in love without falling in love. I believe this hype reflects a safety first concept of love. The Matique approach reminds me of the propaganda of the American army when promoting the idea of smart bombs and zero dead wars. It's all rather the same scenario. Nothing random, no chance encounters, backed as it is with all the resources of a wide scale advertising campaign. I see it as the first threat to love. I've served a series of online dating poems. I'll read you a couple of them. It's called edipticmatch.com. My love lives in a tiny box made of pixels and engineering. When I write him, he writes me back. And when he writes me back, I write him. Though we exist, me, him, here, there, one day our band of consciousness will transmigrate. When science puts chips in brains, stripping every mystery intimate as sweat. For now, imaginations a gangling vine clings to life. He's been so busy writing a narrative where he has no wife, she has vanished in no time. So much first person construct in banter. He has a Vixen school teacher held down on his mind's feather bed. And when he writes me, he makes me. And when I make him, I write him. We are invented by the wanting and not having of others. Soon someone else will pick him from his little box and begin again waiting for him in the rain outside a coffee shop where donuts harden like maybe he can't and the red vinyl stool swirls empty as if trying to conjure something so close. But so close is almost and almost is still a climax too far for if is always further than you think. She tries to pick him out of a crowd ever hopeful though night comes on like an emergency. We live two places at once, virtual and real. My love lives in a little box. Someone is making him into something else now. Chemistry.com, so that's another one. I had a friend when I first got divorced, he's like, let's fill out this chemistry.com. And we got to the end of it and it said, are you divorced? And I'm like, no, I'm only separated. And I said, try again later. And we just spent two hours chemistry.com, he's a match. I know you really wanted to meet me but I had this sneaky feeling you are an Uber Aryan chiropractor with homoerotic tendencies that maybe I should be up with my academic Asperger's husband and wear Moomoo's on Saturday night. You live in this little box spread across the screen of pixelated desires, but I met you before your snowboard race. The style gel in your crew cut looked like ice and you disappointed my hair did not match my photograph. Implying I lied as we walked Stowe's Main Street past New Jersey tourists buying scented candles and Gnostic punk rock townies eating baguettes. My nose running in the cold until we came to the cemetery and after you maligned your lying ex-wife, lamented your pretty old girlfriend and waxed overly cute over a pair of little green baby shoes that made you realize you were now too old for children. And I parsed the poetic significance of shoes, how used and alone they symbolized death. Your text messages beeped us all the way to my car, German but not clean. Where you wished me good luck, shook my ungloved hand then thought better and hugged me as if you were Princess Diana and I a grateful patient in the ward. So another big influence for me has been Frank O'Hara and from the New York school poets and he always said you had to go on your nerve, right? And that, you know, maybe a love poem is like talking into the telephone and to have that direct contact with the you. And so I'm going to write, I mean, read a new poem that I wrote that was inspired by, I'm so sorry, I'm all like disheveled, that was inspired by him. So it's called What Remains of a Burning Frame? Everybody knows what Moses is at, like terrible Mexican restaurant. There's one in Williston, it's kind of like Taco Bell. Okay. I love you most in the morning like a house worships the idea of fire, a relenting that comes from undoing. I walked into Welcome to Moe's restaurant on the mall strip and pushed a chip in my mouth not for pleasure or communion but for angst and business and glanced the burning and bitumen of CNN on five TVs, Western Civ on Fire. Maybe the men of Western Civ are bad men but lately I understand we are all bad men. The spire of Notre Dame turns into itself like a meta advertisement for a nostalgic whiskey. I love you most in the morning like a bed loves the silences of brewing coffee turned on by an iPad. The future is a burning spire. There is nothing you can do to predict it. The future is vast interstellar space with moon junk and all I can do is sit in this plastic chair and watch. We all know history is a fire that wants to eat us blackened like Americanized carnitas. I imagine my dead parents and grandparents crying. It feels like an ending to have a beginning and watch the burning of 800 years made on the backs of some so that on all our backs we carry a great and terrible beauty. Notre Dame, the loyal portal to so much. By the soda machine, I spray hand sanitizer and the deafening dim of welcome to Moe's once again that the cashier sings like a hallelujah hymn every time the door opens, another one closes. I believe in truth and beauty, so kick me already. I've seen it all on TV on the elliptical. Once I watch Saddam Hussein be led to his execution thou shall not murder our days. The opposite of achievement is ruined. My face falls with the weight of all I've mortgaged. Someone orders a home record junior no beans. What will remain of the frame? Once my father took a picture of me in front of these columns, my life was starting. I was 22, which dreams came true. I love you most in the morning, far away from here where all collapses into a fire wedding. Thanks. Anna Whitney, and that was awesome. And I'm honored to be the closer tonight with these great poets. And I wanna start by reading from a new poet who I discovered, and I just love discovering new poets and it's not that I don't have the influences like definitely Sylvia Plath and Rilke and Live the Questions, but I review books and so I literally get new books in the mail every single day and sometimes one just comes along that really speaks to me. So this book came and it's called Ridiculous Light and it's a debut book by Valencia Robin and she's also a visual artist and she did the cover of her own book which I thought was really neat. And I guess I'd describe it as a poetics of joy not that she doesn't write about darkness as well, but I'm gonna read the first poem. It's called Cathedral. Cathedral, not that I needed reminding but even the trees, the trees, like giant awestruck afros grown in the laboratory of a mad brother, the nerdy nerudian of my dreams who somehow isolated the colors of all the saddest love songs in the world, baby, baby red and please, please, please yellow. Yes, even the browns are talking to me, the greens blue in this early autumn light that makes everything shout and where's my hopeless agnostic when I need her for seer of endless wars and sorrows? Is that her running toward that old abandoned church, cathedral of shadow and grass, the leaves above trembling like tambourines, two happy squirrels dancing down the aisle? So there's a lot, if you look through this book, it's an ARC so I feel like I can just mark it up and doggere every page but I love discovering that and for me I actually looked up the etymology of inspiration and it goes way back to 1300s and it's kind of biblical, Genesis breathing divine life into cloud of clay but the meaning of inspiration like an inhalation was actually a later meaning and I guess for me out being in the natural world and breathing and walking in it which is I think something that a lot of poets have shared. Also the weather and being in the garden and writing about Vermont weather is sort of an endless task. So I'm gonna read, the poems that I'm gonna read of my own are pretty much all in progress so that feels sort of vulnerable and risky but thanks for being a compassionate audience. This one is, it's actually a villanelle which I found a container in terms of writing about grief. My mother is Alzheimer's so using a form to hold the grief was really helpful. It's called Gray Matters. June pummeled us, weeks of rain, drowned the gardens in soupy mud. Sometimes my mother doesn't know my name. She watches Barcelona win the game, the players strike in blue and red, her picture window filling up with rain. I cut her lilacs in a vase, arranged the blooms into a scented cloud she breathes in oblivious to the name. The sky exhales her sorrow and my shame. I visit only when the timing's good, consumed with children, errands in the rain, dreading her face behind the veil, so strange. What's done is done, too late for why or should. No medicine to excise or reclaim the sticky neurons tangled in her brain. The streams are rising, threatening to flood. Her eyes are steady as soaking rain. They know me, though she doesn't know my name. So I have two daughters who are almost teenagers, almost both teenagers, they're 11 and 13. And for a very long time in their infancy, what I called the baby cave, I wrote a lot about them. So I guess they were a source of inspiration. And I wrote a parenting column every couple of weeks for many years until the point where the oldest one said, learn to read and saw herself in the newspaper. And she said, mommy, I'm not a feral cat. And then she forbid me from writing about her. So I've had this kind of like gag maternal gag order, which I found really difficult, but, and I do have a memoir yet unpublished in which they're in, but I've sort of found my way around it and I've been working on a long poem about them. And now they're almost, they think that they're gonna be famous if I write about them. And I hate to try to say, though, that's not how poetry works, but. I thought I'd read part, it's a long poem in sections. And I thought I'd read a few sections from this. And in terms of inspiration, I guess I found a writing community really invaluable for being able to, I guess, dive in and have the courage to try something new or. So I go to a writing group every couple of weeks and I started writing this in there. So I guess without that compassionate group, I might have not had the courage to try this. And I'm really grateful for that because writing can be, yeah, very isolating. I struggle with depression and that can really be like a form of silence. So I'm grateful for the other writers who inspire me, not just the published ones. So this is called Haunted Hey Ride. And I don't know if you have anything like this up in Northern Vermont, but where I live down in Brattleboro, we have a very famous place where people come, like hundreds and hundreds of people come in October for this ritual. So I'm not gonna even tell you about it. You might get a sense of it from the poem. Haunted Hey Ride, one, corn maze. The girls roam in pom-pom hats, play hide and seek at the edge of the corn maze, skeletal stalks 10 feet high, pitch black fun traps set tonight when the veil is thin and the moon waxing, pumpkins stacked on a crooked throne, fried dough, candied apples, hot cider, a massive bonfire laid of scrap and ash, while out in the woods, red lights beckon, illuminated Hellcastle waiting for our journey. The girls' thrall in anticipation spin and cringe as the chainsaw guy in the teddy bear mask strides through the crowd, finger on the trigger, revving his weapon, assault of noise. We wanted this, we paid for this. Even the bad guy stalking with a dead white face, his scarred doll mouth stitched in pain. Blue jeans and a gleaming axe, he walks among us, stirring up screams. Still, there's power in numbers. The girls' link arms curse boldly and laugh at the costumed killers, scrape their teeth on the apple's dyed shell, that sticky red brighter than any blood. Two, made in heat. Not fixed yet, the puppy hurls herself into a throng of dogs, face fights for hours blissful on her back, gnawing on the schnauzer, the pit bull, the spaniel, rough housing and a trance of joy, till she drops panting in the grass, spent. The trainer says, watch for the signs. She'll get peckish, needy, hungry for love. Her vulva will swell in its small tuft of fur. Swab her with a tissue. If you're not careful, you might miss the blood. Three, eighth grade science class. You ace the quiz on predator-prey relationships, life at the top of the food chain, or is it a web? Stealth versus speed, brute strength versus smarts, teeth and claws versus camouflage. And look, here's your lab partner in a Nike hoodie, cool kid, shaved undercut, clear braces. He'd never glance your way in the cafeteria, but now you share this data table, track the deer population changing over time, graph the death factors in colored pencil, drought, famine, wolves, bear. It's busy work too easy. You fill in the blanks with your five senses elsewhere, and he notices the dark honey of your hair drip, broom straight down your sweater. As the number of predators increases, the prey population blank. I had to get on and sneak into my daughter's homework in order to do research for that. All right, a couple more sections. Tricked out, horror movies, hunger games, vampire fangs for Halloween, matte white face paint, lipstick bleed, black velvet nails, sweet 13, a jet of satin cape shadows her jawline, taking selfies in the faux mortuary, posing in the open coffin, giddy with macabre cheer, polyester cobwebs, splayed from the rafters, phone lights torching the darkness, dissolving the trappings of fear. The predators are out, but all her friends are here. This year, C wants to wear a fear mask this year. Michael Myers is cool. She's never seen the film, but understands the ritual of agency. If you're the murderer, you can't be his prey. I draw the line. My girl, do you remember when you were a penguin, a fairy, a fawn in a brown felt homemade vest, pipe cleaner antlers hot glued to your headband, cantering in the dusk parade? No, she can't remember. The ghosts of all hollows past are gone. I'm the only one conjuring them up to night, scrolling through 10,000 photos to find the animals we once were while she says, move on, move on. So a few more, I'm gonna read one last. Moontime. We waited for hours by the bonfire and when it came, the wagon creaked deliciously. We sat down on hay bales and lurched through darkness, fields of dry stalks, a cemetery of leering jack-o'-lanterns. A sack body hung from the gallows in the corn. Skull men on horseback thundered past. Gunshots, chainsaws, cackling, a child suspended in a cage, dirty trailer with help scrawled in blood on the cracked window, red lit church of dead brides, electric chairs sparking, blaring heavy metal. Remember, we wanted this, we paid for this. Killer clowns and monster masks, demons leaping on the back of the wagon. The girls kick at them, madly giggling. Sea throws a punch, fuck off, loser. Wild girl laughter, a spell of protection. Now they know they can defend themselves. They're practicing, practicing. And I'm bleeding, ill-prepared for the long night, capable of chaperone clean out of pads, soaking through my jeans into the dry hate beneath us that bail absorbing the evidence without a trace. Thank you. Look for some questions if you have questions. Or not. Or not. Or recipes. Or some recipes. Or some recipes. Or suggestions for summer travel. Or poets to read for inspiration. If you write consistently, or if amused comes and goes, what is that word for process? I write consistently for and improve the meets. And I like to have a deadline. I like to try to, I believe that it's sitting down at the laptop where I write with pencil on paper still first. And that's why I have to start it. And I don't wait for like an inspiration. I know this is about inspiration. But I mean, of course, I tap into things that would be inspired to me, which I've revealed if I've been traveling or the natural world. But I just sit down and make it. I work at it. I'm more of a binge writer. And that is not really nothing to be proud of. But I've struggled to create a practice like that, where it's daily the way I've managed to figure out how to do that with exercise. Or writing for me is more of a roller coaster. And I have a lot of good luck with actually going away, like leaving my life with all of its just for responsibilities and multitasking. It's like my poetry brain needs some space for that. So I try to carve that out. And also the container of their writing group, which I wish I got there every week, but every couple of weeks, that really does, I guess, provide a practice space that is semi-regular. Yeah, also I find that that idea of living the questions helpful in my journal writing, because I'm always curious what's going on in my life. And if I ask myself, what do I want to, what are my life goals for the week? Or what are the things in my life I'm not understanding? Sometimes that motivates me to then write a poem because the poem will many times, if not all times, know the answer to things that I don't know that I know. So that motivates me. And I've sort of had this idea, like, how do you be motivated when you're not in pain to write? And I was asking, actually, I asked Alison Pryne, a really good poet, and she said, well, just when you're not in pain, use your joy to look back on things that were painful and see them from a joyful perspective. I was like, oh, that's great. Yeah, but that was really good. And I can be, I'm sort of bingey in that, like all of a sudden write five poems, but I try to be prepared every week for a writer's group, which I find totally helpful for the deadline aspect and sort of just the workman-like attitude toward it. I just want to add one thing onto that, too, sorry. One thing I always do is that if I have a poem in my mind, I hold it there for a long time before I write it and I think about it, like when I'm bored, I turn it around in my mind, I'm thinking about this and I'll be living and then I know the poem is in my head and then something will happen and I'll collect it and I'll be like, oh, I'm gonna add that to the poem and add that. Like right now I'm thinking about a poem about waste, the accumulation of waste that a human creates over the course of their life. It's nothing I've ever thought about writing. I think about it constantly, so at some point I'll sit down and do this mathematics about how many of everything I've probably used in my life and make it comparative. So I try to think of a poem, like a little toy in my brain for a while and then I write it down. Do you have a question? I wonder how much each of you revised. I remember seeing Ellen, Brian, Voight a couple of years ago at Woodstock and one of the things that really struck me was she said the major process of creation and her poetry occurred during the revisions. That's true. For some of us. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I stayed with Ellen and she told me nothing's finished until you're dead, which was very kind of an ominous thing to think about. I mean, I get a lot of, I think of the initial thrill of composition when you first write a first draft. And I do love that. But even if I write a first draft in its long hand, like on a scrap of paper in a notebook, then the next stage is for me then to put it into a computer and then revisions happen in that process. And then through the process of reading out loud, even to myself, but especially to others, other writers, then I can hear things and then revisions happen. And then sometimes time is the best editor. So putting something away for a while and then opening it up again and then a poem may take a whole new shape. So I guess, yes, lots and lots of profession. Somebody who I've recently become acquainted with more after taking a workshop with C.A. Conrad, I find C.A. Conrad so inspirational in this idea of using rituals to write poetry. And I think it's helpful for me to also think about revision as a ritual because it's a revisioning and the idea of a vision quest. You're on a vision quest, but you have to revision it. That's kind of an interesting idea to me in how maybe using some sort of ritual around revisioning something. I often try to surprise myself with a draft. I've written it and I put it in my pocket and I take it out, like, what's this? And then I'm like, do you pretend that I didn't write it? I can gain sometimes a little perspective. It sounds, but it's actually true. In the car, take it out, look at it now. Or look at it at a time when I'm not, like, grocery shopping, when the context is wrong. I can see it differently. A fairly new writing group here in Monterey. That is fantastic. And I wondered how do you work with your, within your, are you all in the same group? And do you work, how do you work with your group? Well, I haven't lived too far away. Yeah, I live in Brout. I'm on Longway Way. But why don't you talk about your group first and then I can talk about mine. So when I first moved to Vermont, everywhere I've lived, I've had a group of other poets that I sat down with and shared. And that was even before graduate school where those relationships are formalized. But for me, how it's worked is a level of, and actually that group that started in Burlington has morphed over the past 16 years. And four of us here are part of a larger group that meets. But one of the things that happens is these, they know my work even without my name being on the page. They can probably spot it because there's certain themes I keep hovering around or a certain approach to the poem, which has its benefits because they can call me out on me dialing it in. So that's the idea. And that's good because one of the questions that, either family or friends, eventually when they find out you are a writer, someone's gonna ask you, what are your poems, what do you write about? What are your poems about? And for me, that's always a difficult question because it's like asking, what is my life is about? It morphs and changes from day to day. And if I see myself kind of writing around the same subjects, I wanna make it slightly fresh. I just finished a nine-stand-up poem that every, it was good to just do nine lines. I don't know how many, I guess, over nine weeks. They saw this nine-line poem that just kind of built in a creed. And what was great about that is they were journeying and watching almost like a building being built in your neighborhood. And they were there to kind of comment like, inspector zone. The building inspector zone. The building inspector zone. It was like when you're a kid waiting for the next episode of MASH. Yeah. I was always looking forward to that. I have an interesting, so moving up from Florida, I'm lucky to be a part of a great group here. And in Florida, I have as part of a group where a friend of mine, she and I, found it ourselves pregnant in grad school. And we became best friends for that reason, because we're like, what the heck are we doing? And then we started meeting and we had a third friend that came into our group. And we would meet at seven, I think seven o'clock. I think it was seven o'clock, eight o'clock on Sunday mornings, every Sunday. And we all worked, I taught high school. She taught me, one of my friends taught middle school. We were all working through the week, long hours. And they had each three children. I had my own son. And that was the only time we could meet. And we would not show up without a poem. We would just like, we would not do that. We was like, so Saturday night, you know what, at 11 o'clock at night, whatever comes out was coming out. But it was like, we showed up with a poem. And so we would have breakfast first and get all the talking out, because we'd all want to catch up and chat and talk. And then we'd sit and workshop our poems. And that was every Sunday and 7 a.m. It was just huge that any major accountable to your life. Major accountable to my writing life as a writer, because I just feel like I had to keep. I've never gone away to write, ever. And so I thought I had to do it as part of my daily life. You know, I had to do that. Another thing we do that, the mechanics of the group, one of the things is learning how to talk about each other's poems, like learning how to say something, learning what to look for, what to articulate, what's about you, what's about the person's work. We often use a time restriction on comments. So we have little rituals like, if it's my poem, the person to my left will read it. It's just a ritual. Like whoever's the left will read the poem and then we'll set the timer for seven minutes. And after the poem is finished and we talk for seven minutes about the poem and then break the rule and talk for a little longer. It's happening, right? But, and then when it keeps the thing moving, it keeps us from wallowing. And if you know you have to say something and you have to say something quickly, it can really help you have a good thought sometimes. So the group I'm in is very different. And I actually belong for a group that was more of a workshoppy group and other poets. So I don't have that right now. But the group I'm in is a generative group. And if you told me, like when I was in grad school that I was gonna do this, I would have said, no way, I write alone. I do not wanna write with others. But I almost had to kind of recover from my academic grad school experience because I became so overly critical, both of my own stuff and others. So this, a friend of mine created this formula or whatever where we get together at seven to 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night. And I can never been able to make it every week, but some people do. And we socialize and drink wine usually until about 7.30. There's a prompt, which might be, I often just read a poem and then like talk about, just like, well, what about this line or something? But sometimes people bring a tarot card. It could be very random. We try to rotate and then we write for an hour. And it's, a couple of the people are writing poems. Some people are working on novels or someone's, a couple of people are songwriters and they will literally sing their lyrics with their, it's amazing. So after an hour, then we read. So you're reading new work and the rule, and then we have a very brief time when we can comment because we don't wanna go over because we have too late and everything. So there is a timer going and I think it is for about seven minutes or maybe a little less, but you can only give a comment about what's working. So that's actually kind of the opposite of like a MFA workshop because it's brand new draft. So the idea is that you respond to, you can literally, if you listen to anybody, you can find an image or a section or a line that resonates with you. So you offer the comment about what you like. And it also, when you leave, you just feel great. I mean, because you've heard on this new thing like the things that are positive and it makes you wanna keep going and work on it. So that's been really, I mean at different times when I've been working on a longer piece that I need to be editing intensively then this method doesn't work as well, but for generating and I think it's a great way to set up a group. Yeah, it just occurred to me, you're saying that the more I do this, the more I realize these groups are a way for people to take care of each other, particularly with the fragile object that is the poem. Granted, sometimes that ego, one can be a little kind of attached to that new thing, but I think when we're invested in each other's work as much as we're invested in ourselves, there's a really wonderful kind of energy that I feel like resonates out from that gathering. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, we do, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.