 My name is Rachel Senesha and I'm the Program and Development Coordinator here at the libraries and also the organizer of Holm City and I just saw on Facebook yesterday that Holms.org just recognized Holm City again. They did a few years ago and they recognize us again in our 10th year. That's what happens because we have a lot of great sponsors, National Life Group Foundation, Vermont Communities Council, under my own co-op, college of fine arts, and the Poetry Society of Vermont. And the President of the Society, George Lomenecker, is here with us and he's a great supporter. He's a great supporter as a sponsor. He is one of the volunteers that makes Holm City happen. Without him, we'd be stuck. So I'm really glad that George is part of Holm City. Tonight's program on Earth Day is a celebration of the Poetry of Mary Oliver. And we have Dee Dee Jackson, who's a poet, a published poet, and also teaches creative writing at UPM. She'll be reading Mary's poems. And Chris Krugman, who is a poet and also musician and also the manager of WGDR Community Radio at Goddard College. So we have a really nice harry tonight of music and poetry. And I also need to say it's Dee Dee's birthday today. It's your birthday with us. So please help you all home, Dee Dee and Chris. Thanks for bringing us out. And thank you all for coming out. What a great, you know, sea of faces. And yes, I was born, I was saying earlier, on the very first birthday ever. And so I was wondering if we all knows that year. It's about my revealing age. But yeah, 1970. And I always tell my students, I always thought that I might do something like be an environmental scientist or some kind. But I write poems about a nature and a natural world. And so that is why Mary Oliver's work speaks to me also so much. So tonight, what I'm going to do, I'll let you know. I'm going to read my poems as well. And I'm not going to talk a whole bunch. I don't really want to over-explain anything. And I'll let you know when many of you are probably Mary Oliver fans. And we'll probably recognize her work when I read it. But I'll kind of clue that in. But yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and get started. And I'll occasionally maybe, I thought it'd be nice to just share with you where and when I have some influence by her. Like where I have some similarities in my own work and what she did for me as a young poet when I was discovering her in my 20s. But I'm going to go ahead and just start off right off the bat with a poem that I think is a really perfect poem for today. And it's titled North Country by Mary Oliver. In the North Country now it is spring. And there is a certain celebration. The brush has come home. He is shy and lights the evening best. And also the hour just before morning. In that blue and greeny light he climbs to his branch or smoothly sails there. It is okay to know only one song if it is this one. Hear it rise and fall. The very elements of your soul shiver nicely. What would spring be without it? See frogs. But don't worry. He arrives year after year. Huffle and obedient and gorgeous. You listen and you know you could live a better life than you do. Be softer, kinder. And maybe this year you won't be able to do it. Here have his voice rises and falls. There is no way to be sufficiently grateful for the gifts we are given. No way to see the Lord's name often enough. Though we do try and especially now. As the dappled breast breathes in the pines and heavens. Windows in the North Country now spring has come are open wide. Winter's sleep moved behind us. The flower has came a month and she hoped for some help. Another said I put myself through here. All this growth and his own home to evolve. Things we never wish for come to be. Things we miss more than anything else. The time will find its fruit. Heart will find its fruit. We'll just shut our free time line. We'll start to learn the true sign. That we've had a thing for. From year after year no matter what changed our mind. And this morning the sun makes us the girls that you've got. I need it loving you. I need it leak. Things we never wish for. The time will find its fruit. Heart will find its fruit. And many are looking for anything else. The time will find its fruit. Heart will find its fruit. Are very important to my work like hers. The next three poems will take you from spring to fall. Back to spring again. On the stone patio searches for the spring sun. As the magnolia buds swell. Firm line and silver slick. A pair of rabbits hunt clover. Frightened, jet across the lawn. Tails flashing like two whips of meringue. There are no bells to peal for this day. It passes, nods. Its small sorrows receding toward the moment at dusk when the robins return. On days like this, death is so far. A barely audible hum. A slight glint of thaw. The earth a censor for mist and fog. That was so influential to me was this poem, Egress by Mary. And I wanted to mention this one moment when I was my 20s and she writes about walking down to this pond and seeing these reeds and suddenly the reeds unfold into birds and the birds trust the air and take flight. And it was that moment that I wanted to reveal the world like she does. I wanted to reveal the world in this metaphor and explain it like that. And so these poems are my best attempt. Fall, do you know what I was? How I lived? Louise Lick. It is a goldfinch. One of the two small girls, both daughters of a friend, sees hit the window and fall into the fern. No one hears the small thump, but she, the youngest, sees the flash of gold against the mica sky as the limp feathered envelope crumples into the green. How many times in a life will we witness the very moment of death? She wants a box and a small towel, some kind of comfort for this soft body that barely fits in her palm, its head running side to side, the neck broke, eyes still wet and black as seed. Her sister, now at her side, wears a dress too thin for the season, white as the liquor only weeks away. She wants me to help, wants a miracle. Whatever I say now, I know ways more than the late falls, the layered sky, the jeweled leaves of a maple and elk. I know too, it is the darkest days I've learned to praise, the calendar packages up time, the days shrink and fold away until the new season. We clothe, burn, then bury our dead. Know this, they do not. So we cover the bird, story its flight, imagine his beak singing, they pick the song and sing it over and over again. Listen. Like a hundred gray ears, the river stones are layered in a pile near the shed, where mourning does 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 form, round after round. It's a love call, a call to make himself known to himself. The stones listen harder, decipher the song, attempt to offer back its echo, but fail. This is not a poem of spring. This is a poem well aware that grain flesh is dead flesh. All of the right listening comes at a cost. The first sky is in all skies. The first song is in all songs. The first of all, the sky, the afternoon and dawn. Just before the end of the day, it's just a single bubble. Now it's passing by a crystal candlelight. A street shine, your sun, your time, your days, your hopes are real. Now it's changing your solution. Let's make your shoes shine, your shoes shine too. Coast ties and oceans, long tears and light too. Shelters and oceans. Associated. That's a little cleaner. Excited to be here. Happy birthday, Dee Dee. This is a really cool way to celebrate your birthday. I want this too for my birthday. So y'all have to come back. I, like many people, was a huge fan of Mary Oliver. And I started before being a singer-songwriter, I started with poetry as an amateur poet at Goddard late in, what, like 1997, I think was, right, I think. That's when I graduated. And before that, like 95, 96, I was fortunate enough to take a trip around the world, take some time off of school and travel. And before that, I had fallen in love with Mary Oliver. Her books started to accompany me everywhere. And when I traveled, I brought her books with me. And I noticed that no matter which group of poets I was flirting with, whether it was late 19th century French poets like Verlaine, or even really not Verlaine, or Rambo, early 20th century, Mary Oliver would be there too in that library. And then later on, Neruda, you know, and even Stanley Cunitz, a little bit more of a serious writer for that group. But, you know, Neruda and Mary Oliver would always be there. Or later, the Beats, Mary Oliver was always keeping company. And I started to realize that her work really had the spirit of traveling for me, of going out, being in love with the natural world, being in love with the world in general. But what was remarkable was that her poems were really about delivering you to the nature of yourself, the wilderness of yourself. And wherever I would go, whether it was New Zealand, or Nepal, or wherever it was, her poem would put me in the same place. Wherever I was sitting, whichever riverside, whichever churchyard I was sitting in, it would, her poems would return me back to home to myself. I started to realize the study of the wilderness was really, ultimately, a study of going in, not going out. And I think Mary's poems do that. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. It is worth saying that I was also lucky enough to come out of Goddard and start a job as an educator in the area, as a teacher of young people, teaching poetry and music. And that group was called the Second Sunset Poets. We started in Worcester, then we ended up in Middlesex. We made our way around. We performed on this stage in 2002. I think it was for the first night. And that was a wonderful thing. They always featured their work on WGDR, which was this anchor, this campfire that still is for this community. And then later on, that group evolved into the Hungry Rabbit View, which really was Karen McCadden who was sitting here in the front. It was really her brainchild and her creative leadership that brought that group together. And we started working at Montpelier High School. And we started doing the same thing, performing original music and original poems for folks around here. So, in honor of Mary, it's nice to be here with all of you. So, Mike, this poem is called A Dream of Trees. It's a Mary Oliver poem. There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees. A quiet house, some green and modest acres. A little way from every troubling town. A little way from factories, schools, laments. I would have time, my thought, and time to spare with only streams and birds for company to build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me. So was death. A little way away from everywhere. Being still dreams of trees, but let it go, homesick for moderation, half the world's artists shrink or fall away. Find solution, let him tell it, my heart toward lamentation. Where as the times implore our true involvement, the blades of every crisis points the way. Where as the times implore our true involvement, the blades of every crisis points the way. But it were not so. But so it is. If you tell me to throw from spot forward my cravings too weak for you. Very tales living on your sleeve, I'm gone. One said that because of a really difficult childhood, she turned to the natural world. It was her escape. And I relate 100% to that. I found solace in my backyard. I lived in Florida, which some of my poems reveal my move and my fascination with the natural world in the north. How different it is, how I didn't know the trees necessarily and the birds. We don't have chickadees in Florida, sadly, because I think they're amazing. But I too found the natural world and the smallest things in the natural world comfort during difficult times. And it's interesting that Mary Oliver, we switched. She moved to Florida. In her later years, as you may or may not know. And talks about having to really work at learning to love the mangroves. Which were so very familiar to me. So one of the things I feel really in so much ways, I mean connected to her and her adoration of the natural world and the smallest things, I wanted to share an essay that I'm not going to read in five pages. I'll say to you guys today. About her, and you may or may not know this, it's in the Truro Bear, the book. Where she's watching a spider build a web and she comes down these steps in this rented house every day and watches the web being built and what happens on the web. The male spider is off to this side. He doesn't quite get on the web. The spider, I love this phrase. She uses the archipelago of sacks around her as she places herself in the center. And to pay attention to that. And then to worry about what's going to come of that spider when she and Molly would have to leave. Because they were renting the house and they would have to have a housekeeper come. And it's just so beautiful. And she has, I wanted to just share one sentence from this where she was just curious on the type of spider. It wasn't an orb spider and what kind of web and all kinds of things. She admits that she could probably find all this information in some biology book or I don't know that she would have gone to Google. Because she didn't talk about how she was really adamant about not composing on a computer. Composing with pencil and paper and out in the world. But she said the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery. And so it's being open to that discovery that step looking and that close looking. And it's true because then we can learn all the things we need to learn but to discover them for ourselves and maybe not even know all the things. Let the mystery remain. This is a big advocate of mystery and allowing for the mystery. So this poem is a Mary Oliver poem and I want to, I'm sorry, I was hoping I'm clear enough on which ones are which but is it if I could, you know, anyway. I shouldn't. But this is the hermit crab and growing up in Florida again catching hermit crabs. I had a pet hermit crab. Got ahold of them. It was a horrible demise for poor Charlie. But this smallness and the other thing is the bravery to leave the familiar for the unfamiliar. Always embracing the unfamiliar because that's part of the discovery and the mystery. The hermit crab. Once I looked inside the darkness of a shell folded like a pastry and there was a fancy face or almost a face. It turned away and frisked up its brawny forearms so quickly against the light and my looking in I scarcely had time to see it gleaming under the pure white roof of old calcium. When I set it down it hurried along the tide line of the sea was slashing along as usual shouting and hissing toward the future turning its back with every tide on the past leaving the shore littered every morning with more ornaments of death. What a pearly rubble from which to choose a house like a white flower and what a rebellion to leap into it and hold on connecting everything the past to the future which is of course the miracle which is the only argument there is against the sea. Without much more talk these are poems again inspired by the natural world and Mary. Two mule deer walking past my window this morning female I think no antlers as the day moon pressed like a faded thumbprint into the bareback of the Santa Cruz mountains and the meadow of wild rye and wand buckwheat rocked in the new light all hide and eyes and hunger moving with caution and blaze is there a coming of good as if their path was already decided I watched them step into the day black tail tipped and wide eared so much of what I want isn't even about me yesterday a friend said the sight of deer means danger is clear no coyote or mountain lions nearby still I remember what it feels like to be a sidewalk a sudden girl at an all night party fingered then dropped by a boy who will be dishonorably discharged from the army two years later you know how it feels wanting to walk into the rain and disappear while hiking a photographer found two deer legs about 100 feet apart cloven hooves and dew claws intact adapted for fleeing predators left by a hunter we are only what we are don't pity me a slight steam rises from the backs of the deer as they move past the black-oaked edge into the white light lifting their eyes to the tree line then to my window then to the sky hooves striking the ground over and over like the syllables of a low staccato voice also when Mary would go into well she said this this is interesting she believed a spiritual life although she couldn't quite connect with organized religion and in school was difficult for her in some ways because she just didn't like walls and she just even in her last interview I think a few years before she died she just is not like being enclosed in a room she wanted to be outside so she said the only really broken school was truancy she just wanted to be out in the woods and so she would take with her her heroes, her poetry heroes she bring Whitman and a Blake she said and have conversations with them and I I love that interesting self-education in a lot of ways so a nation after William Stafford Alondo passes the border of the dirt road heaving herself over the plowed snow becoming a new silence one of the many that like standing shadows beat themselves weary between the wind and ground round of belly she walks with a nation inside of her and I look and look for the grief past the long wall of almond ash on either side of me past the car lights that listen ashamed past the tiny specks of luminous snow that spin and lift like mealy volks I think hard for her baby of St. Margaret ripping herself from the belly of a dragon her crucifix slicing an incision patron saint of childbirth I whisper a small prayer for the two that already tastes extinguished all the while knowing Stafford couldn't know every time I read his poem I want him to save the fawn he didn't know he didn't know she is us all pushed over the edge in my last poem mine couple more Mary Oliver poems this title signs for the living sometimes after the last snow in May I've lived here a couple years now sorry I'll start again I love the saying that sometimes after the last snow in May after the red wing blackbird clutches the spine of the cat-tail after he leans forward droops his wings and flashes his epaulets I imagine shouldering the yellow center lines of the road near the recently thawed pond within a long channel of construction a man holding a sign one side says slow the other stop time and sorrow always run like parallel lines inside the house when I leave the lights on small white moths come like a collection of worship pulsing their wings up and up the window as if in a frenzied trance-like dance some dervishes others dependent on shaky knees the first few years after my husband's suicide I wanted to be the penitent I thought I deserved all the pain I could feel the drill of road work in late summer was a welcome grinding music now the yellow center lines are flung like braids behind me this is a Mary Oliver poem titled When Death Comes When Death Comes a hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me and snaps the purse shut when death comes like the measlespox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades I want to step through the door full of curiosity wondering do you like that cottage of darkness? and therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood and I look upon the time as no more than an idea and I consider eternity as another possibility and I think of each life as a flower as common as a field daisy and as singular and each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending as all music does towards silence and each body a line of courage in something precious to this earth when it's over I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms when it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular and real I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument I don't want to end up simply having visited this world I don't want to feel so like a storm snow around 2000 like 99, 2000 I started thinking about master's programs and I've been studying Mary Oliver and I thought well Mary is in Bennington I probably couldn't get in she's highly sought after she's a superstar I'm going to check it out and it should be said that I grew up in rock and roll and I've been exposed to huge celebrities all my life and I've met the biggest but I was really star struck when it came to Mary Oliver I could meet Bruce Springsteen that would be fine but if Mary was going to be there that would be the pinnacle for me and so it didn't seem possible to me I went to Bennington and asked for an interview to talk about the program but sure enough I called and they were eager to set me up with Mary for an afternoon I couldn't believe that I thought am I the only one thinking about this I went there I went to Bennington and I waited there at the desk at the emissions building down from her well from that place that high exalted place where she spent her time Bennington turned out to be a room upstairs at their main building and led me upstairs and I'm following Mary up the stairs and I'm just blown away it was a transcendent experience I remember the walking up the stairs getting a little woozly and just not knowing what to do I hadn't prepared anything to say really I didn't realize it was just the two of us but it was and she sat down with me and she started to ask some questions she was a little flustered she was busy and she was trying to ground herself and get her papers organized and I'm just trying to catch my breath and come up with something smart to say and she asked me to talk about myself that was drawing me to the program and there I am trying to expound about the importance of how I spend my time and why I want to do this but I can't help watching her at every single thing she was doing she spent a lot of time scratching her head I remember that she had scalp and beautiful silver hair it's funny how those things are what end up standing out I don't remember one word I said there but I remember what she did with her fingernails and her shoes finally she led me off the hook and cut me off and said listen it sounds like you'd fit the program sounds like you'd be great here there's six or seven students right now that I'm working with that you would join and it sounds like you'd be fine but I want you to know something I'm just going to tell you to go home and read and write eight hours a day that's what I'm going to say so if you're doing that now which I happen to be doing at the time very fortunate keep doing it that was it she kind of intimated that she didn't have a ton of reverence for her own schooling that her schooling was the practice this deep religion for practice and she talked about and this kind of confirmed what I was saying earlier she talked about place and how she had found her walk around a lake nearby that she would do it every single morning and by being in the same place and doing the same thing every day she would see what was changing she would see how the world shifted and be able to write about all the deep wilderness of places because she was practicing so deeply I took that to heart I didn't spend the money on school I had a lot of books including hers she also said something else I have a couple of things that really stand out for me that people I really admire said and this I read like Dee Dee's referencing I don't know was that Rules for the Dance where you referenced that line of hers but that was called Rules for the Dance she had a book about writing poetry it was a technical and one of the things that stood out for me she said it takes 72 hours to pull a poem into the light which pointed so directly at the editing process that so much of her magic had to do with sitting with what first came out and what first came out for amateurs is the only thing that matters but once you become a stronger writer you start to realize that the real writing happens in the revisions and the movement and the sculpting of the poem later takes 72 hours so that's it no more no less I'm going to read one more of hers I'm too close with Dee Dee At Grey Pond the sun rising scrapes his orange breast on the thick pines and down tumble a few orange feathers into the dark water on the far shore standing like a white candle or a man in the distance in the clasp of some meditation while all around me the lilies are breaking open again breaking open again from the black cave of night later I will consider what I have seen what it could signify what words of adoration I might make and to do this I will go to the desk I will sit in my chair I will look back into this lost morning in which I am moving now like a swimmer so smoothly so peacefully I am almost the lily almost the bird vanishing over the water on its sleeves at night so smoothly so peacefully the lost morning in which I am moving now I am almost the lily almost the bird vanishing over the water on its sleeves at night spread some mellows spread some mellows draws its yellow coat tail over the hollow rose hips and raspberry leaf tips and grasses love's roll of the night's shadow born as a passing fresh blush blue in the back just like you fingers learn to say goodbye it's the end be the tree your sales brand new I'm gone by Mary so I want to thank you all for coming out having this little big love fest of Mary Oliver it's just it was just beautiful and it was just a very special I think this was very special with her passing so recently this was just a really beautiful evening with beautiful music and poems so I'm just going to close with one poem I shared it with my students when I learned that Mary had died one of my students actually had this he actually did this and so you'll see I think it's really cool the summer day the world the swan and the black bear who made the grasshopper this grasshopper I mean the one who has flunked herself out of the grass the one who is eating sugar out of my hand the one who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face now she snaps her wings open and floats away I don't know exactly what the prayer is I do know how to pay attention how to fall down into the grass how to kneel down in the grass how to be idle and blessed how to stroll through the fields which is what I have been doing all day tell me what else should I have done doesn't everything die last and too soon tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life