 I'm not talking loudly. I'm talking in a pretty modern tone. Is that too loud? A little loud. Yeah, I agree. Let's try this. How does that sound? Sounds good? Yay! Welcome everyone. I'm Michelle Singer. I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the Calgary Book Library. It's my pleasure to have you here with us for Poem City. I'm not going to take a lot of time for introductions because that's going to happen. I want the readers to have as much time as possible, but I do want to express my gratitude to Rootstock Publishing for partnering with us. Thank you, Sam. And I want to thank Orca Media for being here to be our filmers and give access to people who are not in the room with us at this moment. Hello everybody. Hello. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Samantha. And again, welcome to Poem City. It's a special thing that we do here in Montpelier. I think we do it better than anywhere else in the world. World? Okay. We'll see. But we're very happy to have you. Yeah, much of a way. Thank you everyone for coming. Poetry on a Saturday afternoon. What could be better? Sunshine, which started to come. Thank you Orca Media for filming. Thank you Kellogg Hubbard Library for hosting. It's been great as Rootstock Publishing. My name is Samantha. I'm the owner and the publisher. And it's been great working with the library to be a sponsor of Poem City this year. For those of you who might not know, we put together the Poem City anthology. They have that for sale here. Most of the poets here are in it except for Kim missed the deadline, but that's okay. She was busy getting her book together. So we do have three debut poets here today. Now I say debut. They've been writing and reading and sharing their poetry for decades. But this is the first time that they each have a printed book published by Rootstock. So we have Amy Allen of Shelburne. This is her debut chat book. Chat book means little book. You can see how thin it is, but it's mighty. Mountain offerings, poems very much about Vermont nature, the human experience. I'll read a little bit about Amy Allen from her bio. As I said, she's from Shelburne. She was just named as the new Shelburne Poet Laureate, which I think is super cool. And I'd love to talk to the library about making a Montpelier Poet Laureate. She'll be working with the community, with schools, with the library there to bring poetry to the community. Amy Allen studied English literature and creative writing at Skidmore College and at Drew University. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals, including Westrade Review, The Right Launch, The Mountain Troubadour, Pine Row Press, and more. I'm sorry to read the whole list there. She lives in Shelburne with her husband, children, and dogs. And she enjoys time outdoors in the beautiful Green Mountain State. She owns all of the right words of freelance writing and editing business, a profession that allows her the time to write for pleasure. So that we'll have Amy will read first. I'm going to introduce all the poets and then they'll come up to read. Next, we're going to have Mary Elder Jacobson with her debut stone chat. Beautiful cover. These poems are more of a full-length collection because it's almost, it's about 80 pages. These also span the human experience. You're going to find grief. You're going to find parenting. You're going to find nature. There are bird poems, though it's not specifically a book of bird poetry. And I'll read Mary's bio as well. Mary Elder Jacobson was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. She holds a BA with honors and art. Is it Goucher College? Goucher College. Some words I don't always pronounce. This is what happens when, I've heard that when you're a precocious reader, like you learn to read at a young age, you don't always know how to pronounce them. That was definitely me and my daughter as well. We both were reading when we were three. She holds a BA with honors and then the MA from the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University where she was a teaching fellow. And an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals and have been selected for anthologies, radio, poetry daily, and other distinctions. She's a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency and she lives in North Calis, Vermont. And Stone Chat is her debut. Our third poet, Kim Ward from Montpelier. This is a lovely collection, Fire on a Circle. This is also her debut. I've known Kim, I think ever since I moved to Montpelier. I think we've lived in Montpelier the same amount of times, 20 plus years. And at every open mic and poetry thing, a bear pond, Kim was there and I've always loved her poetry. I mean, I love all my rootstock poets, but it's really been an honor to publish all three of these poets with their debuts. So let me read Kim's bio. Kim Ward is a poet, playwright and visual and theater artist. She is the founder of the Vermont Playwright Circle and received her MFA in performance poetry from Goddard College in 1998. RIP Goddard College. I'm also an alum. I did my MFA in writing there in 2014. Her poetic play, Angel in the Fire, received the 1999 Playwrights Showcase Award by the Vermont Actors and Theaters Artist Association. Plenty of seats up front. Feel free to come and take a seat. And the same poetic play, Angel in the Fire, was accepted into the New Frontiers Conference in 2000. She grew up in Vermont. Many of these poems are very Vermont-y, but they might show up, you know, they're beautiful, but they also show a dark side. There's a lot of poems about addiction, poems about poverty, poems about motherhood and nature, but it's really growing up out of that darkness. And you'll hear from some of that today. She's lived in Vermont Playwrights for over 20 years and she teaches English at Norwich University. As I said, these are my three rootstock debut poets for April. We are publishing more poetry throughout the year. In the fall, we'll have a posthumous collection by Ruben Jackson. He signed with us in November. He sent over his collection to me in January and as many of you may know, he passed in February. I'm going to move forward with his book. We are putting it together. He had already given me poetry and a picture for the cover and a title, which is just blanking my mind. I can write it down. So stay tuned for that. If you'd like to sign up for my newsletter with rootstock publishing, I do have a form in the back so you'll get notice when these new books are out. We also have a debut book by Toussaint St. Megritude. He's a Vermont poet and musician and his poetry will be coming out in the fall as well. So as I said, we will hear from our three poets. There's a bathroom in the back. Help yourself. We'll be selling books after the readings. You can come back and get your book signed. I have a question already. Toussaint and Ruben's poems are in the bookspealer window this month. They're a beautiful little arrangement. Please go over and read them. Thank you, Rick. Yeah, we do have a tribute to Ruben Jackson in the Poem City display. The Poem City anthology is also dedicated to Ruben Jackson. So please enjoy your poetry today, but please also enjoy Poem City throughout the town, Poem City in the library. I know Amy Allen's poem. Did you say it was here? Yeah. Amy Allen has her poem here in the library. So Treasure Hunt, go find it. Mary's is up there upon books, correct? Kim's will be in next year. That's okay. It is on State Street, I forget, which building, one of the old banks. But enjoy your poetry and I'm going to step aside. And our first poet today will be Amy Allen. Thank you, Sam. Hi, everybody. Nice to see so many people on a Saturday. We finally stopped raining and you're inside to hear some poetry, which is really wonderful for all of us. I know. So thanks for being here. Quite a few of my poems, as Sam mentioned, are inspired by the outdoors and the natural world here in Vermont. So I'm going to start with a couple of those because I think there's sort of a good indicator of my style and some of my favorite subject matter. So the first one is called January in Vermont. January in Vermont. Afternoons are fleeting. Their daylight quickly replaced by brilliant oranges and pinks spreading and easing down into Lake Champlain. Soon a three quarter moon takes stage, a spotlight on snow covered hills, illuminating the journey as our car slips through wood stove smoke suspended above the pavement like a phantom toll booth. A solitary cow stands just outside a lopsided dairy barn seeping warm yellow light out into the night air. Her saucer eyes are fixed out to where the sky joins the lake. The stars always shine brightest on the coldest of days, a reward just for making it. The next one I'll read is called Pilgrimage and this poem was inspired by times, as Sam mentioned, I live in Shelburne and I live out on, lucky enough to live out on Shelburne Point, which is such a narrow strip of land in between Shelburne Bay and Lake Champlain and you can almost, you can stand there and see water on both sides from certain parts and there's so much preserved land there that's undeveloped and it's just a bevy of wildlife. There's just so much to see, so many animals and so many birds and my husband and I often sit outside in the evenings and as the sun is setting, the birds go back and forth between the bay and the lake and that inspired this poem, which is called Pilgrimage. People arrive by car, on foot and on bikes. Some bring dogs who chase frisbees and each other out into the lake's shallows, oblivious to the show before them. Some hold toddlers who mimic the ooze and oz of the adults surrounding them. The lovers hold hands, their shoulders touching, heads tipped together. The teens hold up their phones, adjusting settings in a hurry quest to capture, to perfectly capture the glowing ball as it eases down into Lake Champlain. She prefers her spot alone in the woods, reclining on a flat rock, jacket bald under her head, surrounded by the pines and maples, the only soundtrack from the birds passing back and forth overhead in a sort of rushed commute. Their bellies are illuminated with golden light, the undersides of their wings aglow with the sun's final offering. She knows from the pinks and oranges visible through the trees the beauty that exists out on the horizon, but her pilgrimage is here in the margins with a quiet shade and the reverence in knowing what can never be captured. Some of my other poems are about relationships, partnership, and also motherhood. And a couple of them are about my daughter. My daughter is 19 now, and she actually designed the cover for the book, which was fun. It was funny in the past, you know, if you've worked with someone that's given you copy and you're going back and forth with them, you know, and this isn't quite right, you do this, but it's different when it's your child because you're still trying to be supportive like when they bring home artwork growing up. And so I said, I really love what you're doing and I appreciate that you're doing this, but can you just alter it a little bit? And so we went back and forth until we got it quite right. But during COVID, she went through anorexia and nearly died. And I speak about this with her permission. She speaks very openly about it. She's thriving and on the other side, but it will be a lifelong thing that she will deal with. And she has spoken in front of her entire school and about it and plans to make a career out of helping others. You know, she's studying social work now. But I wrote a couple of poems during that time when she was in the hospital. We were at Dartmouth and I spent eight nights on a chair next to her bedside in the hospital. And so a couple poems came out of that and I'll read one of those, which is called Monitors. There's an implied understanding in the family lounge at the children's hospital that we will discuss the persistent light rainfall or the questionable sushi from the deli downstairs. Making conversation like actors in an extended improv where we play people who bumped into one another on the stained couches of a car service lounge or shifting in metal folding chairs in the back of a sticky school gymnasium awaiting the orchestra concert's first note. Our stiff limbs reveal the toll of nights spent curled in vinyl chairs, eyes alert at every beep, watching intently for the rise and fall of chests under blankets. Our hearts can't bear to feel anything for fear of feeling everything. So we smile meekly, lament the weak coffee and resume our synchronous solitary vigils. Okay, I'll do one or two more. The other one is about, I'm the youngest of five by 11 years. I was a surprise. I prefer to say surprise, not mistake. And so I was incredibly close with all of my siblings because we never had to share anything and I never had to, you know, they sort of adored me and they weren't around a lot. But my one brother died several years ago now of early onset Alzheimer's at age 57, which as you might imagine was incredibly difficult. And I have found as you move through the world other people who have lost a sibling, there's just a certain, it's a certain type of loss and it's an interesting and sad way to connect but I think there's connection in understanding that type of loss. So this is called brotherhood of the brotherless. There's a bittersweet kinship among those who've lost a sibling, a strange comfort in all that does not need to be spoken. Like how it feels to take a seat at the Thanksgiving table or to line up for family pictures at weddings and graduations, knowing there should be another chair at the table, another body to drape your arm around in the photo. There should be an asterisk on everything that comes after. And while we all just keep getting grayer and more tired and freckled and wrinkled, our brothers remain captured, suspended in yellowed three by five photographs with curved edges, stuck in thick chestnut-haired days, wearing their faded ripped cutoffs, their tanned tone limbs gleaming and wide grins spread effortlessly across their faces in anticipation for all that was surely to come. Okay, and I'll finish with one. I'm going to finish with one that's actually not in the book. It's a more recent thing that I've written and it's actually a flash micro, so it's like a short, more like a prose poem. And it's called Perspective. And the prompt for this was, I'm in a writing workshop that this was assigned for, and the prompt was a one-sentence story or poem, so this is ostensibly one sentence. I am at the beach under an umbrella pretending to read my book, but really I am watching a toddler holding his mother's hand, pulling her toward the water, crying and then yelling, mommy, mommy, mommy, over and over. And she is talking to a friend and it's clear that she really just wants to relax on the beach and watch the ocean while laughing with another adult, but her son's little hand in hers is making that impossible. And he's got her arm fully outstretched and she is still talking, but he's winning and her feet begin to move toward the object of desire and she raises her voice now so that the other woman will still be able to hear her and the boy carries on repeating his calls and finally she finishes her conversation and picks him up in her arms. His sandy legs wrapped around her tanned, taut waist and she says okay, okay. And she pushes forward into the shallow and then deeper water and she yells to him to close his eyes and hold his breath and they duck under a wave and when they surface his eyes are wide and he is beaming and he begins to laugh and pats her shoulder with his little hand saying again, mommy, again. And I am sitting there not reading my book and thinking that I would give anything, literally anything to be able to do that one more time with my son. This is when I always start crying. Who is now a young man who shaves his face and calls me mom and really barely calls me at all and doesn't seem to need me for anything and I have all the time in the world to relax and talk to friends on the beach but really all I want to do is be able to pick up my child and show him something magical. Thank you. I know a lot of people here but I'm Mary Elder Jacobson if I haven't met you before. Nice to see so many faces that I know. I have notes so that I stay on track. Where's Sam? Sam, thank you so much. This book would not be here without this wonderful community-minded, poetry-loving, smart, articulate local business-owning woman. Thank you. A lot of people have asked me what is Stone Chat? Why is it called Stone Chat? I thought I'd start with the title poem Stone Chat. So Stone Chat is a bird and at the front of the book I have the definition here it's a small old world songbird of a thrush subfamily having old markings and a call that sounds like stones being knocked together. And when I came across that word Stone Chat in the dictionary and it said that it was called that for the way that it sounds I thought well who named that bird? What was that? So that's where this poem comes from asking that question. Stone Chat. Who first thought to name it? Who first heard its cry? Before she heard the Stone Chat did she stoop at river's edge the weight of an infant pack heavy on her back her blistered feet blessed by the waters foaming eddies? Did she ask what sort of pebbles fall that they may sound like birds singing? When she first heard the Stone Chat did she hear the rhythmic whisper her broom saying into air moving its patterns across the dirt floor? Did she pause long enough to notice the design her body and broom had wrought out of the dry earth? The straw combed hearth at her feet the way the ripped dirt lay like a tablet before her? Perhaps it was then that she squatted down to trace her name in the blankness then when she called the lines her own connected sound to sight and heard again the falling pebbles their music drawing her eye to an open window through which she saw on a wavering branch small and copper breasted amid white flowers and dark berries the song's true source to which she listened and wrote beside her name Stone Chat, Stone Chat, Stone Chat it is amazing to have a book that has everything I need in it I did not have that bad dream last night where you leave your papers at home this is a poem that's difficult oops we're good hello hello this is a poem that's difficult to read but I'm losing it's really difficult to read am I jiggly the wire? it's a very difficult poem to read I will not lean on the podium even more it's not important so in Stone Chat that poem gives voice to a figure, a woman who names the bird people talk about having to find your voice as a writer and I feel like you have to find your voices I've been discovering many voices in my work so this poem is called After the Floods and it's the most recent poem I think in the book after the floods in July and like an incontainable flood it has no punctuation after the floods I should say sorry this is a poem of and for a month after the floods where went the sky that emptied itself into the green mountains who moved the mountains that emptied themselves into the rivers that flowed the rivers that emptied themselves into the roads where be the roads that emptied themselves of black tar of rock, of earth, of culvert, of bridge span and now damn into the cellars, stairwells, hidey holes oh god the bric-a-brack all through the mud rooms, dining rooms living rooms, wreck rooms here, heave the homes filled up, fed up, flooded up wrecked with mud, with roads with rivers, with mountains inside, inside inside the houses themselves reaching, retching, reaching end over end lost and found a posted sign still pinned up outside everyone looking left looking right looking up, looking down each dwelling emptied inside out, out onto the streets lost, utterly lost who has seen has anyone seen the sky where went, oh my my dear parent's clear blue sky yes I am shaking a little bit now, want to do something else I always kind of envy guitar players because they can sit there and tune while they're coming up with the next song I'm going to retune a little bit and have a different energy here so here's another Vermont poem a Montpelier poem a few years ago they were getting ready to completely restore the dome on the state house and of our capital city and I was captivated by that so with a nod to everything that's beautiful beautiful about Montpelier and how we take care of things this poem is owed to Ceres and her golden dome so they were re-guilding the dome with gold leaf or about to before the re-guilders can touch up the dome to match the gold that Ceres stands upon they'll have to find the just right leaf in sheen and tone the glint and hue of hillsides autumn afternoons old pastures guilty with goldenrod or proud with grain Monet's depth touch end of summer brushwork mounted haystacks and oh right here that shimmering hour when tucked in farms nod to dusk as sun bends down to kiss Vermont re-guilding acres and acres of burnished wheat Timothy, rye even the yellow-gold surprise of fresh-shocked corn stacked nearly too high upon kitchen tables by eager children who must wait bright bits of corn silk clinging to their blue-dung greeds In my family, if it's your birthday we call you the birthday boy we have a birthday boy in the audience today so he can choose whichever poem he likes to have dedicate to himself as from me to you this is a little poem sometimes I like to become something else and not have it be my voice but have it be another voice so this is a little persona poem some of you may have seen it in another iteration it's from the point of view of shadows it's just a little six-line poem without a peep deep from the yawning barns ink-black silhouette we seep unasleep we spill in silence in puddles in every shape of dark we curl up tight at your feet then wait to pat about all day proverbial cats pacing the path mute as the marks beneath cats' practised paws I would do three more does that sound good time once in I have five minutes I might leave one out then this poem is called pondweed sometimes I'd like to escape the constructs of our human world and just be something else pondweed the grass is greener underwater I've grown green with envy over every underwater weed so long and thinly loved and lively glint and greenly underwater fluidly, movingly underwater leave me grow me willowy green me underwater ebb and billow me laugh and please me leave me be the underwater oh ribbon me oh rabble me oh underwater's where undone I've long become, have gone and go under spells and lo how soon am overquelmed by deep, by shallow water's all and in whose realms I'll gladly dwell all unhoused and underwater take me underwater water me there make me pondweed underwater undulate me underwater so I'll close with this poem and I chose this for a lot of reasons I guess but it seemed to be quoted or quoted by people that read the book it seemed like a lot and on a personal note after my mother passed away and I had to go through her things she had many copies of this printed out at her desk because I think she gave it away to lots of people why I still write because on Monday I am not a Syrian refugee fleeing with nothing but my name lost on a two year long waiting list to safety because Tuesday I am not the Hawthorne tree found feeble with rot in our yard trunk collapsing to its core because come Wednesday I'm neither my neighbors lost curls nor her wept tears dropping onto the chemo chair because these late September temperatures never did plummet as predicted by Thursday and I can't forget to plunge again into the Pearson lake to swim once more deliriously numb because on Friday morning not another soul in my garden I work leaf litter into loss meeting the earth while kneeling down grateful to have known the Hawthorne its blossom and its thorn because we can't even fathom an age as old as Saturn's four and a half billion years yet already before it's over we've begun to miss this day the one we've just been given and the one after that because on Sunday after nightfall we sit under dark skies on our wobbly outdoor lawn chairs their old joints creaking the wood silvering to gray all of us waiting together mother father and son on the cusp of adulthood warm under blankets the air brewing cool our puppy roving from lap to lap wondering what's up as we speak or don't speak in the welcome quiet gazing out across the lake up over treeline our heads tilted back we stare in awe at the super blood moon just now Eclipson because whatever science says about some equal future moon I know the rare particulars of this vast and intimate brilliance the now of us won't ever in our lifetime come my way again I like to set a timer because otherwise I'll be up here forever because that's who I am thanks everybody for coming today and it's so lovely to be able to read with these two amazing poets and be part of poetry month it's exciting and I would definitely echo thank you to Sam for all her amazing work to put the kind of books out that Rootstock is putting out poetry or otherwise it's a real gift so I appreciate it maybe this isn't done but I'm going to read a poem that's not in the book I read it the other night at our LGBTQ reading and that's because it was recently a solar eclipse so I felt like I had to read it and this comes from Angel in the Fire which is a play written in poetic verse, monologues it's all about three generations of my family and a lot of its fiction and when my mother heard the piece and sort of went out at intermission I thought oh my god she's so upset I wrote all about our family and I came out and she was just smoking because she was a smoker oh my god your poetry is so amazing but some of that's not true I love that I wish she could be here to hear it so this doesn't have a title it's just part of a monologue that's done from the play the moon blocked out the sun today for a brief moment night at noon I am eight the cement steps have a hole beneath them bees dip and fly silently between my legs waiting for me to move until you come and pick me up in the dark and we watch the moon dozee-doe with the sun visions of old apocalyptic stories fresh in my mind then the sound of the bowl in the field across the way startles me and you take me inside oh and I just realized I read that with no glasses on it's been a while since I've done that so if I were in a circle everyone says where did the title come from and you'll find out as we go because there's three sections in the book the first is called Pursuit it's mostly about I feel like I'm too tall for where this is it's mostly about what we pursue whether it be art or relationships or just what is our passion the second part is called Green Mountain Rooms and it takes place all of the poems in this section come from me practicing as a pagan and studying the old German Futhark Rooms so as I introduce those poems I usually try to at least spell the room so you know what I'm talking about and I tried to bring those into Vermont because that's where I grew up the last piece is called Fire and deals a lot with family so I'll read a little bit for each section I thought why not read the first poem from each section so this first poem is called Movement in D Minor I think it's probably the oldest poem in the book it was written when I was a wee lass going to Johnson State College when it was still called out it's only a dark stage a bright circle clinging to her yellow skirt grey words upon her palms it's only a twisting body knives of light slice out and away from her small frame it's only one short step out of that safety where she sways to the chanting of the unseen crowd she leaps off the wooden cliff into the darkness yellow skirt lifted above her head like a leaf storm that's definitely about performing at least my passion and always has been I was a someone was talking about like when they started to read Sam like I don't remember I think I learned to read in the womb because I do not remember and always always was writing and making little stapled books and giving them to people so having one that's not just stapled this kind of fun so I was with my partner for about seventeen and a half years she's still my person but we haven't killed each other because we don't live together anymore and so a ton of the poems in the beginning are about our relationship or being in love but they're also about depression which she struggles with a lot so this is called your turn it's a hard rock surrounds me I cut it myself eons of work I slide downward ever aware as the bomb silence grows while you hang above lean precariously into my deep well your voice knocks the slippery walls don't worry I'll be here when you come up the encircling breeze turns your hair into a torrent of wings you think I would have planned this out go on to the second section there's nothing else I want to read so the first poem in the green mountain room section is a poem that just tries to give you a feel of what it I think it might have been like to work with the runes in ancient times it's called dried ghost a small cave smoke on the water an empty longboat once filled with settlers the rune secrets itself inside her chest the men gather trumpeting for war hunting dogs sniff the carving knife a dried ghost curls under her tone it's leaf of death it's lodging teeth waiting to spring into fruition on the end of the spear and the rune she carves bloody handed and so I haven't gone through the entirety of the runes there's 24 of them and the first eight are supposed to be about your physical life and physicality the second eight are intellect and the third are spiritual and I figure it's going to take me until I die to do the third because I'm working through them um this first one is called it's named after the rune onsues which the definition of is breath of God and it's also about voice your own personal voice onsues God mouth of time moth of words wisdom of the weird inside that hole we part grandmother God takes the tongue and roots it elsewhere lights your bones with eternal flame sets them deep beneath my own skin and the blessings burn goddess slips her tongue over my bones drills the cipher to my life deeply against hip and shin breast and skull becomes the cursed bird and flees thorazaz it stands for thorn but when used in numbers in three times in a row it's supposed to help you cast a spell thorazaz giant I hear your steps in the forest of dawn thorazaz thorn that pricks my rib with glee thorazaz transformation of the very flesh inside of me transformation happens when the thorn pricks the thumb transformation that sticky seed of the giant transformation the thrice cursed bird and the wind blows and the thunder rocks as you move into night with the bird and when the crow cries three times I know it is you so what I tried to do is for a long time I did these individual stanzas which are loosely based on the structure of the attic rooms and then I started moving into doing things that were more directly connected to me so this is called green mountain rooms great grandmother beginning with your bare Irish feet standing on Abenaki backs you walked from rune to rune fehu cattle was the first fehu prosperity which first generation meant sheep more sheep than one woman could shear and not go bleary eyed and bloody handed home the gold of the hills propped you up when you walked the rolling turf up Snipe Island Road when the barns had yet to cure much less sag unturned corpse of wood and hay the foundation is filled with rusting sighs and old plows and in the field above the graves are full you moved on to Nauthe's that greasy little room full of vicious joy and taking if you don't watch him I stand before your tombstone below us the highway prances like a nest of ticks the falling dark pulls yellow's foos gold from the city as it sparks to light I wrote that poem for my grandmother and she grew up on a 250 acre farm in Richmond to which she said when the 1927 flood happened everyone definitely came to their place because it was the highest place in town so I'll redo the poem that has to do with the title you'll hear where the title came from and the poem is called Rido and Rido means journey it's more than that when you journey to find yourself Rido, wheel of days crushes a month of thunder beneath its heel the journey is pleasure while the world is a flame I follow I dip myself in the waters of the rains, live off of the land and land I travel is strange give me the hand you once held out, Rido let my horse slow only when it is at the end of our trail that I may know to stop the pursuit is fire on a circle water anointing my bare head and the clear aster of a new moon sky blazing blackly above I'm going to be careful to read this one important poem today because Anne is here and she wanted me to read it last time and I didn't so the last the last section of the book is fire and a lot of these poems are definitely just about growing up in Vermont and this first one it actually got published right after our last hurricane, Hurricane Irene which is ironic, that's my grandmother's name but it's not about that hurricane it's about one my mother experienced when she was 8 Hurricane in Vermont after the hurricane we went out to help our neighbors in the dawn the moon was just the slivers, sharp and small the cows beneath the collapsed barn called out like an anguished village and were silenced with each successive blow from daddy shotgun little light reading and I would say this is the title poem from the play that I did for my MFA at Goddard rest in peace we've been knowing that's unfortunately been coming for a while and a bunch of us are very concerned that hopefully that the archives at Goddard will be somehow magically saved and kept for good use because they're important I am the girl you brought through the fire I am the singing angel in the furnace the voice of the hunting owl as she kills her prey in the beginning I was the silent face all questing eyes and limbs my early body ready to fling this world off you are mother of mothers voice of the ages soothsayer to the aged stretches to the top place of crones become infants and daughter become keeper in the stone of your heart beat the hearts of tree frogs and the wings of youth while I returned to the girl in the tree the one who lost her voice winter after winter as if the gods were stealing her angels fire so that I would start up in bed fever shaking the voice out of me while out in the hall was warm light and the sound of your deep song drifting last but not least so I don't get in trouble okay so one of my most recent poems is called Vermont Calendar I don't know if it needs any introduction I wanted to write a poem about Vermont but no one wants to know about my Vermont the streets of the trailer park flooding and freezing and winter the boys tripping me mercilessly as I crawled my way across that rippled expanse of ice in a dress I'd been forced to wear to school the man whose trailer was the first one at the third entrance who chopped his wife to pieces as if he could fling her up and make ruby stars by which to navigate his broken heart our neighbor Billy who decided not to come to the bus stop on Monday because he had a date with a tree and a rope he could not break I vowed at 16 one day I would make my own foliage calendar and send it to Vermont Life for publication with a January full of rusted trailers instead of collapsing bucolic barns or tractors in an October full of young tortured souls falling in the bright air in reds and black and blues and a December filled with the panoramic picture of my neighbor David running from his father's rusted truck at midnight casting green sickly night vision and buyers will get a special greeting card with a microchip playing the song of his adolescent voice calling out dad no don't please stop while the growl of the engine can be heard rising and falling like a roaring fire truck the byline would state no rural poor were killed in the making of this memorabilia David only broke his leg that night thank you I forgot to mention we can do a Q&A so anybody has questions for our poets they can come up and answer them questions for me about rootstock questions about home city there's lots more programs so many topics so little time anyone or we can hear more poems or we can do book signing but if anyone has anything speak now or forever hold your feet now oh there's a hand guess okay I'd like to ask the power to their literary influences so come on up here poets and each take a turn about your literary influences so come on to yourself well you can go first everybody I almost brought some Wallace Stevens with me because a lot of people when I say I love Wallace Stevens they're like oh my god he's brilliant I also discovered Ellen Bryant Voight in the library at Johnson State when like only her first was out tons of women poets I was like oh women can write poetry too but tons of people so Ellen Bryant Voight was one that I was going to mention too and then also Barry Goldinson who I studied with at Skidmore and went to Goddard and actually I saw it was published in some of their literary journals that they're trying to preserve and then also David Budbill another Vermont poet at a workshop which was a blessing but so a lot of Vermont poets for sure how about you Barry that's a tough one I'm going to say Maurice Sendak and Mother Goose and folk songs of 1960s were my earliest nice good answer I attribute Shel Silverstein oh I'm blanking on her name there's a children's book called The Giant Jam Sandwich oh Janet Burroway is her name she's a fiction author actually those books for me as a kid I think made me a poet any other questions for our poets thank you so much for listening everyone please join us in the back for books and signings you in my jeans they're just white this is what I do on Fridays is I don't want to dress up I understand thank you you're awesome thanks so much for the back