 Good evening everyone. Thanks so much for taking the time to come out this evening. I'm Tamara Higgins, president of Sundaum Poetry. We appreciate taking time out of your busy busy schedules because we know how busy we all can be, especially during Poetry Month, right? Yeah. We have many to thank for making this new book a reality. The very first person who is important to acknowledge is Mary Jane Dickerson. In 2015, Mary Jane wholeheartedly agreed to take To the Road with Me to explore bookstores throughout Vermont through snowstorms and into late nights, always returning with bags full of books. We were excited about the potential for the lecture series we were planning. Thank you, Mary Jane, for your willingness to shape an idea into a reality. Mary Jane and I were amazed over and over again at the generosity of every Vermont poet we contacted who so willingly agreed to take in the original lecture series. We thank those poets here this evening as well as the additional poets who enthusiastically agreed to share their expertise for this collection. I don't believe there's another anthology like this and I am humbled to be a part of it. I'd also like to take this moment to thank the lead editor of this anthology, Neil Shepherd. Neil's keen eye, sharp ear, attention to detail, and commitment to quality made this book as perfect as it could be. In addition to these traits of Neil's, he is an absolute pleasure to work with. Thank you, good friend. Publishing a book is always hard work, but it is certainly worth it when the design and layout reflect the quality held within. For this we thank Greenrider's Press. And lastly, thank you Orca Media for filming this evening's readings, which we are so ready for. Please welcome Neil Shepherd who will give a brief introduction to begin this evening's program. I guess we should be filmed with a beer or a poetry mug. So yes, I'm Neil Shepherd and I'm the co-editor of the anthology along with Tamara Higgins who is instrumental in so many phases of the project but most importantly in keeping our publisher Greenrider's Press on task in the design, layout, printing, and distribution without which we would have nothing to celebrate. So Tamara Higgins, thank you so much. And just a few words about Sundog Poetry Center, what it is and what it does for poetry in Vermont. First, our activist board members are all here this evening. Lucy Higgins who's back there selling the books and Judy Arnell and Mary Jane Dickerson and Pamela Harrison both of whom will be reading tonight along with Tamara and I. Our mission at Sundog Poetry is to bring poetry to Vermonters of all ages and in every corner of the state. We've offered poetry programs for grade schools and high school populations. We've offered writing workshops for adults from young adults to Elder Hostel. We've offered readings and lecture series for wide-ranging populations and we've created programs on poetry and social justice, on poetry, food, and culture, all of which you should feel free to join in. And lastly, we've dedicated ourselves to publishing one book of poetry a year, sometimes a book of poems by an individual poet and sometimes anthologies such as the one that we're celebrating today from one poets in their craft and one that will be coming out soon by Stephen Kramer who's with us tonight and that's called Turn It Up. Is that it, Stephen? Turn it up. Music and poetry from jazz to hip-hop by way of rock and roll. So that'll be coming out in the fall and we're excited about each one of these books we publish. So Sundog is busy, very busy, and it can use all the help it can get and if you're interested in helping us see Mary Jane or Tamara or me afterwards or during the intermission and we'd be happy to take your names. So what a pleasure to officially launch Vermont poets in their craft and have most of the contributors here with us today, each ready to read a small sample from their craft essays. To the poets who contributed their time, energy, and wisdom to this project, thanks so much for your commitment to this art form and to spreading the word about the high quality of poetry in Vermont. And to the audience gathered here this evening, thanks so much for attending and supporting Vermont poetry in Vermont poets. As you'll see when you purchase a copy of Vermont poets in their craft and read my introductory remarks in it, which I'll paraphrase here. This anthology offers thought-provoking essays on the elements of poetic craft by some of Vermont's leading poets. It's an exciting and invaluable resource whether you are an accomplished poet or a reader curious about poetry's allure, a student seeking insights into poetic craft, or a teacher seeking ways to impart these. Among this eclectic group of essays are two Vermont poets laureate as well as many poets with award-winning books and national prizes. One commonality amongst them is their love of Vermont, its readers and writers, its landscapes and values, and their desire to communicate with poetic means through poetic means. Their essays here emphasize the importance of poetic craft, the sounds and cadences that make poems content come alive, the vivid images that create a sensate world in which the poem exists, the metaphorical connections that clarify or augment what readers cannot sometimes access directly, and the shape of the lines and stances that provide a visible, almost tangible pattern on which the words are strong. While Vermont poets in their craft is partly a local affair discussing Vermont poems and poetic concepts that resonate for writers here in the Green Mountains, it also reflects ideas about poetic craft that come down to us from several thousand years ago and several thousand miles away. And so that's my few minutes introducing and now we're going to hear from the illustrious contributors to the anthology but first a few housekeeping details. The contributors' extensive biographical notes are in the back of the anthology. If you want to know more about them, the anthology is a place to find out. And it's on sale for $20, $5 off the price and no shipping and no tax. And we're going to proceed in the talks tonight in reverse alphabetical order as poetry is a radical art form in which the last shall be first. And so the batting order shall I announce it. It's Martha Zweig, Baron Wormser, Diana Whitney, Dee Dee Jackson, David Huddle, Jeff Hewitt, Hamela Harrison, Mary Jane Dickerson, Char De Neword, Greg Delanti, Stephen Kramer, Nadine Budbill and Lois Ebe who will be reading an excerpt of the essay that David Budbill contributed to the anthology. And last but not least who is often first, Partridge Boswell. And since Tamara and I have done the introductions, we will not be reading from our essays and the two other contributors to the anthology who are missing tonight are Sydney Lay and Major Jackson who as they say have other commitments. And so I asked the poets to read a poem and then accompany it with some remarks about the craft and we'll see if they follow my directions. As we know, poets directing poets is like trying to herd a plowder of cats. So anyway without further ado, Martha Zweig. As backwards, here we go. My plan was to come in from the essay first and then do the poem and that's what I'm going to do. I think of myself as an odd duck in this company because I don't do plain style. I don't do narrative except very rarely and I don't do, I don't compose from my real life incidents except in heavy disguise and I try very hard never to do wisdom. I like to rub words together sometimes at random. I'm good with a prompt, I like a prompt and it often happens for me that I don't even know what the poem is about. I'm told it's about two-thirds through and then I say to myself, oh I never would have thought of that in a million years. You know it is wonderful what words do with their noises and associations and little tricks and twirls. I'm also highly enamored of the Jewish mystical myth of the letters and the letters of Hebrew are living creatures, yes. And so that extends for me into larger language which I imagine has a really strange critter flapping around out there like a pterodactyl and I am hoping that it will speak to me. Yeah, this is much easier than if I had to start with the subject matter. Don't even talk to me about the subject matter. Also I find that the whole wordplay business and the rattle and tumble of wordplay works very well for political poems always for me. So this one is called pledge. It is based on messing around with the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to power flag. The nation's one underdog glows in the dark to its immense satisfaction cover your heart and pledge. Repeat after me pistol packer meister and school kid of in memories. I'm not gonna stand for it. Units of distaste privy trough home tied public flag about the chinny chin chin's yum ruling classic for all flog a misfit for the edification pride the glib and gliberty dissidents up to a drop step jibbit jig. Video amber waves goodbye and God speedy too boo who you it's just us of another disgruntled grunts shock and all shucks americanus cannibalus dog eat hot diggity dog jackal of oil tiray's camo dieties of the exchange hawk it up yank and jingo and if you want to follow all those puns you can buy the book and read about them. Thanks so much to Tamara and to Neil for all their hard work on this book. It's a beautiful book. I'm going to read a bit from my piece in the book and read a poem. I'm going to begin with a quote from which is a title in my piece from the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski from his book Two Cities. Two contradictory elements meet in poetry ecstasy and irony the ecstatic element is tied to an unconditional acceptance of the world including even what is cruel and absurd irony in contrast is the artistic representation of thought criticism down ecstasy is ready to accept the entire world irony following the steps of thought questions everything ask tendentious questions doubts the meaning of poetry and even of itself irony knows the world is tragic and sad that two such vastly different elements shape poetry is astounding and even compromising no wonder almost no one reads poems as Zagajewski end of quote the ecstatic element is childlike praisegiving erotic fervent impulsive materialist contemporary open and unselfconscious the erotic element is adult critical compromised wary thoughtful abstract historical self-protective and self-conscious little wonder that poets or subtypes confused creatures and little wonder is Zagajewski notes that there are not many takers for the delights poetry pervades we can say of course that most people if not all people have these elements floating around within them we cannot say however that most people actively engage them the way that poets do we cannot say that the everyday world thrives on poems the everyday world would not be every day if it did the unique blend of irony and ecstasy in this or that poem contributes to the startling beauty we hope to find in poems there is for instance poetry's habit of asking in a way that is part childlike ecstasy and part adult irony what is that poetry always hinges on that wondrous naive yet philosophical question in that regard poetry's enemies are knowingness and cleverness those socialized plagues that will always be with the human race this mingling of irony and ecstasy is bound to make poetry a radical art full of a strange mix of the comforting being is good and the discomforting being is the ground of much torment both physical and mental sometimes to focus on the poetry of the united states it walks right through the gates of Puritan hell as in the works of Emily Dickinson Robert Frost and Sylvia Platt sometimes it offers an alternative vision of how we might approach life as in Walt Whitman Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams for my part i cannot say that living on that knife's edge has been unnatural for me this may have something to do with my big jewish it may have something to do with by residing for over two decades in the main woods without the electrical amenities and may have something to do with by working in a milltown in mainge for those decades where life was very close to the ground disabused wonderment would be a box i could check here is a poem joy to scoop up a scrap of feeling that falls from the gusty october sky a raw little thing like a bare hatchling of fresh bloodstain the air thick with ochre and violet as if an abstract expressionist had taken hold of a cloud and soaked it till it bled ghost tears then braid with crafty giddiness at arts prodigal counter punch abray the cars take up out of impatience for they must be elsewhere and soon and this moment is only a mental tunnel more failed history though when a woman turns her head sideways and sees one of those slim trees the city plants clinging to a few last leaves as if they were dignity itself it's hard not to squirm with admiration lift weary hands off the wheel and yell to the stooped goggle eyed guy on the sidewalk leaning to catch something don't pocket it let it grow the guy looks up big incredulous eyes big ears too and like the wandering Jew he softly groans thank you Diana Whitney and I was so honored to give this lecture it was at Barleby's books in Wilmington, Vermont it feels like a long time ago it's called the dense fragrance that rises from the earth nature and desire in lyric poetry which has been one of my obsessions pretty much since I I was writing poems in college so I'm going to read a short section from the essay and it includes a poem but it's not my poem so I guess I'm breaking set I'm mostly focused on other other poets work the etymology of desire is from the old french désirée drawn from the latin the original sense translating to await what the stars will bring this root likely comes from the phrase desiderie meaning from the stars and so the word desire originates from beyond from something outside the human world in lyric poetry we can express the experience of longing with more subtlety and more power when we write about nature nature poetry has sometimes been maligned as dry dull or sexless perhaps because it's been associated with mr. Wordsworth rambling the leaks district with journal in hand writing about snow drops and daffodils and here I want to pause and apologize to the Wordsworth fans in the room of course he was brilliant and vital to our tradition but I don't personally find his work sexy okay so there is another tradition of nature poetry that is written from the body and of the poems I want to discuss possess this urgency and heat eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness says mexican poet octavio paz in his book the double flame love and eroticism is eroticism the same as desire not exactly but let's assume the two are kindred spirits and that desire is also an energy directed outwards a movement towards the other in jane kenyon's brief poem september garden party she captures an erotic moment using a few sensual images drawn from nature like many of kenyon's poems it is deceptively simple written with transparent language and clean syntax september garden party we sit with friends at the round glass table the talk is clever everyone rises to it bees come to the spiral pair peeling on your plate from my lap or your hand the spice of our morning's privacy comes drifting up fall sun passes through the wine on the outset nothing much happens at this garden party but there is abundant movement in the poem a rising that encompasses the clever talk the entranced bees and especially the lover scent drifting up the final image of sun passing through wine becomes a moment of transcendence a radiant act of intermingling where light and liquid me kenyon conjures erotic intimacy by transferring the action the bees and the spiral pair peeling are central to her eroticism they embody the purely instinctual animal aspect of desire and its irresistible sweetness we watch the speaker watching the bees then we catch a whiff of the pleasure she has experienced the spice of our morning's privacy which remains hidden under the table even more alluring because of its secrecy so i'll i'll stop there when when i gave the lecture i went on to cover some of my other favorite writers such as a scottish poet john birdside pablo neruda from the 100 love sonnets from which the title is taken mock orange by louise gluck and then i concluded with one of my own poems so thank you hi i'm dee jackson um my essay was titled or is titled writing grief and um i wanted to read to you um the poem that brought me to my own ability to write about my own grief which is a poem by ruth stone one of our own here in vermont and what i'll do is then i'll read a few comments afterwards about what i feel about the poem um and what i think is remarkable but remarkable about that winter the 10 o'clock train to new york coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow steam wheezes between the couplings stripped to plywood the station's cement standing room imitates a russian novel it is now that i remember you your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife your heavy-litted eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood it is another raw winter stray cats are suffering starlings crowd the edges of chimneys it is a drab misery that urges me to remember you i think about the subjugation of women and horses the brutal exposure weather that forces that strips in our time we met in ornate stations arching up with 19th century optimism i remember you running beside the train waving goodbye i can produce a facsimile of you standing behind a column of polished oak to surprise me am i going toward you or away from you on the train discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks mounds of rusting wire grotesque pop art of dead motors senile warehouses the train passes a station fresh people standing on the platform their faces expecting something i feel their entire histories ravish me so my students know that i admit openly and often that i have two favorite craft devices one is figurative language particularly a metaphor and simile and then the other sound devices and so in this poem bruestone imagines for herself this immediate world and it gives her grief a metaphor she she reveals her grief metaphorically and then also the sounds convey the difficulty of surviving suicide loss and so i thought i would just read two sections in which i address those while bruestone's poem winter is important in content is equally valuable in its craft she opens the poem with a simile comparing the snow speckled coaches of a train to loaves of bread in the next few lines she lengthens the starkness of her compelling opening image of winter by employing assonance and consonants the soft o of coaches loaves powdered and snow pull out the cold and lonely landscape of the scene she personifies the steam of the train as it wheezes between the couplings and carries those images along in the following lines with the consonant of the s the fists of the s stripped to ply with the station cement standing room imitates a russian novel by using multiple elements of figurative language all at once stone can link and augment images one image can fall into another as it does here with the train and the cold the sound of the train and finally the train station itself as the poem continues stone piles metaphor on top of metaphor the train station becomes a russian novel the letter knife becomes the profile of her dead husband the dilapidated warehouses are senile minds and the junk along the track is nothing more than grotesque pop art the feeling of movement on a train the feeling of a lack of control in both physical movement and psychological movement are all evident here and in her onslaught of images and metaphors as readers we can experience the overwhelming sensation of pain of this particular memory and lack of control as the memory emerges the reality of what she sees and experiences in real time contrasts greatly with the images from her memory language like raw suffering drab brutal discarded rusting grotesque and senile considerably contradict words like optimism are polished oak and fresh reaffirming the sorrow and the difficulty of her current condition and the longing for her previous life with her husband walter thank you it's my opinion that if you can write any kind of a poem it's lucky as long as you can call it a poem it's lucky it's a good poem you're really lucky so what i'm going to read is the end of my essay and it's going to be about a poem of mine that i feel extremely lucky to have written and there are a couple of things about it that are part of the luck one of which is that i have written a lot of sonnets and a lot of villainels so i am very familiar with those and i tinker with them i change them i mess around with them so but i know how to do that and the other thing is that when i wrote this poem i was teaching at hollands university and living by myself and was pretty lonely except when lindsay would come down and visit but i had a two mile walk that i did twice a day that involved walking up a hill to a graveyard and through a graveyard and then across the ridge and then down a hill and then alongside a stream for a while and then up a hill and then by a horse pasture where sometimes the horses came out and talked to me before i got to my house so that's part of it those are two parts of the luck this is called ronoke pastorel cardinal goldfinch titmouse turkey buzzard dear companions of my afternoons above this field high clouds dream of blizzards to snow me in till spring ends my solitude sober's my binge now nature my saloon rin morning dove house fence turkey buzzard for your entertainment i sing the words of old 50 songs use baby talk croon as i walk the field beneath great blizzard dreaming clouds you gaudy pretties sweet birds of my senior years my leaders my soon cat birds flip through cedars in the graveyard turkey buzzard swirl their patterns overhead across the mountainside sunlight bows a tune rising to blue eternity but heard by the heron fishing the creek wizard of stillness creature designed by the moon bluebird jay chipping sparrow turkey buzzard clouds and field i dream this life walk this world every serious poet has a mental library of poems that help him or her make new poems this help is usually subconscious but the example example of a specific poem can also consciously assist in the composition of a new poem in ronoke pastorel some readers can probably see and hear the influence of ee comings as anyone lived in a pretty how town and theodore retke's the waking the comings poem is not a villanelle but in its length and its use of repetition the composition functions and sounds like a villanelle in the variations of repeated lines it was a particular use to me in writing ronoke pastorel the retke poem which is a moderately strict villanelle helped me find the tone i needed for my exceedingly loose version of the form i would describe that tone as song like an ecstatically surrealist if i'm correct in thinking that ronoke pastorel is my highest accomplishment as a poet i also have to acknowledge it may also be the piece in which i received the most help from other poems and poets in my realizing the composition an incorrect notion i held for at least my first dozen years of trying to write serious poems and stories was that the writer works alone and is solely responsible for his or her artistic achievement it is certainly true and we readers experience this aspect of literary accomplishment every time we read an excellent piece of writing that the author's individual sensibility is a dominant quality of the thing he or she makes seemingly out of nothing now in my 75th year of life and my 50th year of writing publishable work i see that the amount of help we receive in making literary art is astonishing not only do we have the examples and the tools of our art handed down to us we also have the great world constantly feeding our need for experience mystery beauty suffering courage etc and we have those who come before us the thousands of them whose writing we have encountered in our lives whose work inspires us yes but that writing also has taught us how to do the work we want to do ourselves and many of us have our families and friends who have instilled in us an appreciation of literature and the attempt to make literary art when i sit down to read i have my mother's voice in my memory of her reading the wind and the willows and dozens of other children's books in my to my brothers and me when i was a child i have a memory of arnie weingart reading his snake bit poem in james tate's writing workshop at columbia and i clearly remember john engels reading for the first time his vivaldi in early fall in john dewey lounge in the old mill building at the university yes we do it by ourselves but also yes we do it with the enormous and utterly necessary and generous assistance from a thousand different sources we are both alone and astoundingly assisted in our attempts to bring poems into the world we need both the at it we home we need both the solitude and the help in our effort to testify to what it means to be human and to articulate such revelations as we are capable of discovering and inventing thank you the morning i started the final draft of my essay grounding the moment winter's existential proof um on top of neighboring new hampshire's mount washington 100 mile per hour winds created a wind chill of minus 94 degrees fahrenheit tying that day for the second coldest place in the world seasonal extremities have always presented irresistible invitations to poets for generations new englanders have mined winter's sensory and thematic riches to craft poems verging on the existential in his essay the poet ralph waldo emerson writes nature offers all her creatures as a picture language the poet attaches things to nature and to the whole he does not stop at facts but employs them as signs the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning of every sensuous fact magical thinking magical thinking springs from an imagination that works by metaphor the thisness of this i'd set against the thatness the thatness of that joined in one inspired likeness which appears if it appears like the bouquet from a magician's patently empty hat look inside close as you will and still you'll wonder where those posies came from once i lived deep in the country and drove an old car that had no heater through a blizzard home by the time i got there my hands were so frozen i could not work the key though why i'd locked the door in those uncommon parts i couldn't say light and belonging all the human riches of home waited for my entry from the other side behind me snow mounted slowly over the shoulder of my little car obliterated what was left of the frozen road i bent to the lock almost weeping pressing all the weight of my body on the indifference of the door holding my offering in both hands then like a prayer the poem's formal organization works by giving a definition of metaphor in the first stanza then an experiential exemplum in the second for the reader to think on i want to call your attention to three lines in the second stanza where sound values take on a meaningful weight of implication for what i've called in the title of this lecture winter's existential proof behind me snow mounted slowly over the shoulder of my little car obliterated what was left of the frozen road what is the recurrent sound in those lines oh oh oh and what is the sound of woe a keening oh oh oh signaled by the repeated oh sounds in snow slowly over shoulder obliterated and frozen road the place of despair in this poem arrives when the speaker suddenly realizes the impending presence of winter's mortal danger happily though the narrated plot does not say whether the speaker's offering her prayer both figures drawn from the realm of religious practice is answered readers realize after the poem's end that those palms together must have done their trick because the speaker has lived to tell the tale thank you maybe a 10 or 15 minute break no one can leave we will see you for the second half of the really big show additional events sundog events this coming week we have one tomorrow in underhill and that's a poetry reading by mary jane dickerson 17th annual april poetry workshop participants so if you are able to get to the under hill area the deborah rosson library please join us for that it's always a wonderful reading the second event this week is our third and final amp night amp me stands for art music and poetry and that's in the moille county series that we do in conjunction with river arts of morrisville this event will be thursday at the farm store on main street in jeffersonville our artist is a fiber artist karen henderson of montpelier the musicians are a band made up of mount mansfield high school students called lemonade lady they play jazz and ellen where are you jazz and uh what lemonade lady oh lemonade lady they do funk jazz with a little bit of rock influence so be a great great musical night and then our poet again is steven kramer here in the we will be reading tonight too so that's thursday jeffersonville six to eight p.m and then in addition to those events we have the kind of the four big events coming up for the rest of the year for four of the next five five or so in this card so please take the card with you to keep with you so we are planning our second justice and poetry for all which will take place in the north end burlington june 21st and our focus will be new americans and uh the poetry of new americans and immigrants and then we have two things the mouth loves poetry and food of course and that's a retreat with neil shepherd and kate riley in september and then the um anthology of steven kramer's coming out in the fall and our sixth annual retreat at fielder farm has just opened up its registration so without further ado i do no delay we are going on to mary jane dickerson first i would like to say i did not know tamer was going to say what she did in her introduction but i want to say that tamer and i wrote our she i wrote the first half she wrote the second half if you can write with somebody in complete harmony and agreement that's true love and friendship i could not ask for a better person to work with it's like having another daughter and i'm open to having daughters thank you tamer i combined a little new reflection with some quotations from the essay the part of the essay that i wrote and then and then i will end with the poem that came one of the poems that came out of that a poem that i wrote but i had considered many of the wonderful poems that by american poets as they have drawn on history to develop and write their wonderful wonderful poems hardly a week goes by that i don't hear the question where are you from though i usually reply something about my nearly 53 years of living in vermont not having erased the suspicion that i'm from away the question has through the years become ever more urgent as i turn more and more to what i recognize as the simple fact of my existence beyond the family i had been born into and the one i helped to create was growing up in a racially segregated society the american south in a world shaped by the circumstances of segregation it is this difficult knowledge that both my personal history and that of my region and nation have compelled me to address first to read and study on my own and then to teach that rich body of american literature written by african americans and now to wrestle with and attempt to express in poems what i have been both a part of and a witness to toward a poetics of the past attempts to examine how america's poets have grappled grappled with a way of knowing that shows us how lives can be created out of that hard one knowledge i regard the poem long hot summers as only one of many to come that must examine a painful history all of us are continuing to share and to ponder because our very lives as citizens of a democracy demand that we do so long hot summers in august of 1955 at 17 no more on my mind than going away to college in september i worked sometimes in my father's store after long mornings under the tobacco shed where mounting heat beat down to ripple in waves across the tin roof at the store's lunch counter i assembled hot dogs by the dozens at two for a quarter stacked moon pies and pulled cold rc's from the cooler greeting each customer by name charlie little john andrew kelly his sisters pinky and janey delma williams and url crutchfield i took worn dollar bills from hands black hands and white my hands and theirs calloused with sticky traces of tar from a morning spent working together handling tobacco to cure slowly in tall tobacco barns when i placed change silver and copper onto their outstretched hands excuse me palms those coins cool against the lingering heat from our skin was it during one of those moments while i a white store owner's daughter was making change for black and white farm laborers exchanging the day-to-day news of our small town world was it then that in money this is city 14-year-old emet till might have whistled at said something to the white store owner's wife sounds still in dispute words perhaps never uttered at all what we'll never know from lips forever seared only hours later in the brutal violation of that other teenagers still growing body was that the summer the kkk left a stack of printed brochures on the store counter paper my father set a fire on the cement pavement separating the store from the gasoline pumps did i recall those summer days in my own small north carolina life small town north carolina life when in 1956 i returned to school after another long hot summer of working in tobacco and clerking at the store to find my north carolina woman's college had integrated itself by placing its first two young black women in isolation just the two of them living together on a single dormitory floor separated from all the others in the first year class just last summer nearly 60 years later i returned to another north carolina august of humid heat filled days with slow hours passing through heavy moisture-laden air to join my sister as we finished clearing out our mother's house the repository of 75 years of her adult life what began as sorting into piles of what to save and what to load onto my son's pickup soon turned into an excavation as we unearthed artifacts of a life we could only ever partially know or understand fragments of writing in her hand about an unnamed person she had never been able to forgive this in notes while reading c.s. lewis on prayer a facsimile of lincoln's gettysburg address folded with care to enclose a kkk broadside dated 1983 as if one document might obliterate or cancel out the other both documents yellowed and brittle with age messages indictments acknowledgments the yearning to understand and to be forgiven for the sins crossing and burdening her generations into yet another august day marking the passing of a long hot summer in yet another century in citizen and american lyric poet claudia rinkin writes that memory is a tough place it's wonderful to be here to be a part of this incredibly rich community in vermont just living in vermont for the last almost 30 years i realized it's um perhaps one of the rarest places in the country for all the great poets here and it's been enormously humbling and enriching experience but i realized as mary jane was reading and speaking that so many poets have migrated here especially from the south that's uh interesting and void uh who grew up about 30 miles away from me david huddle um i'm from lynchburg virginia roostone is from ronald virginia uh just just curious i just thought of that was mary jane's um reading i'm going to um read a little bit from my essay on robert frost uh and um uh upon uh at the end of my um my essay as i've as i've been reading as i've read frost over the years i finally realized that um and i don't know if um anyone else has noticed this i'm sure they have but maybe not written about it my my essay is on suspense suspension and the sublime in robert frost i realized that he loves to suspend his characters in trees or uh or at the top of the stairs as he does in home burial or um in a birch tree you know they uh and he just he just loved that in between of the firmament and and earth um so i'll read a little bit from this essay which uh i just the title of which i just quoted to you um and i'll start with just a little anecdote i think many of you know this on his 85th birthday linal trilling at the waldofer story commented i think a robert frost is a terrifying poet call him um call him if it makes things any easier a tragic poet but it might be useful every now and then to come out from under the shelter of that literary word the universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe frost um comment or replied to this uh to trilling uh from ripton he said you made my birthday party a surprise party you know really was a surprise party because everybody up to that um point had thought of frost is is kind of a um just a quaint poet in many ways you know he'd won many Pulitzers but they hadn't really appreciated the terror in his poetry yet he said i should like nothing better than to do a thing like that myself to depart from the Rotarian norm in a Rotarian situation and then he concludes his comment i don't mind being made controversial no sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when i'm down so i i took a look at four poems i took a look at the poem mowing um birches after apple picking and um home burial as i think i mentioned um so i'm just going to read the conclusion because this this would be too long to read any of these uh these critiques of those poems thrilling and chilling are the two words that describe frost most sublime poems such as the four i've discussed here frost perhaps more than any other american poet just mythologized a landscape that continues to be known simply as frost country a landscape that continues to be known simply is frost country i'm sorry um on which he wrote his recurrent obsessions to borrow a phrase from simon shama or as frost called them his quarrels these now classic quarrels have made it have made it close to impossible for any poet to follow frost in these parts without echoing his work if even in the slightest reference to a tree or a wall or a hillside which is why i think the vermont legislature waited 26 years before appointing the next vermont state poet the deserving gallway canal in 1989 despite several shocking waves of the new that have transpired since frost death in 1963 frost postmodernism from from postmodernism to the recent welcome explosion of multicultural voices readers continue to hang with frost in his native trees woods and roads where they still feel utterly haunted by his narratives monologues and dramas frost non-readers of poetry frost harrows his readers beyond horror with terrors that compel even non-readers of poetry to return again and again for more than just the mere odd pleasure of being frightened but to discover vicariously that their lives our lives are extraordinary fragile difficult painful bittersweet contradictory ecstatic and grievous not that we didn't know these things already but not in the terrifying way that frost conveys in his best poems by conveying the felt presence of human experience in physical interactions with the world frost divides passage to his readers psyches through their bodies first and then their minds and hearts we feel the abstractions he quarrels with in our bones whether it's the factual dream of labor or the limits of human consciousness or the affirmation of earth is the right place for love or the inconsolable reality of grief frost language finds us enchants us suspends us then leaves us captured in our own willful restraints uh so i was trying to think of a poem in which i was terrified by something and i thought of this poem called goss hawk i was walking through green mountain orchard down near putney when a goss hawk or northern hawk attacked me i was too close to its nest and pulled huge clumps out of my ear and reminded me kind of who who i was and where i was so i wrote this poem called goss hawk how many times have i told this story there i was ambling along in search of dessert inside the orchard when a goss hawk dove on me without stretch talons there i was all dressed in cotton in the cool of evening inspecting the trees for infestation when a goss hawk herald me there i was pinned to the ground like a reprobate with my liver exposed as a fresh hors d'oeuvres on a on a dusty plate when a goss hawk circled me in figure eights there i was crawling away behind the trees where the apples hung like brains and nothing i said reminded this bird of who i was thank you thank you for including me and most people know me here but um i'm living in vermont no longer than i lived in ireland and i laugh no and i say which half of me is the irish part or the lesser half um so and when i was asked to to write this i just stuck to form um for me um traditional forms open form and i i'd prefer the term open form than free verse because i don't think anything is free in language you don't get a letter i was thought that was a wrong term excuse me robber frost and so forth the great saying of what is this free verses like playing tennis with the net down and but and also the mixture of them so i'm just going to read two little pieces and one on um the mixture of form i'm going to from the book itself and i couldn't use the whole poem because of them i talked about at the start we real cool but you all probably know this poem surely and i've also forgot my glasses as well so here we go the mixture of form not all forms are written in either open or traditional form many poets in recent times use elements of open and traditional forms in a single poem when it suits what they have to say a great example of this is we real cool it is wanted to hear a recording of the poet quendlan brooks uh reading her poem one of her main subjects is the lives of african americans in the u.s especially in the poorer areas and specifically in chicago normally in a poem the rhyme words are placed at the end of each line in this poem the last word of each line is we with the one syllable rhyme word coming just before it except for the very last line of the poem where there is no we here are the traditional rhyme words of this full couplet short lined poem cool school laid straight sin jinn to to soon you know it like i mean but we real cool we left school we looked late we striped straight we sing sin we sing jinn we jazz june is the way she says we die soon um a reader expects each line to end with these rhymes instead the we comes directly after each of these rhymes and at the end of each line the this breaks the expected traditional form and corresponds with the pool players since society doesn't give them a decent chance then the pool players rebel or react against tradition that there is no we after soon sin at the end implies that the tradition beats these african-american youths kills them the we also has an incantory quality reminiscent of african-american slaves chanting as they worked you could say that the we at the end of each line and directly following the different full rhymes are rhymes in themselves and that the pool players are in ruin with society and that they are connecting with it the only way they can but for me the repetition of the we is too much of a rebelling chant a chant that wants to undo or break the normal traditional rhyming scheme and tradition itself is anybody got glasses they can give me a loan of sorry i mean are they reading glasses are they very strong oh brilliant i can see the page sorry excuse me i should have done that before that um i can't believe i'm 60 kind of thing you know what i mean and now the short piece it goes back to i start with the traditional form in the book in the essay go on to open form and then finish up with the mixture form which you just heard one of the examples of it there um but here is a poem called The Earthworm uh don't know how to put track in our Shakespearean sonnet it's one of my own poems so we make it clear at the moment so that you're not trying to figure out who wrote this poem excuse me it wasn't Robert Frost as you probably will know but so excuse me for using one of my own poems it kind of embarrasses me but it was our way out of copyright the earthworm do not put track in our Shakespearean sonnet is a sonnet nonetheless i chose this particular form as i thought it right for what i had to say the first 12 lines are in Terzarema the famous rhyme of Dante's divine comedy this poem is from a sequence of similar sonnets about the flora and fauna that today thrive that are in trouble and that are extinct a kind of heaven porgatory in hell the book is coming out next year it's called No More Time um Duster Terzarema with regard to the couplet at the end since the subject of the early sonnet was love then there are also love poems to the natural world in the case of this particular sonnet since this worm works underground then the form is also appropriate uh and then little thing at the start to reproduce they must face each other upside down worms um in the epigraph to the earthworm and i'm just going to read the sonnet now it's kind of Terzarema with the couplet at the end and i i will say for me uh i'm not interested in writing in open form and traditional form and mixture of form i'm only interested in writing in what's appropriate to what you want to say and the form is never separate from what you have to say in my case at least i also don't agree with different groups of writers in the same way as i remember coming to America first and a colleague from St. Michael's not John Engels by the way who was great to me and lovely um i had rhyme something no i don't always rhyme sometimes i do and sometimes i don't sometimes it's open form said you rhyme that's old fashioned you should be writing you understand me and for me it never the form it's all forced to one level and it's all to do with also i think that in in many ways modern life in the 20th century we've gone willy-nilly into open form and breaking tradition and now we have what we have i'm not a by the way i'm not a conservative but now we have a disconnection from the past in the environment and everything is connected including poetry and the traditional world but anyway the earthworm what a minor sorry for that what you call it um you know what i mean the earthworm what a minor piston in slow motion through the underworld of the earth engineering vents channels water flow converting death and death day and night out each eyeless body digesting the soil nursing birth cut in two they double breed via marley skin a must for farm and garden alfalfa spuds spinach carrots cabbage barley wasabi wheat gourds rutabaga papaya i'm saying around and eve you name it build a machine may these lowly laborers of gaya multiply flourish never decline stick with warm love position 69 hey thank you greg glanti usually when i come up after another writer i have to pull the microphone way down so we are kindred spirits in terms of height and i appreciate that so also thank you neil thank you tamra for putting this together great night beautiful anthologies so i'm just so pleased to be involved with with this project so once when uh robert frost was asked what poetry was he said poetry is the sort of thing that poets write now i know that he's been asked you know he'd been asked this dozens and dozens of times and he gave some great answers over the course of his life but at some point it becomes a ridiculous question i'm sure the interviewer was thinking something like thank you very much asshole for for that answer now don't stone me because i know we're in vermont here but uh not a great answer the definition that you're most likely to get for poetry if you have assigned a book of textbook for writing class is the best words in the best order that's samula taylor coleridge that's in like every textbook you could possibly find but that feels to me just so dry that definition to me is like eating sand you know it doesn't really approach what poetry can be my favorite definition that i've come across is um crossenberg he says that poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits which is a phenomenal definition there you know and i think that definition definitely um it deserves more play time in the world of poetry here you know um obviously we're bringing together two very unlike things hyacinths natural production and biscuits human production but for me it's mostly about the sound and i think that a definition that would be matched for meaning would be poetry is the union of roses and cookies which is a terrible definition for poetry right um and it's severely unmemorable but sandberg's definition implies that so much of it has to do with the sound of what we're creating here it takes pleasure poetry takes pleasure in the sounds uh that it produces um so the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits that's a great definition um so my favorite poems relish in the sounds that they create as much as in their meanings a great example which is in this book is uh michael stillman's poem uh in memoriam john coltrane it's nine lines long let me read it to you in memoriam john coltrane listen to the coal rolling rolling through the cold steady rain wheel on wheel listen to the turning of the wheels this night black as coal dust steel on steel listen to these cars carry coal listen to the coal train roll so this poem has definitely i mean and obviously been produced with the sound in mind the assonance of the long o's the long e's and particularly the o's you know vowels have pitches right and the e's and the i's are up here in the higher registers but the o's and the o's are are much lower um it makes sense because a train is heavy uh john john coltrane's sound is heavy um and so the words should be heavy right um so listen to the coal rolling rolling through the cold steady rain those low o sounds get at the feeling of uh of the music there so in any case this poem is one of the most euphonic poems i think i've ever read um i honestly i would love to know the number of times that i've read this thing out loud it is in the high high hundreds if not thousands at this point it's ridiculous um but i love how stillman gets at the um feel of coal train without any reference to the music and without any reference to you know biography or anything like that it's just through the sounds of the words themselves um but because it's in the poem is miraculous actually it's in three haikus uh three haiku back to back um and so it's somewhat mimics jazz uh in a way anyway because it's an improvisation of sorts within a set form um and so um that's another thing that really draws me to it so stillman just nails the art of alliteration here which can be overdone at times there are some poems uh you know that that you read where it's just there's too much of it you know um and for me it's really about the right interplay between repetition and variation in sounds um so i think about it in terms of life not just poetry right too much variation in life sucks right you get to have one raspberry your entire life that's too much variation you get to have one kiss your entire life that's too much variation right um on the other hand too much repetition too much repetition also kind of sucks right you're only allowed to eat raspberries that's great for the first hour right you're only allowed to kiss okay again great for the first hour then we're ready to move on to something else right like uh um we want to um um have some sort of variation um so in his poem stillman i think approaches somewhere um close you know approaches something very close to that satisfying middle ground um i'd also like how he uh compares two very unlike objects he compares something untouchable like music uh to something that's totally physical a train um so the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits indeed absolutely i think i could read michael stillman's poem pretty much all day long without needing a whole lot more to happen and be pretty happy um that would make pretty satisfying day for me um so i'm just gonna end by reading this thing again uh it's so satisfying in memoriam john coltrane listen to the coal rolling rolling through the cold steady rain wheel on wheel listen to the turning of these wheels this night black as coal dust steel on steel listen to these cars carry coal listen to the coal train roll thanks it's eb and i'm here tonight with our daughter nadine budville um we're very honored and humbled to be asked to come and read from david's essay in the book and we want to thank neil and tamra for including us in this event we're going to read from david's essay entire poetry special or ordinary and i will read a section and a couple of poems and nadine will read a section and a couple of poems we've tried to let david speak for himself poetry offers nuggets kernels little knots of intense imagery a vivid moment of clarity about an instant in this world little lyrics that accumulate into a narrative either consciously telling a story or unconsciously revealing a life in the best cases this is not the ego maniacal self exposure too many poet sticker faces in but rather something more in the ancient chinese style where the poet sees himself herself as so much like everyone else so common ordinary so in touch with his species feelings that what they see hear and feel has got to be what others see hear and feel also poetry an eighth century poet from china for one example was so concerned about being clear that he tried his palms out on his illiterate cook and if she couldn't understand them he rewrote them so that his cook could understand them every writer needs to decide whether he is whether he or she wants to be striking and new what a national endowment for the arts grant reader called the quirky odd power of poetry or whether he or she wants to do what grace paley said we want to be understood or as i say in my own poem advice to myself never be deliberately obscure life is difficult enough don't add to the confusion and here's another illustration of what i'm talking about from my own work this poem is titled all of us out of the undifferentiated dow come the ten thousand things the bug in the bird's mouth the bird in the tree the tree outside the window the window beyond the chair the chair in the room the man in the chair who has just risen from the chair and walked across the room to look out the window at the bird in the tree with the bug in its mouth see how all of us at our own in different speeds return to the down oh let us all sing praises now for all of us so briefly here poem should be the way olaf hagas said bertolt brex verse was quote handy to step into it stood on the doorstep like a pair of wooden clogs and quote open the poet's door put on those wooden clogs step into his house come in make tea sit down open the book enter his life i'm a writer but i've always been somewhat embarrassed about being a writer an artist i don't like the elite and elitist air that so often casts itself over artists and the arts it is obvious that many people involve themselves with the arts in order to distinguish themselves from the common people out of which i come and with whom i still fiercely identify i'm interested in the invisible people the ordinary and downtrodden the put-upon and forgotten i hate pretense i want to make art that the common people can understand use find meaningful and enjoy all of this may explain why i firmly believe that poetry is ordinary and is for ordinary people and why my writing is so plain and simple and easy to understand here's how i put it once in poem dowist poet always everything plain and simple no fancy words no illusions no metaphors no quirky phases phrases no allegories no analogies no symbols no anything standing for something else no analysis no conclusions no grand anything just the common and the ordinary spoken in a common and ordinary way just this then that then the other or to put it another way on the road to buddhahood ever planer ever simpler ever more ordinary my goal is to become a simpleton and from what everybody tells me i am making real good progress thank you my end is my beginning but what a thrill to be part of this choir of very unique soloists so my deep thanks to neil and to tamra for bringing this beauty of a book to life um reading and listening to its many voices today i feel as if i've been utterly and brilliantly schooled without once having to set foot on the school grounds it's a beautiful thing for for poets i think it's something that you allude to neil and your when you talk about the kitchen sink school of poetry and keeping with the spirit of this uh reverse alphabetical order i'll read an excerpt from the end of my essay yes but could Homer carry a tune for as elliott says in east coker in my end is my beginning he also says in my beginning is my end we'll ignore that so it may it may be the end but it's every bit is inconclusive as the rest of it so not a spoiler you won't you still have to read the whole thing uh little context if this follows a long quote from a paris review article with robert pinsky in which he addresses the ambivalence of identifying oneself as a poet in today's society which may apply to a few of us here today if a poet laureate who also describes himself as a non singing vocalist is reticent to admit to a stranger he's a poet what does pinsky's hesitation reveal about the duality within poets these days as the role of poet withers in the margins of our society resisting as it succumbs to the same specialized fragmentation as other trades and vocations is the poet content to be exiled from the civic realm working more exclusively in the margin of a margin solely within and toward a context of publication as she sings less and less to a public distracted by countless new media does her vocal confidence in singing the unsayable begin to app as the poet as artist concedes to taking an admin desk job does the music get filed away in the archive of anachronisms that once made us human to be exhumed only on special occasions the blank others draw at the word poet isn't merely social as pinsky suggests but internal as well many esteemed poets insist the title poet can only be bestowed by others as if calling oneself a poet is an act of egoism or hubris as if it's up to the listener to decide whether or not you're making music with words and if that music supposedly timeless is even relevant given the new context of instantaneous downloads as if a poet is the perfect prelapsarian fool capable of naming everything but himself when you tell the stranger you're a poet you immediately open up a realm resonant with possibility that extends way beyond language as mere communication into music's universal realm once language exists only to convey information it is dying says Richard Hugo fear of deepening a conversation toward meaningful human connection by a language that sounds and feels like the thing it's talking about admitting that we are musical instinctive creatures presents and intimidating if not frightening scenario for those who traffic exclusively in information certain songs play our whole lives without us hearing we sing along and even dance to them oblivious the lyric of mine shared below finally became audible to me walking past an all night salon or rather several salons late one autumn night in manhattan stylists and their clients enacting their own dance of tongues in bright mirrored light as herds of young lonely hearts headed home from nightclubs the same music i'd hardly notice countless times in neighborhoods from here to central africa where dap reverberates as an art form woven into the daily fabric of society in an age when ritual and symbol are readily turned against ourselves i now hear these notes more clearly than ever reaching beyond identity to embrace our common longing for belonging i'll just read you this closing poem from that essay called ode to my dap and in case you're not familiar with dap suffice to say it's simply a customary greeting between two people soon as i get my dap down i'll ride uptown and find an all night salon where yvonne will synth my bril cream with afroshine my flat iron world with jerry curl i'll wheel and burn my way to the back of ezekiel's bus where all of us not just us but all of us wait to give our seats up to the next mother child for terrified with feet i'll get off at 125th street where love will come to town unabashed and beautiful not on the back of some ted's force-fed homily but on opalescent hominy wings of an actual angel soon as i get my dap down orita whitney mehalia marion Beyonce billy rising in a clarion chorus a riff will split wide open the moment they reveal before us life in the key of song soon as i get my dap down i'll belong i'll rewrite her history on my palm undam the rivers no more sitting and weeping on the banks of babelon i'll remove these hands from my throat use them for their intended purpose get down to what matters most not the shade of lives but the blood of one note running spilling through them soon as i get my dap down i can get my rap down i'll come back to tell you all i shall tell you all the crap i learned in high school lies i try and can't forget still tasting the saccharine sweat of my forebears when nothing sweet came of kane's descent you can bet the pump will shudder and resist gutter and ballets fist before drawing blood not from skin but from a deeper well the water will we share will help get my head around how the zoo were caged in not only caged us apart but labeled the cages around our hearts in latin soon as i get my dap down my litany of digits fisted and free my hand dance hello to me not me my synchronized solidarity my brother myself my time out taken to get to know my body my other my soul my word up yes but first the whole of my mother not just her tongue the dream i'm coming from rolled into one bump slap skin snap fly dancing light as a jesus bug on water fish bite duck bill cap soon as i get my dap down i'll fold you into a hug let's shake on that you are the music are the music lasts says tia sellia the next time you find yourself sitting beside a stranger on the bus or a park bench or an airplane on your way home to the placeless place both familiar and strange where we can forget what we're supposed to be long enough to just be together and the stranger asks what do you do tell him see what happens a bird doesn't sing because it has an answer it sings because it has a song so sings my angelu under new forever postage next time you find yourself staring at a black page try singing along amen to that uh you've been a wonderful attentive audience and we are at the end but uh i hope you've heard even in these five minute segments something of the breadth and depth of the of these essays and poems that are provided and uh you know for back when i was a grad student reading some of these craft anthologies like donal allen's poetics of new american poetry or donal hall's claims for poetry and then much later maxine cumans lofty dogmiz and there's been so many but i always wanted to create one too and now with terris help i have and with all of your help and and i was out at the awp associated writing programs convention a couple of weeks ago in portland oregon the book was on the table and people on the west coast were looking at it and saying wow you know we want this so although we pitched this as a vermont based anthology it really has a national international reach and we hope that you'll help spread the word so thanks all for coming and i guess there's still food up there yeah i think even the bar still opens so feel free to uh imbibe and and eat and uh maybe you can get signatures from every author here just think the complete collection of 17 uh signatures so thanks again and tamar you might have something that's it thank you so much for coming thank you so much yeah i don't like this thank you thank you we'll be happy bye bye thank you thank you okay