 a poetry event tonight, a court book's poetry meeting. My name is Steve Gold. I'm the president of the Board of Trustees of the College of Liberal Library. And Swan City is brought to you by the College of Liberal Library, but we couldn't do it without our wonderful sponsors, the National Life Group Foundation, Vermont Humanities Council, Hunger Mountain Co-op, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Poetry Society of Vermont. Um, we have two, we're pleased and honored to have two poets reading the court book's poetry tonight. Charred Nord is the poet laureate of Vermont. He is the author of six books of poetry. Interstate, the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Double Truth, University of Pittsburgh Press. Speaking in turn, a collaboration with Tony Sanders. The No Man Press. The Night Mowing, the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sharp Golden Thorn, Marsh Hawke Press. And A Sleep in the Fire, University of Alabama Press. He is also the author of a book of essays and interviews with senior American poets titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets, The Marrowing Press. He co-founded the New England College MFA program poetry in 2001, where he also served as the program director for six years. Charred is a professor of English and creative writing at Providence College and lives in Putney with his wife Liz. Our second grader is Karen McCann. Karen received an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and she is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, New Issues, which received the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize as well as the 2015 Vermont Book Award. McCann has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council, among others. Karen teaches at Montpelier High School and she lives in South Burlington with her husband, Cliff. And with that, I will invite whichever of you is going to be the first reader to come to Karen to give the evening for us. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you to the Kella Cupboard Library and Home City for creating such a wonderful container for poems, for everyone's poems. I'm just gonna introduce this reading really quickly and say a few things about Cora and then Charred will read from her published work, and then I've been rightfully through her boxes for some unpublished work that I'll read second, so that's been quite a treat. I called this reading Six Poems as Useful as Spoons because as Cora was dying, and she's probably said this to 100 people because I just love the way she riffs on language and I think she fell in love with phrasing regularly, she said she wanted to have written six poems in her life that were as useful as spoons. And I thought that was the most beautiful thing. And so she said, because I asked you what to do with her poems and what should we do with her work? And she said, I would like you to make a small book with six poems in it, as useful as spoons. So you go through those boxes and you find six. So we've waited down to probably a 40 minute reading tonight and we'll see how we do. And my favorite poem of hers was, forgive these words, they are not birds. Hit the whimsical in love with the natural world, unpretentious, Cora brooks his poems, hold her life close to her chest and even as they are somewhat private, they build a portrait of Cora, the pacifist, the artist, the fierce friend and the great lover of the moon and rivers and shadows and light. Most of her publications were in the late 1970s. She had books put out through Acorn Press and individual poems were in our bodies ourselves. It's a remarkable place for a poem to live. American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, the Boston Review of the Arts and in Plough Shares. And I'm gonna read her own bio that she wrote and found in one of the boxes just to tell us who she was and I think most of us here know who Cora brooks was so I'll just do this so we can hear her voice. Cora brooks, it's in the third person but she wrote it about herself. Cora brooks has said her poems in public on more than 300 occasions at colleges and coffee houses on village greens and in town halls, sometimes with music. Poems of hers have been published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies including Plough Shares and the American Poetry Review. Essays and book reviews of hers have been published in By Behind the Times and The Times Argus. A play of hers, The Moon is a Skull with Dark Wings, was produced in New York City off Broadway. Books of her poems have been published by Mellon Poetry Press, New Victoria Publishers and Acorn Press. For 35 years she has taught at every level from nursery school to graduate school. In the 1980s she co-founded with other Vermont women, battered women's services for Vermont and particularly Orange County. In May of 2001, 22 of her poems went on permanent display in an exhibit of weaving and sculpture by Andrea Wasserman and Elizabeth Billings in the new wing of Burlington International Airport. She is a student of painting or paintings that appeared in numerous shows in Barry Randolph and Montpelier, Vermont. She is a non-violent activist. Korra is the mother of two grown children and grandmother to three children. I remember asking her for a bio for the anthology that Charred put together with Sydney Lee and her bio was really, really, really long and included this really lush description of her life. And I think that that's a place to stop. She lived a really rich life and I believe we could all raise our hands if we were touched by her when she was here, right? Yeah, there it is. Okay, so Charred's gonna read from her published work and then I'll get up and read some other poems. Maybe there are poems we haven't heard before, maybe they're gone. Thank you for coming. Thank you, Karen, for all the hard work you've done putting this together and depending on the time you did with Korra at the end of her life, I know it meant everything to her and I know what an important voice she was here in Montpelier around Vermont and in the country as well. She was, I think, she was both a quiet and loud presence and it's a testimony to her work that you're all good. You want to keep hearing it, it's that news that stays news. So it's a great honor for me to be here tonight and read some of her poems to you, which I didn't know really very well until Sid Lee and I started putting this book together. Roads Taken, Contemporary Vermont Poetry, which is here in the library. So there are about 96 poets dating back to Frost in that book, two poems each of all the poets. And she's in there and I got to know her then when we were cruising poetry for that book. So I'm going to read, I guess about 15 poems of hers, maybe a few more. I'm going to start with this book, Poems for a Book of Hours. You know this little book, these are very short poems and I think they demonstrate her, the power of her restraint, her belief in economy. January, the tree once green became the log, the fire, the ashes, the year. February, winter, you startled us with our own curved shadows bending the angles of bare light around us. March, the wind would sharpen its tools on the gray stone days, but the stones became smooth and the tools slipped away. April, above each loose river banners of birds. May, sun met hills and hills went their way. June, summer, you wound light spiral stairs, placing bundles of light in our arms. Railings of vines, a wreath of bright air. July, fireflies swirling high as fired to stars. August, a slice of light shifted places with a sliver of darkness. Clouds unwrapped a storm in the unwalled meadows of air. September, we returned to school or we remember we carried summer on our backs. October, autumn, you turned each leaf into a letter inviting the wind to its own celebration. And her last poem in this series, rather than November and December, attached to her axis, the same earth that would fling us would swerve to curb under us, to gather us around. So, you know, it's, she's rare in the sense that she, she was an activist, she believed in getting out of her study and marching and resisting when it was important to do that. She was a good friend of Grace Paley's and set an important social and political example and yet she was poet at the same time. So she's one of those rare writers who was also so important as an example to others and had great courage in all that she did. This next book, wonderful title, A Cow is a Woman. I'm gonna read a few poems from here and then from her other book, Heather in a Jar. If we are in our lives, we never forget that we are living would always, if only to remember this gathering of air where the moon spreads and unspreads herself to the dark above a world that would fling us until we became her arms. Walking through a forest or through a neighborhood of trees, we imagine the lungs of leaves and the twigs and sticks that lie beneath in their different silence are signed, almost praying to a wind that could stir them or the floor that would break them so that even in deafness they would be heard. We would ask who we are and why we are here while clipping our backs, a rain comes down upon us as though it thinks we are the earth. The sea, there's an environment which nearly demands falling in love, the sea, open and wide with fields nearby, chicory and rosehip, sand, ledges, rocks. I want to meet you here having known you all this time for the first time, the map. The map says very little. It does not tell about the detours, nor can it predict an expression of sky, three dark birds, then the migration. It does not indicate which things are living and dying for the things already dead. It does not mention that next to the trees, there is a river washing its own wound, loosening itself from a swift and restless dreams, a wall made of stones, hauled from a meadow, vines twisting towards a steep light or how long I would wait for you here. This is called the visit. Look, the play we are in has no intermissions between the days and when it is over, I could lose the ticket stuff. You might soothe me with balloons, even though riding on the bicycle will be more difficult. If you show me the yellow legal paths that are your life, spread them all over the floor. I promise not to walk on any page while I look for my name. All I came to show you was this drawing book filled with a diagrammed people, ripped in places, and the inflexible anolium block carved twice to make one print. How else will you know the mother in this dance is asleep, sucking her thumb? And when she wakes up, she will say, look, all this time, there was hair going under my arms. I love her sensibility. Love's song of a species. Think of long, tall animals making love into themselves, breaking themselves together, swallowing each other's hair, each other's songs. Think of music as a song. Swallowing each other's hair, each other's songs. Think of these animals, not knowing their species, their strangeness. Think of them trying to tell each other all day long with words. Think then of the most natural way of saying, I love you, eyes, mouth, a place. There is a place that has no thoughts. Think of something, a thing that cannot think inside a place, but cannot contain thoughts. Think of these things together, not thinking. Think of the most natural way to think of this, then unthink everything that follows from that. Then sleep, asleep, in which all dreams and these words are stolen from the dream you are having. You can imagine the difficulties. The question itself was at first impossible to phrase. Lacking sleep away from clocks, the dimensions of time became the walls of a well into which we climbed. Without orders or expectations, we remained patient during the descent. The deeper we went, the easier it became to forgive several of us for several days now that have been asking for news of our own survival in a winter season. When we are seized by the spine in a winter season, our children come to us pale, flickering and dancing, indelible. One by one, they ask to walk beside us, poise their impatient, poise their impatience, bow and slip away. This is the last poem from this book that I've chosen. It's called Endure. You will come home, build out the bridges in your mind with blocks, and your son and daughter believe you are playing with them. I will tell you all the things that happened while you were gone, the telephone calls, the one for you at 8 a.m., the one for me much later. We will speak of attractions. I will tell you that when I met you, I'd never met anyone like you before. You will say that more often. I will say, true or now than before, you will not be sure, you will seem interested, as though you are learning it for the first time. I will tell you of the light waking me through the window you made for the moon. I will tell you I've had fantasies and made love to myself while reading a book. You will ask what the fantasies are. I will say they are better. They are the past in future lives. You will go to bed. But you will be sure to leave the light like the moon on. And I will write this down. So you can read it sometime and remember who we are. I'm going to let Karen come up now. We need some more problems. Thank you. I have a thick pile of bones here. I don't think I'll be able to read them all, but I'm going to just file on and read them all. This is a poem Korra often would say, called Bird Song. A bird sings a song, song isn't long, sings it, never gets it wrong. Reminder, every day I want to stay alive to find out how to. This cow, excuse me. This cow is a grandmother. Some think she is going to fall. The flock flies south. The cow walks north. She senses she is going the wrong way. She begins to turn around. By night when she falls, she is mostly snow. Room, there is a room. In the room there is a painting of the room. The only difference between the room and the painting of the room is that the people in the painting are hungry. I'm so in love with her mix of humor and threat. I keep thinking of, there is always a subtle threat underneath this humor and this whimsical way of looking at the world. Fish in the dark sky, where the, I'm sorry, fish in the dark sky, where the pebbles are stars. Suppose before we were this, we were fish or plums, dust and seed to the wind, hurled here, our hearts are in session, the earth pulls us on. Devotion, her vain moon uses so many seas, rivers, ponds and puddles for her mirrors. A lot of these would make great tattoos. Named. Once upon a time there was a family name group, there was a family name group, spelled group. When they came to this country, the immigration officer spelled their name grunge, grudge, judge, group, grump, gripe, grime and crime to show them who knew how to spell their names and what to call them. It's a really good poem, yeah. Game. There is a pile of tokens. Some people use them for roving. Some people traded them for a hen or oats. It was a simple life, raw as a bite. There was loving and there was feuding. Sometimes you couldn't tell the difference. Has anyone dared you to quit? Don't. I was a writer a while in the zoned areas. Make piles or sort them. I promised I was going to be poems I didn't think were published and I realized that two of them were so I'm going to skip them. House. I am the house, empty and huge, open and vacant. I dream of dishes and glass, roses and glass, paper and glass. I dream of doors flung open and doors shutting out the night, which if it weren't pinned up high by the stars would drape over me like a flag over a casket. I dream of light splashed over the floor, of a fire's smoke heaving up and out the chimney into the air. I dream of rooms and feet. Sometimes the feet dance. Zero to five. What can we say to the face in the painting? Are we more alive than the paint? It may be the paint who moves us or makes us move. How the line for the building which has been taken down is moving on the page. It's chalk like rust. It's slow descent. It's wiggling and the chalky water. She says you can't be angry with them. It's like being angry with the fog. Little by little she learned to paint. Little by little she learned to read. Then because she was a witch she made up her own spells. And the building where has she gone? The boards put up in another pattern. The boards, so few of them painted. But this building painted like rain and spring. Rust and a creamy yellow. It was morning. The morning smelled like toast. It was afternoon. The afternoon smelled like fresh wash clipped to the line. Birds. There were birds in the tree the color of the shed and the branch. Brown and gray. Maybe a little white. Just a little and black. The birds have feathers. They have feet. They hop and fly. Flutter and settle. They settle on a tree. I come closer. They discuss this quietly among themselves. They count of whatever they count to. Or however they measure. They measure and signal. And as if all at once they all leave except one stays and one comes back. And one comes back to be with the one who came back to be with the one who stayed. This is delightful recycling of images. When I was going through the boxes there was a track of which poems I had read already and which I hadn't. And then I discovered they were all over my house and then all over my classroom. And then I realized that some of them are inside other poems. The little poems become stanzas and the bigger poems. So there's this great washing of imagination through all of her work. She particularly seemed to like birds and the moon. The moon is everywhere. But also I love the poems that mention the line. There are a lot of real domestic images which I find really beautiful when people can see the domestic and in the domestic find the divine. And find those moments of real inspiration. The dish. The dish dreams of being stacked in a cupboard with 11 other dishes of the same size. The dish dreams of being chosen to be placed in a setting on the table. The evening dinner party with candles on the table and linen napkins spread out like fans. The dish dreams of carrots and peas, potatoes and beans. The dish dreams of sauces and toast. The dish dreams of fish and lemons. Then the dream changes. People are fighting. Someone, a man, comes and shouts and hollers. A woman screams. The dish and throws it across the room. The dish smashes against the wall and breaks into 14 pieces. The pieces get swept up and thrown out into the garbage and dumped into the ocean. Every piece each fragment dreams it is a shell. Pandora's box. Linen and the discourse of rivers. Or rivers and the discourse of linen. Or discourse and the linen of rivers. Squirrels and outgrown shoes. The upper slope of the moon and blue air. Pillows, beach rubble and hazeed. Berries and cupped hands to drink the heavy rains. Dust ripe for flying and the wind or the leaves. If the tree had a mouth. If the tree had a mouth would it speak? Would it ask a question? Would the tree sigh? Does the tree leave its leafy breath beside it? Or does it toss it in the air? Does the tree make a wish to have leaves and the leaves come true? The ground still diggable. The air like a blessing or grace before a feast, quiet and devotional. Then the wind comes snappy. It's crisp and well washed. Some ready for flight. Others hanging on by some tremulous stem to where they fit to twig or branch. The birches lean together as if someone might yell stop to all this touching with leaves. Let the light its mighty bright tooth light down. This poem, I just want to say a quick thing about it because I cracked up when I read it in this manuscript about boundary. I thought it was finished on the page and then the next page has I think it's either the last line of the poem or it is pretending that this sentence is its own poem but it's very deliberately on the next page so I'm going to sort of do a little show and tell when it comes to this last line because it could be either the last line or its own poem. Go look go look for the moon she's been losing weight she's been hiding out behind the barn like a vagrant traveler go look at the trees their crooked limbs held out like arms their glossy leaves waving hello or goodbye like so many hands go look at the sky its feathery clouds patient and silent as the down in your pillow under your sleep look up at the stars their disarray the light they spew go look at the stream see how the water slackens becomes a fugue catch a glimpse of the birds in their green sovereign courthouse or in the wide blue air dig in the earth for something buried or forgotten find something ordinary an old clothesline put it to use hang this poem up to dry it's ridiculously good and there's a few more this is called Earth Heart and there's an epigraph underneath the title to the woman of Vietnam who is dead and who will not even in a dream let me hold one of the babies to the sky which is never twice the same and to her sisters everywhere first the fire leapt from our hearts because our hearts were red then the fire flared from our eyes because our eyes had seen what the fire would not see we did not dream we did not wake the fire took away those we would have touched suppose before we were this we were plums or fish dust and seed to the wind hurled here our hearts are in session may this earth pull us on and when the sea has gathered our bones and swirled them to shells may it toss them back to shore for the great grandchildren of our great grandchildren to find and this is one of the poems inside it you read the middle earlier and then there's another poem with the idea of the children and the great grandchildren and the shells thrown back to shore spring one shadow was the height of my arm stretched up and another shadow was the height of my left shoulder and flew through the house as if the house were a great tree and they the quick burns within it these shadows then go in the dreams of these shadows there are feathers windows and doors one shadow flew through a window and one flew through a door but it was my own frozen shadow stood up from where I lay and dispersed itself to the night cold sky behind the northeast wall and so long ago flew back with only one wing broken I think so many of the the one wing broken is another image that keeps coming back so many of the poems are not overtly personal they feel intimate but they're not overtly about the story of the self and there's a few about her father which I would want to be my father I heard his voice years later after he had died call I'm gone it rang through his nose and came from his chest his voice came on the wind going south almost a song and he wasn't with his voice now he had no body no crumpled skin no swollen toes not feet, no hands all gone from one thing to another back in the shuffle and all that was left were those two words together I'm gone and not really knowing his voice anymore except by the twang how long lasting was his call at last my father keeps a bird and even so his shadow comes this dark night when for two moments it doesn't rain and the moon pulls full knock tap tap tap now ground unafraid I go to the hall to greet the one who is calling it is my coming to meet him which will frighten him away perhaps the thought of a gust of wind from the opening swing of a door on firm hinges gives him the fear of being chewed off the porch like a neighbor's cringing dog perhaps he fears being flung back to the earth like a skinny worm for he is more slender now than the handle of a ladle or bow through the window I see him bow and withdraw or even before at the creek of the floorboards under my feet he may have retreated without a word thinner than a broomstick or lamp wick afraid I'd say I didn't have room or time to spend ashamed of the mending undone in his arms he may have quickly slipped back into the damp blue night not my father not my father's shadow nor the shadow of his bird are we doing okay? before blooming first eat the bread you were given or it will mold, spoil, ghostail, or crumble then study astronomy or the alphabet or the mouths of snails then glance out the window see how the shadows compose themselves to sway and rest then go out the door watch the water in the river tumble in its bed watch the leaves of trees emerge on the branch as small satin capes or trembling masks venture out further to the deciduous woods bend down or kneel sip the dew from where it fell between the leaves of wild leeks then dig find the glow eat the world angel I saw an angel's body so long in length it was a river even later I saw two ravens shove each other to lift and carry in their beaks the tip of the tapered hem of the angel's silky liquid slip incredible the raven in flight pepped away at the moon each night until the light fell on the land in the waters and waves on the sea on the river on the sand on trees on leaves at first before it was conceived the sea wore nothing and then when one night the sea was born she was wearing so many slippers of light she wore three more poems poem for solstice summer starts with an epigraph or an old saying red sky in the morning sailors take warning red sky at night sailors delay hot pink pink like a pink slip or hat pink like a pedal or a pebble this pink rinsed air above the purple green trees and the rain fed yellow fields and a moment ago gone as if it were summer as if it were fall as if it were a day cast in its own bright scales swimming over us this fire this full light taking shorter turns or less length less breath an elusive glow flitting through the sky or is it we who are turned from this light made already wide pulled long this poem is called Wasps and it is in memory of David Dellinger many that's nodding knowing him as a serious non-violent protester that's his claim to fame what's that what's that what what did Korra always claim she was she was one of the somethings what did she claim she was she lived here at the oh you did what was he to the Chessie Chessie and he lived in the house my dad was born here are real stories here are real stories here are real stories at the top of this poem it says to the editors I don't know who she sent it to it's called Wasps in spring wasps emerge from their hidden nests before flood they move around inside a room as if they were monks and nuns philosophers contemplating existence being when it rains they touch each other in a corner where a window meets a sill they rest there still as pebbles often they keep their thin nests to themselves when they overhear the news more from the radio than one or two wasps show with their whole crisp bodies how the bombs drop with open wings in demonstration they fly to the ceiling from there they drop down and down and down over and over bombarding wall window floor the other wasps turn away like a small banner of sorrow they fold their wings to climb and pile on top of one another to huddle to hold to weep a long time ago after bishop I remember feeling shame I was like a boarded up house I wanted to blaze then I went somewhere or met someone or saw something I waited and felt it seemed like an answer it was not it was more like a cloud or several clouds moving and changing their shapes so I never knew what to call them I tried digging in the earth and planting seed but I was not a farmer I was peculiar even to myself I kept myself paper thin I wanted to be a kite to fly high without wings to flap and dive but I wanted to be attached or thread to your hand I wanted you to set me loose almost free then pull me in lay me down this last poem I'm just kidding I have no ghost now not attached nor clinging to my body which is lighter than a falling leaf the ghost is in my bed in my bedroom I am in the hallway in the bathroom ghost got up with me this morning but left me maybe as I was trying to change the time or the thermostat maybe she knew she was tired of holding on to such a thin specimen of thread at last invisible maybe she feared getting too warm or too cold and maybe she feared love or wished to get rest rest thank you thanks to Cora for writing such beautiful work and there's cake there's cake tomorrow when she I was supposed to say one thing when she was toward the end of her life many people that just had time with her it was beautiful I asked her what's going to happen with the poems what's going to happen with all your poems and I said we need to have a reading I promised her that we would have a reading around her birthday and Charred had already back then agreed that he would do that and for her to know that her poems are going to be honored by the poet Laureen of Vermont I think a really good deal and so I'm really grateful to Charred for coming to do this thank you all for coming as someone just announced there is another celebration of Cora tomorrow night at 4 o'clock in the afternoon upstairs and there are pictures of her all around that room and some of her artworks as well so I think that is the time that any of you can come, can share stories and talk about your memories of Cora thank you again Charred and Karen for sharing your readings with us tonight