 Artistic Director here at Law Session Theater and we're very proud and honored to be hosting another event for poem city This is what you're seeing here is the emerging set for our first production of our 30th season at city hall. It's Thank you Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson a very poetic text by the way and Lauren happens to be the most produced playwright in America these days. It'll be the first time we've done We really love it, and I think you will too. You have some our director and our star here in the audience We keep them under wraps for now It is my pleasure to get things started tonight By introducing the man who is at the head of the organization that makes poem city happen This amazing explosion in the spring that may now enjoy statewide and even beyond Now Tom McCone color-covered library Thank you, Kim And thank you very much to Law Session Theater to Kathleen Keenan, Kim Dent for being part of the poem city for co-hosting co-sponsoring this event with us tonight Without and and Kim, I do have my season's tickets as you probably know, so I'll be here for the opening for it the But without Law Session Theater and other organizations and businesses and individuals We wouldn't be able to do poem city the way we do it because this is really it's the largest project at the library does It requires an enormous amount of time Lots and lots of people work on it So the support we get the grants and in kind contributions and the donations and the volunteer labor are all essential to making this Making this work. I'd like to mention our five primary financial sponsors Vermont Humanities Council and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hungry Mountain Co-op National National Light Light Group Foundation and this year the first year the Poetry Society of Vermont. I think that's really we are always indebted to the communities of Berlin, Calis, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Montpelier and Worcester for their annual support on Town Meeting Day We're an independent nonprofit organization We really depend very heavily on the six communities that contribute to keeping us alive and keeping us thriving So and also there are far too many people to ask you to be able to thank people individually. So many people contributed to this. Our presenters If you saw the article in the week, it was an article about how poets can't make a living We knew that already, but they gave us some specific examples and they were talking about how you know presenters get really modest stipends for participating in this process and we appreciate that because we have people we know in different contexts Actually get you know fair amount of money for doing a presentation and then we give them a couple bucks But anyway, so we appreciate that and many of our presenters actually just volunteered their time. So it's it's wonderful for us The many people who write poems and contribute poems make that happen too, because we have hundreds of poems posted throughout the city which is such a it's such a delight to have Oh, there is one person I could mention because we have the coordinators in this effort with dozens and dozens of people it takes a poem city coordinator Would you please thank Rachel Senegal. I suppose one of the people who started this came up with this idea nine years ago And he's kept it going ever since then. We think this is the first time. So tonight we have the Poets Laureate Right Mary? It's not the Poet Laureates, and I'm sorry that we wrote Poet Laureates in a few places We have Poets Laureate from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine We know it's the first time these three particular Poets have read together And we also think it's the first time that Poet Laureates from the three states have read together And this is kind of adds to making this a special event So so we have in a moment I'm going to introduce Charity Neword the Vermont Poet Laureate Loet Laureates, sorry, and then he's going to introduce Alice Fogel We pull it Laureate from New Hampshire and Stuart Kessenbaum Poet Laureate of Maine So Charity is starting backwards lives in Westminster, West With his wonderful life Liz We had debate whether to talk about Liz or Charity So in 2002 he was the co-founder of New England College MFA program in poetry And he directed that program for five years. He's currently a professor of English at Providence College He has at least six books that I'm aware of, mostly poetry, some essays, and his most recent book is Interstate And before I turn it over to him, I'm going to read a couple of comments from other poems But they have to say about it. So Peter Campion says Very few contemporary poets render as uniquely as Charity Neword does, the sheer wonder of being Our world shines up from his lines and sentences with all its original splendor and strangeness The New York's spectacular gaze, old binaries of reality and dream, bitterness and love, joke and revelation, fuse into a beautiful hole New York is a visionary And then a couple lines from the, I think, Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky The voice of these poems seems to have a cunning ability to see oneself as if from a distance This is compelling, beautiful poetry So tonight, we're fortunate we don't need to appreciate Char from a distance because he's right here Would you please welcome Charity Neword Thank you, Tom, thank you, Rachel, thank you, Austin Nation Theater Thank all of you who've come out, thank you for the entire community, Montpelier I don't know of another town in the country where there are poems in the windows like this Where they're, I like to think of the poems as windows also, the windows to another world life So windows on the windows It gives me great pleasure and honor to introduce Stu Castenbaum and Alice Vogel to you also Tonight, this is a wonderful occasion, a celebration of poetry and poets And I hope this continues You know, there's that famous saying by the lines by William Carls Williams It's difficult to get the news from poetry It's difficult to get the news from poetry Williams was a doctor in Rutherford and Patterson, New Jersey Practiced poetry at the same time that he practiced medicine so he was immersed in the world And people's illnesses and writing poetry at the same time So he had a wonderfully realistic view towards the real world and language that stays new So he said it's difficult to get the news from poetry But people die every day from the lack of what's not there So he was speaking spiritually there as a man who was also integrally, organically connected to the body as well So I hope that tonight you'll hear poetry that contains news, that stays news, that you get And if you don't, you can talk to us afterwards and we'll try our best to talk a little bit about our poetry I'm going to introduce Stuart Casubon to you first, and then Alice Spogel Stuart is the main poet laureate, he's the author of four collections of poems, Pilgrimage, House of Thanksgiving, Prayers and Run-On Sentences, and Only Now And the collection of essays is the view from here He has written and spoken widely on craft, making, and creativity His poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Takoon, The Sun, Beloit, Poetry Journal, Northeast Corridor, and others, and Andreas and Keeler's Writers Almanac He was appointed to Poet Laureate in May of May 2016 Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Couser has written, Stuart Castingbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read He heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love He was the editor of the Haystack, who's a director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Island, Maine for 27 years Where he established innovative programs for mining craft and writing and craft and new technologies He's an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council and recipient of the Distinguished Educators Award from the James Renwick Alliance And it gives me great pleasure and honor to introduce him to you Welcome up, welcome up here You know, we didn't know what order we were going in, now I know I think it's a good sign if your first speaker takes his or her watch off and takes a look at it before they get started Hey, it's not working The water is from Maine, it's Poland's spring water But I bought it in Vermont on the other side of the river Do you know when we were in, this is an amazing city I feel like this was the place I imagined what life was going to be like in the future and it wasn't And here I am and it's like that But we were waiting in the, I was picking up the phones I was going to read tonight We were in the parking lot behind the hotel we stayed in last night And there was a car with its alarm going off Like now it's probably 15, 20 minutes stop and honk, honk, honk And I thought maybe that's the only urban part of Montpellier We needed to have one conqueror, like it doesn't need a conqueror I believe it was a Subaru too Just a hunch Well, I guess I'll start with a prayer You know, it's April And we drove through a snowstorm to get here from Maine April prayer Just before the green begins, there is a hint of green A blush of color and the red buds thicken the ends of the maple's branches And everything is poised before the start of a new world Which is really the same world Just moving forward from bud to flower to blossom to fruit to harvest to sweet sleep And the roots await the next signal, every signal, every call, a miracle And the switchboard is lighting up And the operators are standing by in a pledge drive We've all been listening to it Go make the call You know, there are a couple things that joined Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont together And one of them I believe is a Subaru's But I think, you know, I've thought about the difference between poetry and advertising Because they both use language to get you to do something Well, poetry doesn't want you to do something But it uses language in a way that makes you take a notice And advertising can do the same thing And much as I love my Subaru, when they have a slogan that says love It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru thing Not really Because love has nothing to do with this car, you know And that's the difference, I think, between advertising and poetry In case you were wondering This is kind of a confessional poem And it's the end of winter Starting the Subaru at five below After six main winters and 100,000 miles When I take it to be inspected I search for gas stations Where they just say, beep the horn And don't ask me to put it on the lift It's freezing and soft, rusted underbelly Inside is the record of commuting Apple cores, a bag for McDonald's Crushed Dunkin' Donuts cups A flashlight that doesn't work And one that does Gas recedes, blurred beyond recognition Fingertips numb, nose hair frozen I pump the accelerator and turn the key The battery cranks The engine gives two or three low groans And starts, my God, it starts And unlike my family in the house The job I'm headed towards The poems in my briefcase The dreams I had last night There is no question about what makes sense Wet exhaust, billowing from the tailpipe Heater blowing, this car is going to move me It's going to take me places Well, while I'm on the Subaru kick And, you know, I apologize in advance Now that I'm in Vermont for having mentioned McDonald's And also Dunkin' Donuts But I don't go to McDonald's anymore But I used to get like a look Like two large orders of french fries Just to stay awake And then they fall again on the mat And then you look at them afterwards And with the Dunkin' Donuts I find it's just a good way to stay awake If you just get cocky You have to fuss with it while you're driving So I still stop there And I did find a funny sign When I was drying my hands yesterday And it said Dunkin' Donuts Cares about the environment That's why they have the hand dryer The heat one But they serve like millions of Styrofoam cups So I guess it's a different division That cares about the environment So this is when I was I just wanted to stay awake So I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts And I got a donut in coffee And then I drove off in the dark And I bit into the donut And there was an earring back It was really gross But, you know, when you're having something That gross happens to you You don't actually think it's really gross You just go Anyhow, that was a genesis Of the genesis of this poem I thought that perhaps At that moment they knew that I was a Director of a school of crafts Haystack, and this was Maybe it was an MFA degree In a thesis project Can you eat what you wear? Rocky Coast First there was the pink granite Molten and buried for 350 million years Then there was the ice And countering the ledge Dragging rocks and trees over the land And then the lichen Working in the cold, ceaseless wind Cleaving to the stone Resurrecting the soil By eating away at the Micah at courts To make a thin layer of earth That the coast rests on And then there was the Dunkin' Donuts Built on the ledge in 1989 In Bucksport, Maine The town where the paper mill makes clouds And sends them billowing out into the landscape The Dunkin' Donuts, where the coffee Is always fresh And when you inhale its aroma It's starting the day again Or starting your life over One more chance This is where I buy my chocolate sugar donut And drive down Route 15 in the dark When I bite down on an earring Back baked into it I dream of the million dollar liability settlement Enough to do whatever I would want to And return to show with horror The small steel post to the young woman And bright polyester at the counter Who offers me a dozen free donuts Not enough to change my life Not enough to feed me for a while And what else could you need? Sugar, fat, and the first bite Like eaves, just before she walked out Into the fall in the world When I brought those back Actually She was not horrified at all And she said She said, oh yeah They baked those in Bangor Like if that was enough Well I've lived in In New England for a long time And Rooted for The Red Sox But I'm actually A Yankee fan So I've actually been Torn between the two teams And so now I'm like a man Without a religion or a country I've gone back and forth And now I'm kind of homeless In terms of baseball But baseball figures into this And I could do anything And was a Yankee fan Fresh cut grass This is where my great career As a second baseman will begin Between the rhododendron That makes a hiding place Next to the brick wall of our home And the sloping yard rolling downhill To the slate sidewalk On the far end, the big silver maple That once guarded the old house Of our ancient neighbor Who died there and close by Herb with the storm sewer Where all balls eventually find their way My glove is ready The stand-usual four-fingered model That I've prepped over the winter the way My big brother does Oiled with a ball in place And a belt fastened around it To make the perfect pocket I'm ready for the game I want to wear this glove to break it in So the leather will be black and shiny And I will catch everything The short hop, hard grounders That I am skinny and left-handed May be a drawback for my prospects Of being an infielder for the Yankees But it's not stopping me now I throw the ball in the air, I run under it Calling up all my imaginary teammates It's rising in the sky In this stadium This white planet of possibility I'm searching for it in the vast blue sky So I live on Deer Isle Which is approximately 100 hours From here No, no, it's not that far It's six hours from here Do you know that you can That Maine is as large As all the other northern states combined And do you know It tries to pave all those roads But in Vermont, they know not to It's a smart idea But you can actually just slide off Of a Vermont road this time of year Yeah You can slide off a Maine road But I think it has to be speed-induced But I think about All the farmland Any time you see a stone wall In the woods, you know, that was a farm And I think about what it took To make a farm, to make a life there And what it's like to have that go by And where we live One of the Orchardists on the island do All the trees, all over the island So if you said you want to make cider You pick cider, you can go to Pick apples, you can go to where You say, oh yeah, if you go down Just past this house, take a right Past where someone so used to live There are three Trees that have king apples there That's where you should go So he would know, like it was No in a family, and just let me think about That local knowledge and what we Know and don't know anymore Cider Lloyd knows all the trees on the island The ones they were overgrown But were once pruned and picked For pies and cider, baking and eating The ones with the forgotten names Gravenstein, northern spy Jonathan, and the histories Of the hard scowl homesteads They grew on. Every year They were touched by someone's hands In the fields and yards where Delicate blossoms come early In the southern New England spring He guides us to the crossroad Near the cemetery, backed by the shed Once used for chickens And now used for nothing Close by are the second-growth spruce Where in early winter, deer will leap out To eat the fallen fruit But now, we are the ones who crouch In the tall grass of autumn's Fertility and decay, and pick the drops The huge red kings An apple almost gone from memory Nearly two bushels from one tree That we add to our mix Of Macintosh and golden delicious In the colder afternoon air Lloyd cranks the press down with an iron bar Turning pulp into cider As yellow jackets swarm And stumble around us, celebrating The old sweetness as it goes by A few years ago, I was invited to be a Visiting writer at a school called Kenland. It's a craft school It's similar to Haystack It's in North Carolina And it was really great because I had just left my position at Haystack Right how to worry about potential Disaster and wonderful Education experiences, you know For many years, it goes someplace You decided to watch it happen and it was Very therapeutic And at Haystack, I used to Read poetry to people before A session would begin and it was a way of You know, if you have a chance to Read poems to people who don't expect it And they're not afraid that they weren't Going to get it, and they didn't know What was going to happen and they hear it And they aren't hurt by it, then you Made a convert of sorts And when I got dependent One of the teachers had been to Haystack And he would come and read us a poem Before we started our workshop And I did, and then He said, his name is Bob Ebbendark He said, oh, Stuart's like a tinker Because he comes here and reads poems And I still love her, a tinker, he'd actually Give me her broken things and I'd mend them So when he'd give me words, I'd make them into poems So that started a whole series That's the basis of a new manuscript I'm working on So it's a kind of form Like, I figure it's not my fault But it's also like a word Like I never would use In a poem Like serendipity would not be a word That would occur to me to use in a poem So I'll let you know the words I don't think you need to know them But it'll give you a sense of Of what I was dealing with And this one, the words I was given Repent whole camera, sharks, deteriorating Evergreen, silky Sleep, cement, rose, serendipity Flight, moonbeam, gawk, thistle Satisfaction, worth, and conflagration I wrote this before The election in 2016, but I think I was I must have been channeling something How to start over We knew that things were deteriorating Gothic houses collapsing Sharks patrolling on the goons The born again ministers Warning of an immediate conflagration All of flights to paradise have been cancelled And even pinhole cameras Weren't letting light in It got to be so bad We didn't want to listen to the news anymore Where all we were doing was gawking At someone else's trouble It wasn't worth the effort Where was the satisfaction we longed for We couldn't sleep, so it spent all night Watching the full moons, beams Cement themselves to the silky water And travel for miles on the waves Someone was rowing along the shore And in the silver light The evergreens were shaking slightly At the edge of the forest The thistles were attaching themselves To the fur of animals With serendipity to hitch a ride To your future And This This poem, the words I was given Are marsupial mountain, basket, cleft Dimensely bacon, pattern, noodle Anxiety, rigor mortis Stoicism, applesauce, stress, passion, silhouette Unbed fellows So after I got that compelling I knew And just said so many words And two of them taught at MIT So I really got an odd Like some said Always wanted to have somebody use the word Thixotropic in the poem Me too, so Hermits dream Living on the mountaintop I missed coffee and bacon at first Who doesn't? And later began The dream of simple things Like applesauce and noodles And air Passion takes many forms My master always stressed Look for patterns, he said Being and non-being are strange bedfellows One day, anxiety left Drifting off and settling In a rock cleft far below When the light was right I could watch it silhouette moving wildly I learned the names of my fears And put them in a basket Each day I would climb up the ledges Remembering who I had been I would see the personalities in my pouch Then there was nothing But it's not what we fear No rigor mortis I was alive and dancing in this immense Nothing that is everything Stoics were laughing, birds were singing First morning Then I was teaching In Maine there's a Medical humanities program Physicians and healthcare providers Can read Different books The book of my poems And then I was talking to the person Who was leading it And I told her about the series I said they all sent me words before I got there It's not like a poem while you wait But it's called Evening Song And These words were a melody Vecissitudes Which is the word I would never ever Think of these words Vecissitudes, weevil, laugh, deceit Briss, peepers and catterwall Evening song At first you can't hear the melody Your mind being too busy Replaying the vicissitudes of everyday With its petty deceits Does it feel that you're betrothed to a burden? Toward evening You walk into your field to see the larvae Of weevils ready to burrow into everything You planted Time to blame someone else Catterwall against confusion To them, the spring peepers in the pond Emerging from some salubrious Laboratory of life To sing, if not a hymn of happiness Then at least a raucous tune Made of water and light Why not laugh? How much more do you need? I'll read you Three more poems, one is Three Pages This one Is called The words I use were A slivered dog evoked marriage quality Pizza emulated Newtonian Swim cupcake delirium and loose leaf You know the thing if you start out with that Like what It's actually quite freeing because Like what could go right So you just You just have to jump in so I think anyway It became like a way for me to jump in And then I started this by Making a decree So you know Like in the Bible You know let there be light But like then all of a sudden you're on a roll Because you're making the world Right so Decree Let there be equality in every marriage And let love emulate Newtonian Physics falling down to earth From the heavens so that we will understand That a pound of love drops at the same rate As a pound of iron or a pound of feathers Only when love lands It breaks into slivers of hope Let the dogs roll in the shards And begin to trot deliriously In search of pizza crusts And cupcake wrappers And swim to the land of dead things to roll in Their hope is eternal in all our hearts Animals and humans alike And while we're at it Let's gather up the love and put it in Loosely binders and page through what was That was become is That our hearts learn to be And This poem in the words I use were Memory, money making, logarithmic Time, smoking, unseen, perfection, discovery Flow, travel, scent, growth Talking, passing, intimacy Tangled, serve, recovery, collecting And Oprah Yeah, you get all down to go God, and then you see Oprah Anything wrong? Discovering fame Back when there were staged Doris, you were standing outside one In the alley, smoking a last cigarette Waiting to appear on Oprah The smoke flowed through your body And you exhaled the perfect o's Which traveled down the narrow space Between the brick walls You were passing time wondering What the two of you would be talking about What she could possibly want to know about Your tangled, unseen life The intimacy of recovery Or the scent of the money that you were making Remember that day? You were collecting yourself Waiting to serve up your memories Before a national TV audience Making logarithmic calculations About your soul's journey into the bright lights And the last one I'm going to read When I was at Haystack People would often give me Artwork to I could use it as a prompt work that they'd made I would look at, I'd read something And a glass blower, Kate Rhodes Wanted me to write a catalogue essay for her That was a poem, so she sent me a piece of hers Which was Glass baskets that were made of Merini, which are glass strands They were rolled and cut So you had long tubes of glass And they were stitched together Not that you'd have to know that for this So it's kind of a very airy structure And That's it Holding the light Gather up whatever is glittering in the gutter Whatever has tumbled in the waves Are falling in flames out of the sky For it's not only our hearts that are broken But the heart of the world as well Stitch it back together Make a place where the day Speaks to the night and the earth Speaks to the sky Whether we created God or God created us It all comes down to this In our imperfect world We are meant to repair and stitch together What beauty there is Stitch it with compassion and wire See how everything we have made Gathers the light inside itself And overflows a blessing Thank you So it gives me great pleasure To also introduce Alice Vogel To you Who is the poet laureate of New Hampshire Originally from Hudson Valley She's the former theatrical customer Who earned her B.A. in art In literature from Antioch College And her M.A. in poetry From the University of New Hampshire In addition to strange terrain A guide to appreciating poetry Without necessarily getting it She's the author Of five poetry collections Including Be That Empty In 2007 Interval Poems Based Upon Bach's Goldberg Variations An amazing book Which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award For Music and Literature And The Doubtful House In 2017 She's been an eight time push cart nominee And her poems appeared in many journals and anthologies In poetry Robert Hass's column Poets' Choice Vogel has been a fellow at the Carl Sandberg National Historic And recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship Among other awards She's been a reader or judge For numerous programs Or publications including Alice James Books and the Maine Arts Council Writing Grants Bohen Publishing I think I just watched that pronunciation pretty bad She travels around giving talks And workshops for all ages On both reading and writing Throughout New Hampshire And for the New Hampshire Councils On the Arts and Humanities She works with one on one With learning disabled students At Landmark College In Putney, Vermont Over and over again I'm stunned And Drawn to Alice's Deaf treatment of language in her poems These lines from her poem No less I think Summarize in a way that serves as a kind of Paris Poetica How she works, how she views the world Sometimes The smallest things waste out Small stones that we can't help Admiring and palming Look at the tiny way this Lighter vein got inside Look at the heavy gray dome Of its sky I'm going to end there. The rest of the Poet was just as good. Alice Thanks, Char. Good evening everybody Thank you for coming out Thank you to our hosts And this really interesting site That we get to read in I definitely could connect with What Stuart was saying Getting a supply of Words to write from I do this to myself all the time My makeup rules as I write And so I often will just grab my Favorite CD of the moment And look at the song titles And the album titles and just Make myself use all those words And whatever I'm writing at the time So I was writing Working on this poem that I'm going to Read first I'm going to be recording in octopuses And Pat Fargnoli Who was a previous New Hampshire Poet Laureate got in touch with me And said, I'm doing an anthology On poems about ice cream, you got any And I said, no, but I will tomorrow So I added ice cream Into this It's called Choices And it includes several Words and phrases stolen From the poet William Stafford You and your metaphysical Skateboard Are you encouraging good fortune In your own little ways? How do you act to make things Right when you swerve every Which way to avoid those Obstacles only you Find in the otherwise empty Park? Lucky you, you believe You can keep things by not Having them and by Wheeling around putting them down In ink. In the kitchen of your psyche The freezer is full Of ice cream A dozen glorious flavors And none edible Because not one of them is all of them Take heart Or never mind Alternatively Try thinking of amnesia As a form of revision Elapsed paralysis A stance Can we make good choices We can't even trust the world We navigate with our own senses Is it more heroic to be Like the octopus Flipping colors Depending on your arc Veering in eight directions All at the same time Aum's also come out of Things that I'm reading At the time and The Residency that I judged for The Soshiketsal one The Writer that we Allowed to be there for free This past winter Was a Scottish writer called Maliki Talik And he had this really Great book that I discovered About I think it was called The Undiscovered Islands Undiscovered Meaning that they were islands That were on maps Sometimes for centuries Very recently That never existed It's a really fun book And it's also very highly illustrated So I had islands on my mind And That I would write this poem about exploration And believing in Finding and or arrival The island Sailor Set a course in search of a Dead to lie in And an inhabited island Appearing as if in a myth About the treasure You're about the treasure Awaiting the pure of heart A heaven for the blessed Or for the only now Awakened You will find it as it appears Through heavy fog Or before the rising sun At midnight No one knows its coordinates Or how it got Precisely here Of all the points and patterns On the ocean Longitude of where And latitude of when Without recourse To predict whether It will exist the next time You approach it This island may be unseen From a distance May hover just beyond the risk Of running aground on rocks It's dangerous To misread stars To triangulate by the damp And rusted instruments You carry But forgo codes of Confluence, try the compass Of coincidence Sailor, disorient yourself Open your map Of mirage, your map Of immersion Although the names may change Always the cartographers Love claiming an island To be true Until it's proven imaginary They draw it in Unquestioning Century after century And explorers note In fine letters The floating city Its gardens, its gold Step on ground As if it's there As onto a lifeboat Pull around you the good Fortune of finding a phantom Blanket afloat On the sea Why shouldn't you seek Such a tempting destination Such a sweet figment Of shore? There the ripest mango Sway within reach From trees, foxes And deer watch Long feathers sweet past On wings, bedazzling Fish Weave in the fresh water Wherever you are Moonlight stretches Over the waves Into your arms. I've worked on several books that had themes. I've chart mentioned I wrote a book of poems based on Bach's Goldberg Variations And then I also wrote a collection Of poems that hasn't come out yet Based on Abstract expressionist art And I'll talk a little bit More about that later But recently, in recent years I've just been trying to write poems Not I felt like I was having a crutch It was a crutch for me to Have all these other inspirations That were always there for me to Plug an idea into So I've just been allowing myself To be influenced by separate things So I was working with a student recently On Camus' interpretation Of the Sisyphus myth As some of you might be familiar with And so The idea Of the Sisyphus Story The carrying up the hill of this rock That you have to continue to Every day do it again and again I decided to try to think of that In a more positive way And I decided that's what love is It's called then again What if To love is to be Swapped apart By love's own flung Distances And rejoined by its drenching Climes Each falling Between falling and Mastering the repetitive Of raising it back up To heights So it might fall again All of it, lit and sundered Into what can't be illumined Love Lifted and then lost Time after time Coming briefly To rest at the bottom The unbearable body of it A kind of seal That breaks away As if forever but not forever And rises elsewhere And then again Love moving As two seals Their weight, their density The massive steeping Of their wet bodies Pouring over each other Coming apart Each oceanic Each mountainous Simultaneously Sweat salted and sweet Solid and slippery What if light on the surface Fell And threw shadow down Light on the sea Limited itself by depths Light on the rock Made the rock Light All of it at once Love The rock yearning to be free To fall back alone To rest The arms aching To let it go And the rock yearning To be carried again The arms aching To hold the heaviness Of the burden You may have heard that Scientists have been able to stop Light from moving And trap it inside Of a quartz rock This actually has happened It can be inscribed and then sent along On its way There's a few useful applications I'm sure probably having to do With internet use So I'm really interested In science That often inspires me I'm also working on a project Right now In New Hampshire with New Hampshire women artists And poets We've paired each other up Every poet gets an artist For working on these collaborations So my artist Mary Kornog Has done a painting And this is my Poem that I wrote In response to the painting Which looks to me Like Rain On an ocean With layers multiple horizons About distance A bow strike sound From strings The way the horizon Weaves through a steady rain Distance hinges On distance Clouds can cool To near absolute zero You don't have to see What you've done To have done it Or what comes first Farther or farther still Water throngs On water Rain Skin when the winds Fingers play on me The mind can change While all else remains the same What did I think I wanted to know Or what did I wish Had been different In a lab Scientists slowed light speed To that of the wheels Of a bike Then stopped it How it fit inside a crystal Made transparent As a breath That might travel far With its new message Might streak across Night air to where The sun hasn't met its caten Yet. Weather time went on passing While the light filled the stone Obscured again While A melody paused Rain chords Resonant, massless A vacuum It stayed still Trapped apart When it was released A wave vibrates here In between the spokes That I hadn't been imprinted Like a beam of light And scent Sputtering over thresholds In the strokes of storms I'm not going to say anything To introduce this one. I think it will Just become apparent. It's called on what we can do Before it's too late. How can we cross a field? Do this from a long And cloudless day If we have not yet Entered the field Or the day Still in the woods I try to imagine the field ahead It's splush of Birds from brittle grasses It's fading Wilt of wildflowers Iris, daisy Lace And try to taste the last heat In my throat As I walk through the piercing Tinnitus of cicadas I want the field To be so real I feel the sharp Embedding of insects Teeth in my wrist I want to know the field Before it exists Or not at all Because my father Will die and until then What can I do before It is too late? Only walk beside him And hold his hand Which has a particular feel Dry with a kind Of river inside it And always has While in his particular way He holds mine Where is the field Between the forests Of imagine and know Where is the field I will be crossing When I walk alone Beside him without him Only remembering His hand So I am often inspired By art And I particularly Love what abstract Expressionist painters do For Victor and Liz DeNord Who Layer paint onto a canvas And scrape it and add more And scrape it and add more And it keeps on changing And each time it is something And it's beautiful But more and more happens And there's these layers And I thought maybe I'm trying to write a poem That did that somehow So this poem And it starts With the spareest Lines of words Which Hopefully say something And then Each new Poem takes those same words In the same order in the same lines But adds more to each line More words to each one And each time It changes The meaning changes What I've been really obsessed With fringes. I really like How fringes are kind of part solid And part air. And I've been writing poems That have these lines that are not Consistent. Some of them are long And some of them are short so they look kind of fringy. And so this poem is called The Fringe. I'm not going to say the numbers. I'll just pause between the three parts. The Fringe. A set of peers A perspective A delta Fastened to one edge And stretching to air Part free While attached Spills, strains, shapes Rivers, branches I want Loose open fingers Not the fist And the shore I want the fjord See my own momentum I can Move. A set of peers Affords a fluid Perspective. A delta It slivers, fastened To one edge And stretching to a multitude Part air Part free while attached It spills through Blue, strains The shapes that take Rivers, cleaving Frenches dividing I want Loose open fingers Not the fist The wish and the weight Hell me, sure I want the fjord Give me a boat and my boots By my own momentum I can Move what I have to The fringe is a set of peers That affords a fluid Perspective Is a delta It's angered slivers Fastened to land at one edge And stretching away to a multitude Of finite Elsewares Part air, part solid Part free while attached Attenuated It curves and spills its silk Through blue depths Green Strains the impermanent Shapes that take Form Cleaving cliffs Branches dividing sky And I just want This grief Let loose between Its open fingers Not the fist that was The wish and the weighting That held me to the unsure I want the rift And range of fjord Give me a boat and hand Me my boots I can take both land By my own momentum I can reach the point Of opposing truths Inhale, exhale Move and do What I have to do This will be my last one Sometimes people ask me How long it takes Me to use an idea That I gather an image Or something and sometimes it happens That day or it happens soon One time I think I was In middle school, in 8th grade I had this really great social studies teacher And he had us reading the New York Times Every day back when the ink was really smearing So you could tell it was in his class Because all day long you'd see The black smears all over our faces And our fingers And then there were these little fillers That I found really fascinating And one of the fillers This is like way back Before we knew what homeless people were We didn't have that word yet There was a filler about A man who was found dead in the bleachers After a baseball game And he was wearing his bedroom slippers That was all it said I cut it out And I taped it into my diary And about 30 years later I wrote a poem about it But this one's even longer Even a longer story So this time I was in high school And back in those days FM radio was new And you could listen to these The DJs would go on Sometimes for half an hour Telling a story and you could just Get completely wrapped up in it And drop everything Just sit there in your room Listening to these stories So that's what happened This one particular night This DJ told a story About Of some Place in the world where when people died They did this thing Which I'm not going to tell you Because it's in the poem And I just was so Mesmerized by it And I just finally Put it in a poem really recently So that's probably my longest Let's see That would be like about 40 something years So you just never know Come to fruition ever This is called Beautiful What if what you had Will be from a distance Clear Though it had been up close In decipherable It could end The day before tomorrow And not yet right Not enough Even then will you admit it How it might be like the moment Before you say a name You don't remember Until that moment Like when the chance Meeting meant love When the dying Become sure death As if there were no difference Will you know finally Will you want perhaps Everything Wish that when you wish Someone would do what Someone wished you would do You know you do Want to have made Something that beautiful What if you're never Forced to form it Mid-sentence, mid-life And you are not Ready when you do Slip into the cool Hole you dug Hand me down my flute You could say Reaching up Though you've never played A flute Then alone in those last days With your heart Emptying You play for your life. Thank you, Alice. So I was going to read a poem about my grandson Wilder's name is and he's from Maine He's from Portland And he's a little bit of a rebel I was going to read a poem about him But it slipped under the It's just like Wilder Just slipped right under There So I don't know if I'm going to be able to read It's right under there. It's okay I'll read it again sometime Um It's about picking potato, digging potatoes Within So I'm going to Start with a poem called The Beavers There are a lot of beaver poems around here Yeah We have beaver poems Some of the place in Southern Vermont And the farmers despise them Most of them Try to blow them up Shoot the beavers Including our neighbors So I wrote a poem about This trying not to make it sound too much like Mending Wall The old stone Savage armed They flooded the pasture My neighbor explained When we met this morning at the property line That divides the field from mine Which is also a meadow Although I call it a pasture I'm talking to him since a meadow Is not a place his cows would roam But a patch of paradise For picnics and lovers We've just been walking around To see what damage winter had done To the fence and trees When we met at the marker and greeted each other Then broached the weather And other things regarding spring The sap The grade It's run The snow, the herd The beavers They're heading this way as we speak he said I saw them in a dream Last night Spirits I thought Come back to teach the mysteries Of building houses in water But not it instead Like a dashboard doll Elders in the rooms of beavers Were the genius for damning I wanted to tell them But couldn't stop nodding in agreement But it's with his denial Of the fun he has Each summer exploding their houses With TNT Then shooting them from behind a wall Pests he called them When he really meant such perfect Moving targets for catching In the hairs of his 243 Good luck I said In a tone he didn't catch As I continued down A row of giant maples to the stream Of them To see if I could find some sign Of them as I had In previous years The prince of little hands in the loam And eaten trees But nothing yet Just the cold, dark water Sackets broke beneath the silence Of a cloudless sky Where a red-tailed hawk besieged By sparrows let out a cry And then another Go read This one next, it's called Getting Ruth Up When Ruth Stone who was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from I think 2008 to 2012 Something like that She was in bed most of the time Because she was 94, 95 And She was just tired and she'd done her work And so she just had the greatest This time, she was just a fantastic poet A national treasure Who never went to college And just found her Her poetry Went in herself From her incredible experience Of raising three daughters without a husband And living in Gosha without any potable water I don't know how she did it But anyway, she just Loved listening to PG Woodhouse In bed and laughing all day For five months I tried to get Ruth out of bed To sit in her chair and maybe Stand for a while No, she said I don't have the strength anymore in my legs And besides, I'm blind But I had read her poems I knew how truthful she was as a liar And so continued to urge her To rise like the paralytic From his palate and walk At least sit up and move around Before her muscles quit And then one day a granddaughter A milliner came in And asked her to try one of her hats A 1940s felt classic With a feather And wear it as she once did A similar hat 60 years ago When Walter was still alive And she did Taking her time to swing her legs Like arms under the floor And stand, then walk again As if she could see just Wear a pose in the parlor And smile for the camera A mile no longer And walk back into her bright dark room And slept We Have this little co-op Putty Co-op right off 91 Probably a lot of you have gone there Got in a latte off of 91 Or carrots Or apples or something Alan Ginsberg has this wonderful poem called At a supermarket in California And I thought we should have one on the east coast Putty Co-op In opera It has a little Pepper graph By Alan Ginsberg here We will stroll dreaming of the lost America Of love past blue automobiles And driveways home to our Side of the cottages Alan Ginsberg Go ahead I say to my neighbor At the Putty Co-op Who tells me he can't complain Let it out When there's still two feet of snow on the ground Fukushima has just Melted down in the Washington Monument Cracked at its Pyramidian Put down your bags and sing How many times, dear Father Greybeard, lonely old Courage teacher, must he walk down the aisles As a randy eagle In humming your tunes for us to start Our song begins In silence and grows to a buzz We make it up as we go along Then watch our numbers swell Ten thousand members Who have eyes to see and ears to hear Why, who fly like a swarm To join us in our chambers Which are these aisles I'm singing without knowing it Carrying the tune of main things Lamenting the prices with Bernice Anders My neighbor joins me for no other Reason than singing along As a member of the cast We call the multitudes of Lonely shoppers I roam the aisles with the sadness Of America Juggling onions, blessing with beats It's a local stage on which The country opens like a flower And no one sees beside the road That no one sees beside the road In my hungry fatigue I'm shopping for images Which are free on the highest shelf But costly in their absence The only ingredient here That heals my sight of blindness I see you, Walt Whitman Here toward Axis Mundi By the avocados Reading the labels as if they were Lines weighing the tomatoes On the scale of your palms Pressing the pairs with your thumbs The way you did in Huntington, Camden And Brooklyn And you also Ruth and Hayden And Galway and Maxine At the checkout counter with empty bags You claim are full of apples, almonds And bananas What can you say to those outside Who find it hard to get the news from poetry But die miserably every day For the lack of what is found there It's night The Connecticut slips by Across Route 5 The moon is my egg and stars my salt I score the music of the carrots Scallions in corn and the frost Of the freezer windows The south of traffic at 91 Washes my ears with the sound Of tires on Blue Macado The door is closed in an hour Will both be lonely when we return On the long dark roads To our silent houses I touch your book And dream of our odyssey Westward to a field in Oregon Kansas or California Where we plant our oars and die Ironically where we finish Our journey of strangers in our native land These are the lyrics to our song In the aisles The buzz of the swarm with our queen At the center What America did you have Old Howler When you scattered into the sky Then floated like a cloud As another form in the making Outside of time Forgetful at last And empty of all you sang I was worried it was going to startle somebody Just falling around I mean you got it It was easy Thank you So should I read about Wilder Thank you very much Maybe for the better So digging potatoes Of my grandson Wilder The smell of apples And turning leaves filled the sky With autumn scents that lingered longer Now in mid-October Time to dig them up I said to Wilder Who had been waiting since June To harvest them then carry them up In a basket to his mom and dad To cook for dinner But where are they grandpa he asked I can't see them They're in the ground I said we have to dig At which he looked confused But ready to dig We'll dig together I said Okay okay he said And then reached down to feel the ground With a touch of fear As if he needed to feel the soil first With his little hands like a druid priest Laying his palms on the sacred hills And then while watching me on earth A giant red that didn't bite And dug down himself And found not one but five Beneath the stem that looked Long dead though still attached To many more he Digging I said oh man He yelled as he held One up in his dirty hand So swag grandpa So swag That's a true story So I Think that Think some of your sugars In here I know One person is A lake sugar and season Apparently a pretty good one this year I used Sugar a lot When I worked at the Putney school for many years Over spring break With the students who decided to stay Over and experience The hard work of sugar And the talk That sometimes takes place In the sugar house At the Socratic sugar house I said the steam Was like a ghost in the sugar house And you said that didn't mean anything to you Since you didn't believe in ghosts So I said how about a cloud then And you said but it isn't a cloud Either it's steam Why do you want to make it something it isn't I was only imagining I said don't you ever imagine What for To see things I see plenty It's dangerous to see more than what's there But if you don't you don't see What's there Like ghosts Well yeah, ghosts and other things That I said to you that the steam is a ghost That haunts the house What would you say I'd say you're crazy What's real is here in every place else I'm not saying it isn't I think the same but What about those things you can't see You've lost me now You better keep your mind on the pan I'm looking back And ahead at the same time When I stare at the sap My mind is the fire that boils the sap That turns to syrup That sounds nice enough But crazier still than what you said before About the ghosts and clouds Now run that off before it burns Do you think that someone Who thought that steam was like nothing else In the world invented syrup That's what I mean by looking back Wondering what someone saw Something that wasn't yet real But hidden there So when I look at the steam And see a ghost I'm only dreaming of course I know it's steam but I'm also saying There are things inside of things The world's the way it is Always knowable in the end Always hard with evidence If you look close enough I looked at something once And called it sugar by mistake The little sweetness we get Comes from so much work 40 gallons of sap to one of syrup You look at the steam And see a ghost I look at the steam And see my grief We're close enough in that I guess So let's leave it there Either way it comes to nothing In the air above the roof So I commute to Rhode Island About twice a week Refuse to live down there Or um I sometimes get nasty old Notes on my car That tell me to go back to Vermont Especially when I park too close To someone else in front of me But I've been down there For almost 20 years teaching And uh Providence College has been Very good to me and So um I uh Head down there every Every Monday Tuesday depends on the Days, at least on my schedule And sometimes I forget my wallet So I have to stop in Um I have to stop sometimes in Northfield To go all the way back and get it Which is a great annoyance But I've noticed that on my trip back To Putney That I see the whole world anew I um So I've This happens often enough So that I feel like I'm returning to get something I forgot it's like a ticket To see the world anew So return is ticket When I'm forced to return home To retrieve something I've forgotten I enter a double zone that's the same road I just went down but I'm Returning on now with an altered vision Of it's sameness That turns it into another road Which is so different I hardly know What to call it as I speed Forward and heading back Everything that's so familiar The fence posts past your elms And burdock is suddenly Strange through the lens of inconvenience It's almost a dream But not really More consequence of accepting My mistake which allows me In turn to see if even briefly So many things I've hidden As if my mind needed To forget to save my heart From the haste that governs my life Something shines In the distance I call it the lamp of internal difference That needs the spark of my seeing anew To light it's mental Then everything I see I know was once forgotten And lay in the dark behind the light I hear the cries of them All as parts of the whole And the stuff of wheels In the absence of the single thing That I've forgotten And then the loss of those I can't redeem As well as that quiet The home of a powerful engine And slap of tires on wet macadam I notice too That the cobalt sky has now Become the vault for all I feel on the road of my remembering It is my ticket For the maddened nave my own showing This turning back To fetch my wallet This foreign film I title Late again with burning captions I think I'll just read A few more short ones here We're lucky enough to have A few hermit thrush Outside in our woods Which of course you can't ever see Has anyone seen a hermit thrush before? You have seen them That's what you're lucky I mean they're They do look like I know the pictures of them So I know they exist But they're so hard to see And if you go out there in the woods They try and find them They're camouflaged and they fly away But that song is just Magic The state bird of course The hermit thrush The hermit thrush is set for six To sing his song as if it were The end of the world And he was stirred by dust To sing the same sweet song Again and again in the end Of the story As if to say It's neither words nor meaning That matters in the end But the quality of sound As if we were deafened By the sun and needed his song It's a key to unlock our ears To hear and hear And understand To see and see Knowing that this one day Is the end for now Which it is He claims But the song just loud enough To pierce the woods Until the night descends Like a thousand bagels And then just one So bird You know Birds fly against our windows All the time They look dead for ages And sometimes they are Often sparrows Small black eye Nice stunt but still alive In the periwinkle A victim of the window That appears as air In the kingdom of birds I picked her up and placed Her wing against my face As she came around All the world Sky Grass Trees Shown inside her small black eye That was perfectly still Like a stone That could see Thank you very much. I love to take your picture. I'm the poem city director And this is Michelle Singer The poem city coordinator And for years we've worked together At first it was as a volunteer And then as coordinator Because there are many things to do To organize poem city And this year one of the many things That Michelle did was to Place the poems with the venues And we had over 500 poems To place at venues That's a lot of work And she made a lot of the contacts With presenters And so I wanted you to know Who Michelle Singer is We'd like to invite all of you to come out Into the next room We have food and drink And perhaps get to know Our poets And we'll be back Let's get to know our poets Laureate a little bit more And they also have books for sale And there are poems By the poets Laureates Laureate Out in the other room And I hope you take the time to read them They are also in and around town Marygold Adorman On East State Street Has one poem And Vermont League of Cities and Towns And the library Also has poems By Alice Stewart and Shard And your readings were Marvelous It was really The three poet laureates From Northern New England To come here because I am A Northern New England person Born in Maine, went to college And lived in New Hampshire, went to UNH And now live in Vermont And so this was my dream And thank you for making My dream come true Join us in the next room And thank you Kim, Kathleen, Thomas Is out there For making it happen here They are great poets