 I'd like to thank Poem City and the Kellogg-Hubert Library. I think I told you my name, and Charles, I'm going to be your moderator today. And let's go forward. Let's start with Kim Ward, who is a poet and playwright and a visual and theater artist. You may have seen Kim around town in various incarnations, theatrical, poetic, and otherwise. She's the founder of the Vermont Playwright Circle and received her MFA in performance poetry from Goddard College in 1998. Her play, Angel in the Fire, received the 1999 Playwright Showcase Award by the Vermont Actors and Theater Artists Association. She was also accepted into the New Frontiers Conference of 2000. She has lived in Montpelier for over 20 years and teaches English at Norwich University. Welcome, Kim. Thank you. Lovely introduction. So I have this book that's coming out very soon, but I also have copies of it tonight, if anyone would like a copy. I used to be that person who would say, oh, they're reading from their book. Do they need to do that? And I'm like, oh, I get it. But this is where it all is, right? But I do have something that I pulled out that's apropos of the eclipse as well. Oh, you know what? I got to go get my glasses. I can either see you or read the page. Let's see. It's interesting when I try to choose poems deciding for this night, what are you going to read? And I find there are some poems I read more in LGBTQ settings than other settings. So that's what I'm doing. This is called Recovering Wife Speaks. Hurry. Close the gap between betrothal and denial, between passion and understanding why my wings did not beat once in 30 years of living. Last night I dreamt a great turtle was running with me on its back. Proof reading the desert, it insisted we were on a mission. We met a woman with a wild red mane. She fed me sweet apples. Her lover, confusing women with eagles, had chased her out with a shotgun in the middle of the night. We proof read the desert together. The turtle gave up its shell for us, and we swam in its bowl of ocean. She was laughing water, and I was in the driver's seat. My smile bordering on cool until I saw her slender hand poised to touch the horrific past before me and awoke alone. I promised myself I'd put on a timer. I wrote that, maybe you can tell as I was getting divorced from my ex-husband. He was not a bad guy. This is called The Vision. There was going to be a fire, I saw it. The bookcase was a flame burning through the dark, words spitting outward like stars. When I got home it was over. The kitchen window gaped blackly. It made me shiver to think how close I'd been to death. While picking through bedroom ashes, the night came back to me. We'd tried to rub loneliness from our bodies. Your drunkenness was full of new shyness. My fear of entanglement, a raw river that parted the flames between us until I became a lone flame whispering. Became a dark warmth, a space at the center of your eye, a wing in the sternum of a woman. A word I could not hear and the word fit itself inside the cry of an owl that beat its wings against me until you spoke. Your tongue sending forth rivers of truth that finally did not burn the darkness but scattered it like stars. That poem was written as I was coming out as a bi-woman and a friend of mine was coming out and transitioning. That's kind of the backstory of that. Ooh, someone's in trouble. So it's screaming out there. Ooh, this is called The Way We See the World. The way we see the world crumbles into new country, the moment we dance outside of the circle. The way you move entices me out, leaves me dreaming we are lovers. Do you know the desert inside of me? See yourself become the great breath let out upon the sand, the large crack running through the belly of my world. I put my hand to your cheek, which dissolves into black night's brow, into lightning traveling a warrior's queen's skin. New skies open up in my ribs until I cannot breathe. You are the beating wing of tenderness, country of origin unknown, beauty unmistakable. That was a poem I wrote for my now ex-partner who I was with almost 18 years, we're still close. That was when we first started dating but then she also suffers from a lot of depression. So I have a few poems in here that deal with depression and this is called Ghost Still. Automare seeps into your summer house. You go still inside and feel the swirl of stars buoy you. You go still and deep and let the incision be the path. Let the slow solid pump of that muscle, the deep heart carry you through. What courses in my veins is poison in eternal life. It's gamma ray and goddess shine. I forget that among the tumult of the day until automare seeps into my summer house and I go still and feel the swirl of stars buoy me. So there's three sections in this book. The first one is love poems, poems dealing with just personal relationships. The second one is a group of poems that I wrote after several years of studying the runes and it attempts to use what the Nordic etic verse format was and that's where the title fire in a circle comes from. So I thought why not read the title poem, the poem that sort of created that title. These are very short single lines, single stanza poems and the word I'm going to use which is the title is Raido, R-A-I-D-O and it means journey and in particular journey on horseback or journey to self. Raido, wheel of days, crushes a month of thunder beneath a teal. The journey is pleasure while the world is a flame I follow. I dip myself in the water of the rains, live off of the land and the land I travel is strange. Give me the hand you want held out Raido. Let my horse flow only when it's at the end of our trail so that I may know when to stop. The pursuit is fire on a circle, water anointing my bare head and the clear aster of a new moon sky blazing blackly above. It's the only rune poem I'll torch you with. Those have been kind of fun to write because I'm trying to understand these ancient runes that people carved into trees and rocks where they had totally different cultural mindsets but just trying to bring them into the modern day for myself. This poem is actually a tiny bit from my play Angel on the Fire that was mentioned. It's called Harvest Time. It's very short so I'm going to wait till it says that. It's very short. Red Moon this morning. I am walking barefoot in puddles and find the hogs have been killed uphill. That's spoken by a character that represents my grandmother. She grew up on a 250 acre farm in Richmond which when it flooded everybody in town came to their farm and she was helping do everything at eight years old. This is a short one called Fever that's also from Angel on the Fire. When you caught the fever, it wasn't the doctor who told your mother what to do. It was the whiskey and water to break the fever. The burning of the body brought down by liquid fire. We brought you through like a horse brought through a burning barn while down in the yard drifting up to us through the cold frost came the sound of your grandfather praying. Again so this play I wrote is about three generations of women living in Vermont. My mother used to say that her grandmother said what you need when you're sick is whiskey and red liniment and I'm like what the heck is red liniment? And she said we have no idea. Who knows? What were people giving them? But that's what she would do. The whiskey obviously broke the fever. This poem comes from, there's a quote that I love from Andrea Lone Chu's book called Females which talks about gender and the female situation of feminism. And the quote she had is in the combination of Eve plus testosterone would produce Adam in her world. Formula, fire, vessel, strap. In what way did I truly first come to pass? Eclipse skip turn. My skin truly burns to be let loose on the cobblestones of the city and if I had been thicker, taller, less pretty had the formula have raged over a bunsen a bit longer than would I have surely been the king of my own destiny the queen left behind in the mud pit in the tin plus estrogen minus father equals trailer of my childhood home to rot. And so last but not least I did dig out a different piece that comes from that. I was studying haiku and Renga poetry a lot when I was in my master's program and Renga were these poems that you would always have to include the moon and flowers in and they're very similar, they're precursors to haiku but this is a little longer than a haiku. The moon blocks out the sun today for a brief moment night at noon. I am eight, the cement steps have a hole beneath them bees dip and fly silently between my legs waiting for me to move until you come and pick me up in the dark and we watch the moon docy-doe with the sun visions of old apocalyptic stories fresh on our minds then the sound of the bull in the field across the way startles me and you take me inside. Thank you Kim. I forgot to tell you that there are books on sale in the rear so after the reading you might want to ask the poets to sign them and purchase a copy. Our next reader is Linda Quinlan whose book Chelsea Creek was published by Brickhouse Press and was the recipient of the Wicked Women's Poetry Award and I think Linda is a wicked woman. That's my first perspective. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals some of which include Sinister Wisdom and the New Orleans Literary Review. She was poet of the year in Wisconsin and is working on a manuscript for another book. Welcome Linda. You mean the brand new home now, Wicked Woman? That's right. Yes. I'm going to start out with a fairly new poem that I've been working on and it's not my proudest moment but it was a moment. So it's called Secrets. I've kept your secret 40 years. I carried a bag of money to a woman patient of yours that was blackmailing you. The day was snowy. I couldn't find my boots in the back of the closet were so much as buried and forgotten. The white coat you discarded at her apartment smelled antiseptic. With a small dot of blood on the collar you would have never noticed. I hand over a paper bag filled with money working class lesbian swagger. I warn the woman to never ask again. Leave word with your receptionist that your house is cleaned and yes, I locked the door. I blink and here we are retired and sipping tea on the patio before your husband comes home. We've had some interesting times haven't we and click our tea cups and smile. The gazebo is still overgrown with ivy that tangles together holding up our old furnished wood with splinters as big as our lives. So like I've said, not my finest moment. And this is another not finest moment. And it's about my cousin and it's called babysitting Danny. Danny and I met for the last time at a fifth street bar two doors down from his mother's old haunt where I ran numbers for her to the book he joined across the street. My hand reaches for him then retreats. He is a tear waiting to fall on my cheek. I taught him to steal at Woolworth's. He emptied his small pockets and delivered his hall to older girls he wanted to please. Balloons, eyeliner and candy lips that bled into our mouths. His mother was 43 when she was found dead empty pill bottles beside her no last words in an apartment above Katz bagels. I wanted to steal something for him to give him his mother's laugh the way she held a martini and a cigarette. I paid for his beer and offered nothing more. He lagged behind me my car door opened and shut. Six months later he's dead. Beer bottles on the floor California sun on my face when I get the call. A gun in his hand no suicide note a lone picture of his mother on the nightstand. And this is your fine woman? No, this is well, I have a lot of finest women which I'll leave more of later but this is called Blood Suckers. I'm bored, do you ever go with your parents to like your relatives on Sunday afternoons and you wanted to just like pull your hair out? This is about that anyway. I'm bored visiting aunts. My parents sent me off to a pond down the road. Water lilies play with me, a comfort the way friends are when you're 11 and nothing else matters. The bottom is murky. I try to stay afloat and I feel older as I look at a boulder half submerged the way adults seem when they're lying to you. The thing is when you're young when you're young murmurs from the kitchen sink into you Carol is pregnant the boy is a jerk the mental hospital killed your grandfather when I touch the boulder my wet hands on my face it seems to be sobbing but it's just me kicking my feet to stay afloat my parents call me from the car and I move slowly to be annoying I'm sure there are black spots on my skin my father notices them the same time I do and he yells to my mother go get the tweezers they are between her toes at home my mother's on the phone the way she is when I hit scarlet fever and they quarantine the house my hallucinations of dying ducks and giant people telling me I'd be okay while praying on their knees beside my bed and out of the new poems I will read Father Tom and I could say that again this is not my favorite my finest hour I don't know I had a rough childhood funny anyway Father Tom a priest at St. Rose 45 years after phase of suicide Tommy finds me on Facebook his sister perched behind his familiar eyes a distant queen of someone long gone he was 12 and I 14 when I taught him to French kiss I had totally forgotten what he remembered as divine he asked for pictures of his sister and I had many tees brown hair, black nylons and a look of toughness we all flaunted in one she's standing beside I'm sorry we all flaunted in one she's standing beside Diane who carries a switch blade in her pocket we didn't talk about the mental hospital how we scammed to break her out give her back her daughter stolen from her arms and moved to New York City her daughter is 55 now brought up in some suburb I hope she is loved has a fuck you swagger and devours Italian food neither of us cries until one day I'm in the car and the oldie station plays Tommy can you hear me I was a pinball wizard at Revere Beach phase cheered me on and insisted we hang by the Himalaya rising our voices towards the waves before the time that nothing would bring her joy sorry I went to the wrong page okay anybody here from Boston or around Boston or no okay yeah alright so this one is called Chelsea Mass and actually the poem I read about Danny was her son this was my aunt and so it's called Chelsea Mass then as her February birth my aunt Evie swayed with every half-tone the spontaneous steps of a child living outside Newfoundland the fishing village of her family's past this wasn't New Orleans where she might have had a chance where anger and creativity collide this was Chelsea a city of bad daughters and warlike sons where nothing grew but immigrants and hunger her father's madness beckoned him to an ocean death but instead he crawled into dementia soaked in beer and sadness the smell of urine even when he slept my aunt married one son a man back from the war in Europe his pale violence swelling out of every room made him a ghost she danced at home over the kitchen tile that curled in the corners she danced in circles while her daughter slept until her husband took their child away punishing her dance commanded a beat from the suburbs and snapped his fingers again and again and again until even her suicide seemed clumsy a little on the lighter side which is, you know, hard but so this one is called Regrets I know it doesn't sound it but it really is my father my favorite coffee-stained cup teeters on the dish rack where a precarious balance of glasses faces the blinds that refuse to shut and all the women I've disappointed gather on the front porch swing dangling rebukes and every day while walking to work on Canal Street I want to pay the half-blind gospel preacher to stop a friend gave me a ceiling fear that stopped spinning and Barbara knew I lied after we hitched to Montreal her hands stayed closer to her sides on those long night walks we took where motorcycles roared outside the frenzy of getting somewhere in a chrome shiny life that left no apologies my half-unpacked suitcase leans against the salvage antique rocker too delicate for sitting and I remember fly fishing with my father avoiding all obstacles we cast a wider and wider circle over the grass in the back yard and this last poem um I guess it's well it's about Montpelier and I just have to read it when I went to Montpelier I don't know it's a little sarcastic um so um hang in there Montpelier Ramon the potty was crowded with women all white and all middle aged and still I felt out of place no meryl boots tucked neatly by the door and the wood stove had a pumpkin kind of face that threw heat but not nearly enough a woman's size and stretches her purple wool socks slouched down around her ankles says this is the best place in the world to live the village is full of smug contented people with nowhere to go after 9 o'clock I wonder where she's been to believe this but I don't ask certainly not to Barcelona or Mexico where the buzz twinkles in mid-light melodies of bodies and if you fall into it in a ditch in the dark it's your own damn fault yes there is good healthcare here and progressives and endless winters so I leave the village often carry with me the conflicted beauty of mountains that smother and soothe breasts of contentment thank you thank you Linda now our next reader is a local luminary also and I hate to mention it but I know it's a poetic setting but if you have political inclinations you may see Sam Stockwell's name on the ballot for mayor just a shameless plug unrelated to poetry maybe Sam Stockwell has published an Agni North American review and the New Yorker among other publications her new book in the back I presume Musical Figures is published by 30 West Publishing House her two previous books Theater of Animals and Recital won the National Poetry Series and the Editors' Prize at Elixir respectively she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival first poem prize was selected as the Editors' Choice at Pan Ampley and was the Editors' Choice for Brian Mill Press Sam welcome thank you I'll start with a couple poems I will start by making sure I know what time it is can you put the microphone down a little let me do this first period brave Mrs. Kenley turns her back on the first grade and like a grass fire from raw blade to raw blade enmity spreads Mr. Hawkins twist paper clips around his knuckles Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Hall sit at their stern desks squinting at long absent children shuddering at the mirage of Theodore his head clean and empty as a silver pond no cultivated seed grew in his acre no stray fact lodged between his teeth the void must be extracted that was the clock for Theodore Mrs. Thompson remembers him without even the fondness one feels for a good meal city bus I was I was a somewhat sickly child and so I had pneumonia for like a long long time in the hospital city bus my fever hovered over long evenings in the hospital and the nurse said you're going to be here forever in clean linen sheets but gasping with my books beside me but silenced unlike the boy in the next bed over whose brain was erupting who cried when they moved him released and returned to school I got on the wrong bus the lip of the door sealing and the lurch forward on furious rounds I traveled to streets I didn't know clasped in my waiting my father served in World War II and that was an experience that really he continued living in throughout the rest of his life dining out when my father climbs out of the restaurant he's 10 years older his hands mottled in the sun when he resurfaces scared he returns for a drink he goes back to his table and his war buddies are there when he leaves the sidewalk is being bombed he falls to the ground tastes cement dust he rejoins his buddies laughing the war drops him behind enemy lines his outstretched hand reaching towards us 40 or 50 years past he can't remember he leaves the restaurant an old man trying to cross the street to his front porch lilacs and bloom and ivy climbing the chimney my parents married each other several times of course to do that they had to divorce they divorced several times wow categories my father's sputtering conversation clapped in time to ice knocking in his drink look at that my mother says to atrocity and the price of bacon catastrophes of equal measure she paints fairies on tea cups and walks the street handing out dollar bills my mother sorts her collection of sugar packets and plastic bags all the kids have sided with her father the police the pastor none rescue her despite her frequent calls his physical therapist the receptionist none save him though my mother thinks each his secret lover and the social workers bumping against each other on the narrow couch have neither love nor cure she moves to the microwave the meals she made the loads of laundry she cuts one leg off his dress pants she mails each child an empty box don't you believe people can do anything if they try? asked my sister I shook my head my parents for an argument emptied of everything but motion my father sawed her paintings in hack she threw his medication into the snow the green and blue traces like lively worms after we divided them after my mother's stroke I would hang jewelry on her when my father came to visit my father marooned in the place he wanted cries over the phone I miss her so much he sends her a letter you don't have any friends now do you? one more poem from this road trip we slept by the highway in west virginia I don't remember how we made it that far by morning the gullies of the sleeping bag were filled with snow in the few houses strewn beneath the overpass we could smell cornbread frying and hear dogs because his parents were wealthy he was supposed to bring money he unrolled a candy bar and a quarter his broad shoulders shaking as he wept we turned back a long way from new jersey I knew somebody in the splatter of houses would take us in I wanted him to show he was meek and slowly nod to show I was wise and now I will fumble with some of the poems in here sprite and sprite in this case refers to the soda not the fairy my wife I have insomnia a lot and so sleep is a treasured and rare visitor my wife untangled me from a spurt of sleep and in the dark cold snow crust we skippered over to our neighbor his top half collapsed over his lower brazed in the snow by one fist the wheelchair hunched over his back his head inching to the snow his head inching to the snow at the end of the ramp his voice softer than dark but JR death had hurt him as she limped along the road with the urgent need of the dog at the coldest hour and now the two old of us maneuvered him back in his chair and back into his house we quenched on empty soda cans by the ramp and we also have empty cans and pets to be rich with and where was his lonely mother who talks with her Chihuahua as a fewer reason and temperance and temperance my family came from deepest darkest central main so everything south of main was the south and they they didn't go out a lot apple cake the afternoon clouds came out in the afternoon sky my uncle was taking us for a long ride the ride goes by a paper mill where he worked in the long nothing of closed stores and stubs of forest like the memory of youth only partially furnished and visited on occasion he wasn't looking anyway he was caught in the now with his odd nieces and their stray comments they would have cake with his wife later and return to the south which as often as he had visited he had no language for when I was in college often well not often but occasionally some people would just break down because college is stressful and it's and there you are you're away from your home and family and you're in a completely different environment and this was Goddard so it was a really different environment she was blonde she said she needed to scream so I walked with her on the lawn of the campus you know how you see a mistaken assumption stroking its broken heart the ambulance arrived for her dizzy head one shrieking one screaming I could never scream it wouldn't come back out broke like that yawning and numb I was a poor handmaiden to madness familiar but not encouraging you remember how canal street feels like the backstage for an idea of a city forbidden only the creators wander here not the creations and spandex and jokes stuttering under streetlights this is about some well it's called the mechanics dining at back street grill and it's about mechanics dining at back street grill so it's in the voice of one of the mechanics yes I guess I could measure my wealth in the times when I haven't been bored my body leaning as if I was confused laundry on a windy day bellows inside and out my poor buffeted brain but awake rejoined if I had wealth this would have to be it Daniel said we were flung high but was interrupted a burp abruptly by an outsider and not so bright more like the dim in a broom closet it made me feel better about my failures I murmured odily to Alex and I chewed on a cigar with my bourbon as though I was mighty I'm not complaining although I wanted before I was my mother's a hand on my brow signifying greatness an emollient bestowing a secret mark and ever after a cake without compare I'll read a couple more like Kim I teach English I teach at community college of Vermont this sermon on composition a sentence Michelle is an equation it needs two balanced parts tired sentences and fresh sentences both it won't make you old to know this you've learned harder things if it is Emerson you have to blame for the state of modern poetry then surely it is Thomas Aquinas you must blame for your essays all human passion underlates in a form like geese tethered in an arrow you keep your eye on the horizon whatever has fallen will rise up whatever has risen will have its low moment fame and grief follow the same path even in the complex fortunes of a young woman one more getting there soon cold war my father made a still next to our air raid shelter the men pass the jug around choking and weeping their faces blistering saying this is a good then the rare great aunts arrived in identical floral bosoms each mashed my face in her cleavage and fluffed my hair with embroidered handkerchiefs the men wiped their bright lips on their arms in girlish embarrassment jostling the cigarette packs rolled in the sleeves of their t-shirts thank you thank you Sam now we have a fourth reader who hasn't appeared yet he's making his way from the northeast kingdom here on eclipse day but in the interim I thought maybe we would take some time and chat with the poets in the form of a Q&A and I have a question I'd like to start off with my favorite question and poets don't often sometimes don't like to answer but I'll just pose it anyway I'm ready I'm always interested in literary influences so would you mind talking about your literary influences and I think this attaches and we can come to you if you I know I'm used to this question well as a kid it was of course Emily Jenkins right and as a young adult and in my twenties it was like soviet plath sexed in and and then as later when I came out and it was RJ Lunard and Adrian Ridge it was Adrian Ridge and a lot of lesbian poets and so those were my main influences I also really like Eileen Miles I sort of feel like she's a working class poet and I'm sort of able to work a class poet and or at least you know I was and so her style and her sort of attitude I really like a lot so anyway there you go it's like oh a lesbian poet it would just be great so I love to work because she was alive and it was my first choice but when I got to college I was introduced to a number of poets and I really liked and I went directly from undergraduate school to graduate school in creative writing so I was really immersed in all the poets at that time so I probably read Barbara Kos who was spoken to by the fellow part certainly Louise Klick and Ellen Foy because they were my teachers and then I found John Baron and the world like opened up for me and I didn't read any of my more abstract work but his voice is so powerful oh and a gay poet in Boston in the western night that's an excellent book and I remember reading that but I read it from cover to cover and then I read it again from cover to cover that was a glorious shock a lot I read her when I was in the 40s I was really impressed with some of the things that she doesn't want to be tied up with there are so many people I would say almost everybody you said definitely also some of the folks that you said I read when I got to college I discovered some really fun people including Ann Sexton Octavia Paz I became obsessed with Octavia Paz and all of the Latin American poets because of course I took a Latin American seminar but I took this course in the 80s at Johnson State called the back experience which was one of those rare times when they really did talk about racism in the country I remember at Hintesapashan Gaze for color girls who have considered purple with suicide with the rainbow was enough and because she was doing poetry on stage that was what really hooked me because I'm a theater baby at heart but I also love poetry and Maris Wolf who teaches I think still there was doing dance to poetry Emily Dickinson I got to go to her house last year it had just been refurbished anyway and I turned around because they said this door was not on you know when they died the house did some amount today or something they took the front door off but the curator said we were really lucky that they saved the door for some reason and we recently put it back so I turned around and I touched the handle and I was like I just thought it was the coolest thing but yeah those are some of them I just recently refurbished her brother's house we tried to go to his house but it's just barely been finished maybe this summer other questions or comments I have a question what is it like writing these songs in private I'm assuming then now you're sharing them in public here you should have them in your books compare that experience with your mother writing it in private and then presenting it in public I know I'm thinking about that because I never write it I'm like that too I'm asking but in the moments that I am it's like in the elevator going to my apartment or sitting outside it will come to me what I'm thinking about I'm one of those people that maybe everybody is I don't know but to sit down and think now I have something that I want to work on and that's because I'm never private I'm so social I'm like who's meeting me for coffee today where are we today but anyway to answer your question the solitude of it I really like and it's also really really hard so that's my nature sticking to it I think for me I would absolutely echo like I'm such an extrovert and I used to write three lines I go over reading brand new poem I just wrote this it might be crap and I would read it and some poets are not like that I know from just knowing but I think the bigger difference for me was writing that was the big difference because I remember writing some poem in college and I was not out at all and I showed it to my advisor and he said why all this sumterfuse why just not say this is a lesbian relationship because I ran away terrified when I come to something like this I'm like what do I read I have this one poem I wrote out safer sex during AIDS epidemic it's probably the most lesbian poem I've ever written and so it's that difference but sitting down alone to write sometimes I mean I have just recorded something in the car because our new car has like a memo and I'm like oh crap you gotta get it down and we must have that experience there's a lyric I've got written down so it just kinda comes out of you someone's gonna listen to it I hope that's why I write the writing in my closet that's much better reading it in public is hard it's a bit of a challenge and I'm such a big fan of John Baron so he's on YouTube so you can meet these old YouTube's of John Baron and read his poetry well he read it completely wrong here I even read it you put the emphasis there are you sure dude because I know that poem by heart so for me the poems that I love are poems that I know from paper and someone else said this but once a poem's on paper it's your experience it's not the thing that someone has produced it's what you've made of it so it is really different sometimes I have great responses or terrible responses to my poems reading them and I think it is all the performance and not necessarily which is different from music I think it takes great bravery to get out and read a poem I just have to say that because as someone who is a musician I play guitar and sing to get up there and speak without anything and people even clap after each poem I mean do you live that moment when you finish a poem the whole audience goes mmmmmm you ended a poem till I know that's it that's what we love about it it's everything like a vlog I like that it was really like a disinpoetry reading on zoom where you're most muted and hearing people's attention what you really hear through their breathing it was like reading to a wall so that was much harder I listened to you during the last of that time and I had a man that I played around to he did zoom concerts and it was like people are really in the group chat they love it you have to see the chat that is true so when you play music it's not how it is for you guys have a show Sam was my mother's mentor she was my father my father just graduated she went to bar she graduated I think it takes a lot of bravery to write a poem when I think of some of the stuff you're talking about it's very and I love what Kim said about coming up because I've read a collection from a friend and she changed the pronouns and I thought other questions or comments I think there are a lot of artists in the room I know but it's strange so I'm a historian I translate old French journals that's what I do but every now and then I wake up in the morning and there's a complete poem in my mind and I have to go and write it down and it is absolutely complete and I didn't know I was writing it so does that happen to you guys at all? in there at least one of the poems I read the one about the I met a woman with a wild red mane we rode on a turtle that was a dream the two I read at the opening where I just woke up one morning and they were completely done and I didn't know I was doing it it happened sometimes like when I did I was like ok I'm done and it just came out I was like ok so that was one that just was kind of kind of wrote itself some are excruciating trying to find the right word trying to find the right phrase you know and the subject matter might be really difficult also I have a question for you too speaking of that you know Sam Colbert who runs Roots Up Publishers I was amazed in putting this book together I've been performing this poem that I literally wrote in the car in my head it's one of the only poems I know in my heart especially in this book I read oh that needs to be why are men not men do you feel like that's part of the process too for you guys there's always a little something to tweak and never quite done well sometimes when you're reading something a lot of you hear them mistake like you hear that doesn't work or that work doesn't but there are poems that come easily quickly they pretty much come out whole like your experience but that doesn't help a lot and there are poems that are like years of work we have a I'm in a writing group with Sam actually and we need work once every five weeks throughout the month throughout the month and I find that really helpful and I get a lot of good feedback and people who are good writers who can say that doesn't really work or maybe you could try this or that and so I find that really helpful how do you introvert how do you introvert when you're running for mayor Barry I remember that part it's a well I'm actually introvert she's an activist introvert well it's a practice you know it's like people everywhere need someone who's going to just say you know things to be better for regular folks for middle class folks for poor people, for homeless people and so yeah running is really hard I hate doing it but I made the plan I treated it as a game and I just set it up it helped really running poetry really helped me run for office because there's this process of making your statement right figuring out who you're going to reach to making sure you're out there things that of course will of course myself to do that's great so more to what you said when I interviewed you through the bridge I asked Sam Harper poetry I asked Sam what the poetry and politics have in common similar answer similar answer yeah you talked a lot about housing yeah well picking up on Linda was saying about her writing group when I was talking to Kim earlier we were talking about what a great place Central Vermont is for poetry how a life not only poems city but you know all the poetry groups and all the readings this month I mean it's really fabulous and supportive so even though Linda has that Montpelier Vermont poem I think give ourselves a round of applause give ourselves a round of applause oh dear I'm 8.30 so talk to the poets talk to the poets buy some books go forth into the evening and thank you very much for talking thank you everybody for coming this year I know it was hard on an eclipse but no the eclipse was done yeah I'm so glad the credit college worked out in the morning sorry to miss