 of Poetry Month. I'm not, Matt is not my strong suit. You can go back to your room. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. My name's Amy Cunningham, and I have the great pleasure of being a volunteer board member here at the Kellogg-Covered Library, this wonderful institution. The wonderful institution who are the presenters and creators of this poem, City, which is, yay, now in its 10th year. And I want to thank some organizations who make that possible. The National Life Group Foundation, the Vermont Humanities Council, Hunger Mountain Co-op, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Poetry Society of Vermont are all to thank and putting together our poem City productions every year. So we really appreciate their support. Another hat I wear in my life is the Deputy Director of the Vermont Arts Council. And so I'd be remiss if I didn't take a minute just to let you know that in this month of celebrating poetry, this is also the month every four years where we're taking nominations for a new poet laureate. And nominations are open until I think it's next Thursday. So this seems, I can't think of a better audience to ask you to recruit and think of new nominees who have very big shoes to fill for the next four-year term. Tonight's reading, as you know, is with some of the poets who are featured in Roads Taken, contemporary Vermont poets, published in 2017. And Samantha from Bear Pond has copies to sign if you don't have your copy yet. And I am pleased tonight to introduce Charred DeNord and Sid Lee. Charred earned a BA in Religious Studies from Lynchburg College, a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He's a co-founder of the New England College MFA program in poetry. He's the author of several books of poetry, including I Would Lie to You If I Could, interviews with 10 American poets published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. And Charred, as you all know, is our current poet laureate of Vermont. It's my pleasure also to introduce Sid Lee, who was a poet laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. His most recent collection of poems, No Doubt the Nameless, is available from four-way books. His fourth collection of lyrical essays, What's the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, was published in 2016 by Vermont's Green Writers Press, which in 2017 produced, Roads Taken, Contemporary Vermont Poets, the anthology that Charred and Sid co-edited together. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to them. Thank you, I'm the older and better looking of a former poet laureate. As my daughter called it immediately when I got the phone call, oh, that's pronounced poet laureate, that integrates. This has been a wonderful undertaking for me as I think it has been for Charred. We didn't know each other terribly well. We read before I think at the Brattlebury Literary Festival and each of us had been approached independently to do an anthology of Vermont poetry. And each of us said, well, I don't know, we got other things to do. And I can't even remember the details about how it came to pass that a collaboration was conceived. And it was a great delight for any number of reasons. One was that I got to know Charred and whose poetry I'd already admired. And I came to liking very much and considered him a good friend now by virtue of a lot of collaboration over a couple of years. And what was really extraordinary, I think, about the collaboration was that we didn't have any conflict over the selection of poems. We asked each poet, and the list is growing, as people like Ralph Culver is here, published new books. They will be invited to join the ranks of these poets. We asked each poet to contribute five poems of which we would select two. And we, almost inevitably, I think there was one instance that I can remember and I'll name the names in which we disagreed about which of the two to take and publish. And I think that's a pretty remarkable thing so that the poetry, God's blessed us in being able to get along not only personally but also aesthetically. And what we're gonna do tonight is I'm simply going to read the introductions of the poets who will read. And we're following, not terribly originally, we're just going to do alphabetical order because at least I am not smart enough to do it otherwise. And Char will introduce our first reader. Thank you, Amy and Sid. It's wonderful being here and thank you all for coming out. Yes, this was a wonderful undertaking and I can't really remember either how it started. It just started and we decided that it was a good idea since there's so many wonderful poets in Vermont. I think Vermont's poetic legacy is probably as strong if not stronger than any other state that I can think of. Beginning with Robert Frost up to the president as far as contemporary poets. So this anthology does begin with Robert Frost and continues right up to the president. I think Dee Dee Cummings who published this book and has been such a wonderful editor in Vermont, especially is up for doing even a third edition. So we'll keep adding folks to this book. Our criteria was pretty simple. To solicit work from poets who had at least one book out and who'd lived in Vermont for five years. And so we've discovered, what, three or four more poets since this book came out and about 96 poets in here. Or have long-term seasonal relations. Right, long-term seasonal. You know, a lot of poets who just move up here from Tennessee and New York and all over and live here for long because Robert Penn Warren, for instance, who died in Stratford and is buried there. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first poet tonight who is David Kavanaugh, who lives up in Burlington and has worked at Johnson now, Northern Vermont University for many years. He's the author of four books of poems, including Strattle, The Middle Man, and Falling Body, all from Salmon Poetry, which is a wonderful publisher in Ireland, and Crying in Plato's Cave. From, apparently, didn't make it out of Plato's Cave there. From Formite Press. David's poems have also appeared in leading journals and anthologies around the country and in Ireland. He's a native of Canada and he lives, as I said, in Burlington. David, come on up. Thanks very much, Char. And thanks to both you and Sid for putting together this really beautiful anthology and for bringing together so many poets in one place. Probably the place where they're most comfortable together. They do mostly get along. I thought you meant the library. That too, that's right. I'll read a poem of mine from the anthology and then a few other poems as well. This poem's called The Iceman and there's a preamble. Can you hear me all right? There's a short preamble to it. In 1991, he was found inside a glacier of the Alps. Seems he had been out walking. An x-ray found an arrowhead in his back. He was 5,300 years old, The Iceman. If he had known his stroll by an alpine lake would be his last. How the arrow from behind would thud into his daydream. How the lake would claim him, harden. How anthropologists would pour over his neolithic self the way his own kin hovered with stone knives over a hill, ready to skin, dismember, eat. If he were fast-tracked, five millennia, would he say, what are you looking at? What do you want to know? Where fire comes from? Or, hey, where can I get some of those sneakers? Or, I am no source, I am an omen. The way one of us, blindsided, mangled by a muscle car running the light, might face the maker calmly, nothing more to prove, might say, I don't want in, just want you to know what I've been through in case you want to learn something. You gods, such know-it-alls. Most of all, would he have wanted a word with his mate left that morning by a hearth? What tenderness, what worry, might have furrowed that big brow? Where is the poem? It's hiding in here. I think it's in this one. This reminds me of a cartoon in the New Yorker where the author is at the front reading a book and there are people in the audience and there's a sign that says, author reading. And the caption is, isn't he supposed to say something? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Hair-lipped, you were beautiful. Loom, lonely eyes and lithe shapes split by the veering renegade lip. Asymmetrical, utterly stirring. After the surgery, I wasn't even sure it was you, so nearly regular your mouth. Just a hint of up-pull, so flashing your look. You seemed younger, less sad, less sure too. As if you had become your own little sister. How I wanted that wildly rising line still to be there, I had no right. I know your life is better now, hear it in the loose swinging of your chatter, but your glance more flit than flash. Something has been smoothed away, I loved. At least one self wrenched from bed by thugs you never knew, hustled off, never seen again. Now it is left to find out what was lost in that line you were born with, what became of the disappeared, what grace resides in that thin river you no longer have to cross, and where it may be found again, and why I worry so. Quantum jump, this is my science poem. So I hope there aren't too many science people in the room, uh-oh, I'll be really in trouble. So one of the debates in physics has had to do with whether light travels in a straight line consisting of particles or whether it moves in waves. And turned out through various experiments and Einstein was involved in some of this, that it actually does both at the same time. And so how could that be? So we're talking here about very tiny, we're talking about subatomic particles, really tiny stuff. Well I kind of expanded it to think about human things. Which is scientifically absolutely preposterous. But there you go. Quantum jump, the wave that crashes on the rocks is made of particles that behave so much like waves. The scientists scratch their individual heads until their one bobbing mass and their voices rise like spray. Certain, uncertain, certainly we are all going to die one day probably, is about all with precision we can say. No one has ever not done it. And I don't aim to be the first. Not that I lack ambition, only that aiming doesn't seem to help. Still, smack the tennis ball against the wall often enough it could one time go straight through. So I say unto you, phone the woman, plant the rare hibiscus, most likely it won't take, except when it does. And this is a new one, newish, seems somehow to have a relationship to that last one that I read, but I'm not quite sure what that is. The perfect peach. You keep trying to say something important. And by you, I mean me, but you probably know that. The harder you try, the more something important skips away, laughing so hard, it trips over another something important somebody left behind because it was too hot or hard or heavy or boring. To put it another way, because another way is really what you're after, you keep swinging for the fences. While reality beats out grounders for singles and steals second on a wild pitch or gets thrown out in a tense tangle of dust, gloves and cleats. Everybody loves a slugger, but nobody cares in the end who's struck out mightily every time. It might be great to be a dying hero, except for the dying part. There was something important you were trying to say, some single thing that matters like anything, like all get out, like nobody's business. But wait, look at that splendid peach suddenly before you, just daring to be eaten. You bet its juice would run down your chin and snake like a tributary of a great river, the Mississippi maybe, down through your chest hairs, cool, wet, a little sticky, a perfect peach that hangs still and bright in the patient air, ready to be smashed right out of the park. And I'll end with this, and thanks very much since Sunday is Easter. I'm not a believer, but I do have some sort of belief in resurrection and hunting for eggs. This is called the hunt. On the Easter, before there was Easter, Jesus rolled back a rock and went home looking for something perfect, like an egg, to hold up to his dad, delighted. Then came thousands of Mondays with their here we go again. But oh, that pop up Easter urge to heave back the stone, race free and find the hidden treat, scour behind couches or the silent trees out back for something we're not even sure is there. To find is sweet, but the pulsing drive to seek, the giddy hope of, here dad, see what I found. Take it now, the lost egg of endless urge, eat and rejoice. Let's do it again in memory and in need. A couple of poets whom we invited to be here tonight who at the virtual 11th hour had conflicts which keep them from being here. And so one of them is Major Jackson whom I suspect those of you know or know of, recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, National Downwind for the Arts, Greater Artists Fellowship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, published poems and essays in many journals and been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry. He's the University Distinguished Professor on Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and he's the Poetry Editor at Harvard Review. And I'm going to read a poem at Major's Coulter and Chanters of Addison County which is in the anthology. We were more than gestural, close listening. The scent of manure writing its loft and the leaves off Route 22A. My nightfall, our gaze flecked like moon cries but no one was up for turnips nor other routes, not least of which the clergy. Romanticism has its detractors which is why we lined the road with tea-lit luminaries and fresh-cut lemons. We called it making magic. And storm the corners and porches of general stores, kissing whenever cars idled at four-way stop signs or sought grade A maple syrup in tin containers with painted scenes of horse-drawn farmers plowing through snow. The silhouetted rusted farm equipment gave us the laid-back heaven we so often wished and fireflies bequeathed earth stars such blink and blank and bunk-a-bunk-bunk. And of course we wondered if we existed and also to the cows of the ancient pastures and the white milk inside our heads like church spires and ice-cream cones. Even after all of that cha-cha-cha, we still came out of swimming holes shivering our hearts out. One of my favorite introductions I ever heard was by the great jazz trumpet of Dizzy Gillespie who was introducing a new member of his band and he said, I'd like to turn you over to a young man as without a doubt you walked off the stage. Oh, my friend Jeff would admit that he's not no longer young but that might serve for Jeff. Most of you know him. A lot of people in the state know him. He's just been a tireless campaigner and ambassador for poetry in Vermont, taught tirelessly in schools throughout the state for decades, but publishing and performing his own work in venues as diverse as Harper's, the Paris Review Exquisite Corpse, the Whitney Museum, and the Honolulu Zoo. He teaches at the Delta Green Program at Vermont College and serves as writing secondary English consultant to the Vermont Department of Education. 1995, Hyman published his first book for teachers, a portfolio primer teaching, collecting, and assessing student writing. An old man without a doubt. I can't help wondering what happened to that poem, the one poem that Sid and Chard butted heads over. Keep hoping it made it into the anthology and not only that, I pray that it's mine but we'll never know. None of us were winners like Armin Trout or Bee Bee, the heavyweight, who surprised opponents twice his size in the unlimited division, flipping one who still scowled from the peevish handshake that had to start each match. Spring weekend, my parents drove my date up from New Jersey and I wrestled the 135 pounder from Petty who took 30 seconds to pin me. Spring weekend, the year before. My father clapped my back in the locker room and pronounced it a moral victory. Behind the gym, two weeks later, the hacks on the team smoked their first cigarettes since fall and chafed at the gung-hoes who were still running laps. Where are they now? Well, Armin Trout's big in business for sure and Bee Bee's a famous neurosurgeon. And us hackers? Oh hazard, our wages per capita can't touch theirs. We were artists, idealists, the boys who invented wrestling to lose. Slam yourself down on the mat with shoulders flat, hold your opponent just three seconds over you, helpless in the victory pose. And this is toilet knuckles. It relates to my grandchildren and that's my other poem in this amazing thank you anthology. Toilet knuckles. That's what the kids called bagels. Toilet knuckles. Brothers. Brothers with a language built on inflection and direct metaphor, none of this waffling typical of similes. Brothers that hunt together and when they sing without rehearsal, their voices blend and the tone is true. No gimmicks, except that secret language of the almost imperceptibly curled lip or the double beat of eyelids, only the other feels and note how I didn't say sees or notices, we are outsiders in the deepest sense made deeper by our jealousy. From the lake, not mosquitoes, but those jet skis where the person stands, a modern miracle. I can walk on, but the big grin and yell disappear. If he'd only been looking where he was going, the pier didn't budge and to help us feel better, the doctor said he never knew he was dead. You think I make this up for the cheap burlesque? Do I even wonder if I'm inventing it? Answer, no. It comes from a higher power, a gift that flows through as Colin said when all the ducks are in a row. It's not your everyday occurrence. Like when you read in the paper, someone you didn't know has hit the pier or is circling the drain as the British doctors say when the patient is not expected to last through the next pay period. It's a crime, we have to laugh to make ourselves feel better when after all we didn't exactly ask to be here in the first place, a little late night fun or an unexpected quickie and you are summoned then become attached through suffocating unexpected times, months before bursting out to breathe, to walk with the moon on your back and step to the shadows of your feet watching Mars begin to tire of its ascent. Don't ask the Martians what they want or if they chose to exist, we thought them up. Poor things, not likely joviated through tickling and lusty pleasure, but creatures of imagination and thus too real to contemplate. We're the only ones, God told us so. Turning as the asphalt path becomes the parking lot, I walked backwards in the fresh empty space, I square on the man who in spite of being called the moon has never shown his backside. He's done a month's duty as long as history year after year, keeping in constant but reliable watch on us, a servant of sorts, especially the lovers who find excuse in his majesty to behave like bunnies. I shifted focus to the lake and saw how deep, steep water holds the clouds, the sky, the moon and Mars in spite of itself descending deeper. Today I am thinking about unconditional love and it's opposite, like what are my conditions I can love everyone in this room, at least those who haven't returned a cocktail chatter or the summons of a cell phone. So there's a condition and a pretty serious one too. I mean what it says about me. You know, I'm wondering about you. Is my condition wider spread than I know? Maybe it's all of us. Today I am writing a pound of poems, that's one pound tear, weight of paper excluded. You can tell from the quality they were scribbled in a mad extended rush to express a whole pound of ink. Oh, my aching hand. Today the snow falls endlessly, gobs of miniature snowballs late for the party that has blanketed everything, drooped the branches still hanging heavy with the stuff that dropped last week. Or was it Sunday? Thank you. I was unaware of our next poet until her book, Landscape with Plywood Figures, isn't that right? Yeah, was submitted as a nominee for the Vermont Book Award. And I got these books and I said, well I had some convictions about who really had to win. And then I read this book I hadn't been familiar with with Karen's Plywood Silhouettes before. And then I think she won pretty much by acclamation that year. So she's, I continue to be a fan. Ever since she was a winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award and the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. And I graduated at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. Wilson teaches right here in town. Karen. Hi, everyone. What a handsome crew. Thanks for coming out and thank you so much for this reading and for the anthology and the work that everyone does all the time in the name of poems. I'm still getting used to the fact that I have to change glasses between everything I do. So I'm a little, I can't see you at all. So you can make any kind of faces you'd like. But I can see these poems. So we'll see how we do. The first book, the first poem I'm going to read is called Passerines. And I'm, can you hear me okay? Okay, I'm thinking this was a trip I took to Paris and my daughter and I were outside Notre Dame and there was a man there who teaches people, he puts his hand out and gives you bird seed and the birds feed from your hand. And it's an enduring memory of mine. The poem kind of circles around that. So, Passerines. I want to tell you about the thud against the back door that my man says bird. That later we see its tail sticking out from underneath the siding. That its tail feathers shine like oil, shifting purple to blue and we are kneeling on the wet decking. The yellow of its stomach making it something more than the brown birds everywhere. A tiny prize for kneeling there, for prying back the vinyl siding to find a yellow belly flycatcher. It's cheek bloodied. I want to tell you how he held it, said Passerine, before it took flight. Little Passerine, songbird. Before she left, I brought my daughter to Saint-Gene. There were swallows like boomerangs near dark, like here, like everywhere I go. I want to tell you about the neighbor, the scientist, who said they were swifts, not swallows. Swallows are Passerines, but swifts are not. Passerine, I thought. Passerine, a more future verb tense for to pass. A tense I can't know yet. A passing I can't understand. The order Passerine is a mess, the scientist said. It's impossible to track its evolution. I want to tell you I don't understand evolution, any of it, even mine. Becoming the mother I will be next, the one who lets go. Once I stood on a bridge and a man taught me to call sparrows, to eat from my hands. Told me he was a sinner, that what he did for me was atonement, which is the thing I might understand. I want to tell you there is nothing like their tiny grip, the way they quiver while they peck at your palm, wanting to fly out of reach. I want to tell you what happened when I let her go, but I don't understand it yet. I want to talk about this morning, the little yellow bird in sudden dizzy flight, the trees full of yellow, how I lost sight. I'm thinking a lot about having grown up Catholic in some of the imagery of Catholicism as I work on my next book. And this poem is called A Hagiography, and I love the stories of the saints. A Hagiography. Heads will roll, we say, when shit gets bad, but they don't anymore. No more St. Albin, his head rolling downhill into a well, the water turning holy. St. Elunid, her head rolling downhill into a stone, from which springs a healing well. Ditto St. Winnefried, beheaded by a suitor who wants her, but she loves God, her head rolling downhill, up springing a healing well where it stops. But swift uncle, St. Bayuno, reattaching her head, but still she was ready to die. Where was St. Dennis going when he walked downhill into Paris, holding his head in his own hands? Where does a man go with his head in his hands? And what sermon does he give? This man gone walking and praying, having played chicken without backing down from men with swords, scourged and racked. What is there to say? When I walk into his Sattikar and walk a circle around its stations, I have nothing to say. The sumac that grows along the highways where I live, it catches me, driving past. Its branches circling up to the sky, like the slowest motion dance. Its droops, its extra stretch toward the sky's fine blue ceiling. The sumac, a patient whirling dervish. I walk my Sattikar circle, thinking of the trash mound of its foundation, the cathedral stretching up, away from Paris, my face wet because I wouldn't die for any kind of faith. The not even sumac reach of my heart. I'll read two more poems. Awake. This morning, before I read this from I'll clear my throat. Awake. This morning I bramble toward waking, alarm, alarm, alarm snarling my dreams, like little girls around a pile of marbles arguing quitsies, no quitsies. This morning I don't know. This morning I am lagging with my dead, reminding them they have already gone first. I knuckle down on the day, make strides and comebacks. I ride a train and keep and write and keep crossing out the word rather. I never know what I want until afternoon and sometimes trim the walkway instead of thinking. I pull the curtain on who I am, keep shame from my sleeping like a terrarium of whistles. Somewhere, someone finds me phenomenal. I stand so tall and keep the future as a pet. Together we swim the headwaters like children who don't know the rules. I forget who is playing for fair and who for keeps. And this last poem is for my brother who I lost this fall to an overdose. It's a pernicious epidemic, that's for sure. And when it strikes home, it really hits hard. It's called losing. My brother is lost. I can't find my brother. I say it over again when I lost my brother. A back road I knew once and now can't find. A specific wave on John's pond. The last one we saw there, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one office to the next and no one will return my calls. One day he was somewhere. I know he must have been. The difference in weight between alive and dead. Do the old experiment again. Way the escaped soul. Let it have gone somewhere. Let it have packed one bag. Is my brother any amount of atoms at all, fending for themselves? If I keep saying, I have lost my brother, is there a corollary? Do I make wayfinding? A compass, a geocache, a crashed plane on his island, his black box full of laughter. Every next syllable said by everyone is my brother. Silent mouths, these are where dead brothers live. I keep a jar of nails like a bouquet of denial. Life ends with us finding leaves underfoot. Fend for ourselves, I'm saying. There is music everywhere. There must be a bit of his breath left. Put the needle in the track again. My brother somewhere knows the tune. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Gives me great pleasure to introduce Liz Powell to you next. She's a poet of many talents. I should say writer of many talents because she not only writes wonderful poems, but she writes fiction as well. And she's one of the state's best editors at the Green Mountain Review. She's the author of The Republic of Self, a new issues first book prize winner of that, and which was selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, and also lever titles, Willie Lohman's Wreckless Daughter, living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. That was just waiting to be written about, and she's the first one to really pick up on it, and write just so beautifully about it. Won the 2016 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, it's selected by Maureen Seaton. She's the editor of the Green Mountain Review, as I said, an associate professor of creative writing at Northern Vermont University, and has also served on the Faculty of Law and Residency program at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. And Liz, could you tell me the title of your novel? Interpretation of J.Crew Catalogers. I hope she's gonna repeat that. It's a wonderful title. Please welcome Liz Powell. Thank you very much for the nice introduction, Chard, and thank you, Sid. Thank you both for all your work on Birds Taken. It's a great anthology. And thank you all for being here, helping to celebrate Poetry Month. I'll read the two poems that I have in the anthology, and then I'll read some new poems. I have a book coming out next year called Atomizer with Louisiana State University Press, and so I'll read some of those. The first one I'll read is called From the Book of Condolences. The book forewarned, you may have visions. You may think you hear your dead parents speaking in the courtyard. On page 15, the book comforted. Life is a process of second guessing oneself. It uncannily predicted. You may be completely screwed. It offered irony and canned laughter, ha, ha, ha. It gave dubious advice. Wait, there may be a way out, but the door has premonitions and it's very fragile. It asked, knock, knock, who's there? On the cover, a picture. The dead tiptoeing startled like ballerinas. The book warned, it is the pain of the absence of the body you will fear. It provided a clue. Beware of a goblet filled to the brim with agony. It whistled. The fire water remembers. It pools and sings of the ransacker. The punchline was always, do not drink the story. I don't know if you remember People's Express that used to fly to Burlington from Newark in the 1980s for $19 and I was in high school and I used to take that a lot. And Newark used to just be a little hole-in-the-wall airport and now it's quite grand and I was there recently and it's like the CBGB's shop. Which I thought was kind of ridiculous and wonderful. Anyway, so this one's called at the Swatch Watch store in Newark's Terminal C. I'm going home. I look at Swatch Watches at a store of time pieces for people who wait. Once there was a purple inside space called Deep of Night where God's amygdala made time. The Newark moon did not shine. No travel delays, all's fine. The past kept living inside me like a cheap Timex. Where are you going? The store clerk said. But I heard my father in my head dragging me from bed to bone voyage me out of Newark when this terminal was merely stairs, no moving sidewalks when we were people still, not consumers, flying $19 flights into Burlington for Mont on People's Express. Get your ass on the plane. My long dead father still waving me goodbye in his very white voice in a bubble floating above me like a cartoon or a synapse or a brain protein. You're making me late for an important meeting. Scotch still in my pores like milliseconds collecting for takeoff into minutes. Oh briefcase, the wild blue yonder song he used to sing to me on my own. Then, now, a store of time pieces for those who wait. Once Amelia Earhart dedicated this airfield and hangar deep inside God's amygdala, I tick tock. I'm going, I'm going, and he's gone into a parade of pinstripes, into the vast importance of commerce. I hold a swatch watch. It has a big, cherubic face that says 11, 11. The angels are watching. They haven't aged. My hand to God's portal. So after writing Willie Lohman's Reckless Daughter, I was really happy not to write any more allergies. But I was still thinking about what it means to grow up as a girl in this society. We used to play a lot of Miss America. And one of the things we had to do was walk with books on our heads. And I tell this to my children now, and they're like, you did what? But anyway, so this is called The Girl from Ipanema. It's a song that was always playing in my house growing up. The Girl from Ipanema walked up to me all the way from Brazil to serenade my childhood. All day it was Giao Geberto in Boasanova. The samba sang only to me, no one else. Yet a voice like my mother's began to sing. How can he tell her he loves her? The music petitioning the afternoon for mercy. And then the promise. She looked straight ahead, not at him. My toes in the cold Atlantic, blender making music on Fire Island. My father's long, coffee-colored fingers smelling of limes. The grown-ups fading into the afternoon's vanishing point. I dragged the red wagon down the sandy lane, where I walked mixture of flower and mermaid bosa. Geberto and Getze's sonic thump toward the ear of my undoing. Inside the high notes of my long hair, tangling off key in beach wind and radio sounds. The song sang of the one chord Geberto had played over and over, locked in his bathroom that year when everything was changing. How to understand the new sound of beauty. How a young girl disappeared into an idea of a person no one can have. This is a poem I wrote for my friend Angie Palm, who's a creative non-fiction writer. She's very beautiful and young and vivacious and smart and brilliant and I always like to call her the young Elizabeth Taylor of non-fiction. So that's the reference there. Okay, it's called Burlington is Nuts Today. Every day is a hipster convention. Girls with $300 jeans. She sports her Adifa T-shirt and cork-heeled shoes. I agree with her, but, but, but. I would like some $300 jeans. I think of the Scott's ballad, Sir Patrick Spenz. I have grown impatient. Fake farmers and overalls selling their window-grown wheatgrass. I'm stuck in a huge backup of cars that want into our taxpayer-funded parking garage for people who only use credit cards. This used to be Vermont. Now I'm on the Upper West Side. I keep pushing the button for a ticket. Moms with unsymmetrical haircuts drag their spoiled children in Birkenstocks toward home where the world was ending on CNN just moments ago. A white dude on smack retches junk sick into a trash can. A handsome professor in Danish glasses, briefcase, looks on disapproving. I fear I am getting fat and vulnerable. I think mean in a bad mood. No longer pretty, no longer able to use my pink self for what I want and don't want. My name itself makes a scratchy sound. The dude who was my 100% match online is unattainable, says he smashes patriarchy too. I, myself, am skunked. The construction guy crunches toward the hard core of his lunch almost over. His rich parents in Canada funded his grad degree with high hopes, but I'm late for coffee with the young Elizabeth Taylor of non-fiction. I like to witness her youth and hope she gets everything she thinks she wants. Later tonight, Rachel Mada will pull up the shade only to find more darkness. The world is ending, Boy Scouts hippies, take a ticket, have it validated since you can't be short-term parking is full. Now please pull the ticket out, proceed. And I'll read one more, it's called The Idiot Box, right? Some of you had parents who called the television said that the television was like an extra sibling. My kids don't believe me when I say we had one TV that was this big by this big. And we fought over it a lot. Anyway, so the epigram of this poem is, if you can't all agree on what to watch, I'm going to throw this goddamn thing out the window. And it's attributed to mother in 1978. The TV says it will love me if only. And the TV says earthquake in Japan. The TV asks how many are injured. The TV tells me I will vote for Hillary because I'm X-aged with Y beliefs and I don't use the C word. The TV warns me of erections lasting more than four hours and wants us all to have bathtubs with mountain views. The TV sings the national anthem and uncovers crying babies needing Gerber baby food that nothing else will help. The TV tells me not to read The New York Times. For a moment I have to agree with the TV. The TV has some new jingles that have a backbeat with a secret message that will make me do wonderful things if only I would just listen. The TV confirms my worst fears. I have spent too much on my life insurance policies. The TV implies George Clooney is the smartest man left on earth but I know this not to be true. The TV agrees with George Clooney that only women half their age can suck their big fat dicks. The TV says excuse me, I'm sorry. The TV says a man came out of nowhere wearing a hoodie. The TV asked me why I believe in white privilege. The TV implores me to shave my genitals. The TV prefers breast meat and has found a way for everything to be breast meat. The TV asked me to consider having people from other cultures over to my house to eat frozen pizza and drink wine from long-stemmed glasses that I can buy not far from here. That it will make me more interesting. The TV says don't leave me, I can be anyone. The TV says I remember you as a child, how sad and lonely you were, how bereft. The TV says I should stop trying to make sense of what it is saying. That to do so will increase my blood pressure, cause tingly feet, perhaps fainting. The TV is downloading a better self inside myself and for this I try to be grateful. The TV tries to understand irony. The TV says it is the mother I never had. The TV calms my stomach. The TV is having a tumultuous affair with Donald Trump and blames me for watching. The TV knows exactly how much I don't know. The TV believes in loud public music and not just in elevators anymore. The TV will deliver me flowers for the meal. It shows me how to throw together. The TV will make my hair curly. The TV has dogs who really speak and babies too. The TV tells me not to tell anybody what the TV says and the TV has turned the family into an audience. The TV says sportsmanship at values.com. The TV says large plastic bags with lots of plastic shit. The TV says a tiger killed a zookeeper. The TV says blonde hair, big boobs. The TV is obsessed with breasts, not just breasts me. The TV tells me it remembers when I was crazy in the rocking chair with postpartum and how it kept me company by keeping me scared. And the TV said your life in minutes, hour, seconds. And the TV put a bandaid on my eyeball and the TV combs my hair and sings to me in its white angelic voice. And the TV uses a strategy of indirection. The TV says the Russian prostitute said so. The TV makes like its friends with Jane Goodall, Big Papi, Obama, the old blue hairs down the street. I've known the TV for 45 years now and it has watched me pee, cry, cook, fuck, clean. Sometimes I'm not sure who the lawyer is anymore. The TV who remembers my dead mother to me, how she threatened to throw it out the window a long time ago now. But that TV is dead too, long having coke poured into its vents by my I great brother watching Howard Cosell narrate the wild world of sports. And a knob that fell off into nowhere when one of us was stoned and the TV says that old TV is probably space junk now in outer space, catching cable signals for free, avoiding those Russians. And the TV says that little TV is never coming back so I should quit crying about it. And the TV says nostalgia isn't flattering that back in the day I took my mother literally and it scared me. Thanks. Thank you very much. Wonderful. You see the variety in this book. Although those aren't in the book. Well, try to include those in the next edition. Yeah. I'm going to read just a poem by Veranda. Do you know, how many of you know Veranda, Porch? I think a lot of you do. And unfortunately she couldn't be here this evening because Sater's, she's up early tomorrow to prepare for Sater. Unfortunately couldn't get back in time for it. So I'm just going to say a few words about Veranda you all know her. So she doesn't need a long introduction but I'll just say that she's been really a kind of poet saint in the state for so many years, traveling around, reading, dedicating her life to poetry in schools and recording people's life stories and nursing homes and of course writing her own poetry. And she's just tireless and I don't know. I know her well because she lives in Southern Vermont where she gets her energy and her inspiration and it's just, it's unslaked and relentless and inspiring. She's the poet in residence and performer and writing partner. Well that's what she is as well as a wonderful poet. She's published two books, Sudden Eden, The Body Symmetry and she's now working with a songwriter performer Patty Carpenter and they tour the state singing and performing. She received an honorary doctorate from Marlborough College. Her current project is Shedding Light on the Working Forest, a collaboration with painter Kathleen Colb, which she finished, she completed that and did a beautiful presentation or actually a show with her at the Battleborough Museum and also in Northern Woods, the Vermont, wonderful Vermont magazine about the woodlands. So I'm going to read this poem of Randa's called Kitchen Hints, Not to Enter Winter Empty-Handed. One, hold a candle to a mirror, spell out the lover's name in tallow, dip a spatula in water. If brittle letter blobs chilled on silver, one won't lift evenly set him aside. Two, fill a black sky speckled kettle with a rolling boil, steam quart jars, can light, seal and cool. Three, take a cleaver to a red cabbage, funk, choose half, ink its imprint, dense violet strata, curved around a geologic core, pull yourself together, shred the clean side for a tarts law, serve. Four, root for your future, bring daughters into wind, bend to the field, watch their white hands numb and gladden around red potatoes, dig for our ancestors, see with your fingers, quick work, frost, snow, false alarm. Five, squash song, simmer forever, my delicata. Two toned, thick skinned winter keeper. Why take a lifetime to be tender? Beside, you wet the wet seeds burn. So that's Miranda, she's writing now, I can just see her down there. So it gives me also a great pleasure, I'm gonna introduce Sid Lee to you next and then I'll read after Sid. So let me, I just would like to say a few words before I mention his many accomplishments. He's just, he's been such a wonderful friend, mentor, collaborator on this project. And I just can't say enough about how supportive and inspiring he's been to me throughout these last three years. It's hard to believe that it's been three years both as a co-editor of this as well as a poet. I've read many of his recent poems in magazines such as Plume, the poetry journal and they actually make me weep. They have this wonderful combination of elegance, formality and what John Keats called negative capability which is that ability to be an uncertainty, mystery, doubt without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. And that's really hard to pull off and he does it with such grace and elegance as I said. So just to read you a quick bio though, Sid was a poet laureate as Amy mentioned from 2011 to 2015. He's the author of 20 books, 12 of which are poetry and the most recent collection of poems is no doubt the nameless. Actually, he's got this new book out with four way book. He was founder and long time editor of the New England Review. He taught at Dartmouth College, Yale, Middlebury and several European universities before his retirement. He also went to Yale, received his PhD there and people don't mention this much but he's one of the best Wordsworth scholars in the country, Sid Lee. Thank you so much. That's, I'm not how I'd be able to get up to that I can tell you that right now. I will read a couple of really grand new poems and then I'll read one from the anthology. My beloved wife of four decades had a shoulder operation in December and it just hasn't gone well and she had a second procedure. It was not surgery per se but they knocked her out and manipulated her arm and the hope that it would restore a range of motion and give her some relief from the pain that she's had which is in her throat as they're sleeping. That didn't work so on Monday she'll have yet another procedure. It's been going on since December and she's so upbeat and such a patient person. We went in when our old GP retired we went in to see, to meet the new one and she asked us a series of questions looked at our advanced directors and pointed at my wife and said, Tigger and pointed at me and said, Eeyore. But at any rate, this poem was conceived as I was waiting for it to come out of the second procedure. It's called, Partners and Partners. Partners as in the old western scene of Parker. In the pre-op room, my wife was given a scalene block for a brief procedure. She had a shoulder surgery three months back and now again they'll anesthetize her to break up scars that have kept her in pain. She'll be comatose however briefly. I remembered right off how one's love can seldom appear so precious as she does on a gurney. I feel what I felt when watching her labor giving birth for instance but I won't be on hand for this episode. I sit in the lobby alone but for a fellow old man and a black cowboy hat he's waiting like me for a wife to come to. He punches his fingers into a purse and digs around inside in search of what I wonder. I can't decode his half audible mumbles or his face is expression. On the trip here from home we hit black ice on a busy road in this busy small town. I pick up a spun on ice and what passes for Russia over here. The fact we weren't hurt defines all reason like grace. The man keeps probing and I keep wondering why this looks still a deadpan. I know very well what it is to divert one's thoughts from hurtful or frightening matters to seek what can lift us out of this world when it threatens to tear itself into tatters. How in the world in love tortures us though? This pain seems deepened by the length of its year. An ambulance siren winds down outside. I've been reading to keep myself busy but now I look up to find my cow poke and tears. This one is called Neutrality. My wife hates this poem, she says. It's worse than pessimistic. It's, well anyway, it's called Neutrality. I headed for high ground this morning climbing a ridge against a freshet's flow whose April sound seemed less like song than yammer. The hills flanks were slick and my scaling slow and because of the steepness I leaned my face close to earth. I rather the clotted leaves and rock and so I noticed something I'd otherwise miss, the season's first red Fs. Last week, snow fleas gathered on the subtly sides of tree trunks but by now the fleas and snow rushed off together. What's troubled me slightly since is how I responded to that tiny harbinger salamander. As earlier I had to the fact that our Phoebe is back in the lilac flicking her tail outside the nursery. We still call it nursery, though her children are long gone. You might think a man like me was to sorely miss them after all these years. And what of that pair of hooded maganses that float in the part of the pond that shows open water? Signs in every quarter, spring and hope. To see them I might have felt my old heart flutter or I might have succumbed to despondency and doubt. What obsessed me some is that I didn't either. I attributed this to how my years stretch out for which reason, contraryly, my problems grow shorter. This last one is called My Wife's Back. I'm 76, I think when I was about 60, my knees just wouldn't let me run using the term very loosely to keep myself more or less in shape. So in a fit of what my youngest daughter, my severest and most witty critic, the one that called me to pull at low rate, refers to as a fit of geezer madness. I took up the sport of competitive flat water kayaking and that's a good thing for me because it has no impact and also because in five minutes from where I live, I can be on the Connecticut River and I just really enjoy it a lot. But in those interludes, when I'm not pretending that I'm a lot younger than I am, often I will go with said wife in an open canoe down the river much more assamely and see what we can see. And weight being what it is, she's always in the bow and I'm in the stern and I just remember such a day. My wife's back. All naked but for a strap, it traps my gaze as we paddle. The deer familiar nubs the spine bone punctuating that sun-warm sloth. The slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface. We've watched and smiled as green herons flushed and hopped ahead of us at every bend and we've looked up at a red tail, tracing open scripts on a sky so clear and deep we might believe it's autumn, no matter it's August still. Another fall will be honest before we know it. Of course, we adore that commotion of color, but it seems to come again as soon as it's gone away. They all do now. We're neither young anymore to put matters plainly. My love for you over 40 years extends in all directions but just now to your back as we drift and paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River. We've seen a mink scratch fleas on a mud flat. We've seen an osprey start to dive but seeing us think better of it. Two Phoebe's wagged on an ash limb. Your torso is long. I can't see your legs but they're longer, I know. Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk, marbles under black mountain. But I am fixed on your back in different other wonders. Bright minnows that flared in the shallows, the gleam off that poor mink's coat, even the fleas in its fur, the various birds, the lust of creatures just to survive. But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die. Thank you. And now I get a chance to reciprocate and introduce my colleague, Chard. Most of the original introduction, I don't know that I'll necessarily repeat it. This new book of his, I'd like you if I could, it's really fascinating. I mean, just as his prior interview book was and I highly recommend that you, he's a wonderful interviewer. He even made me sound interesting, I think, once on an interview with public access TV down there in Brattleboro with a wonderful conversation. I will, so many of his accomplishments have already been cited, but I think one thing that you should know about and I hope you'll be aware of is that he's a prime mover in the Ruth Stone Memorial Trust, which is a nonprofit, obviously, which is trying to keep alive the extraordinary legacy of one of our predecessors, his poet laureate, Ruth Stone, and it's worth looking into, and I'm sure Chard would be happy to talk to you about it at length at any time. He lives in West Mr. West with his wife, Liz, who is here as a marvelous artist, so please welcome Chard. Thank you, Sid. You are interesting. Thank you. Thank you. That interview and your poetry and your life betray that. I'm glad you mentioned that about Ruth Stone. I don't know if you all have read much of Ruth's work. She didn't live that far from here over in Goshen and Brandon, so please just keep reading Ruth Stone. We're trying to restore her house. It's an 1830 house in Goshen that is just on its last leg there and we would, Bianca Stone, Ruth Stone's granddaughter and her husband Ben Pease have moved to Vermont from Brooklyn to restore the house and to strut the Ruth Stone Foundation and try to get that house back up. Ruth's last wish was to turn that house into a writer's retreat and so that's what we're trying to do. I'm going to just read a few poems here. I was trying to decide what to read and I went for a walk down by my house and the peepers were out there screaming and I was saying like, I asked them what should I read? And they just screamed, me, me, me. So I just happened to have written a poem about the peepers and called Frog Pond. I crept up on them, a creeper among the peepers and stood on the bank like a metronome and peeped myself a couple of times. Then listened to their slow diminuendo until just one called out his shrill erotic song as if he were deaf to the sudden calm that had settled across the water or maybe thought that he and I were so spectacular as singing partners that we could share the pond and was waiting for me to sing again which I did, I did like the amateur I was so human and wrong without the others whose high professional voices drowned my drone. This poem is in the anthologies. It's about the Hermit Thrush which is of course the state bird, you all know that, has the most beautiful song I think of practically any bird, I know anyway. And it should be, well it's a little dark now but in a few weeks we'll hear it right around this time. It's called To Hear and Hear. The Hermit Thrush is set for six to sing her song as if it were the end of the world and she was stirred by dusk to sing the same sweet song again and again in the understory as if to say it's neither words nor meaning that matter in the end but the quality of sound as if we were deafened by the sun and needed her song as 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. It is, she claims, with a song just loud enough to pierce the woods until the night descends like a thousand veils and then just one. So I'm going to read a couple of new ones in the end also with a kind of a new one. This poem is called The Lack. It's a skinny poem. And I'm going to read one called Diet. So that goes with this one, The Lack. So I am feckless, I admit, for I was born without sufficient feck. Which is why I take a supplement of it. Along with all my other pills and stuff, although it's never quite enough. So I digress as a way to fuck my dearth of feck as if a Prolegomenon or plot could plug the drain of my so leaky self. And then an afterward as well, but no, not yet. I had a dream last night in which I was enough, blessed with a speck that tipped a scale to bliss, but low. I couldn't sleep for long and woke to what I felt was far too much and missed my old ironic want. So I confess, feck is more except when it is less. All right, I'll read the Diet one here. I just have to read this home since I wrote it just the other day and let's see. I'm actually on a diet. So for like 30 years, let me just find out where this is. How to diet. Eat your hunger, put some sugar on it and a little butter too, then eat it a thousand times in all its various flavors until you're so full of emptiness you could eat a thousand more. But don't because you've allowed yourself a little morsel of celery instead. And a radish for dessert to fatten your discipline. A postprandial nibble that gives you indigestion but you chew it anyway remembering the last cookie you had four weeks ago as if it were now and you're eating it again in your head which only angers your stomach that has captured you and is holding you hostage in a ramshackle cabin down a dirt road somewhere you hope will become famous someday as the site where you outsmarted it, your stomach, by simply keeping your mouth shut. Despite the fact it's holding a gun to your head with your finger on the trigger believing that you just might pull it. But I digress, just eat it with nothing on it. It's good. You'll see. Thank you. I'm going to end with a poem I've written in a new manuscript called In My Unknowing. I've only gotten to that point where I'm ready to just say I have no idea about much of anything. So this will actually be coming out in a little bit of a while. About much of anything. So this will actually be coming out next year at some point. I'm not sure the exact date but this is the first poem in this. And thanks so much everybody. It's been wonderful to be here and to hear all these great poems tonight. In My Unknowing it's got an epigram, O Taste in Sea which is a Psalm 34 verse 8 and a famous line that poets have used for decades and decades. Denise Levertaub I think is a beautiful book called O Taste in Sea. In My Unknowing I was driving through the fields of heaven when I realized I was still on earth because earth was all I'd ever known of heaven and no other place would do for living forever. I'd grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt had sprung from lives I'd already lived so that I could feel the way I did which was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling, the slithering, the leaping, the flying, the dying. If you had been there with me in the passenger seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm I would have told you everything I knew which was a frightening amount. Not only that, but just how much I loved them all those heavenly beings, the serpent, the lion, the mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm. Not only beings but stones as well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing I knew I was living forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of heaven in which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting. Thank you.