 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Pwn City, a month-long celebration of poetry presented by the Kellogg-Harvard Library. This is our seventh year of bringing Pwn City to our area. Of course, we don't do it alone. So I want to thank a few people. First, I'd like to thank the Vermont College of Fine Arts for hosting us this evening, for being one of our sponsors. Also, the National Life Group Foundation, the Vermont Humanities Council, the Hunger Mountain Co-op, and Goddard College, who are also important sponsors for this month-long event, 35 events we have this month. This is the second of 35. I'd also like to thank the Gary Home for the cookies tonight and a few people. Of course, I can't thank all the volunteers or dozens of volunteers and can't thank all the poets. Without the poets, we wouldn't have anything to hold this together. So thank you all very much. I'd like to, in particular, thank Amy O'Neill, who is a VCF intern who has worked in Pwn City. Jared and Bowie, who is our VISTA volunteer from Atlanta, Georgia. Michelle Singer, who is the co-coordinator. And I'm going to let Rachel thank Charved in a minute. But the last person that I want to thank is Rachel Seneshaw. Rachel is the library's program director. She's the person who came up with the idea for Pwn City seven years ago, and she has been the driving force behind this great program for seven years. Thank you very much, Rachel. And Rachel, you're next. It's so wonderful to look out and see all you poets in this room. And your poems grace the windows throughout Montpelier in the library and businesses and other organizations. And it just makes my heart jump with joy. Thank you. So tonight, we're very, very fortunate to have our new Vermont Poet Laureate, Char Denyord. This morning, we were together at the State House where he gave the devotional. Marjorie Ryerson was there with us, as well as Tom Martin and perhaps some other people here in the room. But the House Chamber was full of people. And it was just wonderful to sit there and hear poetry in the House Chamber and to see the legislators really listening to the poems. It just, it was beautiful. We're lucky in Vermont to be able to use the Vermont House Chamber, the Vermont State House, for our programs and for poetry. It's just really great. So, Char Denyord was born in New Haven, Connecticut and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he attended Lynchburg College. The son of a doctor, he anticipated going into the medical profession as well until college professors introduced him to religious studies, which he chose as his major. Denyord graduated from Lynchburg College in 1975 and went on to earn his MDiv from Yale Divinity School in 1978. Before pursuing ordination, Denyord got a job working as an inpatient psychiatric aide at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Five years later, he left to pursue poetry, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received his MFA in 1985. Returning to New England, he taught at private schools for over a decade while publishing his poems. In 1990, he published his first poetry collection, A Sleep in the Fire, published by University of Alabama Press in 1990, while teaching comparative religions and philosophy at the Putney School in Vermont. In 1998, he began teaching at Providence College, where he was eventually named the 10th recipient of the Joseph Asino Faculty Teaching Award, and I hope I pronounced that correctly or closely. The same year, he founded the Spirit and Letter Workshop, a 10-day program of workshops and lectures in Patsquaro, Mexico, featuring faculty poets such as Thomas Lux, Gerald Stern, Gene Valentine, Ellen Bryant Voight, among others. In 2002, Deneard co-founded the New England College MFA program in poetry, which he directed until 2007. Deneard's other poetry collections are Interstate, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015, Speaking in Turn, a collaboration with Tony Sanders, Ganon Press, 2011, The Double Truth, University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011, Night Mowing, University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005, The Sharp Golden Thorn, March Hawk Press, 2003, Deneard also authored a book of essays and interviews with renowned poets called Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Reflections and Conversations with 20th Century American Poets, Merrick Press, 2012. The poets featured in this collection included Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Galway Cannell, Maxine Cooman, among others. Deneard is currently Professor of English at Providence College and our poet laureate. He lives in Westminster West, and apparently also in Putney, his property's on the line. So he can be in Putney in his yard and he can be in Westminster West in his yard. And he's here this evening with his wife, Liz. So please help me welcome Charles Deneard. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you for all the wonderful work you've done, your inspiration to start this, this great celebration of poetry. I don't know another town that does, that celebrates poetry quite like this. And it's just growing year after year. I think that a lot of folks in this country don't think that poetry can be celebrated like this. And it's just so wonderful to see this happen here and I only hope it grows more and more. It's a great honor for me to be here and it was wonderful reading at the State House this morning. And it's also wonderful to kick off this wonderful week or month of Poem City. I'm going to read several poems from throughout my book career so far just to maybe give you a little bit of an overview, maybe to hear some of these poems again for the first time, figure out what the heck I'm doing, why I write about crows so much and ants, which I don't realize until I start looking back over these poems, a few other subjects like that. But I realized I actually have a poem called April 1st. So I'm gonna start with that. There's a new quality in the air, a sweet redolence from the first flowers and pungent odor of soil emerging from the thaw. That smell that spring passes under your nose to wake you again, more than wake you, stir you in such a way that you recall the irony that kills, the shadow in the droop, the upswing on the ward. How strange you think at the time to think of your body as form, a cloud, while also knowing that it will clear into the blue. You laugh in a flower blooms beside a door that opens onto a darkness that is so vast, no light can light it, that is the zero against which everything in the world is multiplied. I was driving over in New Hampshire a few years ago, heading towards Vermont. The closer I got to Vermont, the more I realized how much I wanted to be in Vermont and come down off that mountain and just wrote this, I think, in the seat while I was driving. The only road, I was coming off the mountain into the valley to get some gas and keen when suddenly I saw that this was it, that there was no paradise beyond this mountain that doubles as sky and earth. I put the truck in neutral and glided for a while in the firmament. I hardly had to steer or think. I regarded the clouds as pages on which I had yet to write so much and nothing. The road descended like a long black ribbon into the valley of Connecticut. I was going forth and coming back on the same long highway on which I'm still at the speed of light. I was leaving a trail of invisible tracks on the only road that leads to Keen and then Vermont. We live on a dirt road off a dirt road and we see quite a few animals back there, moose, bear, deer, and I've just been studying these animals for many years and writing blindly and obsessively about them. So I just decided to write a poem called The Animals. They bring me tokens of myself, Walt Whitman said. I don't know if you know that wonderful canto and song of myself where he says, I think I could turn and live with the animals for a while. They're so placid and self-contained. I talked back to a cow in the upper field. I talked back to a cow in the upper field. Petted her brow as she loathed in the barn. I was mesmerized also by the chickens in the yard as they strutted and pecked the ground. I sat at the tables of all the animals to learn their letters, the long E of the hawk, the broad A of the crow, the diphthong of the moose. I grasped the goodness in their natures, whether wild or tame. They were the blessed dumb angels of earth. Why was I so moved by the mere opening of a beak, twitch of a flank, wiggle of a tail? They brought me tokens of myself, a cold eye here, a Christ lightness there. I was enlarged by a bee, enlightened by a mouse. Nothing I did returned to them what they brought to me. They were the geniuses of paradise still. I watched them half the day long as they swam and leapt and crawled and they're going forth. I called each one by name, although they did not come except for the dog. I pulled them from a thicket and prayed as they lay on a stone and bled. Here's a short one about ants. In the brief time we have left, let the ant live that's crossing the table. Give me a kiss, give me another kiss. This is a little, this is another little animal poem, but it's also, I guess it's a myth in a way. Frog, my tongue leapt out of my mouth when I lied to her and hopped away to the stream below the house. Mute then, I started to write the truth. My tongue turned wild in the stream for which I was glad and unashamed. I listen now from my porch to the complex things it says in the distance about my heart. How hard it is to tell the truth inside my mouth. How much it needs to sing in the dark. It's to throw bones out on the roof, not where we live now, but another place for the crows. They would gather there every morning and play with the bones, peck the bones. Talk to us, I became a little bit tame. I should just say there's a joke in this poem. I can't tell it to you. Now, you have to get it. I hope you get it. What else can I say? I'm ruining the poem and the joke if I tell it to you. So this is simply called crow. I woke this morning to the rumbling sound of a crow rolling a bone on the flat top roof outside my window. From her routine rounds above the house, this genius saw that I was sleeping, at least not moving behind the screen, safe for the time being, long enough for touching down and picking the joints, luscious marrow. Such a gutsy, hungry bird with a constant smile that said, did you hear the one about the man in an open field? No, I said, inside my dream, because I was also dreaming this. She never told the answer, as if this funny answer were plain enough to every brilliant creature. The sound of laughter filled the trees across the yard. She risked her life for a taste of fat. But oh, what a taste she called to the ranks of other crows on the lofty branches. Oh, taste and see. No murder this morning across the sky, but early waking to a clown in love with a bone. She waited for my lids to cock my eyes without a click, then blink, and when they did, she raised her wings in flight to speak. He isn't real, you know. All right, the scarecrow. Okay, I was a beekeeper for many years, and I hope I'll return to that. This is called raiding the bees. I went out to gather honey from the hives in the sourwood grove, put on my garment of honeybee clothes, and packed the smoker full of burlap. I thought of Samson on my way to the grove, his hive inside the lion carcass, his curse of hair and holy muscle. I stared at the river when I arrived to steal my nerves, lit the rags until they burned, then closed the chimney. I smoked the threshold bear with a steady cloud that rose inside the storied chambers, cracked the seal of the super's dome and lifted frames of honeycomb from out of the box. How many cells filled to the top and sealed with wax for winter meals? How many quartz of sourwood nectar distilled to gold? I made a guess as they buzzed around, no number sticks in the work of hunger. I was only getting a small part of it. The lake was a lens for reading the stars from underneath. What I forgot came back like a gift, and I thought, I'm only getting a small part of it. I'm only seeing with my eyes. I lived near the Green Mountain Orchards down in Putney, the Darrell Farm down there, and there's a family of goss hawks down there, northern hawks, have you read that wonderful new book called H is for Hawk, that's a goss hawk. And as some of you may know, they will attack you if you get too close to their nest like any animal, I guess, but they have this uncanny ability to fly through the woods at about 60 miles an hour without touching a tree and not, and no warning you that they're diving on you if you get too close to a nest, which a goss hawk did to me and left with clumps of my hair, it was a harrowing experience, but I've actually changed the sight from the woods, this deep wood in Putney called Gerland woods to the Darrell's orchard there, Green Mountain Orchards, just for the sake of, you know, you often have to escape the orbit of reality in poems in order to go to what Richard Hugo, the wonderful poet called your triggering town. So the orchard there was my triggering town. How many times have I told this story? There I was ambling along in search of dessert inside the orchard when a goss hawk dove on me without stretch talons. There I was all dressed in cotton in the cool of evening inspecting the trees for infestation when a goss hawk harrowed me. There I was pinned to the ground like a reprobate with my liver exposed as a fresh hors d'oeuvre on a dusty plate when a goss hawk circled me in figurates. There I was crawling away behind the trees with the apples hung like brains and nothing I said reminded this bird of who I was. Rachel mentioned that I worked at the Connecticut Mental Health Center for five years. After I graduated from Divinity School, which was probably one of the best experiences I ever had, work experiences, I worked on this inpatient unit for three years, which was actually a research unit before moving to the outpatient department. And I was, as a psychiatric aide, there responsible during my shifts of collecting urine and blood from these folks who were there on double blind protocols. And so there were these tables set up with urinals, urinal containers on the table. And so my last day there before moving to the outpatient department, I decided to conduct happy hour there and turn those tables into a bar, a little risky. This is the wristwatch telling the time of the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. That's from Elizabeth Bishop's wonderful poem called by that name, Bedlam. I stood behind the table of urinals on evening shift my last day on the job and turned this ward into a bar. Patients stared at me from the lounge and almost smiled. Listen up, I said, it's happy hour. All drinks are free. You're as crazy as we are, Robert said. Nancy laughed like a chickadee. What'll it be, I asked. Rhoda was on an upswing, walking like a penguin down the hall. Give me a screwdriver, she said, to tighten my screws. Coming right up, I said, NPO for ECT my dear, better not, I'm getting the hangover that lasts a year. I asked Kenny if he wanted a gin and catatonic, not funny, suddenly quiet. I was at an altar now instead of a bar. How about a lemonade or sarsaparilla? He stood as still as a mannequin against the wall and stared at something so far away, it came too close to him. Alex stopped his pacing in front of the bar and stared at me. I pictured a worm devouring his brain like so many leaves. I'll take a daiquiri, he said, the first thing he'd said in days. I poured him a glass of air, which he took and thanked me for and drank, then handed back the empty glass. I poured one for me and held it high, and I said to you all, and also to you, wrote a chant, we'll miss you, dear. I drank as Alex did in a single swig, then put my goblet down on the bar and smelled that smell that was also mine. I was really fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with Ruth Stone before she died over in Ripton. She was bedridden for about three or four years. She was the state poet before Sid Lee, and she couldn't get out much at all. We tried to get her out to go down to New York where we did a tribute for her at the Poets House, and we almost got her to go, but she declined at the last minute. But we talked to her on the phone from Poets House, and she recited one of her wonderful poems, Orchard, from memory. She had a photographic memory, I don't know if you know that. She read at the State House six or seven years ago, and she just recited. She was blind, so she couldn't read, and she had that wonderful talent. She was a widow, her husband died in 1959. He shot and already hung himself tragically when they were in England. And for the rest of her life, she wrote about it, Walter, and never knew why he did it. They had two or three daughters, and she headed back on the Queen Elizabeth and somehow survived, never went to college, raised three daughters all by herself, and when she was in her 80s, she became a national treasure. She won the National Book Award, she won the Wallace Stevens Prize, she finally got all the due that she deserved. And so I just felt really lucky to be able to talk to her and hear her poems while she lay in bed and reminisced. The widow, you get what you get when you get it, she said, when I asked her if she believed in heaven, which she didn't, but found useful to say she did in her poems for the sake of the poem, she claimed. Not heaven, but the unity of knowing and feeling the same thing Mendel brought found in the fractal property of self-similarity, she'd say. No different at all than the properties of her poems that just came to her, she swore from across the universe and entered her heart where they fanned the coal of her grief over the loss of her beloved Walter. See what you miss by being dead, she wrote to him in a poem called Curtains, is if what she called the change of means could read it still wherever he was, her story, that is, about a crying jag, she had one day with her landlord, Mr. Tempesta yelled at her, no pets, no pets, upon discovering her cat on the windowsill. But then relented to make her stop, she was that sad and impossibly funny at the same time, so large in her voice that sang the difficult song for two voices in one, made possible by loss. The bitter sweet of her coals invisible smoke rose to her eyes and watered them, then put them out. He never even left a note, she said, just hung himself one day on the office door like a coat. The poems just come to me now from out of the blue while I'm hanging laundry or planting flowers. I never know when they're going to arrive, so if I don't run inside just then and write them down exactly as they sound, word for word, they disappear for good. I've lost most of my poems that way, some good ones too. I'm gonna read just a few more here. We live in, I told you, in the woods and we have these big glass picture windows that birds fly into, you probably experienced this. And so you wonder what you can do. You can't put up a sign. I guess I think there's, there are owls or something you can put on the glass, but it's not feel safe. So I wrote a poem called Confession of a Bird Watcher. The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow prehensile bones. I've sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds mistake the glass for air and break their necks wondering what to do, how else to live among them and keep my view. Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning, especially the cardinal in the snow. What signed a post on the sill that says, warning, large glass window, fatal as struck, fly around or above, but not away. There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath. I need you, which is to say, I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window. I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you. With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants, the sight of you, the sight of you. A couple of years ago I memorized that canto and the song of myself by Walt Whitman, the canto five where he's speaking to his soul and he says to it, I believe in you my soul. The other I am must not abase itself and you must not be abased by it. Loaf with me in the summer grass, loose the stout from your throat, not music, not rhyme or meaning I want, not lecture or custom, not even the best. Only the lull I like, the hum of your velled voice. Now it goes on from there. But so I'm thinking what is this other body he's talking about that's also his soul. So I attempted to write something called the mystical body here to put my finger on it. And I don't think I succeeded in doing that but I think I approached a closer understanding. The mystical body, it is there and not there as the body of your beloved and you as well, two in one but also separate there, beneath the covers, completely covered, then gone when gazed upon as only a body and not the other who hums. As a body that lives in both the inner and outer world, it wakes in your dreams to tell you you burn invisibly for now and maybe then as well, depending on how you love. So there it lies in bed with you beneath the veil of your beloved, the body that takes its form from dream to behold and hold as other, the same but different, joined if only for a moment in the fire from which your flame arose. Hello, you say and here it's echo, hello. You kiss it then and watch it wake beneath your body, open its eyes and stare into yours where snow is burning and right in the silence of your staring that your heart is as vast as a vast irrational archive for every conceit there is about love. I guess it says worthy to be here for a while, a moment, a second. You know I'm here by the way I move between you and your beloved, by the way you trace me on your sheet in the dark without ever saying my name. I'm gonna close with a poem I wrote to myself on my 60th birthday which was actually, I like to believe that I am not 60 yet but I am. So thank you for coming and this is really just such a wonderful occasion and I couldn't be happier to live in Vermont, you know. Vermont cries out for poems, every state cries out for poems but Vermont has such an enormously rich poetic legacy going back to frost and before frost and then after frost and so this is just such an enormously humbling position for me to have and it's wonderful to be here to read to you and I really hope that I can get a chance to read some of your poems as well. Poem on my 60th birthday. Now that I'm 60, I wanna be everywhere at once in a single place, a place that just comes to me from memory, the grocery store in Chester, the trail in Snowden, the old capital in Iowa City, the boardwalk in Ocean Grove, the kitchen at the Catholic Worker, any of these places that double as everywhere and somewhere and just come to me out of nowhere as I'm walking down the street or driving my car, places that lead to the next place and the place after that while remaining fixed in my head, places I want to return to and smoke a cigarette, pause for a moment and then gaze at the view, live again in the very same spot, then move along to somewhere new that I'm not thinking about at all but infects my memory like all the other places, burying themselves in my mind while I'm remembering some place else. It's not nostalgia exactly, but memory released as if the past or the future in a way I can't explain except to say my souls ignite against the ground from scuffing on stones and cracks. So I burn wherever I go, my body itself a flame flickering, welding my mind to earth with flesh, the only solder that works in keeping me attached, at least somewhat, unspringing the clock with its heat. So in looking back, looking ahead to the places I've been from the start and feeling my bones begin to burn beneath my skin with the hottest fire my memory can stand, an invisible flame that burns my grief like a pile of bows that smolders there in acrid smoke and floats away to the farthest place. Thank you very much. Yes. Well, that's always a great question. Now, Alan Ginsburg used to say first thought, best thought but then you look at his papers. And you realize he was kind of saying something else, that freshness of first thought is what you want to preserve somehow, to tell us, for instance, saying, I love and I hate, you may ask how this is possible, I have no idea, but it's happening right now and it hurts. Great first thoughts lasted only, what, 2,500 years now. So how long do you work on it to get it into that shape? Some of these poems are a little formal, the other in blank verse, and so I work that out and at the same time try to preserve that freshness. A lot of it depends on the inspiration. I was talking to a poet yesterday who heard the word listen and it just sparked a whole poem immediately. And so it can just be a word like that. And other times you're thinking of an idea that's pretty complicated maybe and you torture yourself and then you think it's a wonderful poem and you realize you've just been buried in some deeply awful, polemical idea. So that's the curse, that's the curse of not knowing. But yeah, the freshness is so important. Yeah, oh yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. You know, that's the whole idea of myth, that Orpheus and Eurydice never existed and yet that's a truth that's lasted thousands of years. The idea of descending into the underworld to retrieve your beloved and convince the devil that to let her go and then to play the most beautiful music you can on the way out and then forever after that. So I mean it just, we've, our technical age and scientific age has smothered a lot of the wonderful truth of myth and myth has taken on a pretty unfortunate connotation. But poetry is about escaping fact or literal truth in order to tell truths that are going to entertain us forever but may not be literally true. I guess that's maybe the best way to put it and if you can do that, you really accomplish something just invaluable in the art. So someone was asking me about this the other day. I lived at the Catholic Worker for a while and I wrote a story that wasn't true at all and someone said, well, why did you write it that way? And you know, Tim O'Brien, do you know Tim O'Brien at all the great prose writer and witness to the Vietnam War who wrote the things they carried how to tell a true war story? He talks about it in this way that there's a difference between what he calls happiness, literal truth at the end of that wonderful story how to tell a true war story and the truth that lasts, the truth with a face on it. And so he tells this wonderful story about a lieutenant or I mean, a soldier who falls on a grenade and dies and he thinks he's saving his patrol and after he dies, he gets up and he turns to the captain and says, story of my life. And Tim O'Brien said, that is a much truer story and memorable story than the statistical story, yeah. And so that's, I guess, I hope that answers your question, yeah. Yeah, that's also a wonder, because that's the only poem I ever wrote about that, that whole experience. The stories that were told to me during that time for five years every single day were just too amazing that they were too strange. Life is stranger than fiction and fiction is the stuff of myth. So I had a very hard time and still I'm waiting to write either a memoir or a longer poem about that experience. It has to come to me and it hasn't come to me yet. But it was frustrating in that sense because I was experiencing these enormously human stories, every experiences, every day interactions with folks and yet I couldn't write about them. Yeah, except in my reports, you know, every day. My literal reports, yeah. Can I ask you a follow-up on that? Sure, mm-hmm, so you're often nothing, yeah. I wonder, just the imagery is the reason you're not writing about that and that's because you're already writing? Well, I guess that's a great question too. I guess the best way to answer that is to say that it's about the difference between the imagination, the healthy imagination, going somewhere else willfully but remaining sane at the same time. Well, you know, without necessarily realizing what a luxury that is, because when you work on a psych ward, that luxury doesn't exist often. Sadly, yeah, mm-hmm. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean, we're living in a really critical age now when technology and communication has changed in a way that never, the last time this happened culturally was in the 15th century, the convention of the printing press in Gutenberg. So, you know, poetry used to be recited, literature used to be recited, you know, Homer was recited, the Odyssey, the elite, and as well as other literature in the court and then suddenly it was on the page and suddenly all the music was gone, you know, was on the page, very few people recited. So, but now we're in an age where it's a synchronic age, it's an age of information and bites and instant communication that is, I don't want to sound too dire about it because I think a lot of wonderful stuff is happening too on the internet with technology, but you know, I have one student who just is staring at her phone the whole time and she has that look on her face like, I'm not here. And I don't know what to say to her. And I don't know, and I realize that she's Legion now and so what can we do? I mean, you know, all this emphasis now on STEM rather than STEAM, they've taken the arts out of, out of the schools and lots of places because the grants are coming from STEM more than they are from STEAM. I just, I was talking to Michelle Singer about this in an interview and so, but at the same time, I believe deeply in the human spirit and its ability to rise above this somehow, I just don't know, I just think there's a lot of damage being done in the meantime and as a teacher, all I can do is teach poetry and teach them to recite and memorize and to figure out the difference or to try and figure out abstract language and figurative language and enjoy it, but that's tough. I enjoy it immensely. Well, thank you so much, it's been wonderful to be here. Get some freshness, speak with each other, speak with Charred and have a good time.