 executive director. This is the ninth year that we've been doing poem city. This is by far the largest project that the library takes on. It takes an enormous amount of support from the community to make this happen. We get support from grants and in-kind donations, other donations, lots and lots of volunteer work. And we need all those things so much. Plus, our presenters throughout the month make this possible and the many people who participate. In particular, I'd like to thank the organizations that provide a large, larger level of financial support for us. They include Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we are today. Vermont Humanities Council, the Hunger Mountain Co-op, National Life Group Foundation, and the Poetry Society of Vermont. So thanks to all of those organizations. So another important event we have at the Kellogg-Harbert Library each December is that we recognize a Vermont writer. And we've actually been doing this longer than we've been doing poem city. The first year we recognized Katherine Patterson and Senator Patrick Leahy introduced her. We had this gala event at the library and we really transformed the building and moved furniture out of normal places and we get caterers and we bring in flowers and other decorations, have an open bar. And it's just a really great evening. Last year we had the realization that we had never recognized a poet. So I have a committee that works with me on selecting the honoree. And last year we decided, okay, this year we're only considering poets last year. And so we did that. And last year we honored Ellen Bryant Voight and Governor Madeleine Cuner introduced her. And we really had a wonderful evening. It's actually a coincidence that those are the introducers of both political figures because I think those are maybe the only two times that has happened. So then after having recognized a poet last year, this year when we met to talk about who to recognize. And it's so wonderful in Vermont because there's so many wonderful choices. But we figured while we did a poet last year, so now we're just going to open it all up again. It doesn't have to be a poet. Well, it turns out that we decided to recognize a poet again. So, and that poet is here with us today, one of our presenters. So would you please join me in congratulating Major Jackson. Major, would you stand? So we'll be honoring Major on the first Saturday of December. And we'll do a more thorough introduction a little later when he is speaking, when he's reading his poetry. So, first of our five poets, Megan Buchanan is the author of Close Line Religion published by Green Writers Press in 2017. Her work can be found in The Sun magazine, makeshift, a woman's thing, recent anthologies such as Dream Closet, Meditation on Childhood Space, and Rhodes Taken, Contemporary Vermont Poetry, and numerous other publications. She is also a collaborative performer, dance maker, and high school English teacher who works with students with learning differences. Megan just received the 2018 seedling award from the Vermont Performance Lab to restore her interdisciplinary performance project called Regenerations, Reckoning and Responding to the Closure of Vermont Yankee. Would you please welcome Megan Buchanan. I love that there's like a roomful of people to come out and hear poetry on a Saturday afternoon in sort of a terrible weather day. It's really inspiring. Sunday, Sunday. I'm on vacation this week, so I kind of lost track already. So thank you so much for inviting me, and I'm really honored to read with some of my friends today and hear some poets that I don't know yet. There's people here I know from the Vermont Studio Center, from meeting them in bookshops and becoming friends with them. So I just love the poetry community in Vermont. So also here is a woman who, last year I had some poems up for Poem City, and one of your local residents, can I say your name? Liz Benjamin. She made a composition of three instruments and voice based on one of my poems. So there's this cross-pollination that happened without me even knowing it, and I guess they want us to do something with it next year. But anyway, I'm just really honored that that happened, and I get to meet you today, and that's a poem city, like a high-five to Poem City. So this is my little book that I finally published last year, a closed-line religion, and I'm just going to read maybe five poems and then we'll keep going. So thank you for being here. My poems are alphabetical in the book, so I'll just do that too. So this one's called, I like to read this one always, it's called A New and Fervent Domesticity Has Seized Me. Okay, I can understand the boiling pots of strawberries for jam, these herbs in the window, gray and green, my daughter's knees like apples scrubbed with almond soap, stacks of white cotton diapers, and my reverence for closed-lines has been around for years, but what's with this ironing of tea towels in the dark at half past one? Scrubbing out the fridge, thumbnail detail, two weeks in a row. I can out-sweep Cinderella, I'm suspicious of the dishwasher, and I've mastered all the dagger and caterpillar attachments of the vacuum. This is inexcusable, this pressing of creases in myself, new mother, this filling up of all my free moments with tidying, scrubbing, folding and refolding as if untidiness was the reason he didn't want us, as if I wasn't clean. Okay, here's the poem that Liz made a composition of. It's a poem in the shape of the subject of the poem called Buttermilk Moon. Buttermilk Moon, spilling into sky, up over folded mountain ridge, lush evergreen ridge, spilling down to river, Buttermilk Moon rising full over valley, light sliding, shimmer green water, shivering, dreamy, cool, Buttermilk moonlight, golden river skin. This is a poem that, sometimes poems are like part of a healing process for me, and this one's like that, it's called Mornings Full of Sunlight. One, when you are old, I want to be old and still here. I don't want to miss any of you, though I already do. Little bowls of breakfast, ramekins with a small bamboo spoon, jam jars of milk in your vitamins, brushing your hair to the side, golden light of July in each strand, it's wild. Two, all of this will end, Mornings Full of Sunlight. I once walked to school with my two younger brothers. We balanced like a tricycle. We didn't tip until we got too big. We rode unpaved back roads, no headlamps, and we made it through somehow, how? Three, tonight the mother part of me wishes I could go back to those three and say, God, I know it's been so scary. Please come out from under the manzanita. Okay, I'm going to read an Ireland one because I heard the Irish poet couldn't make it last night. What's the place called? Okay, so this one's from Ireland. It's called Singing at Matt Malloy's. And afterwards, when sober red-faced uncles grabbed me for a dance, that freedom I've always been chasing was mine, and I hung on, eyes closed against the tourists, grinning as we flew and stomped, whirling around the center. The music roared in my head like the fierce hum of sea inside a shell, salty and unending, and for long moments I was entirely possessed by that ordinary magic. Okay, one more little one. This one is called Pocket, and I think this was part of Poem City last year. Pocket. And I'm here again, hanging out in the pocket of God's favorite shirt, in worn blue flannel, filtered light and sound, I'm suspended along for the ride. Tag along, tiny human, I'm held and warm, horizontal against heartbeat. I can't see the sky. Thank you. Thank you, Macon. Diana Whitney writes across the genres in Southern Vermont. Her first book, Wanting It, became an indie bestseller and won the Ruberie Book Award in poetry. She is the poetry columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and her essays, poems, and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, and many more. Diana is the winner of the 2015 Women's National Book Association Poetry Prize, selected by Ellen Bass, and has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, and the Vermont Studio Center. Maybe she'll tell us how she came to be the poetry columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. But anyway, would you please welcome Diana Whitney. Thank you, Tom. My alter ego lives in San Francisco, but I live in Brattleboro. And I'm so happy to be back up here in Poem City. I think this is maybe my third year in a row, and I love it. I love all the poems all over the windows, windows into windows. So I'm going to read, I think, from winter into summer, and I'm going to start with a poem that takes place on the meadows in Brattleboro. If you're from down there, you know what it is. It's a confluence of the West and Connecticut rivers that freezes over, and it's kind of like Brattleboro's seasonal cocktail party when it freezes. Everybody comes out of the woodwork, and this is about a scary accident that happened in the blessing that it is to come out the other side. Mirage, cataract light glowered above the meadows. Long season of mistrust, winter's bone, gnawed and tussled by my bad mood, every last scrap of gristle worried from the edges. Still, we sat down on milk crates and laced up our skates, an act of hope on a frozen channel in a small town in a dark time. Cold sunlight glared in the rushes. Ice can be harder than any surface, harder than asphalt, harder than bone. I asked if she wanted her helmet, black vinyl shell, face cage like a gladiators. No, she said, hatless and zoomed free into the day, a speck of blue fleece and flying gold hair. The Sunday crowd stepped out with wool coats and silver flasks. The fishermen slid live bait onto hooks, set the long lines and waited. I skated to the confluence and back, humming a wish I had a river scanning the surface for splits and fissures. The crack of her skull hitting ice reverberated down my limbs, adrenaline shot straight to the brainstem, her scream like a bayonet lancing the sternum, a demon prying ribs open to get to the heart. What is inside us is wet and humble and slippery as fish. She lay still on the ice turning blue in the long minutes before sled rescue. Five EMTs baby stepping towards our numb huddle. A whole lifetime unfolded as they hoisted her on the sled, slid it across the ice to the ambulance, warm and dry as a mirage. Sitting in the jump seat with her hooked to the monitors, I began to pray. Later in the ER wrapped in heated blankets, she ate a red popsicle and wept when the nurse said no screen time. Ice can be harder than any surface, harder than pixels, harder than bone. We were the lucky ones going home with our girl, small egg lump on the back of her head. How I studied the sheets of concussion commands. An ocean away, a rain of bombs cooled the desert. Quiet welded the night with stars, constellations of shattered families, fear sloshed in a metal bucket. So moving on to mud season. This poem is short, it's a sonnet, and I'm very grateful it just appeared in the latest issue of Green Mountains Review, which is a wonderful journal right here in Vermont. It's called Sugar Maker. The heat lamp in the hen house burned all night, all day. The birds scratched hopefully at snowpack as you tap, tap, tapped the cold bark looking for a vein. Drill and hammer, freeze and thaw, lion and lamb blown raw by the winds of marriage, slush ravaged hens huddled in plywood and sawdust. I crushed the secret like pitch pine tips, carried my fragrant hands close to my chest, waited for mud seasons, slow revelations, mist and murk rising from the remains of winter. First drops, plunking buckets, a reminder. Sap run in muck boots, steady as rock maple you come with your pales slopping over. Sugar maker at the steaming arch, tending our dark amber. My husband makes maple syrup in our backyard. So I'm going to read one poem from my book, Wanting It, and goes all the way back to kindergarten. It's called A Marriage Story. Kindergarten was wood chips and Julio on my tail like a rocket through the playground, black eyes and fast legs crawling in the tire tunnel, breath on my turtleneck, scrabbling the rope wall, bouncing me off the hanging walkway into the monkey bar house. Every recess he said he would marry me. He said it like a threat, like I'm going to kill you. And I knew if I ran too slow and he caught me, it was true. At home my mother brushed my brown hair like a precious fleece, static crackling beneath satin ribbon as I cried for my future, for my new life with Julio. Even after the promises and parent-teacher conference, after recess inside and timeouts for Julio, I cried like the world was ending, which it was, because Julio proclaimed I would grow up and leave home. Small profit in corduroy staking his claim where boys' stashed mosses and secret bones played out their terrible shouting games. I was fast, but I couldn't outrun them. In another forest the girl glimpsed the gold, trick apple of love concealed in underbrush, and she slowed her sprint to gather it up. The last warrior who raced her caught her like this, reeled her in like a fish on a line. At night in the king bed my yellow ring shines, bites my sleeping finger sometimes without warning. So I'm going to do two more, two summer poems, just to reassure us today that it's coming. So July and August. The first one's called Torched, and it has a little epigraph from Alina Kalitiak-Davis. Too much was never enough. Torched. All the garish flowers opened in mid-summer. Tiger lilies yawning on the road. Bordello blooms climbed over each other, bee balm, plume poppy, bronzy red and gold. I dragged the couch onto the summer porch in another incarnation of desire. You were the one who lit the torch with pollen, diesel and meadow fire, cooled it with blackberries dripping juice, water pulled from a boreal spring. The cat unfurled herself on the car roof, like a black velvet ribbon of longing. The hay lay knit and spun in torrid rows, falling in a blonde mass to the shoulders of the field. You coasted slow as syrup down the edge of my daydream, engine purring, windows down, rust truck of trouble come back around. And the last one takes place in the upper valley, right along the Connecticut River. Velvet rocks. August in a cotton smock, I hoofed up velvet rocks 40 weeks to the day, full up to my sternum with baby. The elastic band of my bike shorts rode low beneath my belly, panting like a wolfhound, cranky and hot. All I wanted was to get you out of me. So I tramped the granite switchback, path lined with mosses, arms swinging the humid summer forest of my impatience, my trial by fire, as the sun rose higher above the valley, the river snaking between two states. How matter shifts, firm to yielding, solid to liquid, liquid to air. I'd done all my homework, read all the books, practiced my breathing, my hypno visualization, swallowed evening primnose oil each morning, slid the golden capsules deep inside where they melted like honey to soften the cervix. And you dropped into the pelvic bowl, sunny side up, ready or not, here we come. They said, keep walking, so I hauled you up velvet rocks to the shelter where I'd capped at 19, eaten watermelon by firelight, a stone's throw from the tiled hospital, the mechanical bed, beaded with sweats, ice cubes melting on my forehead as if on a skillet, your skull bearing down, your neck arched back. You were navigating the tunnel, we were digging deeper, the summer river green and flecked with amber, suspended between two states of matter, between out and in, between here and there, S-curves of current shifting, alluvial silt filtered through algae, bright scalpel, your blood, my blood, white curtain drawn tight, bright room like a boat where they hauled you in thrashing. Thank you. So four of our five poets don't live anywhere close to Montpelier. Diana and I started emailing yesterday about the weather forecast, and then this morning it was wonderful to hear from her. She'd checked in with all of the poets, and all five were going to make it. So I don't know if you caught that or not, but Megan and Diana drove up from Brattleboro. So a couple of hours, that's really great. And our next two poets, Major Jackson and Dee Dee Jackson, came down from Burlington. So next one is Major Jackson. Major is an American poet, professor and author of three collections of poetry. Holding Company and Hoops were both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature Poetry. His first volume, Leading Saturn, won the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Award. Major is also a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the winner, Brennan Binner. Binner, a foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Would you please welcome Major Jackson. Good afternoon. Really good to read with such fine poets. And also to read back here in Montpelier. Thank you, Diana, Karen, Megan and Dee Dee for gracing us with your brilliance. Dee Dee and I just finished a workshop with some girl scouts. Poetry, they went to... We had a cool time. We did an exquisite corpse and we did Joe Brainerd's, I remember, poem. And the conversation came up about rhyme, whether or not poetry could be rhyme, and I made up some tale about in 1900 the groups fought over whether or not poetry could exist without rhyme. And a little girl named Madeleine cast the last vote. They all read Madeleine. This is a poem that rhymes, and I've been writing just far too many serious poems. So I just thought I would have a little fun. This is called History. If you could turn back the clock, where would you stop? Would you hear freedom ring from the voice of a king? Would you sing along with Paul and John on a song? Or would you dine with Antoinette and risk your neck? Or far from Hiroshima, raise a flag in Iwo Jima? Would you stand bewitched as Edison threw a switch? Would you look with delight as Orville scaled the heights? Maybe you'd shrug and simply turned the dial to a place called Now. If you could turn back the clock, where would you stop? Would you cry aloud for the fall of the Berlin Wall or visit the globe to see King Blair by the new playwright Billy Shakespeare? Would you be among the crowds as Paul Robeson took a bow or Nina Simone or Frank Sinatra or maybe Costa Diva Maria Callis? Would you salute the aparchic as it launched Sputnik, which led between the Soviets and us a nuclear hotline in case of a crisis? Would you dance with Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham or Alvin Ailey or Fred Astaire or Tatwit Bojangles on a stair? Maybe you'd shrug and simply turned the dial to a place called Now. If you could turn back the clock, where would you stop? Would you cross the Delaware, block a tank at Tiananmen Square, fight the battle of Concord, ride shotgun with Henry Ford, run the bases with Ty Cobb, celebrate Valentine's with the mob? Would you boogie woogie and sing the blues on a Harlem step with Langston Hughes? Would you fight for a woman's right to vote in Seneca Falls? Would you kill just for the thrill like Charles and his Neanderthals? Would you circle a tree with a rope, travel to Rome to cheer the Pope, fight teataxation, escape a plantation, sign a declaration or build a nation? Maybe you shrug and simply turn the dial to a place called Now. If you could turn back the clock, where would you stop? That is an ongoing poem. I keep saying I'm going to add some stanzas just before a new reading. I didn't do it this time, but why not? Here's another newish poem recently published. You can find it online. It's an elegy to the poet Derek Walcott, who passed away a year ago this month. And it's written in three sections. Island traffic slows to a halt, as screeching gulls reluctant to lift heavenward congregate like mortars in salt-crusted kelp as the repellent news spreads to colder shores. Sir Derek is no more. Band whips clogged by streaming tributes carry the pitch of his voice. Less so his lines, more as they are to a fisherman's who strains in the Atlantic. Then hearing two drops his rod, the real unspooling light memory till his gate mouth matches the same look in his wicker grill. That frozen shock, eyes marbling a different catch. Pomerac trees, sea grapes, and laurel sway, wrecked having lost one who heard their leaves rustic dialect as law, grasped their bows as edicts from the first garden that sowed faith and believe he did. Astonished at the bounty of light, like Adam over castries, cosmos, port of Spain, the solace of drifting clouds, rains like hymns, then eatings of grass, ornate winds on high verandas carrying spirits who survived that vile sea crossing, who floated up in his stanzas, the same souls a shield saw alive the ocean there coughing. Faith too, in sunsets, horizons whose auric silhouettes divide and spawn reflection which was his pen's work. Devotion twinned with delight, divining like a church sexton. Poetry is empty without discipline, without piety he cautions somewhere even his lesser rhymes amount to more than wrought praise but amplify his palms as high prayer. So as to earn their wings above, pelicans move into tactical formation then fly low like jet fighters in honor of him, nature's mouth their aerial salute and goodbye. Derrick, each journey we make, whether Homeric or not, follows the literal wake of some other craft's launch, meaning to sense the slightest motions and unmoving waters as half the apprentice's training before he oars out careful to coast breaking English's calm surface. What you admired in Eakins in conversation at some cafe, New Orleans, Philly, was how his roar seemed to listen to ripples on the schoolkill as much as to his breath both silent on his speaking canvas. Gratitude made you intolerant of the rudeness of the avant-garde or any pronouncements of the new for breathing is legacy in one's rhythm though the blood's authentic transcription hymns as to ancestors like a pulse. This ifathem is what you met when exalting the merits of a fellow poet that man is at the center of language at the center of the song. Yet a reader belongs to another age and likely to list our wrongs more than the strict rhymes of our verse often retreats like a vanished surf spoon frothing on a barren beach. The allure of an artist's works these days is measured by his ethics thus our books scrub clean rarely mention the shadowless dark that settles like an empire over a page. Your nib like the eye of the moon flashed into sight the source of Adam's barbaric cry. Departed from paradise each nobody a sacrifice debating whose lives matter where on a golden platter our eyes royal dilated by hate from Ferguson to Kuwait. You matra gave in laughter but also for the hereafter an almost unbearable truth we are the terrible history of warring births destined for darkest earth. So as cables of optic lights bounce under oceans our white pain codified as they are in fiber layered in Kevlar we hear ourselves in you. Where race exiles us to stand lost as single nations awaiting your revelations. A shirtless boy brown as bark gallops along shore bareback and free on a horse until he fades a shimmering all that remains. My last poem is called Mr. Pate's Barber Shop and it is in memory another kind of elegy I guess in memory of a barber who cut my hair when I was a kid. Someone who we made up a rumor about that he didn't throw hair away after he cut little boy's hairs and put it in jars in the back of his shop. Mr. Pate's Barber Shop I remember the room in which he held the blade to my neck and scraped the dark hairs foresting a jawline stacks of ebony's and jets clippings of black foxes Joe Fraser, Jimmy Young, Jack Johnson the color television bolted to a ceiling like the one I watched all night in the waiting room as St. Joseph's while my cousin recovered from gunshots. I remember the old Coke machine a water fountain by the door how I drank the summer of 88 over and over from a paper cone cup and still cannot quench my thirst for this was the year of this was the year funeral homes boomed the year Mr. Pate swept his own shop where he had lost his best little helper to gunfire he suffered like most barbers suffered quietly his clippers humming so loud he forgot Ali's lightning left jab his love for angles, for carpentry, for baseball he forgot everything and would never be the same I remember the way the blade gleamed fierce in the fading light of dust and a reflection of myself panned inside the razor's edge wondering if I could lay down my pen close up my ledgers and my journals if I could undo my tie and take up barboring where months on in a child's head would darken at my feet and bring with it the uncertainty of tomorrow or like Mr. Pate gathering clumps of fallen hair at the end of a day in short delicate whisks as though they were the fine findings of gold dust he deposited in a jar in place on a shelf only to return sadities collecting as an antique dealer collects growing tired but never forgetting someone has to cherish these tiny little heads thank you thank you major Dede Jackson's poems have appeared in the New Yorker plowshares the common water share excuse me water stone review among other publications her manuscript almost animal now killing jar was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award the Lexi Radnicki First Book Prize and the Autumn House Press First Book Award Dede's first collection of poems killing jar is forthcoming from Red Hand Press her chapbook Slag and Fortune was published by Floating Wolf Waterley currently Dede teaches poetry and the visual arts 20th century poetry of war and witness and creative writing at the University of Vermont and serves as the poetry editor for Green Mountains Review would you please welcome Dede Jackson how are you thank you all for the introduction wonderful to read with some very good friends and amazing poets and I'm going to jump right in this poem is a poem that I just wrote last week so I'm going to be brave and read it today it's titled Listen like a hundred gray ears the river stones are layered in a pile near the shed where morning doves slow their peck and bobble to listen to a chorus of listening small buds on the lilac perk up a cardinals torpedoed call comes in slow waves of four round after round it's a love call a call to make him known to himself the stones listen harder decipher the song attempt to offer it back its echo but fail this is not a poem of spring this is a poem well aware that gray flesh is dead flesh all of the ripe listening comes at a cost the first sky is in all skies the first song in all songs on hawk mountain Vermont I should say this I just moved up from Florida two years ago and I always feel like I should I love to write about Vermont now it's a new world for me everything about the snow winter lasting well into April birds and such I'm fascinated so you'll see that's a theme in my work on hawk mountain Vermont I'm parting with the sun that like a Greek oracle descends the temple of mountains before me their silhouette darkens to Oxford blue allides the current of the sky until I no longer see crest or peak after moving up from the south how much should I know of coniferous trees or of chickadees who play their winter song of Phoebe Phoebe the last note toppling an octave from the first like a softly closing door the northern sky stands so straight it uses the largest pines for crutches they bend under its weight we have a friend who isn't happy I'm white with him though the road is just sampling the sound of rain so my husband and I hold hands as often as we can each finger erupting a new continent but in the early evening I worry that if pulled over when my husband lifts his empty hands he is lifting only his blackness at this hour a chickadee cries in staccato di di di di di di I wonder how it knows my name before I look at our marriage in the milky evening light my next poem is written it's dedicated to a student of mine who was murdered it's a murder suicide domestic and gun violence so it's titled the burning bush and it's dedicated to Brianne Ortt an entire alphabet can be stuttered in a few gunshots so often it's the boyfriend spiraling down the chamber his words lodged in the barrel behind the bullet fast and frenzied we all wonder why the trash at the dump never stops burning why the blind look to the wind the rain stumbles outside the window the tombe before the heavy pot of array of rain Cathedral de Samarco in Venice speaks two languages Greek and Latin and I'm jealous of those with two tongues like the white pine whose trunk cracks and whose needles whistle to the bilingual nut hatch the sun torches the tips of the trees on a descent from a world where no woman is safe even the man who loved her wanted her dead the burning bush is an invasive species yet cardinals and chickadees flock to its red seeds and flame leaves in the fall I should cut it to a stump and rot its roots but instead I admire its show of color watching the damage as it spreads my next poem I wrote exactly almost a year ago because my son just turned 20 and the title is directions for my son on his 19th birthday I cupped my hands to hold your youth I try to show you how to do the same it takes decades of practice to get this right and by then it's always too late yesterday a man stabbed a homeless man on church street at dinner we tuck this story between bites of salmon pieces of song by Fleetwood Mac melting from the speaker it rained all day today I told you that I always thought I'd have another baby in truth I knew I was only good for one no matter how hard you press the outer edges of your palms and pinkies together they will always leak you should know that you can't hold water in your palms for long don't put yourself in a spot where you'll have to carry all you'll need at dusk we count four rabbits on the back lawn and I consider if it is a sign only to watch the stocking feral tabby turn them to humble bronze heavy and frozen and hopefully downwind at least once a year you should close your cupped hands like a book not to worry hinged they always open again I decided at the last minute to read an Ireland poem too you inspired me to do that so I thought I'd add my Ireland poem in there and then I'll read one more after that you should have had your Ireland poem and this is a little Vermonti too because it's titled four days before winter solstice how will I ever memorize the pattern of snow or the scripted footfalls of rabbit and squirrel around the yard its blank white cheek turned from the early falling light I wish I could tend to the light like I tend to a fire stoke it so it might linger just above the pines the solstice has not yet come and we still spin into darker days the familiar noise of the nightly news echoes inside the cave of our darkened home at Newgrange in the Boyne Valley of Ireland light runs the passage of the megalithic tomb precisely on the winter solstice lighting the chamber when there this summer we use flashlights for the same effect but in those sumptuous green days we couldn't remember how much we would need the turn from the longest hours of dark at the entrance of the tomb triple spirals map the curb stone like carved melody swirls like neolithic voice a mantra to memorize the entrance into the sacred I can recite John 316 I can name the order of the planets and get most of the words to stairway to heaven when I glance out the window I can tell a chickadee from a junko titmouse from a wax wing even the red and white pine can be parsed a poet I admire the words are made mostly of air in the dim light they whirl around the seed for our last feeding and add to the mysterious coils and ruins in the stacked snow so I'm going to end with signs for the living sometimes after the last oh I should change this first line to the last snow in April because maybe that'll bring us good luck but anyway sorry I was just thinking sometimes after the last snow in May after the red wing blackbird clutches the spine of the cat tail after he leans forward droops his wings and flashes his epaulets I imagine shouldering the yellow center lines of the road near the recently thawed pond within a long channel of construction a man holding a sign one side says slow the other stop joy and sorrow always run like parallel lines inside the house when I leave the lights on small white moths come like a collection of worship pulsing their wings up and up the window as if in a frenzy trance like dance some dervishes others the penitent on shaky knees the first few years after my husband's suicide I wanted to be the penitent I thought I deserved all the pain I could feel the drill of the road work in that late summer was a welcome grinding music now the yellow center lines are flung like braids behind me thank you so much thank you Didi so some of you are wondering what's this Irish thing going on today so that came up from a conversation we were having before this started there's a bagel and burrito shop in Montpelier called Baguitos they like hosting musicians and writers and every Saturday afternoon almost every Saturday afternoon all year long there's a group of musicians who get together to play Irish music there Hilary Farrington used to be the director of the Kellogg Hubbard Library and Sarah Blair who works at the library now and she's one of the people who organized this it attracts musicians from around the state of Vermont and on a regular basis they actually have musicians from Ireland who participate who are visiting in Vermont and visiting their friends who are visiting so it's really interesting that they have and I've seen some of you there George dances there sometimes so we won't do that right now if I asked him he would so Karen McHaddon is our fifth poet today Karen is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes winner of the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize she is the recipient of a national endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship of Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series Verse Daily and in such journals as the American Poetry Review Beloit Poetry Journal Horse Thief Prairie Schooner and Rattle Karen is the Associate Director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at the Frost Place and teaches at Montpelier High School would you please welcome Karen McHaddon hi thanks for coming everybody it's really hard to read last because I want to read every single poem I've ever written because each poem that everyone writes reminds you of something oh I have a poem about birds and Ireland can you hear me okay is this loud enough okay I'll start tonight with I'm going to read from my phone for the first time ever maybe ever there's a weekly journal that comes out as an email it's called Love's Executive Order and it's a weekly poem in defiance of the President of the United States and so I have a poem that's coming out in that next week and this is called How I Know We Are Doomed terrible things happen and we read about them and then we do the next thing that changes nothing the people at this AAU basketball tournament cheering their children on don't think they can do anything they don't think anything they don't think anything right now while the children play this game or the next one most are just thinking big D, big D and yelling it and yelling box out as if it were the end of the world if the children didn't box out the boys do touch each other for good luck their hands speak the language of hope to each other you will make the next one is what that tiny slap says everyone in the gym believes it's true when my son shoots hell I uncross my legs and arms and fingers damn if I'm not all in not one of us goes home and does anything to fix anything no one can stop big baby big baby is still going to do I am going to go home and grade papers and read books and tomorrow morning I will make the steel cut oats the coffee I will resist the alarm I will put the trash out on trash day check my calendar's list of small things I need to do and I will do them and go to bed and get up and do small things over and over and they will never be big enough things I can't do a big enough thing I make a small path from my house to a basketball tournament then back home where I light fires and sit with my dog I answer emails and for almost a year I read every article about big baby and yell as loud and as well composed posts as I can post on Facebook now most of the time I'm back to poems and dinner I drive around and wonder if anyone in another car has a good enough idea to change anything about big baby or even the planet in its slow mo crock pot sometimes I pray want to know what else that first day I stayed home and left my students with a substitute who got mad at them when they cried I also did that this is a time of year when many parents are trying to decide where to send their children next year so this is a poem about a year away into the world which reminds me of Didi's poem about her son turning 20 and has birds in it so yeah it's called 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 sifting purple and 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 bellied flycatcher its 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 Sanjanae 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 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 on a bridge and a man taught me to call sparrows a little bit from my hands told me he was a sinner that what he did for me was atonement which is a thing I might understand I want to tell you there is nothing like their tiny grip the way they quiver while they pack 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 what to do next this is a poem called safety instructions my husband is right now in the sky flying so I read this one for him fingers crossed for safety safety instructions unless directed by a crew member do not construct if then scenarios not about the plane not about your life unless directed by a crew member do not build flow charts for the past do not sweeten your silence or the beauty of the shoe shine man who only wanted your money do not consider Denver in the rain unless directed by a crew member do not study the grid of the western planes the forked and dissipating rivers do not translate they should not call to mind the footprints of birds in the dust in your village unless directed by a crew member again do not study the western planes sometimes the fields are crop circles but these hold no mystery they are the elegant drawings only of rolling gantries when resting do not lean on the man next to you like the pilot he will only ask you when you are making your descent into Chicago he will suddenly come alive stop looking out the window only to close the shade again quickly will ask his flutter of questions then disappear unless directed by a crew member do not look at the reading material of the men flanking you do not show them the word they are searching for is backward and diagonal do not reach over and circle it unless directed by a crew member do not dream in general of men or in particular of one you are suspended above the world a careening impossibility you are flying headlong as you fly east the rivers are not isolated bird prints are a pulse the forest's return dispatches from the body unless directed by a crew member do not calculate the weight of pronouns spoken by men I am going to read two more poems one short one a little beefy this is called when my brother dies and then the last poem is about Ireland but this one is not this is light work when my brother dies it happened already it has happened five times and will happen again my brother is dead we try to recover what he stole and start by making a list we can't finish I've been living up and down the same river bank since I started having families I stay on my side of the river which makes our list full of half truths I will not cross the river they try to cross his hands across his chest my brother is falling my brother's skin is older than my dead uncle's love for bees and sunlight my uncle in the sunlight in his trailer saying they want me to leave but I love it here spending days in the hallway once fallen my brother seems to love the satin sheets his hands falling to touch them again when I lean my hands on the fancy wood I slip my brother a lollipop a sister is supposed to put something into the coffin to show love so many nights we sat by the TV while he pawed a bowl of candy nodding, nodding and scratching at his face, his neck as if plants had bitten him up I don't know how to tell him what it means to live on a river I don't know yet that he will die again the ice lets go on the river and floats away like pool toys piloted by tiny children rivers fold into themselves like oars into water like little boys hurt too much and I want to tell the tiny children be careful but there is no time to grow to love them as they braid downstream I walk home uphill past the country and the massive boat in the John boat my brother and I float and row water weeds skim the boat we eat quartered oranges and lean our backs against the gunnels and rip worms onto tiny hooks we forget what is coming and act like there aren't anymore deaths to come we are lazy the water moccasin coiled under the seat keeps its mouth shut as we climb out which death are my parents crying about now I wonder if it's motorcycle death or locked in jail death I hope it's shot by a gunman death and not wasted away death hypodermic needle death is the one I know it always is though it's a blue and translucent death this time we cry like our eyes or needles the plunger pressed we cry like sugar water and dirty apartments there he goes again here is another ice rink another red faced ollie ollie on him again he's dead again and look what he did look how he won't wake up where does he keep going he never packs a thing the dog eats the linoleum and his son shakes him to wake up little daddy daddy jabbing his father on the brown couch we say he won't wake up it's a game his son asks and we say no or practice saying no this brother whose first parents disappeared like ghosts this father who keeps dying on couches and in vans knows how to do this one thing this laying back of the head this wooden blanket from the waist down this wooden blanket top door closing I feel like I should stop but I have one more I have the Ireland poem I'm going to read the Ireland poem because how do I not read the Ireland poem my whole second book is half about Ireland so this is like a weird confluence here this is called Colletter Forest Father McLaughlin's Well and all over Ireland in Donegal there are these holy wells that you go to and there'll be trinkets that people have left at them and people go pray and my cousin we always have to go get holy water and I have to bring it home to Vermont he makes me bring a bottle of it home along with some moonshine that he won't tell me where he gets Colletter Forest Father McLaughlin's Well we cut through the forest to check the sheep on the far mountain and stop to fill our bottles Sitka spruce make a grid filled with moss above the holy water on the shelf this shrine baby toys wrappers of pills prayer cards Star Wars posters Jesus his beard chipped pointing to his flaming heart next to him another Jesus broken ankles alabaster hollow and full of leaves a hole clear through his chest baby dolls a cane and face down there another Jesus slumped beside the shot gun shells packs of cigarettes snow globes near inhalers and hello kitty and zipped baggies of jewelry and charms another Jesus hands open we kneel to bless ourselves midges worry the air until they find us nearby in the asphodel in the wet ditch horse bones almost clean look like what I think I am underneath as Karen was saying it must be awfully hard to decide which poems to read when you have so many so the Irish theme was not planned that just happened but the Irish poet Angela Patton was born in Ireland raised in Dublin and she was scheduled to read yesterday's baguitos and that's rescheduled she actually is going to be there on the 28th of this month to read Irish poetry while they have their weekly Irish traditional music session so I would like to again thank the Vermont College of Fine Arts for hosting us this afternoon I would like to thank Orca Media for taping this and this will be on the Orca website later on many of the poem city events from this year and other years are on the Orca website and thank you Rebecca for dealing with our speaker problem in the beginning or our audio problem and thank all of you for being here because we need not to just the haves but we have to have audiences and we really get wonderful audiences and you have been a very wonderful audience I want to especially thank our five poets Megan Diana, Major, Dee Dee and Karen for being here today for enriching our lives with your work and for enriching our day with your presence thank you