Poetry - Berkshire Links

Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2013

The fifth Mass Poetry Festival, scheduled for May 3–5, 2013, in Salem, MA, brings American’s most admired poets from across the country to a celebration of Massachusetts’ lively contemporary poetry scene. Salem becomes the epicenter of contemporary American poetry, offering rare opportunities to hear first-rate American poets read and discuss their work in intimate and engaging fora. Highlights include:

Friday evening May 3, 2013, Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, joins poet and memoirist, Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), and Jill McDonough (Where You Live) for an unforgettable evening of poems about the humor and the dysfunction of family, Michael Jackson and the Hubble telescope. 7:30–9:30 p.m. in the Atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Saturday evening May 4, 2013, Sharon Olds (Stag’s Leap), 2013 winner of the TS Eliot Poetry Prize joins the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry winner, Terrance Hayes (Lighthead), and Eduardo C. Corral (Slow Lightning), whose first collection won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The three writers demonstrate the extraordinary possibilities of poetry to reveal the personal and political experiences of American life. 7:30–9 p.m. at the First Universalist Church of Salem.
Sunday afternoon May 5, 2013, Santa Fe-based poet Arthur Sze (The Ginkgo Light), recent winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, joins Cambridge-based Gail Mazur (Figures in a Landscape) 2:15–3:15 p.m. at PEM’s Native American Gallery. The 1994 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa (The Chameleon Couch) joins two award-winning poets with roots in Massachusetts: Kevin Goodan (Winter Tenor) and Erica Funkhouser (Earthly) 3:45–4:45, PEM’s East India Room.

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival offers poetry readings, workshops, a small press fair, panels, music, and visual arts. Panel topics range broadly from a Cinco de Mayo reading, Taboo, and the Common Threads Reading, where contemporary poets in Massachusetts discuss their literary heirs. More than 100 poets will engage with thousands of people. Admission for all weekend events is $15, $7 for students and seniors. The website www.masspoetry2013.crowdvine.com provides a list of book stores for festival buttons sales and for pre-registering for events.

Playing to the River, poem by Jeff Daniel Marion

Column 420; by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
There’s something wonderful about happening upon a musician playing for his or her own pleasure, completely absorbed in the music. Jeff Daniel Marion is a fine poet from east Tennessee. And here’s a woman playing the bagpipes.

Playing to the River, poem by Jeff Daniel Marion

She stands by the riverbank,
notes from her bagpipes lapping
across to us as we wait

for the traffic light to change.
She does not know we hear—
she is playing to the river,

a song for the water, the flow
of an unknown melody to the rocky
bluffs beyond, for the mist

that was this morning, shroud
of past lives: fishermen
and riverboat gamblers, tugboat captains

and log raftsmen, pioneer and native
slipping through the eddies of time.
She plays for them all, both dirge

and surging hymn, for what has passed
and is passing as we slip
into the currents of traffic,
the changed light bearing us away.

about American Life in Poetry

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2007 by Nancy Price from her book of poetry Two Voices and a Moon, Malmarie Press, 2007. Reprinted by permission of Nancy Price and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Trick or Treat, poem by Nancy Price

Column 396; by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
I’m not alone in noticing how time accelerates as we grow older, and as the seasons grow ever more brief the holidays are gone in a wink. This poem by Nancy Price about Halloween catches a little of that. She’s an Iowan whose poems are so heartfelt, clear and useful that we could run them every week and none of you would complain.

Trick or Treat, poem by Nancy Price

The ghost is a torn sheet,
the skeleton’s suit came from a rack in a store
the witch is flameproof, but who knows
what dark streets they have taken here?
Brother Death, here is a candy bar.
For the lady wearing the hat from Salem: gum.
And a penny for each eye, Lost Soul.
They fade away with their heavy sacks.
Thanks! I yell just in time.
                             Thanks for another year!

about American Life in Poetry

Billy Collins poem The Names commemorates 9-11

By Dave Read.

The boon and bane of my modern life is the search engine, combined with the fact that writing is a thing done with a keyboard wired to a device that can access the Internet. It is the boon and bane age because it is good and bad – a ready mixture of the salubrious and the deleterious. Instead of taxing your memory – of having a good think, or of putting some effort into research (if not reflection), nowadays when your train of thought pauses at a ? mark, you hie to Google and before you know it you know more than you know what to do with on practically any subject.

So it was this morning when I was beginning to work out an idea for a poem that had occurred to me while listening to a radio program driving home after visiting friends last night. It was “The Hudson River Sampler,” and a string of songs called to mind a couple favorite musicians I’d first heard in the 60s. My idea was to celebrate them, by way of memorializing them in a poem, the way I’d imagined the Poet Laueate would. So, in order to clarify my understanding of what a poet laureate’s duties were when they included the composing of poems for certain occassions, I Googled something like “poet laureate memorial poem duties.”

Near the top of the results was a link to a poem that Billy Collins wrote while he was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. It is called The Names, and I cannot imagine a more beautiful public commemorization of 9-11.

That is the boon – one stunning poem, (and more about Billy Collins) plus all I need to know about “poet laureate.” The bane is that my poem about Dave Van Ronk and Mississippi John Hurt yet awaits its first line.

Old Houses, poem by Robert Cording

Old Houses

by Robert Cording

Year after year after year
I have come to love slowly

how old houses hold themselves—

before November’s drizzled rain
or the refreshing light of June—

as if they have all come to agree
that, in time, the days are no longer
a matter of suffering or rejoicing.

I have come to love
how they take on the color of rain or sun
as they go on keeping their vigil

without need of a sign, awaiting nothing

more than the birds that sing from the eaves,
the seizing cold that sounds the rafters.

American Life in Poetry: Column 333

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Here is a lovely poem by Robert Cording, a poet who lives in Connecticut, which shows us a fresh new way of looking at something commonplace. That’s the kind of valuable service a poet can provide.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Robert Cording from his most recent book of poetry, Walking with Ruskin, CavanKerry Press, Ltd., 2010. Reprinted by permission of Robert Cording. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

More Lies, poem by Karin Gottshall

More Lies

by Karin Gottshall

Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café—
even though I have no sister—just because it’s such
a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since

I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting
in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone
on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting

someone might ask where I was headed. I bought
a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows
fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs

nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered
tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place
where you can hear people talk about small things,

like the difference between azure and cerulean,
and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched
someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain

from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling
their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over
the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.

American Life in Poetry: Column 327. By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006

Some of us have more active fantasy lives than others, but all of us have them. Here Karin Gottshall, who lives in Vermont, shares a variety of loneliness that some of our readers may have experienced.