Poetry

Fall and winter poems by Dave Conlin Read

Article updated September 15, 2019 by Dave Read

Two poems by Dave Conlin Read, Fall Vespers and Winter Reverie, will be published in the Fall/Winter 2019-2020 issue of the Aurorean, due out in late October.

Fall Vespers

Because summertime leaves
us limp with languor, trees
who cast only shadows
heretofore,
now also cast doubt.

They loosen the noose
of certitude –

their showy displays
present a deciduous
analogue to television,
tablets and smart things –

perhaps even lead some
to ogle the colorful leaves.

Winter Reverie

Weeks of cold days under granite skies
Trudging streets flanked by walls
Of drab snow, shaped by glacial snow plows,

Lead to a magical moment when I
Become John Muir, six thousand feet tall,
Striding across Yosemite Valley

Lessons from 2018 Sharon Springs Poetry Festival

Article updated September 12, 2019 by Dave Read

It was my good fortune to participate in a poetry workshop during the 2018 Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, along with nine other poets, which was run by festival-founder Paul Muldoon.

I was smart enough to ask colleagues in my weekly workshop in the Berkshires to help me decide between the two poems that I’d thought suitable to workshop with Muldoon, but then was too imperious to follow their decision!

My local group suggested that I bring “More Ways to Ponder” while I opted for “Cape Cod Post Card.” The group consensus was a two page poem that collects about a dozen epigrams loosely related to the topic of poetry; it has since been published in an anthology.

My choice, which I was very excited about, fell flat as a pancake at the workshop. It was a little mystifying that the regard of Muldoon and the others for the poem were so divergent from my own. But, aware that I must be ready to kill my darlings, I was over my disappointment by the time I was out of Schoharie county.

That poem was scrapped, but a new one was made around the aspect of the old one that had nothing whatsoever to do with Cape Cod. While it has yet to find acclaim out in the wild, nonetheless my poetry cohort agree it’s a worthy poem.

Late poet Donald Hall resources

Article updated September 6, 2019 by Dave Read

Following the appearance in a January 2012 edition of the New Yorker of his now-famous essay “Out the Window,” I became acquainted with Donald Hall and had the pleasure of three visits at Eagle Pond Farm, with trips to a succession of area restraunts. Also, I attended his last reading and poetry talk in Nov. 2017 at the University of New Hampshire, as well as his funeral seven months later. This is an aggregation of links to useful, entertaining, and eluciadting items related to Donald Hall, who died on June 23, 2018.

Donald Hall and Dave Read at UNH, Nov. 9, 2017; photo courtesy David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

The Web of Stories, “an archive of stories from people who have influenced our world…” – recorded at Eagle Pond Farm, Jan. 2005; there are 111 video clips of 5.5 minutes duration – Web of Stories;
Comprehensive, up-to-date, bibliogrphy and related info by the publisher of Poetry magzine – including 54 poems, several essays by and about him: Poetry Foundation;
His 2001 essay, “Death to the Death of Poetry,” is among the material posted here: Academy of American Poets;
In their own words: “This guide compiles links to resources on Donald Hall throughout the Library of Congress Web site, as well as links to external Web sites that include features on Hall’s life or selections of his work.” Includes White House video of President Obama presenting him the National Medal of Arts in 20120: Library of Congress;
NPR interview, 2014;
Interview by Peter A. Stitt, The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry, No. 43 (Issue 120, Fall 1991); The Paris Review;

Donald Hall's living room at Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read. — Donald Hall’s living room at Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read.

Donald Hall in the blue chair at Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read.

Disused railroad ties across from Donald Hall's Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read. — Disused railroad ties across from Donald Hall’s Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read.

View of Donald Hall's Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read. — View of Donald Hall’s Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH; June 2015 photo by Dave Conlin Read.

Notice the pile of disused railroad ties above; Seamus Heaney collected a railroad spike here, then immortalized it in a poem, the monograph/broadside of which was one of Don’s prized possessions. When I learned that, after my visits to Wilmot, I looked up Heaney’s poem, and somehow wound up reading a different Heaney poem, which – if you’re not already exhausted, led me to make one of my own:

Machine Learning

The machine delivered
Seamus Heaney’s poem “May,”
where I found fontanel – a treat,
as if I’d been foraging morels,

but I’d asked for “Iron Spike,”
wherein he visits Eagle Pond,
home of Don Hall and Jane Kenyon,
poets he had a soft spot for.

– Dave Conlin Read

Except for Love reading in Cambridge

Porter Square Books in Cambridge hosted a reading for Except for Love, New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall on Aug. 16 – there’s one scheduled for the Bookstore in Lenox on November 7th. It was great fun to meet several co-contributors, and to hear their various Don Hall stories. I knew that I wasn’t alone as a benefifiary of his correspondence, but it was fun to hear how important it was for so many fellow poets, too.

After introducing me, Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the editor and publisher of the anthology, said that she considered the event a sort of afterparty for Hall, which is the title of my poem in the book. My pal Eddie O’Toole took time away from his Honduras project, for an old-school open-ended road trip; here is his cellphone videography of my four minute segment:

Read Dave’s poem chosen for a Beat Poetry anthology

Article updated July 29, 2019 by Dave Read

My poem, Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff, has been selected for publication in the upcoming We Are Beat, National Beat Poetry Festival Anthology, which I think is scheduled for publication in late August.

Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff

v.1

on the edge of nature
the haughty docent
said to me

here the pretty
flowers are and there
the poetry

v.erotic

on the edge of nature
the naughty docent
beckoned me

there the pretty
flowers are and here
the poetry

occidental version

the poet who dissembles
all day long to earn his pay
will have his say
if he assembles
honest verse along the way

oriental edition

the poet’s lot is
to limn what it has amused
the gods to encrypt

Metro Edition

Some poems reflect everybody
seen in the Metro by Ezra Pound,
while others recall faces I know
whose voices make a beautiful sound.

version vice versa

If it is the poet’s bane to like all the interesting stuff
then her boon is to love only what is perfect.

The poet’s bane is to love only what is perfect,
but her boon is to like all the interesting stuff.

v.epigram

consider any bag of thoughts,
some passel of inklings,
or worry of oughts:

string them together,
the least on top, laced so tight
that the other ones pop!

in re:form

The function of form in a poem
is to devise a scheme so that
you can conceal

the clue to your notion of hiding
an antonym to the rhyme
you mean to reveal.

v.homeric

Turned inward like a bad toenail is the mind’s eyeball,
an unblinking cyclops ready to light me up
like a bored cop at the intersection of reflect and write.

scholastic ed.

Poetry is Miss Zeitgeist
rapping on your knucklehead.

v.paean

Passing by the MacLeish homestead,
a poet espied the globed fruits and sighed
I’m just off the sweets, alas.

double paean

With a smile of recognition he lopes to work
looping George Harrison through earbuds.

Dave Conlin Read

Hotels in the Berkshires

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

Dave Read reads five poems

Once you start the video, you can fast-forward to my poems at around 1:10. Poem titles are:
1.Vice Versa
2.Big Apple Byte
3.Hold Still
4.In Loco Parentis, or Mark & Sheryl to the Rescue
5.It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy
6.Jared has Four Diamonds,* Every Kick begins with K

I made a mistake in It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy – Martin Luther called Henry VIII “pig, dolt and liar (not idiot).”

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts. from CTSB on Vimeo.

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts.

I’m happy to provide the text for these, just give me your name and email address:

Posting them here would make it more difficult to publish them elsewhere.

American Life in Poetry

Cat Moving Kittens

We must have known,
Even as we reached
Down to touch them
Where we’d found them

Shut-eyed and trembling
Under a straw bale
In the haymow, that
She would move them

That night under cover
Of darkness, and that
By finding them
We were making certain

We wouldn’t see them again
Until we saw them
Crouching under the pickup
Like sullen teens, having gone

As wild by then as they’d gone
Still in her mouth that night
She made a decision
Any mother might make

Upon guessing the intentions
Of the state: to go and to
Go now, taking everything
You love between your teeth.

By Austin Smith, who lives in rural Illinois and is an acute observer of the world at hand.This poem is from his book Flyover Country, published by Princeton University Press.

About poetry on BerkshireLinks

Adding a poetry category to BerkshireLinks.com comports with what we had in mind when we started our first web magazine, Berkshire Spectrum, way back in 1996. Today, one could expect to generate some interest by publishing poetry on a website that has an audience of thousands of persons interested in the Berkshires arts and entertainment scene.

The key feature, initially at least, will be the inclusion of the American Life in Poetry project, which makes available to us and practically anybody else, as indicated here:

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so. There are no costs or obligations for reprinting the columns, though we do require that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration, along with the complete copyright, permissions and credit information, exactly as supplied with each column.

Except for Love; New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall

Article updated June 24, 2019 by Dave Conlin Read

Except for Love; New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, was published on June 23rd, the first anniversary of his death at 89. Included in the anthology is my poem Afterparty.

Mr. Hall was a guest on the 2008 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood, with Garrison Keillor, which I reviewed here. His January 2012 New Yorker essay Out the Window led to an acquaintance that included a series of visits with him at Eagle Pond Farm and his final reading and poetry talk at the University of New Hampshire in Nov. 2017.

The book is edited by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, with an Introductory tribute by Wesley McNair, former Poet Laureate of Maine, and cover photo of Hall by Steven Ratiner. 10% of proceeds to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to honor Hall’s wife Jane Kenyon It can be ordered via this link.

Afterparty

We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.

After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.

Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.

The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur

Having ordered a parade of his own,
Trump is transformed
from Putin’s Puppet,
to Kim’s Clone.

Now, we wonder …

Will he ask bids
for a new pyramid,
or coldly evict, then
re-brand Grant’s Tomb?

The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur, poem by Dave Conlin Read

poem by Dave Conlin Read; first published by Indolent Books in their What Rough Beast series.

Sharon Springs Poetry Festival

No way would I have learned about the Oct. 6 concert at Hancock Shaker Village performed by Paul Muldoon, with Rogue Oliphant if I hadn’t escorted my sisters to the environs of Joe’s Diner, on the last day of their week at Oak and Spruce, Maggie’s timeshare. So, be kind to your sisters and good things will happen for you. (Cool video included with my report on the show, linked above)

It was an awesome show, and writing about it led me to details of Mr. Muldoon’s upcoming appearance at the heretofore unheard-of Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, founded last year by Muldoon, just in time for me to book a spot in a workshop led either by Muldoon or Billy Collins. Also appearing in a variety of roles are Anne Waldman and current US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (she and Collins named for two terms in that post). Happiest hard decision of my life: choosing one poem for the workshop!

Paul Muldoon with Rogue Oliphant, Hancock Shaker Village, Oct. 6, 2018.

Important to keep in mind that whatever poem I carry in is not as important as what I may learn about making poems from Muldoon/Collins and the ten other participants. I would love to talk with Mr. Collins about my poem The Living and the Dead, which is my response to his poem Winter, which I think I heard read by Garrison Keillor on the much-missed Writer’s Almanac.

At the time (of first hearing or reading), I was in the midst of about a year-long dilemma of how to attribute the phrase I got from Herman Melville’s Piazza Tales that are the basis or catalyst for my poem Pivot of Spring. I hadn’t figured out a way to proceed yet, then I’m stopped in my tracks when the penultimate line of Winter includes “the living and the dead,” which also closes James Joyce’s story The Dead. That assemblage of five utterly common words was put to such powerful effect by Joyce that, for me, the phrase would be forever Joyce-branded.

Where’s the attribution? If I had fretted so much about repurposing a Melville phrase, did Billy Collins, too? Honest to god, I came this close to asking Don Hall about it – and felt immediately like a teenaged squealer, busting my buddy or my sister, just to see them squirm!

My solution (months later) was to preface the poem with a mini-essay that put the poem into the context of how it occurred to me, which led me to think that I may be on to something, a prose and poetry hybrid, with the poem ineluctably following the prose, rather than the prose serving as an exegesis of the poem. The prose addresses, instead, how an odd phrase, from a 150 year old short story, can become embedded in someone’s imagination, only to assert itself years later, and spark an ordinary little poem.

I sent them both to Don, who replied in the best way possible. Besides saying something along the lines of “good for you, getting poems while walking – Frost and Stevens used to but I never did.” Alright, there’s a rush from being mentioned in the same breath as those two, even if he only was being polite. As for the poem itself, the Melville phrase amounting to two of six total lines, Don wrote, “I like about half the lines, the others would make me grumpy.” Of course I did not ask him to clarify which lines work.

(More after the festival)