Shine on Brightly

Shel Silverstein
Today brought us a poetry collection by the late, great Silverstein (1930-1999).  Every Thing on It features drawings and poems from the author's extensive archive, selected for publication by his family.

Though we doubt any of you are new to the land of Silverstein's quirky, whimsical, strange, clever, and chuckle-filled poetry, don't forget to share anew the author's classic titles with your kids. Who knows? Shel's poems might very well inspire a new poet...

Surf's Up
Use the following links to read more about the author, his books and influence, courtesy of the following sources:
Shel Silverstein's official web site
NPR Morning Edition
Poets.org (Academy of American Poets)

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen

Illustration by Thorina Rose

 The Songwriter as Poet
Join us for a two-part, scholar-led discussion series focused on the poetry in the songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  

Cultural Conversations @ your library
As artists, both Dylan and Cohen produced bodies of work that rank with the best popular music of the past half-century. We’ll explore the close relationship between music and poetry and sample sound recordings while we discuss the artistry, influence, and timelessness of these living legends of music and verse.

To Register
Click here to register for the Dylan program (Tuesday, September 13) and here for the Cohen program (Tuesday, October 11).  Bring your appreciation for the artists and a story to tell about how their lyrics and music influenced you.

Our Discussion Moderator
David Garnes is graduate of Brown University and Columbia University.  He taught English in NY private schools and served as a librarian at Columbia University and UConn, Storrs, retiring in 2001. David is a published author and facilitates literature programs for the Connecticut Humanities Council.  For the past decade, he has worked part-time at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst.

On Poets and Poetry : September to April Series Returns

Donald Hall (1928-) was born in Hamden, Connecticut. He began writing in grammar school, and first published at 16. At the same age he attended Breadloaf where he met Robert Frost, among others. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard, and a B.Litt from Oxford. He was a Writing Fellow at Stanford where he studied under Yvor Wintors.

While teaching at U. Michigan he met the poet Jane Kenyon. They married and the couple moved in 1975 to Wilmot, New Hampshire. Her death 20 years later of leukemia (after his own bouts with colon and liver cancer) cast a pall of grief over his work of that period which is best characterized by a line in the poem “Kill the Day”: ‘How many times will he die in his own lifetime?’

He has 20 collections of poetry, 11 children’s books, 3 dramas, and 2 volumes each of biography, short stories, and memoirs. His recognitions include U.S. Poet Laureate, N.H. State Laureate, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and numerous book awards and prizes.

Ox Cart Man
In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.

Further Reading
Old and New Poems
Ox-cart Man

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

April is National Poetry Month

Celebrating Poetry

We here offer third in a series of National Poetry Month posts; 2010 celebration. Thank you for offering many insightful 'over the desk' comments about this series. Good to know reading poetry is still on so many of our local readers' to-do lists.

Annie Finch (1956-) was born in New Rochelle, NY, to a family with poets, artists, intellectuals and political activists on both her mother’s and her father’s side. She herself is a poet, librettist, and translator who currently is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, and Director of its Stonecoast MFA Program. She holds six honors and awards for her work as author of three collections of poetry, four titles on poetics, a bilingual translation of the work of Louise Labé, two libretti, and as editor of six anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes — for which she is probably best known. The poem that follows is her contemporary response to one by the 17th century British statesman and author, Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” and it appears to be addressed to him:

Coy Mistress

Sir, I am not a bird of prey:
a Lady does not seize the day.
I trust that brief Time will unfold
our youth, before he makes us old.
How could we two write lines of rhyme
were we not fond of numbered Time
and grateful to the vast and sweet
trials his days will make us meet:
The Grave's not just the body's curse;
no skeleton can pen a verse!
So while this numbered World we see,
let's sweeten Time with poetry,
and Time, in turn, may sweeten Love
and give us time our love to prove.
You've praised my eyes, forehead, breast:
you've all our lives to praise the rest.

Further Reading:
A Formal Feeling Comes : Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, edited by Annie Finch

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Photo Credit : Jeffrey Cantrell

April is National Poetry Month

Celebrating Poetry

We here offer second in a series of National Poetry Month posts; 2010 celebration.

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was born in Gambia, Senegal. At age 7, a slave on the auction block, she elicited the highest from bid John Wheatley and his wife, of Boston, who sought a domestic. Encouraged to learn to read and write, she became a student of the poetry of Alexander Pope and John Milton. In 1772, in Britain, she published Poems... Religious and Moral, becoming the first published Afro-American woman — to wide acclaim in Britain and the Colonies. It earned her manumission, but not the full rights of a free woman. She married a free black grocer to whom she bore three children (two predeceased her). She lost both her literary patrons and her audience in the Revolutionary War. Her husband landed in debtor’s prison in 1784. She died alone the same year — an impoverished boarding-house domestic in Boston.

An Elegy on Leaving —

FAREWELL! ye friendly bow’rs, ye streams adieu,

I leave with sorrow each sequester’d seat:

The lawns, where oft I swept the morning dew,

The groves, from noon-tide rays a kind retreat.

Yon wood-crown’d hill, whose far projecting shade,

Inverted trembles in the limpid lake:

Where wrapt in thought I pensively have stray’d,

For crowds and noise, reluctant, I forsake.

The solemn pines, that, winding through the vale,

In grateful rows attract the wand’ring eye,

Where the soft ring-dove pours her soothing tale,

No more must veil me from the fervid sky.

Beneath yon aged oak’s protecting arms,

Oft-times beside the pebbl’d brook I lay;

Where, pleas’d with simple Nature’s various charms,

I pass’d in grateful solitude the day.

Rapt with the melody of Cynthio’s strain,

There first my bosom felt poetic flame;

Mute was the bleating language of the plain,

And with his lays the wonton fawns grew tame.

But, ah! Those pleasing hours are ever flown;

Ye scenes of transport from my thoughts retire;

Those rural joys no more the day shall crown,

No more my hand shall wake the warbling lyre.

But come, sweet Hope, from thy divine retreat,

Come to my breast, and chase my cares away,

Bring calm content to gild my gloomy seat,

And cheer my bosom with her heav’nly ray.

Further Reading: The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited with an essay by John C. Shields.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Sneak Preview: National Poetry Month

Celebrating Poetry

April is National Poetry Month and was first marked in 1996 by the Academy the American Poets. Since then, National Poetry Month has become a way to promote interest in poetry and to celebrate poetry’s place in our culture and everyday lives.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the son of a U.S. serviceman on duty in Germany, was born there in Andernach. His parents relocated to the United States and settled in South Los Angeles. He suffered severely abusive treatment from his father and from school yard bullies, and began use alcohol in his early teens. He graduated from L.A. High School and took courses in art, journalism, and literature at City College. His literary influences include Antonin Artaud, Louis‑Ferdinand Céline, Anton Chekhov, E.E. Cummings, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, and James Thurber. He authored 27 books of poetry, seven novels, and 13 collections of short stories. Taken as a whole, they fall into the literary movements known as Dirty Realism and Transgressive Fiction.

x‑pug
he hooked to the body hard
took it well
and loved to fight
had seven in a row and a small fleck
over one eye,
and then he met a kid from Camden
with arms thin as wires—
it was a good one,
the safe lions roared and threw money;
they were both up and down many times,
but he lost that one
and he lost the rematch
in which neither of them fought at all,
hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos,
and now he’s over at Mike’s
changing tires and oil and batteries,
the fleck over the eye
still young,
but you don’t ask him,
you don’t ask him anything
except maybe
you think it’s going to rain?
or
you think the sun’s gonna come out?
to which he’ll usually answer
hell no,
but you’ll have your important tank of gas

and drive off.

Further Reading and Viewing: Click here

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

March's Featured Poet
Mark Strand (1934-). Canadian-born, Strand spent his early teens in South and Central America. He earned a B.A. from Antioch, a B.F.A. in painting at Yale, and studied 19th Century Italian poetry on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1960-61. He has taught at numerous colleges and universities. He became Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1990. His work — which includes six volumes of poetry translations, twelve titles in prose, and 17 collections of his own poetry — has won eight national awards. He is a somber-hued surrealist who is sometimes clownish:

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Further Reading:
Blizzard of One : Poems (1999 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry)
The Making of a Poem : a Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
Library Note : The second title, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, offers a wonderful introduction to poetic forms used by poets featured on this blog over the years. Poetry readers and writers, consistent or emerging, will find in this volume concise explanations and examples of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, elegies, pastorals, odes, pantoums and other poetic structures.

Coming in April: National Poetry Month

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

February's Poets

Part 2
Alice Walker (1944-) is best known for The Color Purple, a novel which won her the Pulitzer Prize and became a movie. She is the author of 17 other novels and short story collections, ten collections of poetry, and eleven non-fiction titles. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child in a sharecropper’s family. Her brother accidentally shot her blind in one eye with a BB gun, disfiguring her. Ridiculed by school children until age 14, when surgeons removed the scar tissue, her experience enabled her "to see people and things... to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out." High school valedictorian, she attended Spellman College, where she met Martin Luther King and became a leading civil rights activist. On transfer to Sara Lawrence University, she published her first book of poetry while still a senior.

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

Further Reading:
The Same River Twice
Alice Walker Banned

There is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

February's Poets

Part One
Nikki Giovanni (1943-). Outspoken, charismatic, activist poet and author of 15 books of poetry, 11 children’s titles, and 3 she co-authored, Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni is currently Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Like her mother and sister, Giovanni suffered lung cancer. She had one lung removed. Afterward she commented, "[I]f it takes a near‑death experience for you to appreciate your life, you're wasting somebody's time." Long an activist for civil rights and black power, she has often spoken truth to authority. At Virginia Tech she demanded the administration remove an unknown student, Seung‑Hui Cho, from her poetry class. She offered to resign over the issue. The day following the shooter’s massacre, she brought healing to mourners overflowing Cassell Coliseum by intoning the “chant poem” which follows:

We Are Virginia Tech

We are Virginia Tech
We are sad today
And we will be sad for quite a while
We are not moving on
We are embracing our mourning
We are Virginia Tech
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly
We are brave enough to bend to cry ...
And sad enough to know we must laugh again
We are Virginia Tech
We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa dying of aids
Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a
rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of night in his crib in the home
its father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was
destablized
No one deserves a tragedy
We are Virginia Tech
The Hokie nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to
those who offer their hearts and minds
We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid
We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be
We are alive to the imagination and the possibility
We will continue to invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail

Further Reading : a Selection for Adults and Children
Bicycles : Love Poems
Hip Hop Speaks to Children : a Celebration of Poetry with Beat
Rosa
The Genie in the Jar
On my Journey Now : Looking at African-American History through the Spirituals

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

January's Featured Poet
Michael Ondaatje (1943-) was born in Sri Lanka and lived there until he was eleven. After a time in England he settled in Canada at the age of 19 and became a citizen. He earned a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Queen’s, Kingston, Ontario. For a number of years he taught at York University and Glendon College. As an author he is best known for his prize-winning best-selling novel The English Patient (among four others). He has produced 13 volumes of poetry. Best known among these is The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), which was adapted for the stage.

Biography

The dog scatters her body in sleep,
paws, finding no ground, whip at air,
the unseen eyeballs reel deep, within.
And waking—crouches,
tacked to humility all day,
children ride her, stretch,
display the black purple lips,
pull hind legs to dance;
unaware that she
tore bulls apart, loosed
heads of partridges,
dreamt blood.

Further Reading: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Next Month: Phillis Wheatley

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

December's Featured Poet
Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. He was a mathematician, a logician, a deacon in the Anglican Church, and a photographer. More important, he penned what has become probably the most famous literary nonsense poem in English, “Jabberwocky.” It was originally part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and What Alice Found There (1871), which was the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). All are among the most well-known and well-loved examples of fantasy literature in English.

Jabberwocky
(Library Staff Note : Read this aloud and with gusto. It'll make perfect sense! )

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker‑snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Further Reading: The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll
Next Month: Michael Ondaatje

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

The latter title was recently reviewed by Kirkus Discoveries.

National Book Award Winners

On Wednesday last, November 18, The National Book Foundation awarded 2009's National Book Awards:

Fiction Category
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Click here for a list of NBA Fiction finalists.

Non-Fiction Category
The First Tycoon : The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
Click here for a list of NBA Non-Fiction finalists.

Young People's Literature Category
Claudette Colvin : Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Click here for a list of NBA YPL finalists.

Poetry Category

Transcendental Studies : A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop

Poet of the Month

November's Featured Poet
Maya Angelou (1928-) grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. Highlights of her career: At 14 she won a scholarship in dance & drama and subsequently toured Europe in Porgy and Bess. She studied under Martha Graham and danced with Alvin Ailey. She’s authored over 30 strongly selling works of fiction, non-fiction, and verse. She wrote the screenplay and composed the score of the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia, and directed the feature film, Down in the Delta in 2008. She’s probably best known for “On the Pulse of the Morning,” her inaugural poem for President Clinton.

Conceit
Give me your hand
Make room for me to lead and follow

you
beyond this rage of poetry.

Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.

For me
Give me your hand.

Further Reading: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou

Next Month: Lewis Carroll

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:

21st Century Bread (2007)

In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

October's Featured Poet
Marge Piercy (1936-) as the Boston Globe put it, is “a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.” She has authored 15 volumes of poetry, though she’s best known for her novels: Gone To Soldiers, Braided Lives, and The Longings of Women — plus 13 others. She is a passionate feminist and anti-war spokes-person. She has taught, spoken, or performed her work at well over 400 college and university campuses around the world.

More Than Enough

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.

Further Reading:
Try Piercy's novels or her early poetry volumes:
Early Grrrl : The Early Poems of Marge Piercy

What Are Big Girls Made Of? : Poems

Coming in November: Maya Angelou

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

September's Featured Poet
X.J. Kennedy (1929-), who writes delightful poetry for children as well as adults, is the recipient of the PSA’s 2009 Robert Frost Metal for lifetime service to poetry, the 2004 Poet’s Prize (for The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002), and others too numerous to list in this space. He was educated at Seton Hall, Columbia, and the Sorbonne. He served four years in the Navy. He has taught English at U Michigan, UNC Greensboro, Tufts, and served as a visiting professor at Wellesley, U of C at Irvine, and the U of Leeds. Here are two examples of his poetry for children:

A Mammoth Surprise

Down the trunk of an elephant, Daredevil Jed
With incredible speed took a slide on his sled
At a time when that pachyderm, lunching on hay,
Was happily tucking a bundle away.
Off that doubled‑up nose‑hose, poor Jed shot the chutes‑‑‑
Blubbery brutes have such rubbery snoots.

A Needed Invention

For safety's sake, each jumbo jet
Should travel with a safety net
Suspended from its underbelly
Or racing on the ground below it
To break its fall or slightly slow it,
Sort of an upside‑down umbrelly

Further Reading:
Elefantina's Dream / verse by X.J. Kennedy ; pictures by Graham Percy.

Knock at a Star : a Child's Introduction to Poetry / [compiled by] X.J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy ; illustrated by Karen Ann Weinhaus.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson, author of:
21st Century Bread (2007)
In Vitro : New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 (2009)

Poet of the Month

June's Featured Poet
Dave Smith (1942-) was born in Portsmouth, Virginia and was graduated from the University of Virginia. After four years in the Air Force he settled on an academic career. He established a poetry magazine called Back Door. He has published (as of this writing) seven collections of poetry and a novel. He is regarded as a perceptive observer of human nature in poetry that springs from his homeland in Virginia, penetrates the intersections of personal and public history, and explores stylistic experiments to see what they yield.

Wreck in the Woods

Under that embrace of wild saplings held fast,
surrounded by troops of white mushrooms, by wrens
visiting like news-burdened ministers known
only to some dim life inside, this Model
A Ford like my grandfather’s entered the earth.
What were fenders, hood, doors, no one washed, polished,
grazed with a tip of finger, or boyhood dream.
I stood where silky blue above went wind-rent,
pines, oaks, dogwood ticking, pushing as if grief
called families to see what none understood. What
plot of words, what heart-shudder of men, women
here ended so hard the green world must hide it?
Headlights, large, round. Two pieces of shattered glass.

Further Reading: Little Boats, Unsalvaged : Poems, 1992-2004

July's Featured Poet: Marge Piercy

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson

Poet of the Month

May's Featured Poet
Vikram Seth (1952-) : While working on a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University, Seth happened to visit the English Department out of a desire “to have some contact with the writing program.” A verse novel, The Golden Gate, sprang from that, as did five collections of poetry and two prose novels. He is one of the most perceptive, compassionate, and wit-filled poets writing today.

1.35 [From The Golden Gate]

Janet picks up her fortune cookie,
Then puts it down, turns to her friend:
“Don’t bank too much on youth. Your rookie
Season is drawing to an end.
John, things we would—when young—not think of,
Start to make sense when, on the brink of
Thirtydom, we pause to scan
What salves and salads cannot ban,
The earliest furrows on our faces,
The loneliness within our souls,
Our febrile clawing for mean goals,
Our programmed cockfights and rat races,
Our dreary dignity, false pride,
And hearts stored in formaldehyde . . . .

Further Reading : Try the prose novel Equal Music; the poetry collection, Three Chinese Poets, or Vikram's literary biography, Two Lives.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson

April: National Poetry Month's Poet of the Week

Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood (1939-), a perceptive and frank Canadian feminist with a sense of the absurd that will often make you laugh, is a poet and a novelist who has received wide acclaim in the U.S. and Europe as well as in Canada in both fields. She cryptically described the difference between writing the poem and the novel by saying, "With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen." Here is a good example of one of her lyric poems:

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half‑acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Further Reading: For a quick selection of Atwood's novels and poetry, click here.

Next Up: Dave Smith

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson

April: National Poetry Month's Poet of the Week

Gary Soto
Gary Soto (1952-) was born in Fresno, California. He began to publish in 1977 as one of the Chicano voices articulating the protest literature associated with César Estrada Chávez, co-founder of the labor movement which became the United Farm Workers. Soto’s poems express a journey from life in the ghettos of Fresno to back-breaking harvesting in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and to Taxco, Mexico, in search of his roots. In the poem below, Ocampo is a Mexican town abandoned by its residents due to the desolation of persistent drought conditions:

The Drought
The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains
East of Ocampo, and then descended,
Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate.

They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went
Trackless, the houses blown open, their cellars creaking
And lined with the bottles that held their breath for years.

They passed the fields where the trees dried thin as hat racks
And the plow’s tooth bit the earth for what endured.
But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless

And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket,
Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger—
Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

Further Reading:
Gary Soto writes for all ages, in both poetry and fiction forms. For poetry readers, try New and Selected Poems or youth-centric titles Party Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing and A Fire in My Hands: Poems. For a quick list of other titles authored or influenced by Gary Soto, click here.

Next Week: Margaret Atwood

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson

Poet of the Month

Elizabeth Thomas
Elizabeth Thomas, whose most recent collection is From the Front of the Classroom, is founder of UpWords Poetry, a company promoting programs for young writers and educators. She was a leader of the CT National Youth Poetry Slam Team in 2008, as well as two others, including the U.S. team that traveled to Sweden in 1998. She has been poet in residence at schools in Windsor, New Haven, Torrington, Hartford, and Suffield, among others. The following poem is from her most recent collection:

ABUNDANCE
for Kiana Rose Andle

The chair is as old as my son –
brown wood, still sturdy after all these years.
Gold painted basket of eggs and feathers
even now overflows.
And somewhere along the seat,
teeth marks notch the surface.
It was the nicest piece of furniture we owned
and we dragged it
from apartment to apartment,
state to state.
When I was pregnant
his future grandmother offered it, saying
“Might as well be comfortable
while we wait.”
And it became our special place
for songs and fairy tales.

The chair now gathers dust
in this old room.
I see my son
learning to pull himself up
and he is teething.
I wail when he uses the rocker for both.
“Time out! Time out!
Look what you’ve done to my chair!”
I have no appreciation
that all these years later
I would rock,
seek out the marks,
run my finger across them –
like someone blind
needing to remember.

Further Reading: Elizabeth Thomas, From the Front of the Classroom, in our library.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson