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TRANSCRIPT
2015
COMMON THREADS Volume 5 | 2015 Edition
Common Threads is an annual publication and outreach program produced by Mass Poetry, with a goal to facilitate ~350 poetry discussion groups throughout the state each year in an effort to broaden the audience for poetry and support poets and poetry in Massachusetts. Mass Poetry is a 501(c)(3) organization.
A $10 hardcopy of this publication is available to order from Harvard Book Store. $5 from each sale goes directly back into our programming, while the other half supports Harvard Book Store.
A listing of public Common Threads events is available here.
Video production for the poems of John Hodgen, Fred Marchant, Rhina P. Espaillat, and Mary Oliver by Riley Fearon Productions
Cover Art:Summer Light Gouache on paper 11 1/2 x 17 1/4 inches2009 | © Denise Manseau 2014
Summer Light recalls a moment on a walk in Maine looking up through a stand of towering oaks to see glimpses of cobalt through translucent greens swaying in the summer wind.
Denise Manseau investigates the nature of transitory relationships in the environment and how they influence and define the layered complexity of place. Her work navigates the inevitable changeability of the landscape in personal cosmographies that interweave space and place, environment and perception. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Manseau received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and her BFA from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She maintains a studio at the Arts Research Collaborative, an art space in Lowell dedicated to arts dialogue and education. More at denisemanseau.com and artsresearchcollaborative.com.
COMMON THREADS Volume 5 | 2015 Edition
GUEST EDITOR Alice Kociemba
MANAGING EDITOR Laurin Macios
PARTNERING POET COORDINATOR Gabrielle Tyson
VIDEOGRAPHER Riley Fearon
Table of Contents
Introduction Alice Kociemba 4
How to Read a Poem Robert Pinsky 6
Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups 8
Poems
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World Richard Wilbur 9
The Birthing Deborah Digges 10
For the Man Who Spun Plates John Hodgen 11
Prospective Immigrants Please Note Adrienne Rich 12
On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once Rhina P. Espaillat 13
The Salt Stronger Fred Marchant 14
Sea Grapes Derek Walcott 16
The Osprey Mary Oliver 17
Discussion Questions 19
Writing Prompts 20About the Poets 21
Media Package 23Resources for Poetry Exploration 24
About Mass Poetry 25
About the Common Threads Team 26
Acknowledgments 27
Copyright Information 28
Introduction: What Calls You to the “Things of This World”? Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor
The overarching theme of this fifth edition of Common Threads is love—a reverence for life and a zest for living that is intensified at moments of birth and death, the cherishing of one’s birthplace and the longing for what has been left behind, a passion for peace and respect for poetry itself as its witness, and finally, the precious and precarious beauty of nature. Each of these eight poems reveals love’s common threads.
In his introductory essay to The Best American Poetry, 2008, Charles Wright, our current US Poet Laureate, writes:
“Still poetry comes, for lack of better words, from the heart […] It’s the only time that two plus one makes two—language is half; technique is half, and emotion is half…It is not a question of paper, of typewriters, of white space or of dark space—it is a question of what’s in your life, and where you want your life to lead you…But if it is poetry that you want, then don’t look for language games, intellectual rip-‐offs, or rhetorical sing-‐alongs. It’s too often been a matter of life and death to those who really cared.
Art is supposed, they say, to make sense out of the senseless, coherence out of the incoherent, and connections out of the unconnectible. And poetry, of course, is an art.”
In this year’s eight Common Threads poems, notice how words repeat throughout—words like soul, tongue, angels, halos, war, exile, journey, responsibility, obsession. These poems weave a tapestry of meaning that deeply engages the reader, indeed changes the reader, maybe even on a molecular level, when the poems are read aloud.
• In Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” the speaker, a city apartment dweller, is rudely awakened. The poem moves with both whimsy and delight to acceptance of the inevitable surrender of oblivion. With this return to consciousness, the speaker appreciates the joys in the ordinary. This poem created the theme for this year’s Common Threads.
• In Deborah Digges’ poem, “The Birthing,” the reader is pulled into a powerful narrative of what love requires of us in unexpected moments, when a bystander is moved to become involved in a life or death experience.
• John Hodgen’s “For the Man Who Spun Plates” begins with the memory of watching the Ed Sullivan Show, and through its use of metaphor, the near comical is transformed into the almost ungraspable reality of grief.
• Although Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” was written in 1962, it remains a timely and succinct portrait of the wrenching either/or dilemma of leaving or staying in one’s homeland.
• Rhina P. Espaillat’s sonnet, “On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once” makes personal the larger issues described in Rich’s poem. The smaller losses and shifts in identity become writ large.
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• Fred Marchant’s epistolary poem “The Salt Stronger” is a tribute to language and to the power of poetry to bear witness in, and bring solace to, a world continually searching for peace.
• In Derek Walcott’s “Sea Grapes,” the timeless image of Homer’s war-‐weary wanderer, Odysseus, mirrors the concerns in Marchant’s poem, Why are we still and always at war?
• Mary Oliver’s “The Osprey,” picks up the thread of predator and prey and explores the obsessions and responsibilities of a thoughtful, conscious “imaginer” with a lot on her mind.
In selecting these eight poems, I drew on my experience facilitating eight Common Threads discussion groups in local libraries and churches. What makes a poem discussable? First and foremost, hearing the poems read aloud. Some readers tend to prefer “heart” or emotional poems; some prefer “head” or philosophical ones. Some readers gravitate toward formal verse, some toward the narrative, and others esteem the lyric. These poems reflect a true diversity of voice, and of region within Massachusetts. All the poems are both accessible and excellent, as the aim of Common Threads is to broaden the audience for poetry by engaging the general public in the pleasures of reading and discussing captivating poems.
Why eight? To have Common Threads fit easily into a standard 90-‐minute discussion format. I asked thirteen poets (many of whom had participated in a previous years’ Common Threads group, or had led workshops in their local libraries) from across the Commonwealth to recommend to me up to eight “discussable” poets and their poems. These poets recommended more than 50 poets and more than 150 poems. What I had assumed proved to be true: I would have overlooked some spectacular poems if I had let my personal preferences drive the selection process.
In his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost says of a poem, “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom…For me the initial delight is the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”
Common Threads is full of delights and surprises!
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How to Read a Poem Robert Pinsky
A crucial, defining moment, at the mysterious frontier between the mind and the body, takes place when a feeling or thought takes form in the voice—possibly as speech, but maybe as less than that, as the exhalation of a barely vocalized oh or ah.
I mean the moment between the twinge of an aching back muscle and a muttered “ouch” or at another extreme the moment when a mix of passion, determination and purpose leads to “I disagree” in a meeting or “I love you” in an embrace.
We cross that threshold between concept and breath in two directions, I think: outward of course, but inward as well. In an intense conversation, my effort to understand your words—to “take them in,” as we say—may include my imagining what it feels like to say those words—physically, actually, to say them. That sympathetic, bodily imagining may go back to the infant gazing up at a parental speaking face: so far back that we are mostly unaware of it.
Sometimes, feeling eager or pressed to understand, I might silently “mouth” your words—technical instructions, say, or the best route to my destination, or just a name or a phone number—form them with my lips, maybe with a whisper of breath through them. (C.K. Williams’ great poem “My Mother’s Lips” describes this form of attention.)
That basic, intuitive process, involves the first principle of reading poetry—the most purely vocal of all the arts. (In song, the voice enlarges and transforms to become an instrument, as well as itself.)
So, the three-‐word advice I might be tempted to give, about “How to Read a Poem”— “read it aloud”—is kind of inaccurate, though usefully compact. “Read it aloud” might lead toward the art of the actor, or the technique of a poet who gives good poetry readings. With all due respect, performance is not what I mean.
I mean something more intimate, more immediate, more physiological, at that mind-‐body frontier: to feel the poem in your mind’s voice, hearing it in your mind’s ear as you hear the things you say. To achieve that, you may well say the words—mutter them or declaim them, vocalize them or not—as a means to feel what it would be like to say the poet’s words: to need to say them, as Emily Dickinson needed to say “Because I could not stop for Death” or Walt Whitman needed to say “Vigil strange I kept in the field one night.” If the poem works, the reader experiences an echo of that need. That, I think, is demonstrated by the video segments at www.favoritepoem.org.
Here is a specific example of what I mean—one of my favorite examples, because it is brief and to me seems remarkably clear: an untitled, two-‐line poem by Walter Savage Landor (1775-‐1864). I invite the reader to say it aloud, or to imagine saying it aloud, maybe moving your lips a little:
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On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.
The patterns of consonants and vowels in this poem, to me quite beautiful, happen to be unusually clear, by which I mean unusually easy to talk about. At the beginning of the poem, if you say the words, actually or in imagination, three times you will put your upper teeth onto your lower lip to form the “v” or “f” sounds at the ends of “love,” “grief,” and the first syllable of “every.” Another example of this anatomical aspect of poetry, at the end of the poem: three times, you will purse your lips as you say “water with his wing.”
Weirdly, but absolutely, such things matter. I cannot explain why, but these patterns of sound (usually not so distinct), apprehended in the body and by the mind, convey feeling. The physical conviction of Landor’s poem relieves me of necessarily knowing that Lethe is the river of forgetting in the Classical underground. The poem’s physical presence, in my voice, helps me understand that Lethe is what time sprinkles on everything. How do these artfully arranged vowels and consonants, these sentence-‐sounds, do that? I don’t know. I can’t explain this vocal-‐emotional power any more than I can explain the power of music or of comedy (which, the great comic Sid Caesar said, is music).
Poetry is apprehended by the body and the mind, both. (I think this is why Ezra Pound says, in his An ABC of Reading, “poetry is a centaur.”) If you are not inclined to use your mind, you will miss the point. If you are not inclined to use your body, in particular breath and the muscles of speech, you will miss the point. True in poetry, and often true in the rest of life, as well.
There has been a lot of excellent writing and thinking about the ways poetry is different from all the other uses of language. It is also worth considering the ways poetry is continuous with the other uses of language, resembles them, from its position somewhere between speech and song.
Poetry is different from, but also resembles, conversation, teaching, business negotiations, family arguments, joke telling, complaining, medical interviews and many other kinds of interaction. Facial expression, bodily posture, hand gestures, tone of voice, pace, inflection, all amplify and modify the words—make the words more than a transcript. The equivalent of all that is in a poem, waiting to be animated by each reader’s vocal imagination.
How to read a poem? Imagine saying it. Imagine the feeling of needing to say it.
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Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups
Common Threads discussion groups are conducted in a variety of settings, from church groups to libraries, to senior centers to schools, and can range from sessions that are open to the public to sessions that consist of a few friends discussing the poems over coffee. There is no right or wrong way to conduct a Common Threads group—what Mass Poetry does is supply the materials and support for engagement with the poems; what you do is take the poems to your community in a way that the shared experience will be enjoyable and valuable. But we can offer some tips—proven methods for hosting a successful and fruitful group.
Alice Kociemba, 2015 Guest Editor and eight-‐time Common Threads discussion group leader, says, “Encourage each person to participate. Trust that they will connect with these poems in an authentic and unique way. There are no right and wrong answers, no smart or dumb reactions to these poems. Everyone brings something valuable to the discussion. Not everyone will agree with each other, or like a particular poem. These reactions are also to be welcomed.”
We suggest supplying (or linking to) the Common Threads PDF in your promotion of a public group so that interested participants can familiarize themselves with the poems beforehand, but it is also perfectly fine to have copies of the Common Threads poems you’ll discuss on-‐hand at the event, so that attendees can read them there on the spot.
Within your group, we suggest that the person who finds a particular poem meaningful read that poem aloud to the group, with no worries about stutters or mistakes. Their connection to the poem will come through with their enjoyment in reading it and hearing it recited in their own voice. It’s a strong way to kick off a discussion.
“At almost any poetry reading group experience I have had (and I have facilitated a monthly poetry group at the Falmouth Public Library for the past five years), members who have walked in skeptical about a poet’s work or a particular poem have left the group more open-‐minded after hearing a poem read by someone who has a connection to the poem,” says Alice.
After the person reads the poem, ask him or her to say why or where they connect with the poem, and from there, the open-‐ended discussion questions we have supplied in this publication should carry the conversation forward.
Some members will want a “close reading” of a poem—an analysis of the use of adjectives, the power of the verbs, meter, syntax, and rhyme. This is all well and good, but for group members completely new to poetry, who may be intimidated by the idea of poetic analysis, we would encourage discussing craft as it relates to the meaning and heart of the poem.
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Richard Wilbur Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-‐sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”
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Deborah Digges
The Birthing
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witnessto the day he stopped the car,we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,what he called front leg presentation,the calf came out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleevesof his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.I watched him thrust his arm entireinto the yet-‐to-‐be, where I imagined holy sparrows scatteringin the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wingagainst the new one's shoulder.And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out into the world together.Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,came falling whole and still onto the meadow.We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands. The mother licked the newborn, of us oblivious, until it moved a little, struggled.I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,and his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry while he set out to find the farmer.When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,leaving our coats just where they lay we huddled in the car.And then made love toward eternity,without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
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John Hodgen For the Man Who Spun Plates
On the old Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, before Topo Gigio, the dancing mouse,before the Beatles and the Mersey Beat, before we all knew all we needed was love,someone to kiss us goodnight, there was a man who spun plates on long slender poles,keeping them spinning with the tips of his fingers,running from one side of the stage to the other, the crowd calling out to him when a plate started wobbling, the man so intently spinning plates in the air, a little like Jesus before the Last Supper,keeping his disciples’ haloes from falling, the crowd like the masses with the bread and the fishes, crying, Judas, watch Judas, his halo is falling, Jesus too busy holding up the whole world. And sometimes he’d miss one and we’d all see it fall, shatter like crystal all over the stage, and we loved him even more then because he was real, working as hard as the devil for us. But we didn’t know then that our lives would break too, my good friend whose daughter just drowned in Brazil, his plates all come down like a crockery sea. He tries to lift her up again, get her life spinning, as if he could raise her from under the waves, the waves that keep falling, one after another, like shimmering plates on the sea.
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Adrienne Rich Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you willgo through this door or you will not go through.
If you go throughthere is always the riskof remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly and you must look backand let them happen.
If you do not go throughit is possibleto live worthily
to maintain your attitudesto hold your position to die bravely
but much will blind you, much will evade you,at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.It is only a door.
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Rhina P. Espaillat
On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once
The voice over the wire trills my R, snares me with soft diminutives, and waits for me, in our shared language, to allow my words to trace, like fingers down a scar, stories we’ve known since childhood, places, dates in brackets on worn stones. He tells me how our old ones slip away, forgetting, now, faces and names. My cousin hesitates; I take this name again and say goodnight. Odd how the gringo tongue that shifts, translates you into something it can say, but far from what you were, that never gets you right, rolling you round too long, too smooth, too light, loves you at last to who it says you are.
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Fred Marchant
The Salt Stronger
I have seen the legislators on their way, the jacketless men in mid-‐winter who will cast their votes like stones for this war. Men who have to cross the street through slush and over gutter, their cuffs now vaguely blued with a salt that dries in dots where it splashes, and mingles with the finely woven cloth of the chalk-‐stripe suits, the soi-‐disant practical men, you can see them now tiptoeing, now leaping, balletic, windsor-‐knotted, fragrant and shaved, they pass, they pass the window of the Capitol Deli wherein I am writing to my friend in Baghdad, he a “witness for peace,” a poet who for years has wondered what good poetry is or has been or does. I compose today’s answer from here, saying, I think of poetry
as a salt dug from a foreign mine that arrives like a miracle in Boston
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as pellets to break underfoot and melt the dangerous plated ice and cling to the acknowledged lawmakers, to stay with them in their dreams, to eat at the cloth and reach down to the skin and beyond the calf into the shin. I think the soul is equivalent to bone, and that conscience must hide in the marrow, float in the rich fluids and wander the honeycomb at the center. There, and not in the brain, or even the heart is where the words attach, where they land and settle, take root after the long passage through the body’s by-‐ways. Just think, I write, of how some poetry rolls off the tongue, then try to see the tongue in the case that faces me, a curious, thick extension of cow-‐flesh fresh from a butcher’s block, grainy and flush. I think that if my tongue alone could talk it would swear in any court that poetry tastes like the iodine in blood, or the copper in spit, and makes a salt stronger than tears.
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Derek Walcott Sea Grapes
That sail which leans on light,tired of islands,a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,home-‐bound on the Aegean;that father and husband's
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in every gull's outcry.
This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same
for the sea-‐wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console. But not enough.
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Mary Oliver The Osprey
This morningan osprey with its narrowblack-‐and-‐white faceand its cupidinous eyesleaned downfrom a leafy treeto look into the lake—it looked a long time, then its powerfulshoulders punched out a littleand it fell,it rippled downinto the water—then it rose, carrying,in the clips of its feet,a slim and limber silver fish, a scrim of red rubieson its flashing sides.All of thiswas wonderfulto look at,so I simply stood there,in the blue morning,looking.Then I walked away.Beauty is my work,but not my only work— later,when the fish was gone forever and the bird was miles away,I came backand stood on the shore, thinking— and if you think
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thinking is a mild exercise,beware! I mean, I was swimming for my life— and I was thundering this way and that way in my shirt of feathers— and I could not resolve anything long enoughto become one thingexcept this: the imaginer.It was inescapableas over and over it flung me,without pause or mercy it flung me to both sides of the beautiful water— to both sidesof the knife.
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Discussion Questions For use with all poems
❖ First, what brings this poem to life? Then, what brings this poem to life for you?
Note: The first will probably lead to exploration of elements of craft (the title, beginning, ending of a poem, the fresh images and language, the form, the sound, the way the poem is placed on the page, etc.). The second question should elicit deeper layers of meaning (some personal, some philosophical).
❖ Think about the stories that come to mind when you read the titles of each poem. Share these stories with your group and think about how they are similar and different. Discuss the different images upon which group members choose to focus and why these images are important.
❖ Read the poem out loud and listen for the accented syllables. Is there a musicality to the mixture of accented and unaccented syllables? Does the poem sound dissonant or melodic? How does the sound of the poem affect your understanding of it?
❖ Look at the lines of the poem. Think about the ways in which each line begins and ends. Are the words nouns or adjectives, conjunctions or pronouns? Do the words, on their own, cause the reader to pause and reflect on the importance of the line or do they carry the reader forward through the line (or onto the next line)?
❖ What about punctuation? What purpose does it serve the line? Look into the line itself and think about how commas and dashes, parentheses and semicolons direct the reading of the poem.
❖ With music comes tone. What does the tone of the poem suggest? Is it quiet and reflective, loud and bombastic, angry, sad, joyous? Is there a shift in tone and a variety of emotions working together or at odds with each other?
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Writing Prompts For each poem
Love Calls Us to the Things of The World | Richard Wilbur Call to mind the impressions, images, bodily aches, and half-‐formed thoughts that are your first return to consciousness upon waking in the morning. Write a poem about this liminal space between the unconscious and the return to reality. Try to make the poem move on the page.
The Birthing | Deborah Digges Write a narrative poem about an experience in which you went from bystander to participant in a sudden crisis or event, or describe what it is like to bear witness to a life and death experience in which you remain helpless.
For the Man Who Spun Plates | John Hodgen Write a poem set in a cultural context by thinking of a classic movie, television show, or song that supplies you with a metaphor that you can extend or twist to apply to other situations.
Prospective Immigrants Please Note | Adrienne Rich Write about an either/or dilemma that would be life changing. Use direct address “You” and include a question within the poem.
On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, For Once | Rhina P. Espaillat
Write a poem that describes the experience of realizing there is something you have lost, or gained, or both. (If you’re up to the challenge, try it in sonnet form.)
The Salt Stronger | Fred Marchant Write an epistolary poem (a poem as a letter). Describe the setting and what is being observed while the letter is being written, and then shift to the interior world of the writer.
Sea Grapes | Derek Walcott Write about an iconic hero (classical or contemporary) who is lost on a journey home. Set the scene with visual images, giving special notice to sound. Perhaps break out of stanzaic form with a chilling last line.
The Osprey | Mary Oliver Observe or imagine something in the natural world. Begin writing a poem that admires it. Then, using the word “later” as a hinge, become the thing you have observed and see where it takes you.
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About the Poets More info at poets.org & poetryfoundation.org
Deborah Digges was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1950. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and authored four books of poetry and two memoirs. She lived in Massachusetts, where she was a professor of English at Tufts University. She died in April 2009.
Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. After Espaillat’s great-‐uncle opposed the regime, her family was exiled to the United States and settled in New York City. Writing in both Spanish and English, she has published 11 books of poetry. She is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets and lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
During his high school years after his father died, John Hodgen worked part time as a gravedigger. He has since gone on to writing and teaching poetry. He reports that the jobs have interesting similarities. He lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and teaches at Assumption College in Worcester.
Director of The Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston, Fred Marchant is a graduate of Brown University, and later earned a PhD from The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He is a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-‐Boston, and was himself a conscientious objector within the military during the Viet Nam War. He has published four books of poetry.
Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. As a teenager, she lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she helped Millay’s family sort through the papers the poet left behind. Her many books of poetry and prose have received numerous awards. Oliver lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the inspiration for much of her work.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1929, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by W.H. Auden, that same year. She lived in Cambridge for many years. Having written boldly for seven decades on politics, feminism, history, and racism, Rich died in March 2012.
The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies in 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The
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Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. He has published numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays. Since the 1950s, he has divided his time between Boston, New York, and Saint Lucia.
Born in New York City in 1921, Richard Wilbur studied at Amherst College before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He later attended Harvard University. A former Poet Laureate of the United States, he currently lives in Cummington, Massachusetts.
A version of many of these biographies originally appeared on poets.org, the website of the Academy of American
Poets, and on poetryfoundation.org. All rights reserved.
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Media Package masspoetry.org/mediapackage2015
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Resources for Poetry Exploration
This is by no means a comprehensive list—rather, it is a starting point, noting some of the resources we find richest for those beginning to explore poetry (as well as those for whom poetry is a daily part of life).
Poetry Guides for Reading and Writing
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0156005661)
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0385480017)
A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetryby Mary Oliver (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0156724005)
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0374526177)
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0393321784)
Anthologies
Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0393048209)
Good Poems selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0142003442)
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris (ISBN-‐13: 978-‐0061583247)
Websites
The Academy of American PoetsFavorite Poem Project How a Poem HappensThe Poetry Foundation Mass Poetry
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About Mass Poetry masspoetry.org
Mass Poetry supports poets and poetry in Massachusetts. We help to broaden the audience of poetry readers, bring poetry to readers of all ages and transform people’s lives through inspiring verse. We are a tax exempt, non-‐profit organization.
Our largest programs include: The Massachusetts Poetry FestivalThree days of readings, workshops, and panels.
Student Day of PoetryA youth program that brings students together for an intensive day of poetry workshops, performances, and an open mic, held both in and out of schools.
Common Threads A poetry outreach program that facilitates the creation of reading and discussion groups throughout Massachusetts, centered on a publication of eight poems by Massachusetts poets, videos, and a guide to reading and discussing the poems. Published annually.
Poetry on the TPoems in place of ads on the MBTA; ran continuously from April-‐October 2014 and is seeking new sponsors.
Professional Development for Teachers Workshops and seminars for educators led by successful and engaging poet-‐instructors.
U35 Reading Series A reading series for poets under the age of 35, held every other month at The Marliave in Downtown Crossing.
Fiscal Sponsorship We are the proud fiscal sponsor of MassLEAP and Louder Than A Bomb Massachusetts. Online PublicationsWeekly articles and poems, continuous promotion of new books by Massachusetts poets, a monthly Massachusetts Poet in the Spotlight newsletter (5400+ subscribers), and more. Plus: facebook.com/masspoetry | twitter.com/masspoetry | @masspoetry
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About the Common Threads Team
Alice Kociemba is the author of the chapbook Death of Teaticket Hardware (2011), the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. She directs Calliope Poetry Series, a monthly poetry series at the Falmouth Public Library, and is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets. Alice is a member of the Advisory Board and Program Planning Committee of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. She is a psychotherapist and lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Laurin Macios is Program Director of Mass Poetry. In addition to Common Threads, she produces Student Day of Poetry, Professional Development, Poetry on the T, and the U35 Reading Series. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship for three years, and has a background in publishing. She has been published in a handful of journals, which can be perused at laurinbeckermacios.com.
Gabrielle Tyson is Program Assistant at Mass Poetry and the coordinator of Partnering Poets for Common Threads. She is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she studied writing, literature, and publishing. Her fiction has been included in on-‐campus publications and her poetry recently appeared in Burningword Literary Journal. Gabby has worked previously in publishing at Elsevier and for the literary journal Ploughshares.
Riley Fearon of Riley Fearon Productions has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine and been nominated for several awards including Florida’s Crystal Reel Awards. He has been involved with many production companies ranging from Fox, HBO, NBC, Warner Bros. and many local commercials, promotional web videos and more. Riley Fearon Productions is a video production company based out of the Greater Boston Area. Fully equipped with the latest high-‐end production gear, Riley Fearon Productions produces quality HD videos for a wide range of clients.
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Acknowledgements
Mass Poetry is grateful for the poets and publishers who gave their support and permissions to this edition of Common Threads, and to everyone across the state of Massachusetts who is taking the time to bring poetry to their communities. We would also like to thank the many poets who volunteered their time as Partnering Poets, offering to partner with discussion group leaders across the state who requested support. A thank you to Massachusetts artist Denise Manseau who donated her piece Summer Light for the cover—a piece that evokes this issue’s theme of love calling us to the things of the world and to each other. A thank you to Rhina P. Espaillat, John Hodgen, and Fred Marchant, for their time, enthusiasm, and warmth, to Riley Fearon for this year’s wonderful videos, and to Noah Tucker for his Word expertise. A thank you to Robert Pinsky for his time and generosity in composing “How to Read a Poem” specifically for Common Threads readers, as well as his support of Mass Poetry year-‐round. And of course, a big thank you to Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor, for her many months of hard work and attention, and her commitment and devotion to Common Threads.
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Sincere gratitude and appreciation to the poets and readers who spent their time recommending such a deep pool of poems, from which these eight Common Threads were chosen. And especially to poet-‐friends who listened to my obsession about which poets and poems to select. Judy Askew, Lorna Knowles Blake, Kathleen Casey, Jarita Davis, Dorothy Derifield, Susan Donnelly, Alan Feldman, Prosser Gifford, Roger Kessel, Henry Lyman, Barbara McGovern, Kathleen Voigt, Sheila Whitehouse. And to the generous Robert Pinsky, whose Favorite Poems Project as US Poet Laureate has been crucial to building a general audience for poetry. Thank you for adding your essay to Common Threads. With the vision of Michael Ansara and the rock solid support and steady guidance of Laurin Macios, my commitment to Common Threads continues to be a labor of love. —Alice Kociemba
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Copyright Information
“The Birthing” from THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH THE DOORS OF MY HEART: POEMS by Deborah Digges, copyright © 2010 by The Estate of Deborah Digges. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once,” from HER PLACE IN THESE DESIGNS (2008) by Rhina Espaillat. Reprinted by permission of Truman State University Press.
“For the Man Who Spun Plates” from GRACE, by John Hodgen, © 2006. Reprinted and used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Fred Marchant, "The Salt Stronger," from THE LOOKING HOUSE. Copyright © 2009 by Fred Marchant. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
“The Osprey” from WEST WIND by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
“Prospective Immigrants Please Note” Copyright © 2002, 1967, 1963 by Adrienne Rich from THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME: SELECTED POEMS 1950-‐2001 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Sea Grapes” from COLLECTED POEMS 1948-‐1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
“Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World” from THINGS OF THIS WORLD by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1956 and renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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