Posts

Posted on

UPDATED April 2016 Boston Poetry Readings

National Poetry Month offers a dizzying array of events across the nation, but especially in Boston. Updated listings appear below. You can see my teacher Barbara Helfgott Hyett read alongside an old poet-friend Nicole Terez Dutton at the Newton Free Library on Tuesday, April 12 at 7pm. You can meet me in person at the Roslindale Public Library on Saturday, April 23 at noon. And if you have the time, inclination, and stamina, you can attend at least one reading on just about every day this month. All readings are in Mass unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, April 7, 6 pm
Martin Corless-Smith
introduced by Boyd Nielson
Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330
Harvard University
Cambridge

Thursday, April 7, 7 pm
Cammy Thomas, Sophia Yee, Ros Zimmermann
National Poetry Month Celebration
Cary Memorial Library
1874 Mass. Ave.
Lexington

Continue reading “UPDATED April 2016 Boston Poetry Readings”

Posted on

Robins in the Snow American Sentence

The robins don’t care if there’s snow on the ground, they sing their mating song.

NOTE: This poetic form is Allen Ginsburg’s answer to the Japanese haiku

Posted on

How to Love a Woman by Kate Wallace Rogers

Listen to her heart,
loud as a hummingbird engine
or the rattle of a snake on your threshold.
Bring her frequent bouquets of all petals,
shapes and colors. Write her love
notes in hopscotch chalk on the sidewalk.

Collect everyday treasures:
shells, feathers and skipping
stones for her, so she will look out
further into the sparkle and glaredash
of fins, whiskers, breathsplash, whole pinnipeds
she never thought she’d see. Love

her beech tree that lays out
a gorgeous blanket of dappleshade for picnics
you eat with chopsticks, so it lasts longer and that’s the way
she likes it. As you celebrate her birthday
suit, her mesmerizing texture,
soothe her with sun-drenched stones.

Sing her songs
you remember your mother sang, drifting
in moonlight, stars landing on temples
and scars. At dawn, make blueberry pancakes
together savoring her creation,
every luscious, sticky, syrupsweet bite.

As Saturday slips past noon,
and there’s still more love to be made, tender
her, breathing in her rhythm, and rhyme with her every
swoon, reflecting upside down
on the indecipherable plush of birdsong
strung along the tanglevines stretching out beyond you.

About the Poet:

Kate Wallace Rogers has been writing and performing poetry since second grade. With some friends in Dennis, Mass., she co-founded the Dragonfly poetry and music series. She has had work published in The Beaver and Red Weather. She self-published a slim volume of poetry silk-screened on Japanese folding paper. More recently, she has been a frequent participant and feature at the Mews coffeehouse and AMP gallery in Provincetown. Kate’s poetry weaves together her love of language, nature, and women. She is originally from New York City, but currently lives in Provincetown in Stanley Kunitz’s house. She loves swimming in the ocean year round.

Posted on

April 2016 Poetry Readings in Boston MA and Environs

NOTE: You can find an updated version of these listings here.

April is National Poetry Month, which means that readings and classes abound. Here are my top picks:

Listings follow. All venues are in Massachusetts (USA) unless otherwise noted: Continue reading “April 2016 Poetry Readings in Boston MA and Environs”

Posted on

Free Poetry Workshop at the Roslindale Public Library in Boston, MA

The Roslindale Public Library invited me to help them observe National Poetry Month. I’m collaborating with them on window displays, and on Saturday, April 23 I’ll be conducting a poetry workshop on premises. I’d love to see you there. Here’s a link to the event listing on the Rozzie Public Library website, which includes a map and other venue information. The library is right in the middle of Roslindale Square, an easy bus ride from the Forest Hills T stop. There is plenty of on-street parking in the neighborhood. Details follow:

Poetry Workshop with Frances Donovan  Click to add this event to your calendar
DATE Saturday, April 23, 2016
TIME 12:00 pm – 1:45 pm EDT
WHERE Roslindale Branch of the Boston Public Library
4246 Washington Street
Roslindale, MA 02131
LIBRARY Roslindale
NEIGHBORHOOD Roslindale
TYPE OF EVENT Workshops & Classes
COST Free
AUDIENCE Adults
DESCRIPTION Join local poet Frances Donovan to explore one of the oldest art forms. We’ll read work by well-known poets and explore the meaning of their words and the feelings they evoke in us. Then we’ll use prompts to create our own poems, focusing on positive feedback to nurture these new seedlings. Experienced poets and raw beginners — or the merely curious — are welcome. Frances will also have a poetry display in the library during the month of April.

More about the facilitator:
Frances Donovan’s work has appeared in many places, including Borderlands, Snapdragon, Marathon Literary Review, Ishka Bibble, and Gender Focus. She holds a degree in English from Vassar College and has studied with Barbara Helfgott Hyett and Toni Amato. She curated the Poetry@Prose reading series and has appeared as a featured reader at numerous venues in the Northeast, including the Newton Public Library and the PoemWorks Reading Series. Frances aims to create a comfortable, intimate environment where writers of all kinds can become open to new possibilities and new ways of looking at their own work.
MORE www.gardenofwords.com
Posted on

Annie Finch, Author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

Detail of the cover of Spells: New and Selected Poems, by Annie Finch
Photograph of poet Annie Finch and her cat Merlin
Annie Finch, author of Spells, and her cat Merlin

Fearless in its lyricism and expansive in its range, Annie Finch’s work spans four decades and encompasses eight books of poetry, a translation, and numerous anthologies, plays, libretti, and books and essays on poetics. The more I researched her, the more I wondered how our paths had never crossed before. Neither the poetry world nor the pagan world is all that large, and the overlap between them—pagans writing poetry with the depth and seriousness she brings to it—is even smaller. “As a Wiccan,” Finch writes in the foreword to Spells: New and Selected Poems, “I write poems as incantations to strengthen our connections to each other, to the passage of time, and to the sacred cycles of nature.” Her celebrations of the turning wheel of the year and her goddess invocations connect us with age-old traditions but root us in the present day with economic and unsentimental language. Consider these lines from “A Seed for Spring Equinox:” Continue reading “Annie Finch, Author of Spells: New and Selected Poems”

Posted on

My Mother’s Instructions for How to Prepare for a Last Phone Call with a Dying Ex-Husband, by Tom Daley

Find an uncomfortable chair.
There are old letters from a bomber pilot in the South Pacific. Discard them.
Do not conjure the lemony rot in the collar of his pajama top.
Find the ear syringe behind the ice cap in the medicine cabinet.
Give up vindictive nightmares for Lent.
Try on the dead dog’s collar that hangs on a nail in the basement.
Pull all the brown leaves off the geraniums.
Apply hot compresses of clam broth to your forehead.
Research the pain indices for bone cancer generated by malignant tumors in the prostate.
Invite the children over to watch home movies, and when they arrive, take a long trip in the car.
Inquire about the current rates at the motel where you checked in the afternoon you found
the tacky, sequined lady’s cigarette case on the passenger side of the front seat of the Falcon station wagon.
Search scrap metal junkyards for the cast iron skillet you threw at him on Mother’s Day,
and missed.
Turn over the mattress.

-Tom Daley
from House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems, FutureCycle Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission of the poet.