Tag: nicole terez dutton

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Boston Area Poetry Readings for April 2017

April is National Poetry Month, which means the already vital poetry scene in the Boston area kicks it up to eleven. Start off the month with the Boston National Poetry Month Festival and wrap it up with the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem. In between take your pick from all the events listed below; with so many talented poets from Boston and beyond, it’s hard to go wrong with any of them. A few shout-outs:

This coming Monday, April 3:

  • Nicole Terez Dutton, Regie Gibson, and other luminaries give the second in a series of panels on African American Poetry at the Copley BPL. I attended the first one and found it very inspiring
  • Fellow Lesley poet Eileen Cleary appears that same evening at Newtonville Books with PoemWorks
  • Jill McDonough reads at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge.

Also of note:

  • US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera appears Thursday, April 6 at Harvard
  • My former workshop-mate Grey Held reads from his second book of poems on Friday, April 7 at Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain
  • Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges appears Thursday, April 27 at Rozzie Reads in Roslindale.

Saturday, April 1, 7:30 pm
“Singing the Body Electric”: Contemporary Poets Respond to Walt Whitman
Linda Bamber, Nancy Boutilier, Robert Carr, Christine Casson, Amy Clark, Jennifer Clarvoe, Steven Cramer, Tom Daley, Regie Gibson, Joan Houlihan, Dorian Kotsiopoulos, Julia Lisella, Jonathan Weinert, Gail Mazur, Lloyd Schwartz, Theodora Stratis, Joyce Swagerty, Cammy Thomas, Daniel Tobin, and Rosamond Zimmermann
Munroe Saturday Nights at First Parish Church
7 Harrington Rd.
Lexington, MA

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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

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Interview with Poet Tom Daley, Author of House You Cannot Reach

Photograph of Tom Daley's Book House You Cannon Reach, displayed on a desktop with other items

I first met Tom Daley at a reading at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d moved to Boston a few years before, thrilled at the rich, diverse poetry scene and itching to dive in. Unfortunately, I hadn’t factored in the years it would take to acclimate to Boston’s notoriously chilly culture, or the way that living with my girlfriend would stifle my ability to write poetry, which requires a self-knowledge and candor incompatible with my struggles to reconcile our difficult relationship.

Photograph of poet Tom Daley
Poet Tom Daley. Photo credit: Devin Altobello

A few months after I moved from Brookline to Cambridge, I began dipping my toe in the literary waters. It was then that I discovered Regie Gibson’s reading series at the Zeitgeist and met Nicole Terez Dutton, who was just about to embark on a graduate program at Brown University. Nicole was one of the featured performers — I particularly remember the persona poems about her black ancestors. Tom Daley, a thin, greying man in tweeds, epitomized the sort of intellectual one might expect to find in Concord, the land of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He read a poem in praise of Nicole, and the warmth and intensity of the piece stayed with me for more than a decade. I recently reconnected with Tom via Facebook and was thrilled to read his new collection House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems, published in 2015 by FutureCycle Press. He took the time to answer some questions about his work and his life.

Continue reading “Interview with Poet Tom Daley, Author of House You Cannot Reach”

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