Poet’s Corner: A different kind of blue

All that is beautiful/ that slips away––/ a December night/ that before was November/ and September and before that,/ July when days were blue silver/ waves we swam through.

The storm before Christmas and all through the house/ No appliance was whirring, not even a mouse

If I remember the lake yesterday, the tanager/ deep in the woods, it feels like a memory/ lost in a series of new ones, each singular event/ simply a tanager in a tree. 

When Jack Mayer is walking alone on the Long Trail, he carries a small notebook — a place to jot down whatever comes to his mind.

Here in Cornwall, my small town/ in Vermont, a precinct of deer/ and leaves, I like to think/ Of my neighbors who are likely/ to volunteer for anything. 

After her mother died in 2014, Margaret Rogal came across a small packet of notebooks and letters that her father, Robert Silliman Judd, wrote in 1909 when he was 22 during a six-month visit to his uncle Elmer Judd’s farm in Cando, N.D.

follow sun/ breaking through sky-edged mountains/ into the heart of a stone fruit

The Rochester Public Library will host an evening of poetry with two special guests, Major Jackson and Didi Jackson, on Saturday, Oct. 1, at 6 p.m.

Until September 30, the Sundog Poetry Book Award is open to submissions from all Vermont-based poets who have not published more than one full-length collection.

A saturated meadow,/ Sun-shaped and jewel-small,/ A circle scarcely wider/ Than the trees around were tall…

Masquerading as a series of poems told from the perspective of residents in the fictional town of Sanctuary—some dating back as far as 450,000,000 B.C.E—the book’s concerns are neither fictional nor purely historical.

Downy Woodpecker, a small guy,/ pecks at big wood./ A storm is brewing/ and I’m still half a mile from Minerva Hinchey.

On Friday, May 20, from 7-8:30 p.m., The Compass Music and Arts Center, Park Village in Brandon will present an evening with acclaimed poet Paul Christensen.

These words in this poem by James Crews help us feel the energy and strength of the little coltsfoot flower rising up, or of the many other things in spring that appear overnight with color and vibrancy.

Jim Samler, who taught art at Otter Valley Union High School for 28 years before retiring in 2014, says his inspiration for the book came not only from those poets, but also from The New Yorker cartoonists Charles Adams and Gahan Wilson, as well as Mad Ma … (read more)