The Astonishing Variations of "Poetry World"

My first published poem, "October," came out in YANKEE magazine -- which meant a lot to me (and still does), because more than any other, this magazine captured what my mother loved and valued. In the enormous gap that her premature death left (she was only 53), I could at least feel that she saw my poem this way.

For a long time, the only other place my poems appeared (under the surname Dugger, which I'd kept from a college marriage) was the Green Mountain Trading Post. In its wide and welcoming pages, I wasn't afraid to write about my Northeast Kingdom world as I saw and treasured it. To be read by my neighbors seemed the best reward ever. And it shaped me "forever," because when I went (twice) to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference and met poets whose work often seemed very complicated, very hard to understand, and made them famous, I made a decision:

I want to write what my friends and neighbors might want to read.

And that's still my goal today, although I write differently than I did back then.

This morning, out to a relaxed diner breakfast with a buddy, I learned she'd connected with one of my poems that Ginosko Literary Magazine published this week. (I'm still stunned that the magazine editor chose ALL TEN of the poems I'd sent to him. And very much honored.) My friend's reaction to the poem reassured me that I'm not just writing to "be creative" or to "vent" -- I'm writing poems about parts of my life that might mean something to someone else. It feels right to me.

"My" Dave, the man I happily married in 2003 after we'd met in a bookstore, chose poets for who they were in his life. That meant Galway Kinnell, deeply connected to the Northeast Kingdom and a neighbor to Dave's beloved Lyndon State College, was the most essential poet in Dave's life. But you know how it is -- married people start to notice each other's interests more, and soon Dave was insisting that we go to poetry readings all around the Kingdom, and even to The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, as well as to a reading in San Francisco when we went there for our honeymoon.

Bobbie Bristol and Donald Hall at The Frost Place (Dave took the photo).

 

Even though he wasn't a poetry reader by preference, he had a great ear for strong work, and his highest compliment was "He (or she) is the real thing!" That's how he felt about Maxine Kumin, too, and Ruth Stone, who was nearly blind by the time we met her -- she responded to his warmth, flung an arm over his wide shoulder, and inscribed a book to him, "To My Darling David." He treasured signed poetry -- here's a poem Galway inscribed to him.

 

 There are a lot more of my poems coming out this year, including a book of them, THRESHOLDS, around the end of May or early June. I did have a small collection in print way back before I met Dave, thanks to a friend who thought they should be "out there" for others to read ... most of those included in the pretty chapbook "Mud Season at the Castle" came to life first in the Green Mountain Trading Post.

 But this will be my first poetry collection with a national/global publisher, Kelsay Books, and as Dave would say, I'm "more than thrilled."

To add to today's joy, a rather distant cousin of my mother's got in touch this morning because of the poems in Ginosko ... and gave me a long email about my mother's New England family roots in various locations. I had no idea getting the poetry out there would mean this kind of reconnection. Dave would have loved every minute. 

* * 

Consumer

 

Grocery shopping was my late husband’s delight:

his quick scan of what’s on sale, his seasonal urges insisting,

cherries, melon, organic farmed turkey—he prowled the grocery aisles.

heaping the cart, sending me back to aisle number two for olives, sardines.

In widow world I miss his pulled-pork mandates, his fragrant coffee grinds,

the newspaper stains on his thumbs from sorting coupons. Yes, I kissed

those fingers anyway. Ate his enthusiasm, spread thick on toasted

sourdough bread. Savored kisses redolent of sautéed onions, of fresh garlic,

smiled at belches, farts, and his well-fed contented groans.

 

BK

 

Business Plan: Meet the Robert Frost and Mary Oliver Goals

"I can buy myself flowers" -- Miley Cyrus

This morning I carried my painfully totaled business figures -- income, expenses, proof of everything, except I forgot the documents for the college savings accounts for the grandsons -- to the careful and smart woman who's minded the math for me since a few years after I married my Dave. Before that, I copied the numbers onto tax forms myself, but Dave had more complicated details, and we needed her help. I still immensely value her careful stewardship, and it's worth every penny of her fee to see the neat and professional results of her work.

Along the road today, I met some "my" deaths in this community, the ones that matter so much to me. One that's still raw is the murder of a young mom, who worked two jobs, had a toddler, was targeted by a truly insane and cruel murder plot. I took time to picture her smile, her attentive gaze, her quick movements, as I passed the place where she was taken prisoner. It's important to me to remember her.

 In that moment, I felt as though my dead are always attached to me. There are the terrible tragedies, like the not-yet-sober woman whose body was found in a snowbank, the crib-death baby, the Covid-stricken aging mother who could not hold the hand of her grown son as she passed, because the virus was still new to us and there was no vaccine at that point. And there are the gentler ones, the heartache of friends whose health signaled the approaching end. At this season, I also walk again toward the death of my husband Dave, because with deep snow still around the house at the end of one February, we asked for a hospital bed, to physically assist us through his steady loss of mobility.

 But this is also a time when spring begins to tease. I won't even start tomato seeds for another month, but I'm thinking about rotating garden beds, moving the strawberry plants (which month?), fertilizing the plum trees that began to bear fruit last summer. The seasons, like the night sky, provide an arc of reliable change. 

So it is that holding death as a long chain behind me -- or perhaps a slowly dissolving hard sweet candy on  my tongue? -- also means holding life, and love. It is a marvelous thing to be able to say, "I have loved and been loved, with all my heart and all of his."

 But I was going to tell you about the poetry goals. I told them to the CPA, as proof that even my poetry writing has an organized nature to it. Here you go:

 I have a casual friend in the next village who often posts snippets of others' poems, especially Mary Oliver's. I know others who post Robert Frost lines. It is my goal that one of these days, they will post words and images from the poems I've written.

 In case you are moved to help me toward that ambitious goal, here's a set of ten of my poems in the newly published issue of Ginosko Literary Magazine. I hope one of them, as my Quaker mom would say, "speaks to your condition."

Here's to a life of love for each of us.

Groundhog Day, and I'm Thinking About Woodchucks

The woodchucks, aka groundhogs, are still deep in hibernation in this part of Vermont, according to naturalist Mary Holland. So you get an early-light bluejay photo for the day!

I spent some time with Alfred Godin's guide, Wild Mammals of New England, to craft this poem.

    

The Woodchuck: For Groundhog Day

 

Clover. Alfalfa. Sprouts from the early garden, carrot,

peas, squash, corn, even cabbage although you might think

those could make a woodchuck’s farts stink, swirling

in a poorly ventilated burrow. Deep hibernators, fasting

through dark winters, they dream of asters, dahlias, hostas.

Their hungers pulse up from the deep midwinter snow

and desire is what the mother woodchuck knows, frantic

hunger, a poor preparation for a month of pregnancy: April

devours her body for fetal growth, until at last the babies

pass from the womb, fasten their desperate lips to nipples,

tiny and pink, fattening in five weeks to furry rompers. Diets

meant to deprive can’t connect to such needs; it is one thing

to spend months curled around some inner emptiness

(lost love, or radiated organs), when it can’t be helped. But oh,

what a feast the mama groundhog greets in June: grunting,

squeaking, sucking on succulent specialties. Suspecting,

in her wordless appreciation, that you planted this all

for her vegetarian vocalizing delight.

Published! Two of My Sonnets, in ALL THE WORLD'S A PAGE

 

Of course I read Shakespeare's sonnets in high school, and liked some -- although at the time, I had little experience of trying to describe love, or fit it into carefully counted "meter" and "rhyme." Much later, I sat spellbound as poet Ellen Bryant Voigt described remaking sonnets and adding to and removing their components, for her book KYRIE. 

Then a few years ago -- I think it was still during the pandemic -- in one of the online classes I took with gifted poetry professor and author Ellen Bass (who said she personally had never written a sonnet!), I explored the form all over again. And slowly, a few sonnets began to wander into my folders of my own poems.

So when Quillkeepers Press invited poets to send Shakespearean sonnets for a new collection, I polished up a pair and sent them along ... and to my delight, they were accepted, and form the finale to the new book ALL THE WORLD'S A PAGE!

In case you, like me, need to see the definition of a Shakespearean sonnet in front of you as a refresher, here it is, from the Poetry Foundation:

Shakespearean sonnet

The variation of the sonnet form that Shakespeare used—comprised of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg—is called the English or Shakespearean sonnet form, although others had used it before him. This different sonnet structure allows for more space to be devoted to the buildup of a subject or problem than the Italian/Petrarchan form, and is followed by just two lines to conclude or resolve the poem in a rhyming couplet.

So here are my two sonnets. The Frost one was actually drafted at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH (and as you'll see, I was very annoyed with Mr. Frost that day); the other fits with my memoir-in-progress.

 

 

If you'd like an actual published copy of ALL THE WORLD'S A PAGE, it's here -- with lots more enjoyable poems in it to browse.