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. 

 

You Have to Be Willing to Strike the Match

Blame it on those little paper matchbooks, too soft, too small. Those first efforts when I was a child terrified me -- the idea that a flame would be held at the end of my fingers. And it seemed I could not get the paper match to take fire, in its clumsy travel along the rough lighting strip.

Wooden matches arrived as a huge relief in my life. I could get them to light without flinching much, just making my fingers scurry backward along the small stick as the flame took shape at its tip. Every since then, I've avoided matchbooks, and appreciated those cardboard boxes full of potential instead.

It's the middle of the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, as I write this. I've just taken part in an online session called "Magnify the Light," hosted by Ritualwell, a Jewish collaborative; a rabbi in Israel gave a teaching about how powerful light is ("it just takes a little light to push back the darkness"), and half a dozen of poets -- including me -- read related work. Mine was one of my poems based in awareness of both my happy marriage and the absence of my beloved, as I'm now a widow. A widow who knows how fortunate she was, and is. 

Then, as the session ended, I heard from Persimmon Tree, a lush and abundant online publication that delights especially in the lives of women over 50. My poem "Where's the Tag?" is in the just-revealed issue, and it deliberately rides the traditions of both my Quaker mother and my Jewish father. I've added a dash of the distress I hear around me, as many people who are oppressed by short days struggle through December, aiming for the relief of the Solstice and longer hours of sunlight ahead. Here's the link, and here's a screenshot too: 

 

There, I've managed to light a match and then a candle in my own (rather dim) mountainside afternoon. I've said in other places this week that a candle can be both a candle of mourning and a festive custom, at one time. That's how it feels. 

I'm so grateful that I've learned how to light a match ... even if it still makes me flinch a little. 

 

Coming Soon: Audiobook of THE BITTER AND THE SWEET -- Plus Nov. 20 Presentation

Almost all of my "spare" time for the past two weeks has been spent listening to a very skillful "audiobook" reader create the spoken version of THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, checking that the words move smoothly from the pages. It's taken a huge amount of time and has been fascinating. Kathy, the professional reader, clearly prepares for each chapter ahead of time, so that she's ready with separate voices for the different characters, and moments when someone "drops" their voice to keep quiet in a scene. She even inserts small chuckles of her own when they are laughing!

I am so excited about this, and grateful to All Things That Matter Press for investing in this version of the book. People often ask whether there are audio versions of my novels. Now I can give a resounding YES for this latest title. As soon as the version is available to order, I'll let you know ... it won't be much later, I think. (Locally, Boxcar & Caboose bookstore in St. Johnsbury and Green Mountain Books in Lyndonville are carrying all three books in the Winds of Freedom series, in softcover.)

In another direction, I've learned over the years to develop an engaging public presentation, and loved the way the audience connected with my talks recently, first this summer on the 1800s immigration into Barnet, Vermont, and then in September on "The Poetry of Transitions," as an approach to my poetry book THRESHOLDS that will be published in 2026 (recording here!). 

So when the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum asked me to take part in their November consideration of mysteries, of course I said yes! Here's the planned approach: the various subgenres, how mysteries are changing, the inclusion of more women and minorities as both authors and characters, and I'll provide a list of suggested authors for people to check out. Of course I'll mention THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, with a quick explanation of how I learned this region's role in counterfeiting in the 1800s. But this talk also dips deeply into the 17 years of learning the mysteries and crime fiction field with my late husband Dave Kanell, as we created Kingdom Books and traveled the United States, meeting authors and learning more.

I hope you can join me! November 20, at 7 pm, at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. I'll let you know if it's also recorded for viewing afterward. 

Would You Change a Famous Line of Poetry?

Work room, with art in progress, year 7 of the "after."

I'm walking into my seventh winter without Dave, my late husband. The pain is muted now, a low hum of missing spiced with surprising joy, as I recall the fun times we made and had.

But the transition (as you'll see in 2026 in my book Thresholds) surely colors my poetry, so I feel grateful this week to write about other things, including raking autumn leaves as a kid, and my mother's endless supply of nursery rhymes and children's songs. Good memories! These fed into a poem I'm calling "Half," and it took shape around a memory of something Mom used to chant at us when she wanted a kiss from one of her children: "Half past kissing time, time to kiss again!"

I thought she might have made it up, but it turns out to be part of a poem by Edward Field, and I found a list of his poems on Wikisource, an online compendium that I don't think I'd ever visited before. Find it here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Eugene_Field

Coincidentally (and in 12-Step programs we say, "Coincidence is God acting anonymously"), one of my relatives called when the poem was almost done.  He told me he plans to get a poetry tattoo dedicated to his wife: "We were together. I forget the rest." (Yes, it caught me in the heart as he said it.) He said it's Walt Whitman's poetry, then added that he'd recently learned it is a paraphrase -- the original line, which I looked up as we chatted, said:

"Day by day and night by night we were together,—All else has long been forgotten by me."

 So, a poet's question to you readers today: Do you like the shorter version better, with that hint at modern language? (It is concise, packs a punch, and fits well on shoulder perhaps.) Or would you hold to the original? And for extra credit: Would you add a line of poetry to the landscape of your back or shoulder? Or have you done so, already ...

What If Aging Means Less Juggling? Novels, Poems, Feature Articles, History ...

I have never learned to juggle. I've watched a few people learn it, and it didn't seem terrible -- but as someone who can barely catch a basketball, grabbing smaller items out of the air isn't likely. Actually I don't throw very well, either. (Don't ask about the company baseball team, back in 1973 or so.)

Maybe you have read the "how" of juggling? I leaned on such book-learning for writing "Juggling Parenthood at Seventy," which is in the most recent issue of New Feathers Anthology - you can read it here (it's short). I was thrilled that New Feathers asked for a second poem, too, which again is set in my part of parenting "adult children." (Yes, it's here.)

With the onset of my seventies, I notice changes in how I move, which is no surprise. I'm losing some speed and coordination, but not, thank goodness, determination.

What scares me more than the physical changes are mental ones. I worry each time I can't pull up a word or remember why I was headed into another room. It seems that most of my similar-aged friends have the same worry ... none of us want to become dependent on others for basic life, and that's what those little glitches seem to threaten.

But I can't live under threat as a mood. It's terrible for writing. So I'm trying to be practical, the way I was when I got rid of the last throw rug (I loved it, but throw rugs are a Big Problem in terms of falling, "they" say.)

For writing, that means sometimes narrowing the range of what I'm working on. With the gracious collaboration of editor/publisher Justin Lavely, I'm taking a break from feature articles for The North Star Monthly for a few months at least, and I'm not rushing to write another novel. Instead, I'm making a lot of room for poems. There are scraps and Post-it notes and lists all over this home, with metaphors, bits of lines, ideas for structure. It's working! Maybe I should have tried this sooner.

Meanwhile, though, I'm watching how the novels are reaching readers. If you live in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, you can buy a copy of The Bitter and the Sweet easily in St. Johnsbury or Lyndonville (thank you, Boxcar & Caboose, and Green Mountain Books). But you might not have heard: I was able to regain rights to the first two books in the series, The Long Shadow and This Ardent Flame, and Speaking Volumes has them back in print, with covers that match the ebooks. You can get the lovely softcovers at those same two bookstores -- and of course, order them in any other bookshop, in person or online.

There's some relief in not juggling as much: I don't worry about hard rubber balls landing on my head. But can I stick with just poetry? Umm, no. Watch for news about a huge historical research project in the wings. 

 

History, Historiography, and Mom: A Meditation for Indigenous Peoples' Day

Real history.

My mother wasn't a historian. She remembered her own life, of course, and some of the stories told by her relatives about earlier years. Descended on her mother's side from Quakers, who kept good records, she owned one small book written by a Quaker ancestor. Otherwise, her exploration of family history took place via letters exchanged with her cousin Alice -- who, as a professor, might have been expected to be more tuned in with the standards of history. But Alice's interest was in religion, and she too mostly provided family history via stories, letters, and some photographs, as well as her personal experience. Some of those details appear in my Winds of Freedom series of historical novels set in the 1850s in Vermont.

On my grandfather's side -- Mom's father's side -- there are better records because many of the ancestors were merchants on Cape Cod. Those folks are well documented and date back quite neatly to emigration from England on the Mayflower and other notable ships. And in England, church records allow good reliability for tracking the family tree, too.

The most fragile part of Mom's stories about the family turned out to be its connections with Native Americans. I wasn't yet asking "the right questions" at the time of Mom's death -- I was only 28 then. But I have one of her excited letters, splashed with exclamation points, suggesting that my four-greats grandmother Love Perkins in Wells, Maine, might be of Native American ancestry.

Thanks to marrying historian Dave Kanell, I've become a researcher, and I question everything in the family tree, especially connections to America's pre-1600 people. It took a lot of work, but I've demonstrated that Mom was wrong about Love Perkins. But another branch of her tree, the Hopkins line, seems to have descended in part from Wampanoag members based around Nantucket and Cape Cod. I would love to be sure about that, because it would certainly be a source of great interest. But ... the historian part of me doubts that I'll ever have enough evidence.

Still, I am thinking of Margaret Diguina today, on what has been a date recently to contemplate Indigenous peoples of our continent. If she was indeed the Wampanoag person that some records suggest, she had an amazing heritage herself. I hope that her marriage to Gabriel Weldon was both willing and happy. "Historiography," the study of the writings of history, suggests I won't get answers to my related questions during my lifetime. (Also, DNA from back then is far too diluted at this point to show up in my own genetics.)

But for the sake of a bit of history today, I recommend this article on Ruth (West) Coombs of the Mashpee Wampanoag. And for the sake of my grandsons, who may read this post some day, here's a reminder: The Wampanoag did not wear those massive feather headdresses that you see in old movies. Dig into the history of your people, and your nation, and this continent. There is so much to learn!

Real postcard but fake history and garb.

 

Some Days Are Meant for Poems

I have a new routine that I call "Tuesdays are for poetry." It's a way to break the hold that "paid work" has on my schedules, and admit that I need, for all my soul, to spend enough time writing poems. Yesterday was Tuesday, and that's what I did with the time.

But even though today is Wednesday, this poem came along as I paced the wet sidewalks of a nearby town, waiting for my car to be ready at "the shop." You'll see things in this one that may become themes of many poems ahead. Thank you to this day, and to Emma, for starting this rolling.

I Remember: for Emma

 

When I slipped (again) to your sister’s name it was only because

those memories were laid down when I was a young mother—

a time so fraught with peril that hypervigilance felt normal

(there must have been ways to stay safe)

 

and I hope you can forgive me (again) for what must seem

like I do not know you for who you are: But so many times

each year now, as I scan the images of who I’ve been and where

this aging brain is headed,

 

I’ve seen you again in your leather chaps, chainsaw ready,

your confidence on a mountaintop and the carefully blank

gaze you gave to some demanding young man, bare chested,

muscles rippling,

 

who practically dragged the saw out of your hands, started

showing off with the fallen trees. There were reasons we had

for not shouting at him. I remember those, too. And the moment

I pulled my supervising motif

 

up from my boots, interrupted him, said “I am paying this woman

to do this job, give the saw back. Now.” Plus your calm patience

guarding the lake (its wide waters ample as a woman’s hips) from

invasion at the boat dock. See?

 

Now every morning through an Alice-in-Wonderland view

I marvel at your blossoms, herbs, eggs, invitations to strangers

as well as friends, the way you share your journey in biscuit-

sized morsels, feeding the world.

 

You will understand, on this cold and rainy Wednesday, how

my mind goes to biscuits, and lighting the oven, making magic

with flour and cream: Baking may become my enduring skill

as bits of thought crumble behind me

 

trails laid out for grandchildren to follow if they are quick

because there are always crows ready to sample what’s left

behind. Crows recognize faces. The ones around me call out

when I pass, walking briskly,

 

trying anything and everything that may maintain my mind.

Aging comes with funhouse mirrors, thickening the waist,

creasing the face, tugging at eyelids that never will go back

a quarter century and more.

 

I am willing to give up youth and nimble knees. To wake

repeatedly each night, rolling the seized-up shoulder muscle

easing the hip, taking care not to think in the darkness

(because it triggers insomnia)

 

and then to meet the stranger reflected in the bakery window,

telling her she looks seasoned, capable. I talk to the crows. One day,

I may not notice when I mouth the wrong name. But today

is not that day. I do remember, Emma.

 

BK 10-8-2025

 

The Poetry of Transitions: A Community Conversation of Discovery

It was such a pleasure (and honor!) to recently share poems and ideas, focused around how poetry connects with transitions in life -- and to do this with a group of community members, for an enjoyable hour that also included some impulsive moments of song, and plenty of laughter and learning.

Catch up with it all here, in this recording courtesy of OLLI St. Johnsbury, Catamount Arts, and KATV community access television: https://www.katv.org/vod/osher/2025/20250925