The Poetry of Transitions: How to Splurge on a Holiday Weekend

Today it seems to me that nurturing poetry skills is a bit like childrearing: If your kiddo grows up well enough and heads out into the world, you don't say it's because you learned something in the last week and that made it all work out. It's the long haul, the small things like food allergies and birthday cakes and helping the unexperienced hand to shape a perfect O or the teen to question and improve an essay. It's being willing to let them try evenings in town with friends, and not flinching (much) when you accidentally overhear those first romantic diversions. No parent can do a perfect job -- we're human -- but bringing a child to maturity, reasonably healthy and brave and independent, is worth the years leading up to that.

When THRESHOLDS is published in February 2026, I expect I'll feel much the same way about that. But there's always the next poem and wanting it to be better, and that's a difference, for sure. Most of us don't start a second family, just to see whether we can do it better ... or have I missed something?

At any rate,  I opted to spend most of my Labor Day weekend pinned to my seat in Zoom'd poetry classes led  by five outstanding poets. There's still one more class to go, tomorrow. For the evening I'll be mulling over the lessons this afternoon about the power of short poems (if you want them to have power). It amazed me that I recognized the first poem that the teaching poet offered, an anonymous one:

“Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!”

And it amazed me even more to find online material from a class taught by Allen Ginsberg, opening with that very poem. Incredible to discover what those students were then exposed to. Check it out here. 

Okay, I'm off to scribble a bit. Or peel some of today's apples. Or take a walk first. Yep, that sounds about right. One beautiful day to be a poet, looking at life's transitions and wondering how to spill them and rearrange them in words on a page. 

Majoring in Art? Counterfeiting in the 1800s Offered You a Good Income

I've always enjoyed historical fiction. It's the classic "spoonful of sugar" for the facts of our past. As a writer of historical novels, I'm responsible for getting the underlying details—skirt fashion, maple sugaring, weather extremes, and famous persons like Harriet Beecher Stowe (real-life author of Uncle Tom's Cabin)—all correct in the stories I spin. My goal is to give readers an enjoyable ramble through Vermont's 1850s in my Winds of Freedom series, while making sure their experience in the lives of the characters is true to life.

The Long Shadow, This Ardent Flame, The Bitter and the Sweet: These are adventures of teens in the village of North Upton (based on our real North Danville), and each one explores the level of risk the teens undertake. There are scary threats around them, and as anyone who's lived in snow country knows, winter can be the most potent threat of all.

But each book also handles the dangers of 1850s life, from bounty hunters to deadly disease to unquenchable fires that take down houses, barns, and life itself.

In The Bitter and the Sweet, one of the scary aspects is counterfeiting. It took decades for the American system of coins, paper money, and banks to develop. Rampant counterfeiting took place in the 1820s and 1830s, and the effects still made problems for anyone dealing in Big Money in 1854, the year of this novel.

Historians divide written evidence of the past into two kinds: primary, written by the people alive then, and secondary, the books that the historians then write, where they line up the details and pull together the themes. For The Bitter and the Sweet, I used a "secondary" source called A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by professor Stephen Mihm. (He also kindly answered some correspondence as I narrowed the details I'd be using in my story.)

I already knew about Vermont counterfeiter Christian Meadows, whose history is repeatedly rediscovered for popular articles (here's one). A skilled engraver and silversmith, he strayed from his daily work into counterfeiting, applying his skills to the design and crafting of printing plates. He was captured, convicted, and imprisoned -- but did such elegant design work that Daniel Webster spoke up for him, and Vermont governor Erastus Fairbanks in 1853 pardoned him so he could return to the legitimate side of his engraving.

Devouring the well-written pages of Mihm's comprehensive book A Nation of Counterfeiters, I discovered an even more fascinating fellow: Seneca Paige, who led a major collaborative of "money makers," including multiple artists, just across the Canada border from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. In his later years he "reformed" and his grave in Bakersfield, Vermont, praises his life, saying, “His Loss will be felt by many; particularly by the poor. He was truly the poor man’s friend.”

I wanted my characters to meet this man (under a new name, of course, for the novel: Foster Pierce). But by 1854, the year of The Bitter and the Sweet, he was already that reformed character that won such acclaim. How could I include him in a way that would be true to the facts, but also potentially terrifying to the teens meeting him in their village?

Yes, I solved it. I won't spoil your fun by saying how! But I loved writing this book, and now that it's in print (softcover and ebook), it's a great joy to share the lives of "my" people with readers.

And I remind the artists I meet: 125 years ago, your precision skills could have been making you an excellent living ... as long as you didn't get caught. 

The Poetry of Transitions: When and Why

When I say I've been writing poems ever since I could shape the letters of the words, well, that was really my second stage. The first came as soon as I could repeat the lines my mother spoke or sang: "Jack and Jill -- went up the hill -- to fetch a pail of water," we repeated to each other. And very soon, I began to protest about that particular poem: "Mommy, water and after do NOT rhyme." 

But they almost do, and that too was something to learn.

In The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach teaches that "All poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of sounds." 

Reading that, more than sixty years after Mom and I began poetry together, brought all the strands together for me. California poet Ellen Bass pointed to Longenbach's book during one of her classes that I first enrolled in during the Covid pandemic. Between her lessons and the resources she listed, I found new strengths.

And now a book of my poems, THRESHOLDS, will be published in a few more months. 

Starting with an OLLI (aka Osher) talk on September 25, I'm inviting you to join me to explore the poetry of transition. After all, autumn in Vermont practically defines transition: blazing with color, gusting with northwest wind, stripping the gardens and toughening our word-winged selves for winter.

As they say: Watch this spot for more.

* 

Eve in Vermont

 

She sits on the front step

potato in her hand, peeling

turning the round cool white

and brown form, rubbing off

the traces of soil, rejoicing—

“potato, potato,” naming it.

When the bird flies past it calls

and again she says “potato” but then

she looks up, shakes her hair,

follows the angled wings in flight.

She grins and calls out “blue jay”

and it answers.