New Year's Eve Meditation

And so we have arrived, once again, at the last day of the year.

In some ways, this year was easier than the previous two were. High Covid passed into chronic Covid, and vaccines and boosters made me less afraid of dying or of killing someone else. But our national crises continue to ripen and burst, the war on Ukraine has been an unspeakable cruelty, children are murdered in schools, women are raped and told they deserve it, Jews are scapegoated, people of color are crushed like garbage, families without shelter wander the frozen streets. I could keep slicing this vein, but you already know the bloody tale.

Meanwhile, we shrink into our private lives. This may be right, this may be wrong, but it is how we manage to cope . . . and because of this I am shedding the pulpit we that began this meditation and reverting now to the quavery, lonesome I.

What has my year been?

I have learned, once again, how to live far away from my children. I have watched my father crawl into and out of death. Distance and parting. The present vibrates. Loss is imminent. 

Some jerk has just published a New York Times article about the death of poetry. I haven't read it because I don't have a Times subscription, but I can tell you that waxing pontifical about the death of an art form to an audience of people who have given their lives to it is a pretty bad way to end one's year. I'm not going to do that. You may not like my art, and I may not like your art, but they exist, and you and I exist in them, and they are a vision of the earth and the heavens, and I am endlessly, repeatedly, loudly grateful to have this devotional. 

Poetry is a way to shoulder pain. A way to stumble into joy. Do not denigrate your own strivings. I say this as a reminder to myself, but maybe you are glad of that reminder too.

I turned 58 this year. I am aging, and I have been aware of that--physically, culturally. I feel myself slipping into new, mysterious territory. My writing has shifted, thanks in large part to the communal work I have been doing with my Thursday salon partners and to my close conversations with Teresa Carson. These changes in my own writing have led to changes in my teaching. They've also led me to ponder my trajectory. How did I get from there to here?

Earlier this year I told you that I'd made the first cut for a major award. The final results won't be announced till next spring, and I have no expectation of winning. The knowledge of having made the first cut feels unreal enough; it feels like prize enough. Part of my application involved writing a career narrative. In other words, I had to write my own public-autobiography-as-poet. This was an odd and nerve-wracking exercise, but since then I have kept returning to it, kept rereading it. For whatever reason, my mind finds itself wanting to consider how what I did turned into what I have become. So as a New Year's Eve offering, I'll share what I wrote with you . . . but I'll also suggest that you might want to write one of your own. It may seem like a strange, even mundane, task, but it could present you with a whole new way to consider how you got from there to here. As far as my narrative goes, it's got plenty of necessary but boring parts ("I did this, I did that, blah, blah, blah"). But if you wade through them to the end, you'll see what I suddenly figured out. And that's what I want to carry forward into 2023.

* * *

I graduated from Haverford College in 1986, with a degree in English, and taught language arts for a year at Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts, before leaving teaching for a year-long farm internship in Andover, Vermont. In 1989 I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and took a position as an editorial assistant at Jamestown Publishers. I stayed at the press until 1992, working my way up to assistant editor, and then went freelance. Since that time, I have continued to work as a freelance editor for a variety of academic (e.g., University of Massachusetts), educational (e.g., Merrill/Prentice Hall), and literary presses (e.g., CavanKerry).

            In the meantime my husband and I moved to deep rural Maine, to a tiny, remote town in the north country. We lived there for more than twenty years, quite isolated from any kind of writing or academic community, and I learned to be a poet. Though I have never attended any graduate program, I worked intensely, via mail and occasional meetups, for a number of years with the poet Baron Wormser, and gradually my poems and essays began appearing in top-line literary journals such as the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

            In the meantime, I was teaching music part time in the 90-student local school and working as a visiting artist throughout central Maine. This is a conservative area of the state, one that does not, on the whole, privilege art or education, so I learned a great deal about ways to work in community with people whose experiences, expectations, and beliefs are not my own. This skill set gradually became a linchpin in my broader teaching and outreach work.

            In 2009, Baron Wormser invited me to work as his assistant at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, the nationally renowned teaching program he founded at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. In 2012, on his retirement, I took over that program as director. In 2021, Maudelle Driskell, the executive director of the Frost Place, invited me to help her launch the Frost Place Studio Sessions, through which we now offer year-round online poetry programs for writers and teachers. I serve as creative director of these sessions, designing and often leading programs for a wide variety of participants, at all levels of experience, who come to us from around the United States and beyond.

            Meanwhile, in 2019, the poet Stuart Kestenbaum, the former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, asked me to help him design a pilot program for high school students at Monson Arts, a newly founded artists’ center in rural Maine. By this time I was living downstate in Portland, but Stuart believed that my years of work in the region could help us effectively reach the underserved students in the area. Covid took a bite out of our sails, of course, but we still managed to create an intense, school-year-long studio experience for eager students from six far-flung rural high schools. That program will start again in earnest in the fall of 2022.

            As you can see, my trajectory in the world of art is not traditional. Much of my work, especially early on, was unpaid or underpaid. In Harmony, I was raising children and homesteading; my husband is a carpenter, and there just wasn’t the money for me to consider grad school. So I became an autodidact: I wrote and read and learned, and eventually book publishers began accepting my work. As of 2022, I have published five collections of poetry, two memoirs, and two teaching texts. To be honest, I don’t apply for many grants and prizes because I can’t afford the application fees. But in 2009 I received a $20,000 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. I have also received smaller grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2010 I won the Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction, and in 2020 I was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

I am not an academic, nor do I have deep institutional ties. Instead, I am a poet on the ground. I am fervent about poetry as public conversation . . . as an opening, a bridge, a revelation. This has been my life’s work.