Vermont Poetry Newsletter • June 7 2010

[The Vermont Poetry Newsletter is not issued by me but by Ron Lewis, by whose permission I post this. PLEASE NOTE: I have edited his newsletter so that links are provided rather than text. If I cannot find a link, I will either omit the relevant portion of the newsletter to avoid copyright violations, or I will provide an alternate link. Please contact Ron Lewis if you would like to receive his Newsletter in full. All images are linked.]

Vermont Poetry Newsletter

Your Poetry & Spoken Word Gateway in the Green Mountain State
June 8, 2010 (Previous issue: 05/12) – In This Issue:

1. About VPN/How To PrintNewsletter
2. Editor’s Note
3. Writing Assignment/Suggestion/Exercise/Prompt
4. Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010)
5. TLS, The Times Literary Supplement
6. Still Crazy, Writing About Life After 50
7. Poets @ Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2010
8. New Book on Poet Pernette Du Guillet
9. How to Read a Poem
10. Sin City Poetry Review
11. Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
12. The Salon: A New Lit Magazine
13. Route Seven: A New Lit Magazine
14. The Death of Fiction?
15. Poems about The Moon
16. Quibbles.org
17. Poets for Living Waters – Call for Gulf Coast Poems
18. When Poets Rocked Russia’s Stadiums
19. Scientists Discover Meteor Event in Walt Whitman Poem
20. Did You Know? Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg Partner, Dies in VT
21. Ponderings: Dennis Hopper Reads Kipling’s “If”
22. Poetry Quote – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
23. Failbetter Poem
24. Linebreak Poem
25. Copper Canyon Press Poem
26. American Life in Poetry Poems
27. US Poets Laureate List
28. Vermont Poet Laureates
29. US Poet Laureates From Vermont
30. New Hampshire Poet Laureates
31. US Poet Laureates From New Hampshire
32. Contact Info for Publisher of VPN: Ron Lewis
33. Vermont Literary Journals
34. Vermont Literary Groups’ Anthologies
35. Vermont Poetry Blogs
36. State Poetry Society (PSOV)
37. Year-Round Poetry Workshops in Vermont
38. Other Poetry Workshops in Vermont
39. Year-Round Poetry Writing Centers in Vermont
40. Other Writing Groups in Vermont
41. Poetry Event Calendar

1.) About the Vermont Poetry Newsletter Network

The Vermont Poetry Newsletter Network is made up of people of all backgrounds, ages and skills who appreciate the craft of poetry and want to promote it in the beautiful state of Vermont. The network consists of a free e-mail list, an eventual web site, workshops, open mics, poetry performances and other literary events.  The network provides opportunities to meet local poets, talk about and enjoy poetry, and motivate and inspire yourself in whatever writing projects you are involved.

The mission of the Vermont Poetry Newsletter is to foster the poetry arts community in the Green Mountain State. Its goals are to serve as a resource for and about VT poets; to support the development of individual poets; and to encourage an audience for poetry in Vermont.

Block Prints for Sale

My wife’s block prints can be seen, admired and bought, first hand, at Hanover, New Hampshire’s Left Bank Books – my favorite, local used book store.

I’ve asked the store owner to send me their logo and as soon as I have it, I’ll add it to the post. In the meantime, and if you’re in or around Dartmouth College, drop by the bookstore and take a look.  It’s on Main Street, right above the Dirt Cowboy Café.

Whispering under the floorboards… send out the sun.

In my most recent job, I replaced a rotten sill on an old New England house. Since I’m not the one with claustrophobia, my job was to crawl into the crawlspace, through an opening too small for inhalation. What did the sill look like? It didn’t take long to decide. A very, very bad decking installation under a standing-seam eave meant that all the roof’s water was redirected into the wall and onto the sill. A solid old 6×6 sill had been reduced to mulch.

But while I was under there, I saw some very old fragments of a newspaper still glued to the bottom of the building’s old hemlock or pine floorboards. There was just a slender scrap left. All the rest had fallen off and disintegrated in the dirt of the crawlspace. I carefully pulled off the remaining fragments and brought them, perhaps for the first time in a hundred years, into the light of the sun. We had all wondered how old the building was – when it was built.  Anything that might have identified the paper itself, or the date, was gone. Some other scraps hinted at news from New York or Boston. But here was the fragment of a poem – a little clue.

The fragment praises the sun. How quieting to think that a song like this had been hidden away in a dank darkness for so long.

Send out the sunlight it sings again and again.

So, as a kind of gift to this little fragment, here is some sunlight (and as a gift to the song’s author, surely long since received by a different kind of light).

Send out the sunlight! ’tis needed on earth,
…                                       afar in scintillant mirth
…     more than gold in its wealth-giving worth!

And it’s last words before it vanishes…

…send out the sun…

There will surely be some librarians among my readers. Take a look. If you ever discover the name of the poem or the author, leave a comment. In the meantime, a little fragment for the sun – after so much darkness.

From up in Vermont
June 5, 2010