Op-ed: A much-welcomed immersion in poetry

By Nicholas Boke

We’ve all—everyone, everywhere—been through a lot lately. Maybe your power went out for several very cold days recently; maybe you have friends in Ukraine, or Israel, or Mississippi; maybe you — like me — just spend too much time wondering what will happen to teen-age girls who’ve been raped in Texas, or Russians who criticize Putin, or what Covid has in store for our species.

It’s hard to step back from it all, “to find the joy in life these days,” as a friend puts it.

On Saturday night, I was reminded, however, that moments of feeling safe are possible. The occasion was the first event of the Stone Village Poetry Experience’s celebration of National Poetry Month in Chester.

Robert Nied, Tuck Wunderle and I had invited former Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea to kick it all off with readings of his poetry at the Chester Town Hall.

As Saturday approached, all I could think of was the details: Was there enough publicity? Would people set aside the night before Easter to listen to poetry? What had we forgotten to do?

Then Syd arrived and lugged a bag of his books upstairs, the several dozen poetry lovers settled in, and the foibles of the microphone were dealt with as best they could be. I gave my brief introduction and Syd began.

Suddenly, all was well.

As though just talking with friends, he explained that he’d spent a lot of time in Chester but never noticed its attractive Town Hall, that he was basically just a small-town kid, that Here, his most recent collection of poems, had come out just as the pandemic hit.

He added that when, decades earlier, he had asked a mentor how long his first reading should last, he was told “Don’t let anything exceed the length of a ‘Kojak’ TV episode.” He smiled, paused, then read “The Owl and I,” concluding:

It feels as if I’m in some pitch-black tunnel and won’t get out again,
that this, as the saying goes, is it, that all I’ll have at the end
— of course there can’t be anything to it — is the sorrowful eight-note anthem
of that single owl, the sound just now having reached my old vexed head,
though I’d be foolish to think that song was addressed to anyone human.

The audience listened silently, rapt. He paged through the book.

Then he read “Stick Season,” which reminds us that “everything’s for a time.” And then “My Wife’s Back,” a poem about sitting behind his wife in a canoe watching “Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk,” concluding “But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die.”

The poems and the thoughts continued, as he explained that he learned from neighbors in Maine to see life as a series of stories, described the complexities of his relationship with his mother, then read a new poem, “Hi-Fi,” in which he and his young siblings watched their parents in the living room, dancing “in what looks like a fond embrace.”
The audience of various ages listened, joining him wherever his poem would take us, applauding from time to time. But mostly just sitting there, smiling, chuckling or sighing now and then.
Asked, toward the end of the reading, if he thought poetry, in some form, would last, he responded, “I think there’s something about poetry for which people will never find a substitute.” Though, he went on, “It’s always been a small audience.”

But on Saturday night that small audience — when Syd Lea moved from behind the podium and sat signing books, chatting — stayed.

They didn’t seem to want to leave. They seemed to want the moments with this down-to-earth poet and with each other to last, to stay.

They seemed to feel, for a while, safe.

Join the Stone Village Poetry Experience for a Poetry Slam at the Town Hall at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 15, an Earth Day poetry reading at the Brookside Trail at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 22, and readings by Local Poets in front of the Academy Building at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 29 — bring a chair. (In case of rain, the 22nd and 29th events will be held at the UU Church on North Street at 3:15 p.m.)

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Nicholas Boke is a freelance writer and international education consultant who lives in Chester.