*Please note our new starting time.

Lawrence Raab

Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Middlebury College, and his MA from Syracuse University. He has received the Bess Hokin prize from Poetry magazine, a Junior Fellowship from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His collection of poems, What We Don’t Know About Each Other, won the National Poetry Series and was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. Recent books include The Probable World, Visible Signs: New & Selected Poems, and his seventh collection, The History of Forgetting (2009), all published by Penguin. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

Regie O'Hare Gibson

Author, songwriter, educator and workshop facilitator Regie O’Hare Gibson has performed, taught, and lectured at universities, theaters, and various other venues in seven countries, most recently Monfalcone, Italy where he received the Absolute Poetry Award for performance and writing. Both he and his work appear in the New Line Cinema film “love jones,” a film based on events in his life. He is a recipient of a Provincetown FAWC Herbert Walker Scholarship and is an instructor at Grubstreet Inc. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals including The Iowa Review, Poetry, and The Good Men Project: Stories from the Front lines of Modern Manhood, and others. He is a National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, has been featured on NPR, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and WGBH-2 Art Close-Up in which his performance was nominated for a Boston Emmy. His first collection of poems Storms Beneath the Skin received the Golden Pen Award and he received his MFA in poetry from New England College. In 2007 he founded Neon JuJu: A literarymusic ensemble which combines spoken word and poetry with music and electronica.

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THE HISTORY OF FORGETTING by Lawrence Raab

When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn’t yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.

What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn’t appear
to require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.

It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they’d lost, and so to survive
they’d need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.

These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.

(With permission of Penguin. All rights reserved.)

*Please note our new starting time.

Deborah Bernhardt received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and fellowships and grants from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship), the Wisconsin Arts Board (Literary Arts Grant), Penn State Altoona (Writer-in-Residence), Writers@Work, Fishtrap, Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Hessen Literary Society, Germany. She received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and used the Second Year Poetry Fellowship (2008-2009) to work on her new manuscript. Her first collection, Echolalia, was published by Four Way Books in 2006 as winner of the Intro Prize for Poetry.

*Please note our new starting time.

Rhett Iseman Trull. Photo by Jeff Trull.

Rhett Iseman Trull’s first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, The Georgetown Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Meg Kearney’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA

Meg Kearney. Photo by Angela Krajick.

Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher’s guide, came out in 2007. Four Way Books published her newest collection of poems, Home By Now, in fall 2009. Her picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012 and will feature illustrations by E.B. Lewis. Meg has taught poetry at The New School University, and is the Director of the Solstice Creative Writing Programs of Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. She was the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, for more than 10 years. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in numerous magazines as well as such anthologies as Poets Grimm, Never Before: Poems About First Experiences, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present, and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems. She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews. A native New Yorker, Meg now lives in New Hampshire. For more information: www.megkearney.com.

THE STREETS OF MY HEART by Rhett Iseman Trull
for Jeff

What a display. The light chromed off the ornate lamps and signs,
brass bumpers of the Cadillac Sevilles,
spatulas sterling-gripped and forks gold-tined
that swung from every balcony’s smoking grill.
Girls half-undressed came masquerading, frills
on sale to the debonair boys. Parading lines
of pigeons, curbside, puffed like helium-filled
balloons no one saw deflating. The shine
must fade, the city still, to gleam, to escapade anew.
The streets of my heart while sun-licked, well-trafficked, amazed,
hosted a previous traveler or two. But none until you
paused to point out beauty I missed: loves taxiing away;
the saxist on Oak, case open for coins, blue kiss at high-noon;
jay-filled sapling in a slip of leaves, some stenciled to the walk by rain.

(from The Real Warnings. © Anhinga Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission.)

HOME BY NOW by Meg Kearney

New Hampshire air curls my hair like a child’s
hand curls around a finger. “Children?” No,
we tell the realtor, but maybe a dog or two.
They’ll bark at the mail car (Margaret’s
Chevy Supreme) and chase the occasional
moose here in this place where doors are left
unlocked and it’s Code Green from sun-up,
meaning go ahead and feel relieved—
the terrorists are back where you left them
on East 20th Street and Avenue C. In New York
we stocked our emergency packs with whistles
and duct tape. In New England, precautions take
a milder hue: don’t say “pig” on a lobster boat
or paint the hull blue. Your friends in the city
say they’ll miss you but don’t blame you—they
still cringe each time a plane’s overhead,
one ear cocked for the other shoe.

(from Home By Now. © Four Way Books, 2009. Reprinted with permission.)

Thursday, January 7, 2010, at 7:00 pm, poets Nancy Pearson and Afaa Michael Weaver will help us welcome the new year in a special benefit for the Green River House.

*Please note the time change.

The Green River House is a community-based rehabilitation and support program, provided through Clinical and Support Options (CSO), for mentally ill adults.  CSO’s mission is to provide responsive and effective interventions and services to support individuals adults, children and families in their quest for stability, growth and an enhanced quality of life.

$5-10 suggested donation.

Nancy Pearson. Photo by Elizabeth Winston.

Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her book has been selected as a Must-Read from the 9th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Pearson recently completed two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she now lives on Cape Cod with her partner.

Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, was born in 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended public schools and graduated as a National Merit finalist at the age of 16.

Afaa Michael Weaver. Photo by Lynda Kodish.

After two years at the University of Maryland, he entered the world of factory life alongside his father and uncles and remained a factory worker for 15 years. These years were a literary apprenticeship during which he wrote and published poetry, short fiction, and freelance journalism. During that time he also started 7th Son Press and Blind Alleys, a literary journal.

His first book of poetry, Water Song, was published in 1985 as part of the Callaloo series. He received a NEA fellowship for poetry six months after signing the contract for the collections and left factory life to accept admission into Brown University’s graduate writing program on a full university fellowship, where he completed the M.A. with a focus on theater and playwriting. Concurrently, he completed his B.A. in literature in English through Excelsior College.

Weaver’s other collections include Multitudes; Sandy Point; The Ten Lights of God; My Father’s Geography; Timber and Prayer, and his latest, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005. He also writes short fiction and plays.

Weaver has been a Pew fellow in poetry, and was the first Elder of Cave Canem and the first African American to hold the poet-in-residence position at the Stadler Poetry Center at Bucknell University. He has taught in National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar. At Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, Weaver is the alumnae professor of English and director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. In addition, he is chairman of the Simmons International Chinese Poetry Conference.

BELIEVER by Nancy Pearson

I never ordered a Lib’s Patty Melt, never ordered anything,
not one thing Scattered, Smothered or Covered

for five years. Every night I soaked my shins in a mop bucket of ice water.
Pat Sajack lit up with eggcrates, my mother cracked

plastic blue trays in the kitchen.  I was the best runner in Tennessee.
I believed in miracles. Nightly I fingered the sorrowful mysteries,

my pea-sized prayers to a popsicle-shaped Mary with a crack in her head.
I’d never seen someone in a coma, never seen a hospital bed

wheeled to the middle of a living room like the bathtub we found one August
parked in the middle of a tobacco field. I was yelling one night:

Big Money, when my best friend asked me this—
if ever she lie stiff in a coma, I’d promise to pluck out her chin hair.

I believed I caused the storm that scalped the house for a tub.
I believed I’d never throw my head back in a Lazy Chair

for a frat boy pouring tequila down my throat. Never would I fall in love
with a woman. I ran repeat negative splits. I believed in Joan Benoit

and the Flying Scotsman. I believed that I would bend over
one day, that I could weed out the twigs

of black hair on someone’s swollen face. I believed
I would never need my own tweezers.

(published in Gulf Coast, Winter/Spring 2010)