Abbot Cutler is the author of 1843 Rebecca 1847 (Rowan Tree Press, 1982) and The Dog Isn’t Going Anywhere (Mad River Press, 2001), and his poems have appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Ploughshares and Orion Magazine. He received a B.A. from Harvard University, and then an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College following stints in the Peace Corps, which he spent in Malaysia, and teaching junior high school in Brooklyn, NY. He just retired from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, where he taught for over thirty years. He is a member of Slate Roof Press, a poetry collective in Franklin County, and lives in Ashfield, MA, with his wife, the photographer, Sarah Holbrook.

Diane Wald

Diane Wald was born in Paterson, NJ, and has lived in Massachusetts since 1972.  She holds a B.A. from Montclair University and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She has published over 250 poems in literary magazines since 1966.  She was the recipient of a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, The Open Voice Award, and the Anne Halley Award. She also received a state grant from the Artists Foundation (Massachusetts Council on the Arts).  She has published three chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press.  An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her second book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. WONDERBENDER, her third collection, was published by 1913 Press in 2011.  She works for animal welfare.

*

WHAT HAPPENS / Abbot Cutler

is that the air is full of words and phrases no one
believes. Caverns and crevices groan open.
Small creatures tumble along the canyon floor
trying to get out of the way. The heart of the great
whale bursts onto dry sand at the sound waves
of the shiny machines coursing the oceans. The black
dog whimpers in the heat. We speak in whispers
in the hope they will lean closer, climb down,
climb down. But,
they are walking faster, they are climbing in
and out of black cars, they are having microphones
attached, they are brushing off any small insects
that land on them and never looking
where they step. They are gazing at the monitors,
looking to the sensors, the earphones, the memory chips.
If their eyes would turn toward us … and what
of the heart, the warm heart in its dark cave?
It’s right here in this box which the huntsman
brings into the vast hall, the glass and cement,
the echoing footsteps, the temple of figures.
He has the heart in a box and opens it
for the black queen, for the senators and congressmen.
They take pictures of it. Maybe one of them
will put a picture up on his refrigerator,
the heart of the beast far from the haven
where the maiden spins out her innocence
in pure threads. Maybe he will look at it
every day and learn to say what it says.

Praise the heart of the beast, lift it up
and the distances will begin to lessen,
lift it up and the little snails will continue
on their slow shiny trails, lift it up
and a million tiny creatures will glisten
in a cold Pacific cove, lift it up
and maybe it will be possible to begin to say
something that you believe in.

*

A SILENT WIND OVER THE ISLET / Diane Wald

I’d forgotten you so liked art. And many things
advanced in those days to a point of consciousness
beyond any speech or understanding
the nerves could utter. Yet when I designed
the fine-blown glassware you impressed
upon each piece a delicate leaf, a hand,
a monstrous kiss that marked each one’s
relief from the next, an individual differing
so slightly from its kin, but greatly,
that every one-celled stem
floated its flower-house into a globe, a fishbowl end,
resting at last at level on the table.

Tigers love water. They sleep with their heads
towards the outside wall, and write with blue chalk
on the sidewalk. Outside blue. Eagerly I hand over
the lights to you, but soundless now,
as the man with his ear to the floor must be disowned
and drowned and downed by the giant. Once
you healed a woman twice. The color teal. The crayfish
glimmering in still pools and insect wings
of mica. And the hush. The awful stars. It all
comes back to me now in a wind-up of clouds
as softly they fall to your tie, to your shoulders.

How shall we move from one height to the next
except by the dark back stairs? A wooden linkage
creaks, a figure moves in violets and regrets,
pressing its face to the wall along the steps
so that the dreamers on the other side can hear
the contours of a presence at once kind and cold.
I remember you loved the hour without name
and every shade behind the purchased mask
with both its mouths. The clocks we found
moved backwards, moved in unison once a year,
and we’ve survived that moment in the mirror
as amber acquaintances. In the very end
you will be made to speak of me, you will
entirely forget, in every case, the distance
from the liquid to the rim, And you will then
believe we really did all the things we imagined.

Ellen LaFleche

Ellen LaFleche’s manuscript, Workers’ Rites, won the Philbrick Poetry Prize and was recently published by the Providence Athenaeum. Her chapbook, Ovarian, was published in 2010. She has poems in Many Mountains Moving, Harpur Palate, New Millennium Writings, and Naugatuck River Review, among many others.

Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello’s first collection, Flinch of Song, won the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and her second collection, Body Thesaurus, was named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She is also author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail.

Militello has been published widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in Best New Poets 2008. Her work has been awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review in addition to grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She has taught at Brown University, The Rhode Island School of Design, and The University of Massachusetts Lowell, and is director of the creative writing program at River Valley Community College. She lives in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

*

DYEING THE CHILD / Ellen LaFleche

Our best wishes for a happy holiday season and new year~

we’ll see you in February, when Ellen LaFleche and Jennifer Militello kick off 2012!

Mark Leidner

Mark Leidner is the author of The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011), a book of aphorisms, and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow, 2011), a book of poetry. He grew up in Georgia and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California, to parents from the Chinese mainland. He studied at Brigham Young University, the University of Houston, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He is the author of Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009); Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2009);  For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence (2001); Say Goodnight (1998); Burnt Offerings (1995); and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, (Talisman House, 2000).

Translated into ten languages, Liu’s poems have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

Liu is currently an Associate Professor at William Paterson University and on the Core Faculty at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

*

THINGS TO CALL WATER/ by Mark Leidner

friend of the cup
void soda
idiot’s vodka
fool’s oil
pipe sap
tap wine
faucet gumbo
boiler’s tool
baby of snow
steam’s mom
hot dog blood
“Cannonball!” shrapnel
diver’s excuse
island ender
navy gravy
torpedo media
The Artist Formerly Known as Ice
Dances with Eels
Señor Osmosis
drowner’s woe
world launderer
arsonist’s boycott
Cousteau’s milieu
hydrophobe’s gutcheck
“intern at the cistern”
tempest gristle
Odyssey sauce
hemisphere paint
the ghost in the sauna
the condensed mists of time
zodiac milk
casino preserves
stork’s anklets
periscope’s necktie
rowboat wingspan
catfish litterbox
starfish cathedral
turbulence skein
stream bacon
river luggage
crystal chowder
geyser sperm
fin wind
mer-air
loose frost
dank fire
blue flower

Thursday, October 6, 2011, at 7:00 pm, poets Joan Houlihan and Patricia Lee Lewis will kick off the fifth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Joan Houlihan

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Joan Houlihan has been a teacher, technical writer, reporter, critic, and editor. Her books include Hand-held Executions: Poems & Essays (Del Sol, 2003), The Mending Worm (New Issues, 2006), and The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009). In 2004, she founded the Concord Poetry Center, and in 2006 she established the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference for advanced writers. She is also currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

Patricia Lee Lewis

Patricia Lee Lewis was born and raised in Texas, where her three children were also born; for over 30 years she has lived and worked at Patchwork Farm Retreat in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College, and a BA from Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa. Beloved mentor of many writers, leader of frequent writing retreats both nationally and internationally, she has also been the publisher of The Patchwork Journal. A grant in 2011 from the Massachusetts Cultural Council enabled her to help establish a writing program at her local library. Trained to teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), Patricia and friends volunteer in Guatemala. Her first book of poems, A Kind of Yellow, was awarded first place by Writers Digest International. Her second, High Lonesome, is newly released from Hedgerow Books/ Levellers Press.

*

FROM DIRT, A STIR / by Joan Houlihan

From dirt, a stir put forth its mix, smell
of week and green-held bud, deep cups
sweet and sharp. Warmer started day.
Sun lay wider where us walked.

And ay had seeing out to hers – long cloth tied
with hemp, of smaller head than ay, and that head bent
to sounds from brae, hers hair a gleam-fall over him,
the weaker, full of noise for her and lifting up.

And ay would turn to watch the smoke
go high in thin and thinner twist
the way the sun must bring its burning home.

(“From dirt, a stir” from The Us ©2009. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press. All rights reserved.)

*

KAYAK / by Patricia Lee Lewis

If the kayak had not filled my heart with its
small torpedo yellow and if ripples
had not speckled birch leaves with the rising
sun, and if your voice had carried from the pier
as through the one remaining seagull’s wings,
perhaps you would have kept your place beside
me in the sudden storm. But now, small shapes
surround my boat like shadows. Drowning

is the only sound, the cutting off of air
around your face, the silencing of movement
toward me now, dimming of the earth
away from sun. If courage falls, if love explodes

in yellow light, if what was there, the holding
and the gentle mouth, has turned its back,
the kayak learns the river,
and the heart the rushing cataract.

(“Kayak” from High Lonesome ©2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.)

Until then, we’ll be out Bunburying.

Don’t forget to visit our Video Archive in the meantime, where we’ve added nearly the entire year’s worth of readings.

Happy Summer!

Catherine Sasanov

Catherine Sasanov’s latest book of poems, Had Slaves (Sentence Book Award, Firewheel Editions, 2010) was recently named a 2011 Must Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Catherine is also the author of Traditions of Bread and Violence (Four Way Books) and All the Blood Tethers (Northeastern University Press), as well as the libretto for Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours, a bi-national (U.S.-Mexico), bilingual theater collaboration commissioned by Mabou Mines. Her current work, funded in part by the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, explores what rushes in to fill the void when evidence of slavery’s past has been eradicated from the landscapes in which it once thrived.

Pat Schneider (Photo credit: Tevis Kimball)

Poet and author of nine books including five volumes of poems, Writing Alone & With Others (Oxford University Press), and Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography, Pat Schneider’s libretti have been performed and recorded at Tanglewood and in Carnegie Hall by Robert Shaw & the Atlanta Symphony. Her work has been featured on NPR, on National Public Television, and fourteen times on Garrison Keillor’s “Writers Almanac.” Pat is founder and director emerita of Amherst Writers & Artists and AWA Press. She is an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Her forthcoming book is titled: How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice. You can find her on the web at www.patschneider.com.

Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord is the author of four books of poetry, The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Night Mowing (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Asleep in the Fire (University of AlabamaPress, 1990). His book of interviews and essays on seven American poets (Galway Kinnell,Maxine Kumin, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Jack Gilbert) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets is scheduled to appear from Marick Press in the fall of this year. He is an associate professor of English at Providence College and co-founder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, of which he was also the program director for seven years. He lives in Putney,Vermont with his wife Liz.

Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux‘s latest collection is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). Other books include The Cradle Place, The Street of Clocks, New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems: 1970-1975, and Split Horizon, winner of the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. His distinguished teaching career includes twenty-seven years on the writing faculty and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence. He has taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Thursday, May 5, 2011, at 7:00 pm, poets D M Gordon and Leslie Harrison will read as part of the fourth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

D M Gordon

D M Gordon’s poems and stories have been published widely. Prizes include The Betsy Colquitt Award from descant, The Editor’s Choice Award from the Beacon Street Review, a First Prize for a short story from Glimmer Train. Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in Music from Boston University, she’s the recipient of a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in fiction, having been a finalist in poetry in 2004. She’s been an equestrian and chamber musician, and currently works as a free-lance editor in both poetry and prose, and facilitates weekly public discussion of contemporary poetry, in its eighth year, for Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. She’s the author of Fourth World (Adastra Press, 2010) and Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible by Hedgerow Books, brand new. She’s currently at work on finishing novel set in the islands of British Columbia.

Leslie Harrison

Leslie Harrison’s debut book of poems, Displacement, won the 2008 Bakeless prize in poetry and was published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July of 2009. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including the Best of the Web and Best of the Net anthologies, The New Republic, Poetry, Memorious, Barn Owl Review, Antioch Review and elsewhere. She resides in a small town in rural western Massachusetts.