If you’ve never attended the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which was founded in 2009 and has found a home in Salem on the last weekend of April or first weekend of May each year, you should give it a whirl.
In a packed, three-day schedule, the festival features roughly 100 poetry readings and workshops, a small press and literary fair, panels, poetry slams and open-air performances. This year’s festival included “College Slammers” from Salem State University and Merrimack College, a poetry circus, an interactive drop-in “Random Acts of Poetry” table, a performance by the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, as well as panel discussions, workshops and readings that spanned a vast array of tastes and topics.
Big-name headliners included Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Mark Doty and others. On Friday night, in the gorgeous atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum, Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong read devastatingly beautiful poems in an almost whisper, forever putting the lie to the idea that strength or power has anything whatsoever to do with being loud.
Dada poetry, motherhood, science, Bengali poetry, poetry by Afghani women, poetry of witness, humorous poetry, issues of translation: what exactly are you interested in? You can find it here.
Some workshops take a pragmatic approach, examining the ins and outs of submitting work for publication, legal issues that confront poets and publishers, or how to develop a successful critique group. Others, such as the Grub Street Generator workshop or Kathleen Spivack’s workshop on the prose poem, offer participants a chance to write on the fly. (Grub Street is a nonprofit organization on Boylston Street in Boston and offers writing workshops, seminars, events and programs: grubstreet.org)
A panel called “Perspectives on the Short Poem,” led by Suffolk University professors David Ferry, Dan Carey, Jenny Barber and Fred Marchant, examined the impact of poems ranging from one line to a dozen or so.
“Who doesn’t love short poems?” asked Marchant as he opened the panel. “How can you not love short poems? You may know one by heart.”
During the panel, a worker outside scraped and puttied each small pane in the vast wall of windows of the Salem Five Bank’s community room, unwittingly creating a visual metaphor for the idea that, as the panel description read, “… intense focus on a single moment … can suggest a larger framework.”
An award winning poet, Marchant teaches regularly in the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, which offers small groups of juried poets a chance to ready a manuscript for publication at retreats on Whidbey Island, Wash.; Truchas, N.M.; Wilmington, Vt. and locally at the Brandt House in Greenfield (www.colrainpoetry.org). He is also a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a translator of Vietnamese poetry.
Marchant will be reading from the manuscript of what will be his sixth book of poetry, “Said Not Said,” forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017, at Greenfield Community College on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. in Room C208 on the Main Campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
Speaking to me after the panel, Marchant said his new collection explores how we respond to the various types of violence in our world, from types such as illness or mental illness for which, “no one — or the gods, are responsible,” to more overt forms such as war.
“How do you respond? And what about what you don’t say?” Marchant asked.
He said the poems explore, “violence that leaves you speechless,” and are, “an inquiry into the more difficult and dangerous parts of us.”
Later, Marchant emailed me the poem “Olive Harvest,” which has recently been published in Salamander Magazine, and wrote:
“My sense of this poem is that the olive trees suggest a kind of endurance and persistence, and a generativity, in the face of all the harshness that exists. In this they are like peacemakers, those who with an olive branch keep returning to the idea that we need not harm one another. And in another sense these olive trees are like the impulse to art, to poetry. They are like the ‘makers’ who keep drawing upon what they have to give to others what they can.
“I hope this is what my new book ‘Said Not Said’ conveys as a whole, a faith that there is something in us that returns year after suffering year to offer what we can, and to give to ourselves and others that which keeps us going.”
Big congratulations to the winners in this year’s 25th annual Poet Seat Poetry Contest! Adult first, second and third place winners were Dennis Martin Piani, Wilson Roberts and Barbara Ann Lemoine. Top two winners in the 12- to 14- year-old category were Gina Magin and Gaelen Mast. In the 15- to 18-year-old category, Nick Baronski and Jake Amidon took top honors. Congratulations are due, too, to all who placed as finalists. In an area so rich in talented and original poets, that is an accomplishment!
Watch for columns on Poet’s Seat winners interspersed with other columns as the weeks go forward.
For more information about Marchant’s reading at GCC, contact: David Ram, ram@gcc.mass.edu, 413-775-1824.
For more information about the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, visit: www.masspoetry.org
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is seeking published poets and writers for her column. She’s interested in books written by Franklin County poets and writers and/or published by a Franklin County press. She can be reached at: tcrapo@me.com