Greenfield poet Samantha Wood may be more familiar to many of you as a newspaper editor. Wood spent over 15 years at The Recorder, beginning as copy editor in 2000 and moving up to fill positions as night editor, news editor and features editor before taking a job as managing editor of the Daily Hampshire Gazette early this year.
Her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst meant she had the language skills for that first job. The rest of Wood’s experience in journalism was a crash course.
“I learned AP style in the newsroom,” Wood says. “I learned how to lay out a page using a proportion wheel and a pencil.”
Though she had grown up immersed in poetry, learning to read by listening to her mother read Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milkwood” when she was 5 years old, during these first years at the paper, Wood actively put aside writing poems or making art of any kind.
Just a year into her job, Wood found herself sorting through photos of 9/11, deciding which ones could run in the paper and which were “too horrible.” Her entire journalism career has been shaped by 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror, “that’s been never-ending,” Wood said. Sometimes the news of war weighed heavily on her.
“You don’t ever stop being affected by it,” Wood says. “Your job is to be affected by it. That’s your job. And it’s not something you do like a robot.”
In 2004, Wood made a chance visit to Mass MoCA — the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art — in North Adams that both reignited her passion for art and provided an outlet for the difficult emotions brought on by her work.
Wood was stunned by an exhibit, “Inopportune,” by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. One section of the show featured seven Ford Taurus vehicles with streams of light coming out of them, suspended from the ceiling, with an eighth one in a back room blown to bits.
“You could smell the gunpowder,” Wood said.
On another floor were large images Guo-Qiang had made by burning gunpowder on paper.
“I walked into that show and I saw immediately what it was about; it was about car bombing. It was about the war. It was absolutely, ridiculously beautiful,” Wood said.
She sat in the exhibit for hours because, “I felt like it had been made for me.”
Guo-Qiang’s work made her realize, “This is how we deal with the things that are too horrible.”
It occurs to me later that Wood doesn’t just mean by making art. She means: Not by looking away from things but by looking right at them.
If there’s one thread that carries consistently through our conversation, it’s Wood’s willingness to look absolutely anything in the face and not sugar-coat it — whether we’re talking about people jumping from the World Trade Center, the absurdity of trigger warnings on art (“It worries me that we’re lowering our expectations of people. When we give them good literature to read, it better push their buttons!”), or how the newsroom is like a pinball arcade.
In her poem, “The Mermaid” — previously published in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review — Wood takes an often idealized, fantastical creature and drags her through the Turners Falls fish ladder.
Wood remembers the poem’s genesis: “I was at the fish ladder and sort of in the reverie of watching the eels and the fish. They work so hard to stay in one place and then suddenly they’re moving forward. And you think, ‘If they stop for a second, are they going to get swept back?’
“And it just seemed so clearly like a metaphor for every woman I know in her 40s. There’s no mystery to that. I felt like that. I felt like if I didn’t stop swimming that hard, I was gonna die.”
Wood’s mermaid is not a Hans Christian Anderson mermaid, tail draped seductively over a rock while she combs her hair with a fishbone.
“Her shoulders are bashed and bloodied. Her elbows are scraped to hell,” Wood writes.
“I used to swim laps religiously,” Wood says. “It’s still one of my favorite things to do. So I tried to imagine what it would actually be like to swim that hard in a human body.”
“And it’s interesting because she doesn’t really make it through by the end of the poem, right?” I ask. “We don’t know.”
“Oh yeah, no,” Wood says firmly. “She’s still swimming. There’s no rest.”
Chances to see
Wood’s work
Wood will be featured reader on Tuesday at Déja Word, an open mic series held second Tuesdays at Déja Brew, 57 Lockes Village Road, Wendell. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Ten five-minute open mic slots begin at 7, followed by Wood.
You can also see one of Wood’s art installations at this weekend’s Full Disclosure Festival. Titled “The Uncertainty Cube,” the installation will be housed at 170 Main St., Greenfield. Wood was one of several artists invited by Eggtooth Production’s director, Linda McInerney, to have a “blind date” with a climate researcher and then produce art inspired by the exchange. Wood met with David Glassberg, a public historian who works at UMass Amherst.
“He’s become very concerned about climate change and how it will affect the places he’s been doing histories for,” Wood said of Glassberg.
“Usually places change very, very slowly, not within one lifetime,” she continues. “And what we will see, and what we are seeing, is that places and weather will change within our lifetime. And we’ve made this happen.”
Wood’s Uncertainty Cube is a participatory installation to which people can add commentary written on pieces of paper.
A $20 ticket is good for all events of the festival and are available on site or at:
brownpapertickets.com/event/2541111
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is always seeking published poets and writers for her column. She can be reached at: tcrapo@mac.com