This year’s adult Poet’s Seat Prize winner, Colrain poet Dennis Piana, is soft-spoken in an unassuming way that makes a listener lean forward. And that’s a good thing because he’s got interesting things to say.
Piana has spent roughly the last 20 years as an adjunct professor at Western New England University, teaching writing, literature and film studies. Before that, he taught at a diverse array of schools including The Museum School in Boston, Harvard, Tufts, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and Greenfield Community College.
For the first time in decades, Piana has chosen to take a “pseudo-sabbatical” in the fall. As an adjunct, he won’t get paid the way tenured professors do, but he’s decided to give himself the gift of time to sort through his poems and live the life of “a-seat-of-the-pants artist” for a little while.
Piana says that when he first took up filmmaking, it was with the idea that it would improve his poetry. And Piana definitely brings a filmmaker’s eye for composition and detail to his prize-winning poem, “In Elounda.”
We see the whitecaps, the olive trees. We see — and smell — the feta stuffed fish and the ouzo with olives and unpeeled cucumber, the pounded sheets of squid and octopus drying in the limbs of the trees.
Piana says his son read the poem and said, “Oh, that’s that queasy feeling that travelers sometimes get.”
And the poem is about that. But the food is only part of it. It’s also about a more existential (if you can forgive this oh, so learned word!) and unmoored feeling that can descend on a traveler.
Piana recalls a Mark Strand poem, “Keeping Things Whole,” that he feels bears a kinship to his poem. Strand’s poem begins: “In a field/ I am the absence/ of field./ …Wherever I am/ I am what is missing.”
And ends: “We all have reasons/ for moving./ I move/ to keep things whole.”
“It’s a sense of a traveler, a tourist who is weary because he’s chased after history, ruins, art,” Piana says. “And now he’s in a small place and finds himself in an ambivalent state.”
When he sits, he wants to move; when he begins to move, he wants to be still.
“I have felt that way many times myself,” I say.
I tell Piana it’s interesting to think of moving “to keep things whole,” since I sometimes fear — and people have said to me — that traveling is escapist. Yet I always feel that traveling, especially because I like to travel to difficult places, brings me up against myself in a way that’s valuable.
“Yes, and I think you travel to expand and change,” Piana says. “Perspective, for sure. Self.”
The poem is an older one.
“This was put in a seedbed, let’s call it, 40 years ago,” he says, smiling.
The seedbed, of course, is the folder he withdrew the poem from while looking for poems to submit to the contest.
“I think I was drawn it to again because of the migrations we’re seeing globally and the old story of borders, the Turks and Greeks. It’s gone on for centuries.”
We talk about the hard truth of Turks hanging Greeks from the branches of a tree that has customarily been a symbol for peace, as in, “extending an olive branch.”
“Sure,” Piana says. “And that you plant an olive tree for your children — you’ll never see the fruit. It’ll take 80 years, at least. A hundred.”
Winners over the years
As this year’s 25th Poet’s Seat winner, Piana is spearheading efforts to mark the contest’s Silver Anniversary. He and contest coordinators are discussing possible print anthologies and theatre projects to celebrate the contest’s first 25 years and to launch the next 25.
Piana would like to see an anthology that includes all first place winners’ poems, along with an ode, mini-essay or some other expression of that person’s experience of having the Poet’s Seat chair in their home.
“Having the chair in my house is cool,” Piana says. “Because I lusted after it, I’ll be honest.”
Piana estimates he first entered the contest 10 years ago: he placed third last year.
“And because it’s funny,” he says.
The chair, built by a man named John Carpenter, is a solid, mission style chair upholstered in a book-patterned fabric.
“It’s like you’re sitting on a pile of books,” Piana says.
He’s begun to study some of the titles on those books, and is writing an ode to the chair. He’s interested in the experiences of other winners.
“What about the chair?” he asks. “Did it fit in your house? Was it an albatross around your neck?”
Former first place adult winners are asked to contact Dennis Piana at: dmartinpiana@gmail.com
Greenfield Public Library children’s librarian Kay Lyons is planning a separate project for youth winners. All first- and second-place youth winners in both the 12- to 14- and 15- to 18-year-old categories, please contact her at: kaylyons44@gmail.com
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is always 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@mac.com