A few years back, Warwick poet Elaine Reardon noticed a message on the Wendell listserve — she used to live in Wendell, she explains, and she still lives close to the town — from friend Tom Keller, saying he’d ordered way too many onion starts: did anybody want some?
“I saw the message at 10 a.m. By 1 p.m., when I got to him, they were all gone,” Reardon says with a laugh.
The eagerness of Wendell residents to plant onions got Reardon thinking about what it would be like to drive the town’s winding back roads and encounter onions everywhere.
“You’d be driving down one road seeing onions, and then connecting to another road, and seeing onions,” she says.
You’d see onions planted around someone’s front steps instead of flowers, she suggests playfully. Or, like onions do, they’d escape and you’d see them in places you didn’t expect them.
“It seemed like that might really happen,” Reardon says.
Her poem, “Tom Keller’s Onions,” grew out of this fantasy.
The poem is a pantoum, a folk form that originated in Malaysia in the 15th century. Pantoums use repeated phrases that might shift subtly in meaning depending on where they are placed, and can create the affect of incantation. Reardon thought the form would be perfect for the repeated fields of onions she was imagining.
Reardon’s been writing poetry for a long time. She says that wanting to write poetry when she was 4 or 5 years old is what made her want to learn to write the letters of the alphabet. Her mom didn’t like her to write poetry, though, she says. But Reardon wasn’t deterred.
“I used to write things and hide them,” Reardon recalls. “I used to get in trouble in school because instead of doing math, I’d be writing poetry.”
Reardon has since participated in workshops and critique groups to hone her craft, and she’s recently published a chapbook, “The Heart is a Nursery for Hope.”
Reardon says that as she was putting together the book, she thought of the individual poems as different cars in a train.
“You could take the cars apart and put them together in different ways, depending on what they contain,” Reardon says.
When I ask her to describe the chapbook’s “personality” to potential readers, she answers, “I write simple, short poems.”
A friend told her poems are “deceptively simple.” That there was always something important in them, “Like a hook at the end.”
Reardon sees writing as a way to process the things that happen in life.
“So many things happen to us, and you can hold onto them, or you can use them to grow — almost the way you use manure in the garden.”
“Writing is food for your soul, food for your heart,” Reardon adds. “You can eat junk food in your real life or you can try to refine your diet. I think it’s the same for our thoughts and our soul.”
As a member of the critique group Cathouse Poets, Reardon will be reading at the upcoming Greenfield Annual Word Festival on Sunday, Oct. 23 in the 2:30 to 3:30 session at the Arts Block, 289 Main St.
Cathouse Poets also includes Lea Banks of Gill, Candace Curran of Orange, bg Thurston of Warwick and Sharon Harmon of West Royalton.
The Arts Block is the anchoring venue for the Greenfield Annual Word Festival, a 6-day event that will bring close to 200 poets, writers and spoken word performers — local and far-flung — as well as a book fair to downtown. Venues include The Root Cellar, 10 Fiske Ave; Solar Store of Greenfield, 2 Fiske Ave; GCTV, 393 Main Street; The Greenfield Gallery, 231 Main St., and 170 Main St.
Find “The Heart is a Nursery for Hope” at World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield, Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls, and at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. You can also find it online through Amazon or at www.createspace.com.
Find out more about the Greenfield Annual Word Festival on its Facebook page or at: www.gawfest.org
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers and artists to interview for her columns. She can be reached at: tcrapo@mac.com