Open Field Press of Northampton will celebrate the launch of new collections from three local poets, including Trish Crapo of Leyden, with a live reading Friday, Nov. 5, at the Associated Potential Enterprises, Ltd. Gallery.
Crapo’s poem sequence, “adrift, a rowboat,” explores the life and loss of her older sister, Susan, whose artwork complements the poems. The sea is essential here, as are intimate moments between the sisters, beginning in childhood. The poems are addressed to Susan, and let the reader into the sisters’ relationship.
A tractor hummed in the background as Crapo’s husband, Tom, worked on their farm, Dancing Bear Farm, in Leyden. Sitting on their deck with a distant view of Mount Tom standing out amid a sea of auburn and golden leaves, Crapo, 63, spoke about “adrift, a rowboat.” The poetry sequence reflects on her childhood with Susan and their three other siblings, a move from Florida to Western Massachusetts and her grieving following Susan’s death after an eight-year battle with breast cancer in 2008 — just days before her 53rd birthday.
“She and I had always been super close growing up as kids,” Crapo recalled. “We shared a bedroom when we were really little. When we were teenagers we looked so much alike we used to pretend we were twins.”
In addition to Susan, Crapo said she has two older brothers and a younger sister. The family grew up in Miami but moved to Massachusetts as teenagers when their mom went back to school at Tufts University around 1973. Crapo moved to Franklin County full-time in 1981, and Susan followed with a move to Greenfield in 1987.
“We would just be in and out of each other’s houses. Sometimes I’d come home on a Sunday and find her just already cooking a pork roast for us,” Crapo said. “It was a rough loss.”
The poems in the 50-page book span a wide timeframe. Crapo said some were written right after Susan’s death, while others were written years before she had been diagnosed with cancer. While written at different points, the poems are grouped in an order that reflects the chronology of the story — from childhood to her sister’s death.
“With some of the childhood poems, it’s kind of tender to me to realize I wrote them years and years ago not knowing she would die — I was just writing about our childhood,” Crapo said.
With the poems carrying a theme about loss, the author said she hopes sharing her own experience through her poems will help some readers find understanding in their own grieving and emotions after experiences with the loss of a loved one. Crapo said, “unfortunately,” death is an inevitable shared experience.
“I don’t think you really get over loss. I think you just learn how to be broken,” Crapo said. “Maybe people can get a little insight or relate to it in some way that makes them feel better.”
In a way, she said writing can be a form of processing these complicated emotions. When writing, Crapo said she “starts a poem with an emotion.” After writing the initial poem, she can step back and apply a more editorial form of thinking to assess the work and the raw emotions embedded in the text.
“So I’m thinking about this thing, this poem, instead of thinking about myself and how I feel so much,” Crapo said. “I think it’s a good kind of distancing in a way. Sometimes distancing means you’re pushing something aside and not thinking about it, but I think it’s kind of a good objectifying of it. And maybe a part of that editorial thinking is trying to think, ‘Will someone else understand this?’ Then it does push it away from yourself and makes it a little broader.”
The theme of the ocean ties back into Crapo and Susan’s childhood growing up with their father working as a marine acoustician studying “how sound traveled underwater.” He was hired around 1959 to study the waters between Miami and Cuba “for sort of obvious reasons,” after Fidel Castro took power in the Cuban Revolution, Crapo said. As a young child, she and her siblings would spend time with their father on the research boats exploring the ocean off Florida’s coast.
The first pages of the book include a pastel self-portrait of Crapo’s sister and the dedication — for Susan. With a canvas texture and one of Susan’s charcoal and pastel drawings on the cover, “adrift, a rowboat,” captures the spirit of the sibling artists. Zoomed-in fragments taken from her drawings are printed on translucent pages and interlaid between poems, embedding Susan’s own energy into the book and creating an intimate experience for the reader.
“The reason I wanted to do it more like an abstract, is that I just wanted that feel of her hand, the gesture,” Crapo said. “I felt to see the gesture that her hand would have made felt like bringing her closer, rather than if it showed the whole scene.”
The poetry book was titled as a “sequence” and not a “collection,” the author explained, after a friend suggested the use of roman numerals because they felt titles broke up the experience. The lack of titles, Crapo said, enhances the sense that the poems are all interconnected as a long-form sequence. Or they may be interpreted individually.
When seaweed tangles
and piles at the shoreline,
and jellyfish lie like plastic bags
seeping their last pint of the sea,
noon presses itself upon us.
We are seafarers, sisters,
slathered by the sun’s affection,
lazy-headed creatures barely
worthy.
Car doors slam in some faraway
country, bringing people
we don’t bother to open our eyes
to see.
We wander down the orange
tunnel behind our eyelids, into
the sun’s hot core.
Then the Coppertone ad
comes on the little transistor radio:
Turn over!
Sun-lulled, we
rally our strength
and turn.
Crapo was a freelance photographer for the Greenfield Recorder and wrote an arts column, ArtBeat, as well as a poetry column, Poets of Franklin County, for nearly a decade until 2017. She will be reading from “adrift, a rowboat,” alongside Bill O’Connell and Anne Love Woodhull, both of Amherst, on Nov. 5. All three poets are members of Group 18, a decades-old poetry critique group based in Northampton.
The poems in O’Connell’s collection, “When We Were All Still Alive,” traverse the ancient and the new: the planet of rocks, soil and sea, and the planet of the mind looking outward. O’Connell seeks to know nature’s music and what humans add to that music during our short span on Earth. These poems don’t look for answers as much as seek to be present, to witness.
In “Racing Heaven,” Woodhull’s poems explore life in partnership with a succession of loss — most especially the death of her husband — as she enters all aspects of its unfolding. The poems visit the depths of place and remembrance as well as the joy of spirit still present in this world.
The launch reading will be held at APE@Hawley Street, 33 Hawley St., Northampton. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a casual meet and greet with the authors. Reading begins at 7 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Seating for the reading will be limited to 50 due to COVID-19 health safety restrictions. Register for available seating at eventbrite.com/e/187753695357. Vaccination and masks are required, and social distancing will be observed.
“adrift, a rowboat,” is now available for purchase at Federal Street Books, 8 Federal St., and World Eye Bookshop, 134 Main St., both in Greenfield. The A.P.E. Gallery at 126 Main St. in Northampton also has copies for sale.
Zack DeLuca can be reached at zdeluca@reco rder.com or 413-930-4579.