Celebrating Six Seasons of Reading Local in Vermont: MUD
Mud poetry from “It could be verse”
“It could be verse” began as a monthly poetry column first published by The Chronicle of Orleans County in Barton, VT in April 2007. Each column features a poem of season and place by a Vermont writer. The purpose of both the column and this website is: to put poetry where people can find it. Another goal is to help Vermonters to “Read Local” (as a natural continuation of the “Buy Local” and “Eat Local” campaigns). Because there are so many extraordinary writers in our communities, the column serves as an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the diverse poetic voices in this state, our literary terroir. This website features a selection of 18 of the 50 original columns (published in The Chronicle from 2007-2011). In January 2012, the monthly poetry column became a syndicated project issued from this site, offered gratis to all Vermont newspapers to publish at their discretion.
by Burt Porter
Now as we watch the snow retreat
Soon on this field the dandelions
I marvel at how the reed canary grass—taller than a man on a tractor—has been flattened in the field behind the house by something as simple as snow. Last summer the nibblesome sheep couldn’t eat it fast enough, and the John Deere, then the borrowed Kubota couldn’t hinder it; it bristled through late autumn storms. But winter, the ultimate smackdown, took it back to the mat, or mud rather. Glover poet Burt Porter reports on what’s left, the look of the landscape after winter’s recession in his poem, ‘April First,’ from his book A Spiral Wind. In this two- stanza poem (“stanza” is the Italian word for “room”), Mr. Porter describes his finding in rhyming lines of iambic. “Iamb” is the Latin word for “foot,” and if you read this poem aloud, you’ll find the rhythm of its syllables nearly matches your own heel-toe, heel-toe (soft-hard) footsteps. Imagine Mr. Porter, who also plays the fiddle, whittling a tune to these lyrics of leaving the room of “the dank bleared ground” and promenading into a field of dandelions “like twenty thousand suns”!
*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle on April 15, 2009
by April Ossmann
Out is never content to stay there.
Some magazines have a spread devoted to photos and captions of things the editors are exited about. In Oprah, it’s called ‘Look what we found!’ and it feature purple trench coats, leopard print bangles, lunch boxes shaped like the Parthenon…(okay, I’m making this up, but readers, you know I’m not far off.) Still, I feel a similar giddiness to the baubles editor upon discovering a zero calorie cupcake: look what I found in Anxious Music, a poetry collection by Post Mills, VT writer and editor, April Ossmann. This poem, ‘Living Without,’ considers one of the most distinctive attributes of March (beside dark amber), the whooshing, pressing, pushing, smashing, clashing wind. Listen to Ossmann’s sure voice as she narrates the uncertainty of where her domain begins and ends. Do you hear a tinge of exasperation? Annoyance? Maybe it’s her perverse delight in the mix up of inside and outside, of self and other, of winter and a softer season exchanging places.
*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle on March 18, 2009
Villanelle In April
by Verandah Porche
One night the beavers breached the dam and fled
Come out and hear the woodcocks court! he said.
Two adolescent hawks wheeled overhead.
We’ve had more rain than we anticipated.
It’s somewhere between a rock and a loaf of bread:
He sang: The antiseptic scent of melted
It’s April and the birds are bunched in bushes repeating their mantras. The cardinal says, Jeer, Jeer, Jeer. The red-winged blackbird sputters Kronk-ah-lee! Also, scientists studying the Iceman, a well-preserved 5000 year-old corpse found amid glacial slush in the Italian alps, recently determined that he ate his last meal in April. Then poet Verandah Porche of Guilford, Vt. captures something of both these phenomena: the musical refrains, and the way humans are born (or reborn) in a deluge of fluid—both these elements play out in her poem, ‘Villanelle In April’, originally published in Reading Matters by the Vermont Center for the Book.
The word “villanelle” and “villain” derive from the Latin (or Italian) word “villa,” which means “country house” or “farm.” A villain was originally a countryman, and the villanelle is a poetic form, evolved from a “folk song with an accompanying dance, with themes of the joys of country living.”
In Porche’s poem the forces at work, the breaching of dams and subsequent floods, permeate both the wider natural world, and the private human one. Coincidentally, the newest research on The Iceman –a country gent himself wayfaring around Alpine Italy, hypothesizes his remarkable preservation is due to his “… feet toward the north and arms hanging down, like a body floating in dense fluid… indicat[ing] that the body moved in semi-melted ice.”
And thus like Spring’s swollen rivers, the beavers’ breached dams, and the broken waters preceding delivery, the Iceman re-arrived in public consciousness via slush and snowmelt. Is it me, or do we all feel as if we have been born again, slick and soggy, after 5000 years in the cold?
*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle in April, 2011