NPM 50 State Tour: Rhode Island

My free National Poetry Month poster arrived today!

My ten-year-old daughter explained to her friends that we put the poster up with great ceremony each April. At first they wondered what all the fuss was about and -- "It's free? Is that just if you're a poet?"

They voted the NPM poster as "cool." No surprise, image on this year's poster is eye-catching.

Our NPM 50 State Tour takes us to Rhode Island today. It was the last of the 13 original colonies to join the Union (5/29/1790).

My kids were tracking monsters today with the help of fantasy author A.R. Rotruck, so I loved this weird Rhode Island vampire story. Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island died in 1892, but was exhumed to try to save her brother from a family curse. Read on to find out what happened next.

Poet Galway Kinnell is a native of Providence. Current state poet laureate is Lisa Starr.

On the tour, I love finding poems that give a sense of the region we are visiting. Starr captures The Ocean State in this poem. If you've ever lived near an ocean, you'll recognize the pull she feels here.

Sandpipers, Again
by Lisa Starr
 

I went back to the sandpipers today--

it's been a while.

Six of them, or

was it twenty? Never matters;

somehow we all know when a meeting has been called,

somehow we all know

exactly when the surf

will start tossing back

its wild silver hair.

One time I was astonished

to find them waiting for me on the beach in Newport.

It was so quiet it was like rain

without the rain.

I wasn't planning it

my car just brought me there,

a most uncommon thing-- it's not that kind of car--

but there we were, alone on a beach.

It almost made me giddy,

like today,

just now.

I'd forgotten how much

I need them.

Click to read the rest of the poem and others by Starr.

Tomorrow, I will take you to Vermont. This time, we're calling the Ben and Jerry's factory first before we show up for a tour. Because I can't handle that kind of disappointment twice in one lifetime.

NPM 50 State Tour: North Carolina

Welcome to the National Poetry Month 50 State Tour. We're visiting state poets laureate around the country.

North Carolina is the twelfth state, admitted to the union on November 21, 1789.

Did you check out the meaning of North Carolina's nickname, The Tarheel State? I'd rather call it by it's other moniker -- the Land of the Sky.

Here's another fun NC fact I learned: Whitewater Falls in Transylvania County is the highest waterfall in the eastern United States. I admit, I'm more fascinated by the fact that NC has a Transylvania County than I am by its waterfall.

NC's state poet laureate is Cathy Smith Bowers. She's new to the position this year.

A scrap of speech or dialogue can be a great jumping off point for a poem, as Bowers does in "A Southern Rhetoric." Watch for the complicated web of reactions the speaker has to her mother's words.

A SOUTHERN RHETORIC
by Cathy Smith Bowers

"It's a sight in this world
the things in this world
there are to see!" my mother says
as she hurries between the stove
and Sunday table. She is just back
from vacation. Happy.
Talking mountains. Talking rivers.
Big cedars and tidal bores.
When I tease her for redundancy,
her face glows like a sturgeon moon
risen above fat buttery atolls
of biscuits, steaming promontory
of roast. She shakes her finger
in my face and scolds me good:
"Girl, don't you forget who it was
learned you to talk."
Amazing she would want
to lay claim to these syllables
piling up like railroad salvage
when I speak, to these words slow as hooves
dredging from the wet of just-plowed fields.

Read the rest of the poem here.

We finish off the 13 colonies with the smallest state, Rhode Island, tomorrow. Right now, we're putting on our infrared glasses and taking the kids to the International Spy Museum in DC.

NPM 50 State Tour: I Love New York

I do love New York. In the NJ town where I grew up, you could see the Manhattan skyline sitting in the distance like a Medieval fortress.

And here is an old post about the beautiful Catskill Mountain area, where we visit every summer. This is my brother and my son watching a thunderstorm move through the Hudson Valley.

New York became a state on July 26, 1788 -- so it shares a birthday with my Bronx-born father.

But I also love New York because unlike some places, the Empire State has a poet laureate.

Jean Valentine has taught at several New York colleges, universities and wonderful writing programs. She's a Guggenheim Fellowship winner. I've enjoyed reading her short, evocative poems during this visit. Valentine doesn't explicate her images, so you have to sit with them and savor the taste.

Little Map

by Jean Valentine

 

The white pine

the deer coming closer

the ant

in my bowl

—where did she go

when I brushed her out?

The candle

—where does it go? 

The rest of the poem is at the Poetry Foundation.

Speaking of savoring tastes, if you're not doing anything in September, head to New York for the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival. I wonder whether they'll have any of that black garlic the foodies are hot for lately.

We're driving back down the East Coast to North Carolina next on our National Poetry Month tour. Want to know why it's called the Tar Heel State? Read this!

NPM 50 State Tour: Virginia

Virginia is for lovers...poetry lovers.

The tenth state, which signed on 6/25/1788, has a Pulitzer Prize winning poet laureate to brag about.

Claudia Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer for her poetry collection The Late Wife.

Her most recent book, Figure Studies, is on my to-read list. Emerson's website says it opens "with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called 'All Girls School,' offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls."

I love how Emerson's poem "Stable" is a kind of elegy for her state's rural roots.

Stable

by Claudia Emerson

One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail

above the door, still losing its luck,

and a work-collar swings, an empty

old noose. The silence waits, wild to be

broken by hoofbeat and heavy

harness slap, will founder but remain;

while, outside, above the stable,

eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low

in lazy loops

You can find the rest of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.

Virginia may be for lovers, but I love New York. The Empire State is up next on our National Poetry Month 50 State Tour.

Just don't tell them that the Statue of Liberty really does belong to Jersey.

NPM 50 State Tour: New Hampshire

The ninth stop on our National Poetry Month tour of the U.S. is New Hampshire.

This state had some surprises for me. Newport-born Sarah Josepha Hale -- an author and journalist who campaigned for a national Thanksgiving holiday -- wrote the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in 1830.

Am I the only one who thought it was a traditional rhyme?

New Hampshire became a state on 6/21/1788, but it was the first colony to declare independence from King George. That bit of history fits NH's "Live Free or Die" motto.

New Hampshire's poet laureate is Walter "W.E." Butts. He's currently serving a five year term.

Part of the fun on our tour is finding poetry that reflects the landscape or personality of each state. Butts poem, "The Lake," reminds me of a trip I took to New Hampshire's Squam Lake (one of several lakes that claims to be the lake in the movie On Golden Pond.)

THE LAKE
Walter E. Butts

I don’t know how Father managed
that summer I was five,
on his factory pay,
to bring us to the glistening lake
and white clapboard cottage
for a week, its small rooms
filled with early July light,
and what seemed to me a thousand birds
singing through the open windows,
past the waving flowered curtains.

Perhaps he borrowed the money
from my uncle, who would be dead a few
years later, at fifty-four, the only time
I ever saw my father weep.
But we were happy those days,
my parents and I,
by that lake called “Silver,”
and in its bright water that returned us,
redeemed and shivering,
back to our currency of air.

Find the rest of this poem and another piece by Butts here.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Poet Laureate. Buckle your seatbelts...we're on our way to Virginia, next state on our National Poetry Month tour.

NPM 50 State Tour -- "While I Breathe, I Hope"

The East Coast has let us down, with four of the seven original states lacking poets laureate. But #8 is great! South Carolina became the eighth state on May 23, 1788.

South Carolina has one of the most beautiful state mottos I've found, "Dum spiro spero." While I breathe, I hope.

Marjory Heath Wentworth is SC's state poet laureate. She's a fellow NYU grad (go Violets! Unfortunately, yes, that really is our NYU nickname.)

And I just love this fact, from the SC Governor's website, "Ms. Wentworth teaches poetry in an arts and healing program for cancer patients and their families at Roper Hospital in Charleston, S.C."

Wentworth is a working mom, as you'll see in her poem, "A Normal Life."

A Normal Life
*****
Whatever that is.
I don't pretend to know.

Don't think I haven't
tried to fold the socks

in neat pairs and stacked
the chipped blue rimmed bowls

and matching plates
inside the cupboard.

For years I have fed
the black and white dog

who barks whenever
the doorbell rings.

Read the rest of the poem here.

Tomorrow we're continuing National Poetry Month 50 State Tour in New Hampshire.

Their state motto is, "Live Free or Die." I know because my friend Jennie lives in Concord, NH where they make New Hampshire shaped chocolate that says "Live Free or Die." Which doesn't sound as tough when you bite off the "Live Free" part.

Should make for some interesting poetry.

NPM 50 State Tour -- Maryland, My Maryland

Please come in and welcome to my neighborhood, Maryland!

We've lived in the Baltimore 'burbs for ten years and I admit, I still feel land-locked. (New Jerseyans get anxious if we're more than 45 minutes from the ocean). Remind me to tell you that funny story about crossing the Mason-Dixon line some other time.

Maryland welcomed me with open arms. I've been a poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council for eight years. And Baltimore's CityLit Project is publishing my new chapbook for National Poetry Month. More exciting news on that in a second.

Some Maryland facts: 7th state, joined the union 4/28/1788, home of the very awesome Berger Cookie (it's a black and white cookie without the white) and the Baltimore Honfest.

Another reason I've proudly adopted Maryland? Unlike my home state of NJ, *we* have a poet laureate -- Stanley Plumly, a professor at the University of Maryland. Go Terps!

To help you celebrate spring, I'm sharing Plumly's poem, "Wildflower."

Wildflower
by Stanley Plumly
Some--the ones with fish names--grow so north they last a month, six weeks at most. Some others, named for the fields they look like, last longer, smaller. And these, in particular, whether trout or corn lily, onion or bellwort, just cut this morning and standing open in tapwater in the kitchen, will close with the sun. It is June, wildflowers on the table. They are fresh an hour ago, like sliced lemons, with the whole day ahead of them. They could be common mayflower lilies of the valley, day lilies, or the clustering Canada, large, gold, long-stemmed as pasture roses, belled out over the vase-- or maybe Solomon's seal, the petals ranged in small toy pairs or starry, tipped at the head like weeds. They could be anonymous as weeds. They are, in fact, the several names of the same thing, lilies of the field, butter-and-eggs, toadflax almost, the way the whites and yellows juxtapose, and have "the look of flowers that are looked at," rooted as they are in water, glass, and air. I remember the summer I picked everything, flower and wildflower, singled them out in jars with a name attached.

Read the rest of the poem here.

The exciting news? SAVE THE DATE! April 17 is CityLit Festival at the Enoch Free Pratt Library in Baltimore. I'll be reading with Stanley Plumly, 1:30 PM, and signing the new book. Hope you can make it!

Tomorrow morning, we'll continue our National Poetry Month tour of the 50 states. We're leaving bright and early for South Carolina. No Wall of Shame for them.

National Poetry Month 50 State Tour -- Massachusetts

Massachusetts, the 6th state (2/6/1788), lists their Poet Laureate as "No Position." As in, when it comes to poetry, we don't care enough to have an opinion.

Fie on you, Bay State. (BTW Marylanders, I think we should take over that nickname.)

With a poetic heritage like yours  -- check out this list of Mass. poets -- poetry should be honored in your state. You claim Ralph Waldo Emerson, e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Anne Sexton, Louise Gluck. Show poetry some love!

I promised a visit with Emerson today. Since his home state has given us the cold shoulder, here is Emerson describing a Massachusetts winter.

The Snow Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Come see the north wind's masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion.

You'll find the rest of the poem here. And you'll find Massachusetts on my poetic Wall of Shame.

Put aside that goopy New England Crab Chowder and get ready for the good stuff, Maryland Crab Soup. We're off to my stomping grounds later today, visiting Maryland, My Maryland Poet Laureate Stanley Plumly -- and I have an exciting announcement!