When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was lucky to grow up in a house where poetry and storytelling were loved. My father knew lots of poems by heart and lines of poetry, in both Urdu and Persian, were frequently...
There Are No Unsacred Spaces by Cynthia Manick I’m trying to tell you that the world is beautiful. All thehellos we say in a week, or month, the way the groovesof the grin know what to do. Think about the first timeman went from four legs, hairy knuckles folded over,...
Because the world has its own version of solace by Amy Dryansky in a field of decapitated corn stalkson the corner of Reed’s Bridge and Elma flock of wild turkeys scratchedas if something nourishing remainedbetween the rows of dry stubble.They interrupted a...
Retreat to Saint Leo Abbey by Michael Angel Martín When a long-loosened windshield Wiper snaps off the bumperless Mazda And gets snatched up into a night-storm Erupting on the drive’s final stretch,I don’t think I’ll make it. But I do, Even if hours past compline....
Poets Laureate Across Massachusetts A note from the interviewer, Alice Kociemba I remember the surveys the Mass Poetry Festival team would send out to gauge the impact the festival had on Salem’s economy (Did you stay in a hotel? Did you eat in a restaurant? Did you...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My first encounter must have been with nursery rhymes, but my earliest recollection of poetry is of my mother reciting A.A Milne’s “Disobedience,” a poem that begins, “James...
Abecedarian for the Future by Ada Limón All the old gray gods have fallenback to their static realms of mythcleared from the benches, thrones,dragged kicking to their stone tombs,each one grizzled by their swift exilefrayed, bedraggled, forced to kneel,give up their...
Signs by Anne Whitehouse A brief April snow disrupted our spring.Amid clumps of snow, daffodilsnodded in the icy breeze. A glaze of snowflakes sugared the hyacinths. I worried for them and the tender lettuces,red and green, I’d only just planted.But the sun came out;...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? In the early 1970’s, while home from college for the summer, I took a summer writing class at Berkshire Community College, with Ron Atkinson (author of Looking for My Name). He...
Poets Laureate Across Massachusetts A note from the interviewer, Alice Kociemba Poetry has a natural kinship with music, story telling, and theater, as Magdalena Gómez, Poet Laureate of Springfield keenly appreciates. In this second spotlight on the Commonwealth’s...
Barely There by Julia Story I had touched the weepingbirch in the cemetery so manytimes that there was a smallmark, a grease mark or wornplace where my hand hadrested, trying to feel thespinning that connected itto some invisible undergroundpathway. The cranial...
Poets Laureate Across Massachusetts A note from the interviewer, Alice Kociemba Many years ago now, I attended a panel discussion at a Mass Poetry Festival in Salem by New England poets laureate from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Sadly,...
Contender by Traci Brimhall It’s alright to overdress for the riot. Your rage is stunning.It’s alright to pursue the wrong pleasures and the right suffering.Here’s my permission. Take it. It’s alright to replace a siren with a bell. Let the emergency make some music....
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Ok, so I need to tell you that a month ago, our house was destroyed in a fire. In my head, I say it like I would as a kid--our house burned down. I needed to start with saying...
And Blue by Kiese Laymon All our irony and stretch marks and knowing nods and creations and trifling ways and imagination and sight beyond sight and dignity in the face of murder and lies that sound truthful and the truth that sound lied up and porches and...
Horseshoe Crabs off Loop Beach, Cape Cod, Mid-September by Carole A. Stasiowski I don’t expect this extravagance of death, a thousand and more ...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was 12 or 13 in the early 90s, an American tween living in the suddenly former East Germany, my family part of a tiny English-speaking expatriate artist community. There...
2019 ANNUAL REPORT Letter from our leadership Dear poets, friends, bibliophiles, partners & wordsmiths all, Joining Mass Poetry in 2018 as its executive director felt like a homecoming to me. I mean this in the deepest sense. Poetry, for many years, has given me...
Unmasked by Maria Luisa Arroyo for Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) | Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, 1993 LB squared, you flipped up my mask, askedme to write beyond my eyes, the Hagia Sophia, Agha-jan’s stern face, Mamani’s tear-soaked chador, their son, my husband...
thank you by Najya Williams To a body long forgotten. To a body long stretched plucked pulled. To a body long abandoned. To a body never forgiven. To a body often criticized. To a body discarded. To a body thick like molasses. To a body...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Poetry seemed a little exclusive to me when I was younger, a little chi-chi. But that was only because I wasn’t exposed to very much of it. In college I was interested in trying...