Poets Laureate Across Massachusetts A note from the interviewer, Alice Kociemba Poetry has become an integral part of the social fabric of Northampton and its surrounding towns. I had heard about Northampton’s local-poem-in-every-menu during restaurant week before...
Poets Laureate Across Massachusetts Meet Juan Matos, Worcester’s Poet Laureate When did your city or town decide to establish a poet laureate position? Is there a length of time the poet laureate serves?Distinguish poet, Gertrude Halstead, was Worcester’s first Poet...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? There was no poetry in my parents’ house, and mostly genre prose. Ian Fleming, not Henry Fielding. From first to twelfth grade, I read what teachers assigned, too often less than...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? It was the summer I turned eleven. I discovered T.S. Eliot’s collected poems on my mother’s bookshelf, along with Emily Dickinson’s work. I was blown away by how you could use...
Interview with Aimée Sands, Co-Director
Everyone comes to writing from different places -- how did you first encounter poetry? Did you have an ‘a-ha!’ sort of moment where you realized you wanted to be/already were a poet, or was it more gradual? I first encountered poetry in elementary school in fifth...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? As a Haitian-born writer, storytelling is something ingrained in my Caribbean DNA and as such I was always interested in telling stories. However, as most Caribbean children can...
Interview with Doug Holder, organizer for Newton Free Library Reading Series
A lot of this book is written using language/formatting tied to computer programming, with even the title being formatted in a way that is reminiscent of HTML. Do you have a background in that sort of area, and how did you come to start writing in this mode? The...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Growing up in a small New Hampshire town, I found solace in many places- the woods, the estuary, the railroad tracks- but always seemed to find myself returning to the same spot:...
Reading series interview: Everyone Has a Voice at the Brockton Public Librarya conversation between Frances Donovan and Paul Engle, Director of the Brockton Public Library Does your series happen on a regular schedule, such as the second Tuesday of the month? If so,...
Reading series interview: The New England Poetry ClubInterview with Wendy Drexler and Mary Buchinger of the New England Poetry Club. Does your series happen on a regular schedule, such as the second Tuesday of the month? If so, what is it?We have three reading series,...