I don’t often remember dreams, but, last night, I dreamt that I went to my poetry residency at MASS MoCA next month without my laptop or hard copies of either of the manuscripts I have in process.
I was thinking of buying a cheap laptop so that I could access my poems from my Google Docs.
So, there’s that…
At our 2017 reunion residency at MASS MoCA, the Boiler House Poets presented their first ever public reading as a group.
We hadn’t expected our 2018 residency to include a public reading, for a number of reasons, including the closing of the Makers’ Mill space where we had read in 2017.
It was a delightful surprise when CC, who had just recently taken over as our main residency coordinator, asked us if we would like to have a reading. We agreed immediately and she set to work finding a venue for us. On very short notice. Over a holiday weekend.
CC contacted Ashley of the Ashland Street Project, a recently opened artspace that hosted arts activities, as well as community discussion groups. It is meant as a place to bring together long-time residents and the newer residents drawn by MASS MoCA and programs drawing artists of all kinds to the area.
Because time was so short, we weren’t sure if we would have an audience, but we did! Ashley had put out the word to her mailing list and posted on their Facebook page. Poet Kate Carr, who had been our host the previous year at Makers’ Mill was there. We had a couple of other people who had been at out reading last year, saw that we were reading again, and made a point to come join us. We joked that we had “groupies” but we were touched that people came to hear us a second time. There were also a number of new people, drawn by Ashley’s publicity.
The reading went well and our audience appreciated it. I read last, trying out several poems from my collection about the area, including a couple that I had revised since my manuscript review. I was even more nervous than usual, but was pleased that the local folks related to them. In our social time after the reading, I even got some suggestions for other North Adams topics I could turn into poems.
Will a public reading be part of the Boiler House Poets residency every year? We don’t know. Check back next October and see!
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/18/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-18th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
Today’s Just Jot It January prompt “Paris” caught my eye.
My mind immediately went to this post, written November 14, 2015 in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack there, horrible because it was so devastating and, in retrospect, because it was not the only attack that Paris has suffered.
I remember writing it from my bed in the corner room looking toward MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where I was staying in an apartment as part of the first ever collaboration between Tupelo Press and the Studios at MASS MoCA, bringing poets together for a week of residency at the expansive Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. I had no idea as I wrote that day that our stalwart band of poets would coalesce into the Boiler House Poets and return to MASS MoCA for residency each fall for the next three years with dates planned for 2019, as well.
In that post, I was writing about the attack’s happening so close to the international climate conference that produced the Paris Accord. Hope and unity triumphed over divisiveness and rancor. I am appalled that DT has announced that the United States will leave the accord in November of 2020 and fervently hope that the decision will be overturned by our next president.
As I said in that November 2015 post:
We are all Paris. All bloodied. All in shock. All in mourning. But also united in strength. United in resolve. United in solidarity.
We must be.
The future of humanity and the planet depend on it.
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/15/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-15th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
When the Boiler House Poets get together for our reunion residencies, we have a group project that we work on together, often spearheaded by Marilyn McCabe, whose skill-set includes videopoems and more computer skills than most of us can ever aspire to.
Last fall when we met for our week together at MASS MoCA, Marilyn asked each of us to write a short poem about a work of art that was currently at the museum. She then recorded each of us reading her work and melded it with images of the artwork.
Here is the result. Enjoy! (And because I know someone will ask, my poem is “Redacted” based on a haunting large-scale work by Jenny Holzer.)
For the last several years, it has been my privilege to be in residence with the Boiler House Poets at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, Massachusetts. I grew up in the area and I am always happy to be back in a familiar and beautiful place with engaging and talented poet-friends. I usually blog daily while I am there, but, for a number of reasons, I was unable to this year, so I thought I’d do some catch-up posts about it.
While we met as the first group of poets in residence through a collaboration with Tupelo Press and the Studios at MASS MoCA, we are now a self-directed group and, for our week together in October, we decided to do manuscript reviews. I am relatively new to giving feedback on chapbooks/poetry collections and to putting my own manuscripts together, so I appreciated the opportunity. It involved a lot of preparation before the residency as we shared manuscripts, read, and prepared comments. I was very busy with sandwich-generation caregiving and was concerned I wouldn’t be able to prepare, but I managed to get sick, the silver lining being that I needed to rest and stay away from people for their protection, so I holed up in my room and did manuscript work.
I was so impressed by the work I was reading and learned a lot from the discussions about each manuscript. Mine was the last manuscript to be workshopped and I was super nervous. It was a new version of my manuscript that deals with generations of family, our relationship to the North Adams area, and the massive changes that have taken place there over time as it moved from being home to mills, then to electronics, and eventually to the largest modern art museum in the country. The discussion was very helpful and led to the realization that I need to re-focus the collection again.
I have a lot of work to do on it, but I haven’t gotten to do much with it yet. The week I was in North Adams was the one in which hospice decided to decertify Nana. Things became even busier than they had been and I still haven’t been able to find time/brain to go over all the comments, digest them, and start revisions. I did get to do a bit of work before I left North Adams and I am pondering somewhere in the back of my brain here and there, so I hope that I will be able to make progress when I can get back to work.
Will 2019 be the year that I finally manage to get the manuscript ready to send out?
Fingers crossed…
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/10/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-10th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
I’m pleased to share the link to “From the Boiler House” in Leaping Clear magazine. This videopoem was a collaboration of the Boiler House Poets during our residency at MASS MoCA in October 2016, edited and produced by one of our fantastically talented members Marilyn McCabe. You can hear the voices of the eight poets, each reading her own lines of the poem, with Marilyn’s videography and additional sound from Stephen Vitiello’s installation “All Those Vanished Engines.”
All the poets are happy that our work has found a home at Leaping Clear. Enjoy!
October is one of my favorite months.
Part of the reason is that I was born in October. My birthday is the fourth, which also happens to be the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, who has become increasingly important to me spiritually over the years.
Growing up In New England, I always appreciated the beauty of October. It is the month when the leaves turn colors. Because our forests are mixed, there are red, orange, yellow, and russet leaves, punctuated with the deep greens of evergreens. I am lucky to still live in the Northeastern United States so our autumn foliage is still similar.
The last two Octobers I have been back in my home area for early October with the Boiler House Poets in residency at MASS MoCA. Being back at that time of year is even more special as it has coincided with the annual Fall Foliage Festival. I have even written a poem about it.
Of course, October ends with Halloween. I admit that it is not one of my favorite holidays, but October 31st is special for another reason. It is my elder sister’s birthday and so another reason to celebrate the crisp, beautiful month of October.
*****
The prompt this week was a word beginning with “oc.” Join us for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday and/or Just Jot It January! Find out more here:
https://lindaghill.com/2018/01/19/the-friday-reminder-for-socs-jusjojan-daily-prompt-jan-20th-2018/
Many writers post about their accomplishments of the year in late December or early January. I usually do something along those lines for my blog and poetry. However, 2017 was not a typical year so this post will be a bit different.
With so much going on in our family, I cut back on posting here at Top of JC’s Mind, although I have tried to keep everyone updated on family and personal happenings and have posted some opinion pieces on news and issues here in the US.
I have also posted about writing poetry, which, between the Binghamton Poetry Project, Sappho’s Circle, the Grapevine Group, some workshops at the Broome County Arts Council, and the Boiler House Poets, I have done quite a bit. I’ve published very little, though, other than in the Binghamton Poetry Project spring and fall anthologies. With limited time, I have chosen to spend it writing and editing rather than researching appropriate journals and submitting.
I did, though, take the major step of assembling a first draft of a poetry collection centering on the North Adams area where I grew up. I need major amounts of time to re-work it before it is ready to be sent to contests or publishers.
I also put together some of my recent poems for a chapbook contest for women poets fifty or older. I may submit it to another contest with a January 15th deadline.
Contests are a super-long shot…
Given that there are still a lot of other things that need my attention, I am not making any promises regarding 2018, but, if anything does get published, you can be sure there will be a post about it here.
*****
This is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Find out more here:
https://lindaghill.com/2018/01/01/jusjojan-daily-prompt-january-1st-2018/
From my birthday post at MASS MoCA in October:
I did a walking meditation in the John Cage/Merce Cunningham Bridge with its current sound installation, In Harmonicity, the Tonal Walkway, by Julianne Swartz. For the second time this week, the art has brought me back to my first semester of music theory at Smith, as the installation is a form of musique concrète. The 13:40 minute loop is composed entirely of recorded human voices. This work inspired Marilyn McCabe, the Boiler House poet who conceived and produced our collaborative videopoem last year, to envision a sound project this year. We each recorded a short segment based on a single word for her today. Stay tuned for the final product when it is available.
And now, introducing the completed video/soundscape!
Boiler House Voices: Truck Shadow Muscular Tunnel Window Hoosic Resurrection Flow from Mar McCabe on Vimeo.
Marilyn asked each of us to choose a single word that represented our reunion week. I chose the word “flow.” We each recorded our chosen word for Marilyn in several ways, including saying the word slowly, three times in quick succession, and sung. Marilyn then spent many hours with her computer, cutting up words, overlaying them, mixing sounds, and constructing the soundscape. I can’t pretend to know how she did it, but some of the techniques would have been similar to those used in the Julianne Swartz piece that inspired the endeavor.
Then, Marilyn assembled the video element. Most of the photos are from the Boiler House. I especially love the parts of the video that involve layering of the images, such as the dancing silhouette and the photo of the eight of us taken this year looking out from where some of the Boiler House windows used to be.
I love Marilyn’s creativity and inventiveness, which is always expanding my sense of what is possible. You should all do yourselves a favor and click on the links above the video to see more of Marilyn’s work with videopoems. You can also visit and follow Marilyn here on WordPress at O Write: Marilynonaroll’s blog.
Comments are welcome here or at the Vimeo link.
Shadow, shadow, shadow. Window. Flow.
When I was at the most recent Boiler House reunion residency, I wrote a poem that had been percolating in my head for a while and workshopped it with the group. Unlike most of my poems, this one was more than a page long – two and a half pages – and I was very grateful for the input of the Boiler House Poets which helped me to re-craft it to a more manageable page and a half.
Earlier this month, I brought the edited version to workshop with Grapevine Group, my stalwart local group from whom I have learned so much. As it happened, that session marked the return of the elder-statesman poet of the group, who had been unable to be with us for many, many months due to health issues. I will refer to him here as M. I had been in workshop with M only a few times when I first joined the group and have always been awed by him. He is the one among us who has been published most frequently by the big name journals and who tends to ask if we are all submitting our work, a question which always stings a bit because that is the part of the process that I most often neglect.
So, along with being nervous about presenting this poem to Grapevine because it is particularly close to my heart, I was nervous because this accomplished poet who is a founder of our group was there.
…And everyone liked the poem. I was relieved and grateful – and happy to accept comments that give me a few more things to think about for the next round of edits.
I was especially humbled because M was very complimentary to my poem, saying that he could not have written it. Which, I and the other poets in the group know is true only in the context of M could not have written it as it was my personal experience, as he has certainly written poems that were more finely wrought and effective. Still, I was deeply touched by M’s compliment and specific comments on lines and techniques that he liked. Of course, it helped that I used repetition as a poetic technique in the poem, as that is one of his favorite devices. M asked if he could keep a copy of the poem and I was happy to comply.
We met again last night and I was surprised that M brought up my poem from last time. It’s very flattering – and enough to give me butterflies for fear of being disappointing, although my critique did go well again.
As most of my poet friends – and probably a few of my regular readers here – know, I struggle to have confidence in my poetry. On the one hand, this helps me to accept criticism and make edits that make my work stronger. On the other, it keeps me from putting my work out there as much as I should.
I admit that I will probably always feel that I am behind other poets in my knowledge and experience, given that my academic background is scant and I didn’t being to write seriously until I was in my early fifties. Still, I should more often reflect on how far I have come and how much I have grown and developed as a poet over the last several years, even though, for more prosaic reasons, I have not been doing much submitting/publishing in the last couple of years.
So much of that growth is due to my various poetry circles, so I offer my profound gratitude and love to the Binghamton Poetry Project, Grapevine Group, Sappho’s Circle, and the Boiler House Poets. I literally would not be the poet I am today without you – and perhaps not a poet at all.
Joanne Corey 