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2016 COMMON THREADS Volume 6 | 2016 Edition

Common Threads is an annual publication and outreach program produced by Mass Poetry, with a goal to facilitate ~350 poetry discussion groups throughout the state each year in an eﬀort to broaden the audience for poetry and support poets and poetry in Massachusetts. Mass Poetry is a 501(c)(3) organization.

A $10 hardcopy of this publication is available to order from Harvard Book Store. $5 from each sale goes directly back into our programming, while the other half supports Harvard Book Store.

A listing of public Common Threads events is available here.

Video production for the poems of Alan Feldman, Susan Donnelly, Robert Francis, and Danielle Legros Georges by Riley Fearon Productions

Cover Art: "in the midst of” by Molly Sidell Winner of Mass Poetry’s cover art contest

The artist says of this piece, “When a house falls down, the threshold is often left standing amongst the rubble. Life has a way of dealing blows that mercifully strip us of ancient walls which hinder true connection. Destruction opens a door to something new and beautiful. Though things without boundaries are terrifying—even possibilities—this threshold prophesies in the midst of pain, whispering, ‘hope.’ Nothing is separated in our experience/dreams; not people, person, thing, or spirit, mind or body. Life is less about the diﬀerences on each side of the threshold, but rather the act, the courage, of stepping through.”

Born and raised in Gloucester MA, Molly Sidell draws most of her inspiration from the island's coast and culture. She is currently a student of theatre and visual arts at Gordon college. Visit mollysidell.com. COMMON THREADS Volume 6 | 2016 Edition

GUEST EDITOR Alice Kociemba

MANAGING EDITOR Laurin Macios

VIDEOGRAPHER Riley Fearon Table of Contents

Introduction by Alice Kociemba 4 How to Read a Poem by Robert Pinsky 6 Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups 8

Poems “O Taste and See” by Denise Levertov 9 “Chanson on the Red Line” by Susan Donnelly 10 “The Terrible Memory” by Alan Feldman 11 “Incident” by Natasha Trethewey 12 “The List Grows” by Danielle Legros Georges 13 “The House Remembers” by Robert Francis 14 “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” by Seamus Heaney 15

Discussion Questions 16 Writing Prompts 17 About the Poets 18 Media Package 19 Resources for Poetry Exploration 20 About Mass Poetry 21 About the Common Threads Team 22 Acknowledgements 23 Copyright Information 24 Introduction: Threshold Moments Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor

Threshold is “the point or level at which something begins or changes,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The 2016 edition of Common Threads shows how, through memory, we can cross thresholds—from past to present, self to other, real to imagined— and enter a single changed, riveting moment of insight that expands our empathy with and understanding of ourselves and our world.

Jane Hirshfield put this experience beautifully in an interview she gave to Claire Patton in the Huffington Post. Talking about her latest collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Hirshfield said, “Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us—more range, more depth, more feeling, more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstinted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence and as also the existence of others.”

The seven poems in this volume oﬀer thresholds to such “altered” states. Each reader will bring to them his or her own particular experience. Yet in small group settings discussing these seven excellent, accessible, poems, participants will have their “hunger for more” satisﬁed in nourishing ways.

Denise Levertov’s poem “O Taste and See,” a found poem, captures the delight of a momentary sighting of a biblical verse on a subway, then leaps to myriad associations that allow the narrator to re-experience the pleasures of the body as a form of spiritual satiation. Upon entering this poem, the reader also tastes and sees life in altered ways.

Susan Donnelly’s “Chanson on the Red Line” describes a passage triggered by an unexpected encounter with a street musician (again on the subway), which enchants the speaker in the poem. Listening to the musician, she becomes transformed from “a middle-aged woman carrying two bags” into an ageless woman who then appreciates the importance of a deeper longing and love for “anyone.”

Alan Feldman’s “The Terrible Memory” is a meditation on the inability to forget, but the poem becomes a universal experience. It never mentions the speciﬁc trauma that creates this dark foreboding, but by repeating the word terrible it evokes a haunted and surreal awareness that the past is always in the present, lest we forget.

Natasha Trethewey’s “Incident” continues this theme of traumatic memory, riveting our attention to the threat of recurrent danger. The form she chose, a pantoum, with its four

4 line stanzas (quatrains) that repeat in a certain pattern, hypnotizes the reader into a surreal state where even when danger is absent, its threat is always present.

Danielle Legros Georges’ poem “The List Grows” addresses the catastrophic distress of political torture. The poet takes the reader on a terrifying journey to an almost unimaginable place of personal horror that, when it happens to one human being, happens to us all. Though the reader is ﬁrst abducted to a place of the deepest darkness, the poem concludes with an awareness of transcendent beauty.

In sharp contrast, Robert Francis’ poem “The House Remembers” creates the experience of the quiet nostalgia of home as sanctuary. Through the poet’s use of personiﬁcation (the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects), the tender tone of this poem moves us to feel how ordinary objects (a threadbare sock, cold feet) convey the warmth of remembrance.

A tribute to the imagination, Seamus Heaney’s poem “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” invites the reader into a state of reverie. It is a meditation on the physical reality of the body and the occasional agony it must endure, and how by focusing on something larger than one’s self, it can transcend the pain, become “self-forgetful,” and cross the ultimate threshold, into the “network of eternal life.”

Notice how the common threads of these seven poems weave a tapestry of meaning— sometimes with echoes of tone, sometimes with words: imagination, longing, hunger, terror, beauty, faces, safety, story, darkness, disappeared, forgotten, memory. Often the threads are tied together by the quotidian—the commonplace, the ordinary that belongs to each day: tangerine, cloak, shoe, socks, fairy tale, story, ﬂames, tongue, knees, river, name.

You, the reader, complete this selection of poems. You are necessary. Your reactions are important. You bring this collection to life, by reading them aloud, whether to yourself or to others. By speaking your thoughts, expressing your feelings, revealing your memories, you will then discover and rediscover the power of poetry to connect to others and transcend our isolation. Poetry satisﬁes our hunger and longing, it liberates us with the freedom of the imagination, thereby transforming the darkness of a troubled world into the light on the other side of the threshold.

Writing about the necessity of poetry, Edward Hirsch writes in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry: “Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder… ” This is the purpose of Common Threads. Come, taste and see poetry in all its enchanting ﬂavors, in all its bodily pleasures of reading these poems aloud.

5 How to Read a Poem Robert Pinsky

A crucial, deﬁning moment, at the mysterious frontier between the mind and the body, takes place when a feeling or thought takes form in the voice—possibly as speech, but maybe as less than that, as the exhalation of a barely vocalized oh or ah.

I mean the moment between the twinge of an aching back muscle and a muttered “ouch” or at another extreme the moment when a mix of passion, determination and purpose leads to “I disagree” in a meeting or “I love you” in an embrace.

We cross that threshold between concept and breath in two directions, I think: outward of course, but inward as well. In an intense conversation, my eﬀort to understand your words —to “take them in,” as we say—may include my imagining what it feels like to say those words—physically, actually, to say them. That sympathetic, bodily imagining may go back to the infant gazing up at a parental speaking face: so far back that we are mostly unaware of it.

Sometimes, feeling eager or pressed to understand, I might silently “mouth” your words— technical instructions, say, or the best route to my destination, or just a name or a phone number—form them with my lips, maybe with a whisper of breath through them. (C.K. Williams’ great poem “My Mother’s Lips” describes this form of attention.)

That basic, intuitive process, involves the ﬁrst principle of reading poetry—the most purely vocal of all the arts. (In song, the voice enlarges and transforms to become an instrument, as well as itself.)

So, the three-word advice I might be tempted to give, about “How to Read a Poem”— “read it aloud”—is kind of inaccurate, though usefully compact. “Read it aloud” might lead toward the art of the actor, or the technique of a poet who gives good poetry readings. With all due respect, performance is not what I mean.

I mean something more intimate, more immediate, more physiological, at that mind-body frontier: to feel the poem in your mind’s voice, hearing it in your mind’s ear as you hear the things you say. To achieve that, you may well say the words—mutter them or declaim them, vocalize them or not—as a means to feel what it would be like to say the poet’s words: to need to say them, as Emily Dickinson needed to say “Because I could not stop for Death” or Walt Whitman needed to say “Vigil strange I kept in the ﬁeld one night.” If the poem works, the reader experiences an echo of that need. That, I think, is demonstrated by the video segments at www.favoritepoem.org.

Here is a speciﬁc example of what I mean—one of my favorite examples, because it is brief and to me seems remarkably clear: an untitled, two-line poem by Walter Savage Landor

6 (1775-1864). I invite the reader to say it aloud, or to imagine saying it aloud, maybe moving your lips a little:

On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.

The patterns of consonants and vowels in this poem, to me quite beautiful, happen to be unusually clear, by which I mean unusually easy to talk about. At the beginning of the poem, if you say the words, actually or in imagination, three times you will put your upper teeth onto your lower lip to form the “v” or “f” sounds at the ends of “love,” “grief,” and the ﬁrst syllable of “every.” Another example of this anatomical aspect of poetry, at the end of the poem: three times, you will purse your lips as you say “water with his wing.”

Weirdly, but absolutely, such things matter. I cannot explain why, but these patterns of sound (usually not so distinct), apprehended in the body and by the mind, convey feeling. The physical conviction of Landor’s poem relieves me of necessarily knowing that Lethe is the river of forgetting in the Classical underground. The poem’s physical presence, in my voice, helps me understand that Lethe is what time sprinkles on everything. How do these artfully arranged vowels and consonants, these sentence-sounds, do that? I don’t know. I can’t explain this vocal-emotional power any more than I can explain the power of music or of comedy (which, the great comic Sid Caesar said, is music).

Poetry is apprehended by the body and the mind, both. (I think this is why Ezra Pound says, in his An ABC of Reading, “poetry is a centaur.”) If you are not inclined to use your mind, you will miss the point. If you are not inclined to use your body, in particular breath and the muscles of speech, you will miss the point. True in poetry, and often true in the rest of life, as well.

There has been a lot of excellent writing and thinking about the ways poetry is diﬀerent from all the other uses of language. It is also worth considering the ways poetry is continuous with the other uses of language, resembles them, from its position somewhere between speech and song.

Poetry is diﬀerent from, but also resembles, conversation, teaching, business negotiations, family arguments, joke telling, complaining, medical interviews and many other kinds of interaction. Facial expression, bodily posture, hand gestures, tone of voice, pace, inﬂection, all amplify and modify the words—make the words more than a transcript. The equivalent of all that is in a poem, waiting to be animated by each reader’s vocal imagination.

How to read a poem? Imagine saying it. Imagine the feeling of needing to say it.

7 Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups

Common Threads discussion groups are conducted in a variety of settings, from church groups to libraries, to senior centers to schools, and can range from sessions that are open to the public to sessions that consist of a few friends discussing the poems over coﬀee. There is no right or wrong way to conduct a Common Threads group—what Mass Poetry does is supply the materials and support for engagement with the poems; what you do is take the poems to your community in a way that the shared experience will be enjoyable and valuable. But we can oﬀer some tips—proven methods for hosting a successful and fruitful group.

Alice Kociemba, two-time Guest Editor and many-time Common Threads discussion group leader, says, “Encourage each person to participate. Trust that they will connect with these poems in an authentic and unique way. There are no right and wrong answers, no smart or dumb reactions to these poems. Everyone brings something valuable to the discussion. Not everyone will agree with each other, or like a particular poem. These reactions are also to be welcomed.”

We suggest supplying (or linking to) the Common Threads PDF in your promotion of a public group so that interested participants can familiarize themselves with the poems beforehand, but it is also perfectly ﬁne to have copies of the Common Threads poems you’ll discuss on-hand at the event, so that attendees can read them there on the spot.

Within your group, we suggest that the person who ﬁnds a particular poem meaningful read that poem aloud to the group, with no worries about stutters or mistakes. Their connection to the poem will come through with their enjoyment in reading it and hearing it recited in their own voice. It’s a strong way to kick oﬀ a discussion.

“At almost any poetry reading group experience I have had (and I have facilitated a monthly poetry group at the Falmouth Public Library for the past ﬁve years), members who have walked in skeptical about a poet’s work or a particular poem have left the group more open-minded after hearing a poem read by someone who has a connection to the poem,” says Alice.

After the person reads the poem, ask him or her to say why or where they connect with the poem, and from there, the open-ended discussion questions we have supplied in this publication should carry the conversation forward.

Some members will want a “close reading” of a poem—an analysis of the use of adjectives, the power of the verbs, meter, syntax, and rhyme. This is all well and good, but for group members completely new to poetry, who may be intimidated by the idea of poetic analysis, we would encourage discussing craft as it relates to the meaning and heart of the poem.

8 Denise Levertov

O Taste and See

The world is not with us enough. O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our ﬂesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.

9 Susan Donnelly

Chanson on the Red Line

The heart opens in such unlikely places: a subway platform, muﬄed in February, the train late, no one looking at anyone else. Then a song begins: “Parlez moi d’amour” like a pink ribbon unwinding from the young black man with guitar whose throat trembles, who holds his head back, eyes half-closed. We each look down into our own longings, familiar as the stations we daily travel, pressed up against strangers. Slowly we come forward to drop our thanks into his open case. We are shy. We don’t want to be noticed wanting so much. But who are we? Let me tell the truth for once. I walked here quickly through the dark street — a middle-aged woman carrying two bags. I wore a black-and-white cloak of impossibilities that smoked like dry ice. I am waiting here, fresh from that swift and peopled solitude. I can love anyone.

10 Alan Feldman

The Terrible Memory

After a while, it becomes your friend, which is useful. “Nothing again can be so terrible.” Well, that’s what it tells you: that you lived through the terror like a fairy tale.

But the terrible memory is also a warning… how one planet can become another, with three black moons in front of an enormous blue sun. “Ah, science ﬁction!”—says the terrible memory, as if it never happened. You were drawn in but then the ﬁlm ended, the credits rolled.

But in the dark, when your thoughts are particularly awful and repetitive, the terrible memory is happening as if it is no memory at all but some kind of persistent phenomenon.

Go away, you tell it. This is not the time. And the terrible memory obeys. It moves backwards through the doorway as if you are the sovereign. But your sleep is troubled. What have I forgotten?—you ask.

And soon, like a parent summoned to a child’s bed, it returns to comfort you. Terrible, terrible, it soothes, making a promise to protect you it can never keep.

11 Natasha Trethewey

Incident

We tell the story every year— how we peered from the windows, shades drawn— though nothing really happened, the charred grass now green again.

We peered from the windows, shades drawn, at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, the charred grass still green. Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.

At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns. We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.

It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns. When they were done, they left quietly. No one came. The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil; by morning the ﬂames had all dimmed.

When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came. Nothing really happened. By morning all the ﬂames had dimmed. We tell the story every year.

12 Danielle Legros Georges

The List Grows

They sent you back by boat to a familiar shore, your son and daughter with you, your wife had passed safely.

You hid ﬁrst in Mirebalais, then in Port-au-Prince where they arrested you, disappeared you for two days.

Yvon Desanges, I know only of your voyage, and your image after: your brow missing each eye your mouth without its tongue your left ear lost to a ﬁeld, your face mined. Your face remains beautiful.

It blazes to lay bare your faceless assassins who could not disﬁgure you.

13 Robert Francis

The House Remembers

Faces, voices, yes of course and the food eaten and the ﬁres kindled but the house also remembers feet.

Especially how one big pair used to pad about comfortable as a cat’s bare on the bare wood ﬂoor.

And somebody else in clean white heavy socks (his boots left at the door) would curl up tailor-wise, Buddha-wise, on the couch

And only then the talk could really begin and go on without end while listener sat opposite and listened.

And once when one big toe had broken bounds how someone took the sock and darned it while the wearer sat and wondered.

Blisters to operate on but before the sterile needle the basin of warm water and someone kneeling as in the Last Supper.

What ﬁreplace naturally remembers are the cold feet it warmed but does it recall the time when ﬁre was not enough

And someone took bare feet in his bare hands and chafed and cheered the blood while the ﬁre went on quietly burning?

14 Seamus Heaney

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiﬀ As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, ﬁnding himself linked Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks Until the young are hatched and ﬂedged and ﬂown.

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms? Are his ﬁngers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees? Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river, ‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

15 Discussion Questions For use with all poems

❖ First, what brings this poem to life? Then, what brings this poem to life for you? Note: The ﬁrst will probably lead to exploration of elements of craft (the title, beginning, ending of a poem, the fresh images and language, the form, the sound, the way the poem is placed on the page, etc.). The second question should elicit deeper layers of meaning (some personal, some philosophical).

❖ Think about the stories that come to mind when you read the titles of each poem. Share these stories with your group and think about how they are similar and diﬀerent. Discuss the diﬀerent images upon which group members choose to focus and why these images are important.

❖ Read the poem out loud and listen for the accented syllables. Is there a musicality to the mixture of accented and unaccented syllables? Does the poem sound dissonant or melodic? How does the sound of the poem aﬀect your understanding of it?

❖ Look at the lines of the poem. Think about the ways in which each line begins and ends. Are the words nouns or adjectives, conjunctions or pronouns? Do the words, on their own, cause the reader to pause and reﬂect on the importance of the line or do they carry the reader forward through the line (or onto the next line)?

❖ What about punctuation? What purpose does it serve the line? Look into the line itself and think about how commas and dashes, parentheses and semicolons direct the reading of the poem.

❖ With music comes tone. What does the tone of the poem suggest? Is it quiet and reﬂective, loud and bombastic, angry, sad, joyous? Is there a shift in tone and a variety of emotions working together or at odds with each other?

16 Writing Prompts For each poem

O Taste and See | Denise Levertov Choose a phrase you see or hear during the day. Describe the taste and describe it as it ﬂows through your body outward to a larger reality.

Chanson on the Red Line | Susan Donnelly Write a narrative poem about an unexpected encounter that transforms your mood or state of mind. Weave in the line, “Let me tell you the truth for once.”

The Terrible Memory | Alan Feldman Without speciﬁc details, describe being haunted by a memory, a person, or an historical event. Consider beginning the poem with the line, “After a while, it becomes your friend.”

Incident | Natasha Trethewey Write about a moral dilemma and how you responded. Now write about that same experience, but imagine what would have happened if you responded diﬀerently. Try writing a formal poem using the form’s prescribed patterns (lines, phrases, end words) to evoke the experience of being obsessed or unresolved about the dilemma.

The List Grows | Danielle Legros Georges Research the background and context of someone who has “disappeared.” Use the person’s name. Describe brieﬂy and precisely how the person is altered or profoundly changed. Use couplets and weave in the phrase, “I know only of your voyage/and your image after.”

The House Remembers | Robert Francis Write a persona poem in which you endow an object with memory or conversation, and choose a body part to extend the metaphor. Provide details of as many sensory elements as possible. Weave if the phrase, “And only then the talk could really begin…”

St. Kevin and the Blackbird | Seamus Heaney Write a poem about an experience of sacriﬁcing your own comfort or happiness for another’s. Use colloquial language to engage the reader. Try tercets or another regular stanza form.

17 About the Poets More info at poets.org & poetryfoundation.org

Of Irish American heritage, Susan Donnelly was born in Waltham, MA and raised in Brookline. She earned a BA in English from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. She has published several books of poetry.

Alan Feldman is a widely published poet. He was a professor and chair of English at Framingham State University, and for 22 years taught the advanced creative writing class at Harvard University's Radcliffe Seminars. He offers free, drop-in poetry workshops at the Framingham, MA public library near his home, and in the summer at the Wellfleet library.

Robert Francis was born in Upland, Pennsylvania, and studied at Harvard. Although he taught at workshops and lectured at universities across the U.S., he lived for over sixty years in the same house near Amherst, MA. Robert Frost, an important inﬂuence on the poet, said that Francis was “of all the great neglected poets, the greatest.”

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985-2006. He died in 2013.

Danielle Legros Georges is Poet Laureate of Boston and a professor in the Creative Arts and Learning Division at Lesley University. Legros Georges was born in Haiti and grew up in Boston's Haitian community in Mattapan. She received a B.S. in Communication Studies from Emerson College, and holds an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from New York University.

During the course of a proliﬁc career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reﬂects her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraces a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. Levertov lived in Somerville, MA while teaching at MIT, Brandeis, and Tufts.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Encouraged to read as a child, Trethewey studied English at the University of Georgia, earned an MA in English and creative writing from Hollins University, and received an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2012 she was named the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.

A version of many of these biographies originally appeared on poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, and on poetryfoundation.org. All rights reserved. 18 Media Package masspoetry.org/mediapackage2016

19 Resources for Poetry Exploration

This is by no means a comprehensive list—rather, it is a starting point, noting some of the resources we ﬁnd richest for those beginning to explore poetry (as well as those for whom poetry is a daily part of life).

Poetry Guides for Reading and Writing

How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch (ISBN-13: 978-0156005661)

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (ISBN-13: 978-0385480017)

A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry by Mary Oliver (ISBN-13: 978-0156724005)

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky (ISBN-13: 978-0374526177)

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (ISBN-13: 978-0393321784)

Anthologies

Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (ISBN-13: 978-0393048209)

Good Poems selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor (ISBN-13: 978-0142003442)

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris (ISBN-13: 978-0061583247)

Websites

The Academy of American Poets Favorite Poem Project How a Poem Happens The Poetry Foundation Mass Poetry

20 About Mass Poetry masspoetry.org

Mass Poetry supports poets and poetry in Massachusetts. We help to broaden the audience of poetry readers, bring poetry to readers of all ages and transform people’s lives through inspiring verse. We are a tax exempt, non-proﬁt organization.

Our largest programs include: The Massachusetts Poetry Festival Three days of readings, workshops, and panels.

Student Day of Poetry A youth program that brings students together for an intensive day of poetry workshops, performances, and an open mic, held both in and out of schools.

Common Threads A poetry outreach program that facilitates the creation of reading and discussion groups throughout Massachusetts, centered on a publication of eight poems by Massachusetts poets, videos, and a guide to reading and discussing the poems. Published annually.

Poetry on the T Poems in place of ads on the MBTA.

Professional Development for Teachers Workshops and seminars for educators led by successful and engaging poet-instructors.

U35 Reading Series A reading series for poets under the age of 35, held every other month at The Marliave in Downtown Crossing.

Fiscal Sponsorship We are the proud ﬁscal sponsor of MassLEAP and Louder Than A Bomb Massachusetts.

Online Publications Weekly articles and poems, continuous promotion of new books by Massachusetts poets, a monthly Massachusetts Poet in the Spotlight newsletter (5500+ subscribers), and more. Plus: facebook.com/masspoetry | twitter.com/masspoetry | @masspoetry

21 About the Common Threads Team

Alice Kociemba is the author of Bourne Bridge (Turning Point, 2016) and the chapbook Death of Teaticket Hardware, the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. Alice is the founding director of the Calliope Poetry Series at the West Falmouth Library, and since 2009 has facilitated a monthly Poetry Discussion Group at the Falmouth Public Library. She is also the only poet to receive a Literacy Award from the Cape Cod Council of the International Reading Association for promoting literacy through poetry. She is on the Advisory Board of Poetry Sunday, for WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station’s segment featuring regional poets. Alice is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets and lives and works as a psychotherapist in Falmouth, MA.

Laurin Macios is the Programs Associate at Poetry Society of America. From June 2013- December 2015, she served as Mass Poetry’s Program Director, and was Managing Editor of Common Threads 2015 and 2016. She earned an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she taught on fellowship for three years, and she has a background in textbook and scientiﬁc publishing. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, The Pinch, and Third Wednesday, among other journals. Visit laurinbeckermacios.com for more.

Riley Fearon of Riley Fearon Productions has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine and been nominated for several awards including Florida’s Crystal Reel Awards. He has been involved with many production companies ranging from Fox, HBO, NBC, Warner Bros. and many local commercials, promotional web videos and more. Riley Fearon Productions is a video production company based out of the Greater Boston Area. Fully equipped with the latest high-end production gear, Riley Fearon Productions produces quality HD videos for a wide range of clients.

22 Acknowledgements

Mass Poetry is grateful for the poets and publishers who gave their support and permissions to this edition of Common Threads, and to everyone across the state of Massachusetts who is taking the time to bring poetry to their communities. A thank you to Robert Pinsky for his time and generosity in composing “How to Read a Poem” speciﬁcally for Common Threads readers, as well as his support of Mass Poetry year-round. And of course, a big thank you to Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor, for her hard work and attention, and her commitment and devotion to Common Threads.

Sincere appreciation to all the facilitators of Common Threads discussion groups held in local libraries, schools, and churches across Massachusetts—especially Mary Kane and Annie Dean of Historic Highfield Hall, for curating a month-long poetry & art collaborative project, inspired by the 2015 edition of Common Threads. Deep gratitude to poet-readers for recommending poems for consideration: Lorna Knowles Blake, Kathleen Casey, Dorothy Derifield, Patrick Donnelly, Prosser Gifford, Fred Marchant, Barbara McGovern, and Mark Pawlak. And to Rich Youmans, in particular, for his attentive listening and editorial suggestions for the “Threshold” introduction, and brainstorming the writing prompts. Finally, thanks to the ever-generous Robert Pinsky for his steadfast support, and to Michael Ansara and Laurin Macios, whose incredible vision and energy makes Common Threads an un- commonly delightful project. –Alice Kociemba

23 Copyright Information