Elaine Loft, Staff Writer
In the final program sponsored by the Isakovich-Critz Community Enrichment Initiative, NH Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello visited with the Derryfield community to speak about her craft, and to encourage students to write their own lines of verse. The author of seven books of poetry, Militello currently teaches in the MFA program at New England College in Henniker. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry.
Militello opened the Community Meeting on May 12 by reading several poems about poetry, including Ars Poetica, by Archibald MacLeish, and American Poetry, by Louis Simpson. Militello then invited the audience to consider MacLeish’s observation that “A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed fruit…silent as the sleeve-worn stone of casement ledges where moss has grown… poem should be wordless, as a flight of birds.”
Militello also read several of her own pieces, including Allergic, written after her mother had been attacked by a swarm of ground bees in her garden. During her reading, the Derryfield students were given the assignment of making a declaration about poetry. Militello urged them to, “Try for three lines, and include at least one comparison. Consider what a poem could be, must be, maybe be, could never be.” At the end of the Community Meeting, all the lines the students had written were collected, and Militello strung some of them together into a group poem.
“A poem should be the goosebumps trickling up arms, even though it is summertime.
A poem is anything and everything, all at once.
A poem is nothing, turned into something, that varies from eye-to-eye.
A poem must be nothing but everything at once. Something that sees no boundaries, yet is confined by letters on a page.
A poem is memories of the past, or expectations for the future.
A poem should be your imagination, one that is infinite, eternal.
A poem must be powerful like the will of the tides to change.
A poem must be like the wind that follows me.
A poem is untouchable, unknown to any but its speaker, different and twisted, never quite the same, like the veins on the leaves on a grapevine.”
Militello concluded with a line of her own, “A poem should be a series of lines by an incredible group of Derryfield students.”
