At the foot of Mount Greylock, a round building with a wall of windows looks out at the the stone path of a labyrinth in the grass. The center of the room is a sanctuary, and a woman stands taking in the light. She moves with poised self-command and an […]
Read articleRoss Gay’s ‘Unabashed Gratitude’ surges with life
On a spring night in Bloomington, Indiana, Ross Gay is planting young lettuces. Winter has hung on so long, a warm evening feels new — to stand barefoot in a troweled furrow with the air smelling of earth and stems, and peels in the compost pile.
Read articleNational Book Awardwinning poet Louise Glück reads from ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’
Louise Glück has earned many of the country’s and the world’s highest honors in poetry. National Poet Laureate. Nobel. She won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Wild Iris’ in 1992 — and she wrote it here on Southworth Street.
Read articleOcean Vuong holds calm in chaos with contemporary poetry rooted in Viet Nam
In honor of National Poetry Month we honor and thank a poet who recently came to visit. Five years ago he was giving readings in Brooklyn — Zachary Finch heard of them through a friend in the city and listened, awe-struck, to poems like Aubade with Burning City. Ocean Vuong […]
Read articleHonoring Richard Wilbur, a national poet in the Berkshire hills — BTW column
‘The morning air is all awash with angels.’ The early morning scene has stayed with me since high school. It isn’t etherial or oversweet. In the early light about dawn, a man wakes and hears the laundry going up to dry. ‘The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,’ concrete, […]
Read articleMastheads writing residency brings writers outdoors in the Berkshires
“Like the giddy time I met and danced with my wife-to-be at that roof-deck party with a full moon rising above us, and I was amazed I could have that much fun sober. …” In the wake of a hurricane a paramedic is riding an ambulance back to the hospital. […]
Read articlePhillip B. Williams — Love and sadness in free verse
Bound, it begins. ‘Wasn’t night what lingered where sweat left / salt, where breath touch-expired?’ Bound is the title of the first poem in Phillip B. Williams ‘Thief in the Interior,’ a book that opens with confinement and insistent motion and closes with a movement outward into a changed life.
Read articlePop Up Poets bring the word to the streets
Poetry on a park bench? I once talked with three New York poets at once from my phone on Spring Street, and it seemed right, because that’s the way they perform their work. As National Poetry Month picks up momentum, here are the Pop Up Poets telling me how poems […]
Read articlePoets come together in rhythm at night
‘The great poets Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia meet in Depression-era New York.’ John Keene imagines them together in short story in his ‘Counternarratives.’ And I may have a chance to hear him read it aloud.
Read articleWriters in residence in Wharton’s rooms
In the evening, they share a house in Lenox. They sit up late, talking and making pizza. They read each other’s work or watch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence. And each day they write at the Mount, in Edith Wharton’s inner rooms. Vanessa Manko said whatever she […]
Read article