I am currently riding a high after spending the weekend in the Poconos with a gathering of poets at Boyds Mills for Poetry Palooza. I registered in early December last year after NCTE and have been waiting nearly a year to get there. Many days I wondered if I would. Logistically getting from South Louisiana to the center of Pennsylvania is hard. I am very appreciative of Jone MacCulloch who flew across the country from Oregon and met me at the Newark airport and drove the long winding roads through the yellow, red, and orange forests and quaint small towns. I could feel my anxiety leaving me as we drove.
Boyds Mills was all I had hoped it would be. Everyone raves about the food, so good and so plentiful. The staff of the retreat are some of my favorite poetry people, Georgia Heard, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Irene Latham, and Charles Waters. As part of the retreat, each person gets a one on one critique. Mine was with Rebecca. Her advice on my poems was spot on, and then we cried together about Alzheimer’s. That’s the kind of place this is. One minute you’re talking about poetry and the next, you’re in a deep conversation about the meaning of life.
I have a new circle of friends who love me and validate the work that I do. I started writing a new poem yesterday and could hear their voices. I am not writing alone.
Irene gave us a prompt to write a trinet. The form is 7 lines with lines 3 and 4 as 6 words; the other lines are 2 words. I wrote this one and left it in the notebook in my room.
Boyds Mills Trinet
We write.
We talk
at round tables side-by-side.
Dreams of words fill our souls.
Voices singing.
Connections ringing.
Story birthplace.
