we go thank you all for coming this evening this is as kerry mentioned the seventh lecture and the poets and their craft lecture series that mary jane and i have organized and hosted which is taking place in bookstores throughout vermont i just want to thank a few people and i'm tamar hagen and i'm co president along with mary jane dickerson and we would love to think our need to think kerry and todd and all of the phoenix bookstore staff here who have been so accommodating and we'd also like to think the vermont humanities council for generous grant that helped us  put this series together the ben and jerrys foundation burlington city are still in marketing from jeffersonville and a very very special thank you to m m c t v who has coordinated the filming of all of the vents for our local access television stations as well as from p b s who is recording them and will release a program with them in the fall i higgins the founding director of the sundog poetry center with a master's degree in education and him if a in poetry has long years of experience teaching in vermont public schools and has just concluded a successful term as president of the vermont poetry society and his time had mentioned the books of brawling to recently host one of their annual she has had poems published in such fine literary journals as prairie schooner her first volume of poems nothing saved us has already been chosen for college and high school classes for what it reveals so movingly about the consequences of the korean war on real people her p us face what we don't often have to face when nations are war working with tamra at sundown poetry during this last year has given me even greater insights into the quality of her mind and the goodness of her heart get a little because we promised each other to keep our introductions short now i have the distinct honor of introducing mary jane we're doing it this way because mary jane will go first in the lecture and it will make sense as but as the evening goes on mary jane is professor emeritus from the university of vermont where she taught for more than thirty years in the english department her accomplishments and publications feel many many pages and include teaching in japan and south africa and closer to home at the new england young writers conference of bread loaf her two books topping the center of things and water journeys an art and poetry are deeply reflective collections in which there are worlds to discover and insights to absorb mary jane is a poet teacher mentor protector of rights visionary and role model for all of us i hope to grow up to be just like her mary jane the title of their whole presentation is conjuring the voices of the past the convergence of history and poetry and i'm giving the another title to the introductory part which i'm going to she have with you now and that is toward a poetics of the past and i got from reading a poem oops memoir of growing up memoir of growing up in istanbul which i read prior to going to turkey this spring and it's a truly beautiful beautiful book toward a poetics of the past all of us bear traces of the past in both their physical and their mental beings early all poetry often serve the special function of recording a people's history even before written language memorializing human experience and advance poets have been making use of historical materials in many ways ever since american poets being no exception throughout lives of grass in language as expensive as the continent itself whitman sets his particular american experience against the often tragic broader history of his young nation in paterson well i'm carlos williams the particulars of his own twentieth century life along the passaic river in paterson new jersey with the documented history of the region especially its native american and american revolutionary history contemporary poets have extended the range of their uses of historical material in crafting poems that speak to america's past with reference to the ongoing american narrative it's almost as if poets are venturing onto terrain that history that historians have often been hesitant to traverse robert hayden's powerful poem middle passage vividly describes the voyages of slave ships with names like mr hyde through voices of the white slavers themselves ten april eighteen hundred blacks rebellious passage voyage through death to life upon these shores haden's choice to speak through voices of white slavers themselves only amplifies and dramatizes the master slave power positions inherent in the slave trade and its consequent historical implications especially as  cannot totally escape the recognition that these are suffering beings resembling himself but the living look at you with human is who is suffering accuses you who is hatred reaches through the swill of dark to strike you like a lepers claw length lyric narrative sonata mubarak in her volumes native guard and domestic work natasha trethewey way draws on such things as ohv family photographs and incidents in regional histories to redraw of the lives of those often left out of the larger american narratives her last volume thrown more specifically makes use of a range of historical figures especially those captured by seventeenth century painters drawn to mixed blood subjects to explore her  made flash in my flash go away canal in his poem when the towers fell invokes whitman and his words about new york city and its ties to the american civil war and to the vest bret the american history to place the city and the events of nine eleven into this larger context i sat down by the and passionate city mettlesome mad extravagant city but when the war was over and lincoln dead and the dead bury wittman remembered i saw the battle corpses myriads of them and i saw the bright skeletons of young men i saw them i saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war but i saw they were not as was thought they themselves were fully at rest they suffered not the living remained and suffered the mother suffered and the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffered earlier in the poem kamil room of the towers they come before us now like as not as a likeness but as a corollary a small instance in the immense lineage of the twentieth century's history of violent death black men in the south castrated and strung up from trees soldiers that van seeing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile train upon train of box cars heading eastward shove full of the court shoved full to the corners with jews and roma to be enslaved or gassed atomic blasts erasing cities whitman's expensive vision rhythms and inclusive language and when the towers for the whole purt marilyn nelson even labels a body of her poetry lyric histories drawing on documented people and situations in order to imagine what it meant to live in seventeenth and eighteenth century america also speaking in the voice of white slave owners as well as in the voices of the enslaved she then places poems about her own family's american history against those who stories live in our libraries and state historical archives musing about her family's genealogy as descendants of one of general bedford forests bedford's rangers while visiting a confederate cemetery nelson writes left behind by history's tides like bodies tossed overboard what did these unknown learn as the bullet shattered through them did they suddenly know about our common humanity all of us are embedded in such histories for me local regional national and beyond we occupy the particulars of their own lives within the realities of those whose lives are connected to or through the narratives we are constantly making and remaking in her final lecture as america's most recent poet laureate natasha trethewey describes the rolling of american poetry in remembering our shared past and continuing with it  own going pursuit of social justice she wrote these words in her examination of the process robert penn warren reveals in his major work the participates in the uncovering of the realities and implications of two brothers learn to burn and i shammed lewis sons of thomas jefferson sr who brutally murdered their slave in ways anticipating the lynchings that have set to be smirched the pages of our history it's as if these poets by casting themselves as other or an other are giving themselves a wedge into the past and a way to imagine worlds and circumstances beyond their immediate situations and circumstances a way of knowing that offers us a way forward to create lives lived out of that hard won knowledge often what happens is that a particular moment in our history emerges in voices they give immediacy to that past and reveal what might not emerge in any other way in buffalo dance the journey of  york frank x walker takes on the voice of your the enslaved body servant of william clark who went with lewis and clark on their three year expedition your renders his view of the expeditions homecoming to st louis when we set foot back in old st louis there was much celebrating and putting on as everyone had give us up for dead no one seemed to tire of hearing us tell our stories and i after night the truth seemed to stretch so that by and by i seemed to disappear from the tongues as if i had never even been there as if my blackness never save they have them twisted the tails and leave out my parts in it so much so that directly i become massa clarks boy again just along to cook to but through your eyes we have a unique perspective sometimes in the deep of the night the north sky get full of something like writing only the ro our letters the long streaks of light as if even god is writing everything down when we come across rock drawings that seem as old as the stone that wear it i wonder for the first time i can leave my mark in the world where girl has brought york's voice into the presence into the present as he describes here allowing york's historical voice and personality to surface while suppressing the twenty first century this voice has been balanced challenging and humbling thank you mary jane the second part of the lecture mary jane and i will be looking at how to integrate history into poetry and i want to start off by mentioning audrey to lourdes as a poetry is not a luxury it's text that i return to if i start to doubt the reason for writing poetry if i if i ask myself that dangerous question why as in why should i write about my feelings or explore unanswered questions i write about past lives or historical events and poetry to me lord answers these questions in that as say particularly in this section quote the white fathers told us i think therefore i am but the black mothers and each of us the poet respond in our dreams i feel there for i there are i feel therefore i can be free poetry coin language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand the implementation of that freedom and quote to me writing about the past frees the past and the lives in it the historical could be the story of a famous event told from a perspective of someone who hasn't been heard from yet or the poem may uncover past events that have been kept hidden by the writers of history that is those in power at the time poems that relate more to personal pasts are also written as all poetry is to reveal discoveries and gather new insights writing about the past requires both research and imagination when i dead chronicles the course of events that took place in west virginia during the building of a mountain tunnel and the treatment of workers by union carbide in the one nine hundred thirty s when silicone was discovered in that in the rock in the tunnel they were in the rock they in for the union carbide carbide victims there are some things to consider and this is just a little nuts and bolts list that i was i thought of when i was when i was thinking about conjuring voices and writing and integrating history into poetry you need to think about the size of the scope of the project while you explore an entire history of an event or one segment or an instance of that instance of that segment of that piece of history you need to consider the point of view from whose eyes will the poem be told who is the narrator you need to think about managing the material and what the style will be what questions are you trying to answer by writing t what's different about your exploration of the subject from what already exists about it publishers will want to know that when they live how much historical material will you use how do you set aside your own biases stereotypes and beliefs to consider new possibilities in both content and the interpretation of the content and how do you make the historical poetic of course these questions are answered as research reveals information as thoughts and ideas formulate and as the poem begins to appear from the synthesis of evidence and imagination when writing my poems in my book nothing saved us poems of the korean war i used many different resources i think the complete bibliography is about five pages single spaced but the most important resource was my father i interviewed him over the course of two years allowing him to tell the stories sometimes he needed a bit of coaxing but other times he would just it out of memory he would just say there was this time i volunteered and the story would go on i wrote down everything he said and from those conversations i shaped the poems because the poems are told in first person narrative some people have mistakenly thought that they are just transcriptions of his stories but they're not they are my poetic interpretations of his stories while the events are true in the first section of the book they are written as poetry and i will use the poem one time as an example one time august one thousand nine hundred fifty two there was this time i volunteered it happened when our course tears dropped napalm bombs melted the air and jelly the ground like toast anyone close enough it smelt i was a hell away and underneath my gear my shirt was drenched in seconds from that wall of heat a mile thick the planes veered back sweeping away like swallows in the evening after bugs then the snipers hit how did those bastards do it they should have been dissolved into the ground curious as my commander i count myself all muddy fair face hands was half way there already packed grenades and shotguns for close range and sneaked into the north koreans trenches we blended in my buddy because he looked like them and me i kept my helmet down we elbowed our way through a thousand men only to find we was the same has them and that night and that night there is why my heart still disconnected from my mind but we found their secret tunnels underneath the lines made from all those chinese lackeys two million had joined by then hauling out two million buckets full of earth inside the tunnels they blocked the exits so the napalm bombs when it liquefy their skin and when the planes retreated they'd open up the tunnel pop up and shoot at us across the line once we saw how those damn holes were sniping through our neighbor attacks we worked our way back south reported in and never volunteered again the events in this poll are true however my father never told me and that night there is why my heart still disconnected from my mind he doesn't speak like that you can tell the way he speaks from some of the other parts of the p of course that incident certainly contributed to the soldier's need to sever emotion from intellect to create the separation between the belly to murder as a soldier needs to do and the ability to carry on day to day life raising a family i created those hoping to show a pivotal point in the narrow narrator psyche and the long term effects of well in another poem purple heart recipient i use wilfred  last laugh as a model well for owen was a british soldier and poet who fought in world war one interestingly the korean war was much was very similar to world war one particularly in the  trench in the use of trench warfare so i thought it was important to include something of that war just as a continuation of you know war to do next war to the next war to the next war that we are always involved in the specific form of omens poem lends itself to really tightening up the lines and emphasizing the image which helped me i think and hope to create a better  also by ending this section of the book with repetition of what comes before well for dylan's what a poem it is an acknowledgment of the continuation of war that we are always involved in and that war or rather the individuals be they stalled or or civilian will always be important to write about oh it was one of the first poets who wrote graphically rather than patriotically about the war and he was killed in action at age twenty five i do and the handouts i include  poem next to the ones last laugh and i i don't know if i'm going to read the whole i think i might skip that poem you have it in your hand outs there read it all right you got the tissues purple heart recipient after wilfred owen's the last laugh my god the doctor groaned the stump some mess surgery recovery three months at best needles probe nerve snarled i cleaved them from the v a s rep said sixty percent get a second job if it don't pay rent and the graveyard shift grabbed hold of me and double shifts pulled me apart and hope slept how much research is needed when conjuring the voices of the past only a small percentage of what you discover will end up in your poetry it requires and deserves extensive investigation where you research becomes what you know therefore how much you uncover and learn has an overall significant impact this may be revealed through assuming seemingly small detail for example in the research in my research i learned that for the second part of the book i learned that in the korean culture wedding dresses are traditionally green not white like in the american culture and this found its way into the second part of the book which follows a korean woman through the war because i'm not korean because i did not go through the war the section of the second section of the book is based on extensive research much of which was the memoirs of korean women that i read what does connect me to this topic however is that i am a woman and although i will never be able to know what these women went through doing due to our separation in time culture and circumstances i am able to conjure their voices through research yes import as importantly through imagination and my imagination as a woman and a mother through these means i try to accomplish the implementation of that freedom that audrey lord reminds us we must do and just to end i will read the last section of this the second section of the book that follows the korean woman i cannot help but think of first son did he reach fifteen is he seeing bicycling on a dusty village road or in the square of p and yang there's a living boy better and alone better than infant son where's father where are you grandmother fifty years without a word you do not know daughters sons have grown armistice hangs on landmines hide behind a line barbed wire still punctures the view of you by h biscus blooms late in the summer each balloon lasts only a day but each day brings a vision of home reach and my teacup cradled in both hands the green of my first wedding dress five thousand years of memories at some point you do have to put aside the research in order to create something new it is in the interpretation of the information not in its summary that makes the difference between historical report and poetry and now i'm going to turn it back over to mary jane who is going to share a little bit more about the struggles we have to face when we are witness about what we are witness to and the complexities of our experience mary jane you're doing well to keep up with  when i first began to make poetry from north carolina past some forty years ago now and even then that i was writing out of a homesickness but it was not a miss for my parents my sister my village of cameron north carolina it has taken me years and many poems later to come into a f understanding of the deeper yearning that stimulated so many of these poems indeed i could not fully articulate what was going oh and told very recently when i was before an audience to read many of these poems looking out at the faces of those who had come to hear i heard myself saying that the central and most significant threat of my existence beyond the family i had been born into and the one i helped to create was growing up in a racially segregated society into a world shaped by the circumstances of that segregation until that moment i had not fully come into that difficult knowledge that both my personal history and that of my region and nation met i was compelled to address out of that one sickness i wrote the following poem that i used to conclude the reading white and black northerly peaks and valleys flattened into an expanse without the mention of whiteness that washes all other color away shaping in me that lingering sense after all these years of always being out of place always a stranger in an even stranger land february snows bring me home to what i have missed even more familiar and gentle southern landscape even more than the internet culture of family and place feb snows bring me home to what i have missed most from the poets and rhythm of everyday life to what turned life itself into possibilities of improvisation that day only presence of african americans whiteness given shape in meaning by those shattered contours and lines scripted in black february's white loneliness how is that warmth from the body leaning into the half hour of blizzard knocking at the door yet each february frozen into place stirs longing for a landscape soon to be worn by human figures moving in black and white whose lives matter each to the other whose kinship goes beyond blood whose ever twined histories of boundaries and bondage most recently i have finally tried to come to terms with a specific fact and their ongoing civil rights struggle one that i have talked about in the classroom and one i have read about in other especially those by african american poets in all guest of nine hundred fifty five fourteen year old emmett till black was brutally lynched in money mississippi for years that date has health significance for me not only for its searing meaning as a major catalyst for the civil rights movement but also for my where ness of what  white was doing in the american south at seventeen years of age the contrast could not have been more stark in preparation for drafting the poison that became five lynching i wondered about my total ignorance in a family keenly interested in the news was it discussed with that not paying attention but i could find no news accounts about him it was death or an open casket funeral and chicago to me that omission has come to be even worse than my teenage ignorance certain similarities in the slice of american history made me examine my circumstances in a rural segregated southern town against the backdrop of what was going on elsewhere i regard the poor him long hot summers as only one of many to come that must examined a painful history all of us are continuing to share and to ponder because our very lives as citizens of a democracy demand that we do so long hot summers in august of nine hundred fifty five seventeen no more mankind then going away to college in september i worked sometimes in my father's in my father's store after long mornings under the debacle where mounting heat beat down to ripple in waves along the ten roof at the store's lunch counter  assemble hot dogs by the dozens at two for a quarter stacked moon pies and poor and cold are seized from the cooler calling each customer by name charlie little john andrew kelly his sisters pinky and jamie there are more williams and overall crutchfield i took warning dollar bills from hands black hands and white when i place change silver and copper onto their outstretched pongs those coins felt coup against the lingering heat from our skin was it during one of those moments while i and white store owners daughter was making change for white and black farm laborers exchanging the day to day words of our small town world was what we'll never know from lips forever c e o and only hours later in the brutal violation of that other teenagers still growing body was that the summer the k left a stack of printed brochures on my father store counter counter paper he set a fire on the cement pavement separating the store from the gas pump how much did i think about it in one nine hundred fifty six when i returned to school after another long hot summer of working in tobacco in clerking at the store to found that north carolina women's college had integrated itself by placing its first two young black women in isolation just the two of them living together on a single dormitory floor separated from all the others in their freshman cla in a recent poll a tree workshop with the topic history in the poetic imagination some of us attempted to grapple with ways our personal histories intersect with our shared past as memory and recorded pasts nearly potential for making meanings that my illuminates the present to love that april twenty fifth didn't participants have agreed to share their poems with us so i invite bill drislane and rose a custom from mary april twenty fifth the workshop to come forward macneil who was a photographer for the federal writers project during the depression and the photograph that caught my eye was one that he made of the bronx slave market during the depression there was a chain block stretch in the bronx where white suburban housewives would go and purchase women for a day and one of the things that made it significant was that wages that they were playing were outrageously low at the time you know around fifteen cents a day and what struck me about the photograph was in the image it was just two women a white woman and a black woman and what struck me about it the most was going home with them anyways on the block the bronx one nine hundred thirty seven ghosts exist i've seen them in the pneumonia fog waiting for work the kind that comes in limos and shiny sedans vote housewives behind the wheel my mother tried to city where bone that secretaries arched pencil brows and snarled the i didn't call for colored today the dishwater skies softens the block where she waits under fire escapes with women bend and straight some meat some without stockings or hats all carrying work clothes wrapped in and a large girl inspected by a woman with a dog in her purse her wrapped another wants to know how much my mother can lift i can't hear what mama said but the woman no her gloved finger swipe watery beads from mama's hair the woman asks my mother if she steals mama shakes her head and rain is the worst music i've ever heard the fat drops carry the sound of hauling blood and babies to her breast a felting up and down stairs she has no smile for me now for out of me there ashley follows the lady to her car the other women watch her go written based loosely on life fathers mothers claim they were in the eighteen seventies emigrated from ireland and  what's been most intriguing in this work is finding myself wondering how much of the old language rhythm music of of their time has come through i don't really know impossible to tell us but something certainly has bubbled up through the generations and it's it's it's been fun to work on these there's one reference in towards the end of the poem to the night liner which was a steamboat that did the night run from new york city to albany carry passengers and cargo freight and the setting here is on a train and early morning train bound south from albany along the river so here is john murray he's in his mid thirty's yet emigrated about ten years earl it's a rattling rail car excuse when we start so rattling carriage this rail car down to the brick yards and back if we were king day by dinner  the river plane ascending out of sight like a tune that whistles through your head for days with you one minute gone the next curling through your worries to your worries  in belfast but everyone's here the dutch the brits yankees bog irish blacks a few fren germans brewing lagers like we never had some juice and those new york brothers cork men really in that old synagogue on pearl street running into grocery you can't stay out of the whole salvation inhaling the luxury of their roasting coffees even up t where any standing on the stoop minding billy in her sister and his sister's one on one on her hip taking the morning air god bless you except you have all that in here is the night light moving up the river parting to day break in water like the like a plow through the fields back home oh what a sight for these weary far from the ocean its belly full of it in attic fresh out of the sea early spuds from jersey all the fancy teas from the city those court brothers will be top in there been and will be trading them are coins before so yes so when you trying to conjure these voices from the past do you sometimes feel like hesitant like you might get it wrong or you know do or feel like i know you're with the korean woman or you know the woman in the bronx or something like that you know not really giving a true counter how does that play into your writing yeah i was pretty terrified of that i did wrestle with that because as i said i'm not korean and identical through the korean war and i've never been to korea and so i felt like i was really kind of playing with fire interpret being you know and writing this and and what it came down to was going with my gut as you know i'm as a woman as a mother and trying to imagine this happening and so yeah it's scary territory and we don't know most of the time when we are you know we say things that might be sexist and racist we don't even realize we're saying that and so it's a scary thing to put on paper and put out there when you know but but at the same time i felt it was for in my case it was a really important side to the story i actually got back not to include that half of the story and i felt it was really important to have so i have another voice other than the the soldiers in in my book rosa do you want to speak to that too i would agree that it is challenging when you're trying to imagine what's someone else might feel or think but that is also the fun of being a writer you know all that imagining and so sometimes it's you let it go and just go from your god and if you're feeling those things and it's real for you then there's a chance it might be real for somebody else value and i think i would not have sort of done what i've sort of done more recently than the book that was published thinking about these things had i not been invited to re the flint in february so sometimes just some and that's what caused me to do have the topic for the workshop and april history in the poetic imagination and so and  history and and poetry and narrative actually because as you heard there their narrative poems and mary jane and i were just happened to be really working with the historic in poetry  june these are i've run into the family at this point in june but it was really wonderful our attention and every poet has chosen such a really different topic so  do so and all of the out of the lectures also are on the sun dog poetry website they're loaded on thanks to m m c t v and as i mentioned at the beginning they will also be no i didn't i felt that that book the book of the dad was just a real influence on me on the type of poetry i wanted to write and i didn't i didn't think it  content wise really fit into my book and what that the book of the dead what mariel rock eyes are does in that book is just fabulous it's a collage and that i've thought a lot about that collage idea of she's got some of the hearing the congressional hearing in there she's got a newspaper article bits in there she's got quotes from the from the victim she has all sorts of material in that poem it's not just  it doesn't look like a poem but it but it certainly is so i it didn't it didn't match up for this project but it's definitely in the back of my mind y right that the bibliography is all of the resources i used to write and nothing saved us and so it's an extensive list of books and websites where i you know where i got my information just background information i had to learn what sorts of guns they used and what i mean i was even listening to machine gun fire to get the the right sound written into the lines of my poem you know you want to write a book about korean the korean war i said absolutely not and one thing led to another and and i was amazed that i just really had to learn so much more that's in the book but as i mentioned with the the green right wedding dress and knowing the biscuits is the flower of the national flower of korea and koreans traditionally hold their teacups with two hands and not one hand in all these little details that i i try to work in but so i be happy to email that list to anyone but there is a bibliography in the back of the book too  that justice has to do i've written a lot of poems that i'm going to put in a book that i mean the book is going to be mother of poems and poems about my mother carl so food but i wrote one poem in which i did assume her voice about ten or twelve years old and i had it was describing this place that she was going to this creek that she was going to where because of  where they live they would keep milk and butter and things like that in the creek water this is north carolina where it was a little cooler and so but i mentioned some growing things and she was biology teacher so she sent me back i mean when she her response to the poor and she had no argument with the voice i was you know that i was speaking in her voice and from her experience but she wanted me to get the names of those plants right so i had to do that got to get it right