Posted By Pamela Polston on Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:23 PM

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Peter Miller

David Budbill

It's a sad month for Vermont poetry. Northeast Kingdom poet Leland Kinsey died less than two weeks ago, at age 66. And early this Sunday morning, September 25, beloved poet and playwright David Budbill passed away, at 76. He had been diagnosed about a year ago with a form of Parkinson's disease called progressive supranuclear palsy,  or PSP.

Budbill was a prolific writer of brilliantly lucid, Asian-influenced poems, as well as plays — his best known is Judevine , which also inspired the libretto for A Fleeting Animal, with Vermont composer Erik Nielsen. He also wrote essays, young adult fiction, a cyberzine and more. He was a musician who played the shakuhachi (a Japanese flute), and occasionally performed with his longtime collaborator, New York bassist William Parker.

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Posted By Kevin J. Kelley on Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 4:09 PM

Courtesy of Goddard College Archives

Goddard College students, 1971

Experiences and legacies of 1970s Vermonters were fondly — and sometimes movingly — examined at a Vermont Historical Society event on Saturday, September 10, called "Freaks, Radicals & Hippies: Counterculture in 1970s Vermont Symposium."

The daylong event at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, which featured keynote speaker Edward Berkowitz, a cultural history scholar, bore some resemblance to an educational program at a senior center. But the topics weren't the least bit bland. Most of the 125 attendees seated at round tables in the college's Alumni Hall were old enough to recall the riotous 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the 1969 Woodstock musical festival, the 1970 killings of antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio and other tumultuous events of the era recounted by some of the speakers.

Tags: 1970s , back-to-the-landers , Vermont , hippies , communes , gay rights , radicals , progressives , Image , Web Only

Posted By Pamela Polston on Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 9:45 AM

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Courtesy of Martha Barnette

Martha Barnette

Martha Barnette, who cohosts the public radio show "A Way With Words" with Grant Barrett, is headlining a fundraiser for the Burlington Book Festival later this month. When I interviewed her, she was generous with her time and loquacious in her answers. Not surprisingly, the woman likes words themselves, their origins, and the sometimes quirky ways people put them together.

She also has strong opinions on why language matters. It was an interesting conversation, but we didn't have enough space for all of it in print (now, of course, that's also online), so I'm sharing the rest of it here.

SEVEN DAYS: How would you explain your fascination with language?
MARTHA BARNETTE: I suppose it derives from a natural curiosity and a drive to follow it — just wondering why things are the way they are. When you start wondering why we use the words we do, you discover they’re a great portal for learning about all kinds of other things: history, science, music, art, literature, folklore, mathematics, human psychology and much more. Word origins can give you a kind of X-ray vision; it lets you see things that are hiding right there in plain sight.

Tags: A Way With Words , public radio , Grant Barrett , etymology , Burlington Book Festival , Image , Web Only

Posted By Kymelya Sari on Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 8:49 PM

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Courtesy of Young Writers Project

From left: Hawa Adam, Lena Ginawi, Kiran Waqar and Balkisa Abdikadir

Updated on June 6, 2016 with new performance information.

Since being featured in Seven Days in April, Balkisa Abdikadir, Lena Ginawi, Hawa Adam and Kiran Waqar, 15- and 16-year-olds slam poets who call themselves Muslim Girls Making Change, have performed at locations in Burlington including ArtsRiot, the Unitarian Universalist Church and the Vermont Comedy Club. They've also appeared on WFFF Fox 44 and Vermont Public Radio.

Last Friday, the girls captured national attention when a clip of their showcase poem, "Wake Up, America," was played on National Public Radio's "On Point" (31-minute mark).


The episode also discussed how Muslim Americans feel about the presidential election, refugees and radicalism.

The quartet will compete July 12 to 16 in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, a conference and competition for youth, in Washington, D.C. They are still fundraising for the trip.

Tags: Culture , poetry , slam poetry , Muslim Girls Making Change , YWP , Young Writers Project , Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival , American Muslims , Video , Image , Video , Web Only

Posted By Rachel Elizabeth Jones on Thu, May 12, 2016 at 4:39 PM

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Courtesy of the Poetry Experience

The Poetry Experience logo

When Randee Eddins was a little girl — the second youngest of five children — she had difficulty expressing herself with the same verbal-whiplash wit as her family and siblings. Instead, she told Seven Days, she would use poetry to respond after the fact; her family would find "poem rebuttal[s] taped to the bathroom mirror." 

Fast forward to 1998, when Eddins founded THE POETRY EXPERIENCE  with her son Rajnii in their then-home in Seattle, Wash. This gathering of area poets, writers and spoken-word artists emerged from Eddins' love of both poetry and community gatherings. Seven years earlier, Eddins had founded the city's African-American Writers Alliance, which continues to this day.

Randee and Rajnii Eddins came to Vermont in 2010, and have recently begun to host bimonthly Poetry Experience events at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. "We are determined to make the whole world poets," Randee Eddins said. Now, the mother-and-son pair is branching out to establish a Poetry Experience zine.

Tags: poetry , the poetry experience , zine , Image , Web Only

Posted By Pamela Polston on Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 4:32 PM

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Courtesy of Vermont Humanities Council

The Bard is beloved worldwide: a production in Mexico City

What will the world do on the 400th anniversary of your death? For most of us, the answer is a big fat nothing. But perhaps there's still time to turn out a zillion plays that actors and audiences will revere four centuries from now.

Meantime, Tuesday brings a pair of back-to-back opportunities to get your Will on. William Shakespeare, that is. Not surprisingly, Vermont Shakespeare Festival executive director John Nagle and the University of Vermont have a hand in both Bard-themed happenings.

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Posted By Sadie Williams on Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 3:38 PM

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Courtesy of Tim Calabro

Sydney Lea reads at Three Bean Café during PoemTown Randolph last year.

Most poets rarely see their work under the spotlight; it's understood that, for the majority of their career, they will read to small audiences or sell a few chapbooks in the local indie bookstore. However, in April, Vermont's verse peddlers will have the opportunity to see their work plastered in store windows throughout Randolph. The February 1 deadline to submit to the monthlong celebration approaches, so sharpen those pencils, poets. 

Tags: poems , poetry , poet laureate , Randolph , readings , Image , Web Only

Posted By Rachel Elizabeth Jones on Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 11:10 AM

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Courtesy of Vermont Performance Lab and Ela Troyano

Performance by Carmelita Tropicana and Ela Troyano

In the latest round of arts funding announced last week by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), six Vermont arts organizations were awarded a total of $110,000. Of these groups, four are music, dance or theater related, one is literary and one is both writing and visual arts related (Vermont Studio Center). 

Tags: NEA , arts funding , jeh kulu , new england review , vermont performance lab , vermont stage , vermont studio center , yellow barn , Image , Web Only

Posted By Margot Harrison on Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:07 PM

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Frank Gonzales in 2009, with puppet.

Born in Burlington on October 20, 1859, John Dewey went on to become a major figure in education reform, psychology, philosophy and political liberalism. When conservatives trumpet getting "back to basics" in education and away from techniques that privilege children's creative exploration, they're fighting Dewey's influential legacy.

Tomorrow, locals will have a chance to celebrate Dewey's anniversary in a way he might have enjoyed — with colorful masks made by local kids under the direction of artist and Dewey super-fan Frank Gonzales.

Tags: john dewey , frank gonzalez , words , books , archer mayor , castle freeman , stephen kiernan , howard frank kosher , phoenix books , julia shipley , christine hadsel , Image , Web Only

Posted By Margot Harrison on Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 4:56 PM

Courtesy of Wind Ridge Books

Daniel Lusk

Wind Ridge Books recently announced that Burlington writer Daniel Lusk has won a 2016 Pushcart Prize for his essay "Bomb," published in New Letters, a quarterly based at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The Pushcart Prize anthologies collect the "best of the small presses" in a given year. Many writers are nominated, because any small journal or press can submit its own authors for the prize, but few are chosen. Last year's winners included such heavy hitters as Russell Banks, Rebecca Solnit and former poet laureate of Vermont Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Tags: books , reading , author , daniel lusk , pushcart prize , gennarose nethercott , honeybee press , ben aleshire , poems for strangers , wind ridge books , Image , Web Only