Happy New Year!

Thursday, February 2, 2017, at 7:00 pm, poets Brad Crenshaw and Chard deNiord will continue the tenth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Brad Crenshaw received his MFA and PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine. He later obtained a second PhD in ClinicalPsychology and Neuroscience from the University of Massachusetts. He has worked as a neuropsychologist for many years in a New England tertiary care medical center, and in the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services. His poems and critical articles have appeared in various magazines, including Chicago Review, Parnassus, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, The Formalist, The Sandhills Review, Illinois Quarterly, and Faultline. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and part of the year in Santa Cruz, California.

Brad Crenshaw’s second book of poetry, Genealogies, was published this March by Greenhouse Review Press. His first book is entitled My Gargantuan Desire. He has also published two poetry chapbooks: Limits of Resurrection, and Propagandas. His website is found at: www.bradcrenshaw.me

Chard deNiord

Chard DeNiord’s poetry collections include Interstate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015); Speaking in Turn, a collaboration with Tony Sanders (Gnomon Press, 2011); The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); and Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). DeNiord also authored a book of essays and interviews with renowned poets called Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century American Poets (Marick Press, 2012). The poets featured in the collection include Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, and Maxine Kumin, among others.

In 2002, deNiord cofounded the New England College MFA program in poetry, which he directed until 2007. DeNiord is currently a professor of English at Providence College and the Poet Laureate of Vermont. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.

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THE BLESSING WAY / Brad Crenshaw

Many years have passed since my indiscipline with eggs. I only blame myself as
Gary pares the mushrooms for the omelets, grinning. My inner sanctum growls.
I hear that Peggy shifts her slender allegorical children in their slumber, then
shuts the bedroom door to join us, yawning, over breakfast. It’s been as I write
this, for thirty years or more my chore to grind the coffee–which is, as the air,
essential. Last night on the way to sleep I saw no planets strike, but heard the
billion wind people mill around with their invisible regrets outside, and Spider
Woman in her bright haste slipped away in impossible flight.

II

With that said, inside the house, below the meadow, on a mound, shaded, I tug
at my pajamas green as the sea and follow the laws of my astonished heart. I’ve
dug at those before, the fateful buried principles, but gave it up. I know what
women are to me, and I apologize. Well, sort of. In its black appalling cars
my expectation will collide with things inside my thankless mind and drive
away all hindrances. If I survive this morning–no really, if this consolation lays
me in my comfort, wisdom, peace, let’s forget those graceless words of mine
about regret.

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TO HEAR AND HEAR / Chard deNiord

The hermit thrush is set for six
to sing her song, as if it were
the end of the world and she was stirred
by dusk to sing the same sweet song
again and again in the understory,
as if to say, it’s neither words
nor meaning that matter in the end
but the quality of sound, as if we
were deafened by the sun and needed
her song as a key to unlock our ears,
to hear and hear and understand,
to see and see, knowing that this
one day is the end for now,
which it is, it is, she claims, with a song
just loud enough to pierce the woods
until the night descends like a thousand
veils, and then just one.

From Night Mowing, University of Pittsburgh Press

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