William Carlos Williams

Sharing poems with little kids this week, I keep reading this one:

I’m glad the sky is painted blue,
And the earth is painted green,
With such a lot of nice fresh air
All sandwiched in between.

While Long Winter in Vermont has its endless permutations of snowfall and cold, Spring in the Green Mountain state yields treasures every day — coltsfoot in this unexpected place, emerald so luminescent it seems nearly impossible. How quickly this season sometimes moves.

Last night, from the windows at the top of our house, I saw blue-black thunderheads far down the valley, and white curtains of rain. Rapidly, dead leaves blew against the glass, and handfuls of hail.

This is the morning for the other poem the kids especially liked, about a rain-glazed red wheelbarrow and white chickens.

Yesterday, someone said to me, why would people write a poems if they weren’t going to be paid for them?

That’s a gulch of perception I may never be able to cross. What is a poem worth, anyway?

This morning in Montpelier, I attended an art show, where my daughter had a painting entered. In the opening remarks by Tom Greene, president of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he said creating art widens our experience and makes us more humane. I’m not sure that sentiment would have imprinted on me as an adolescent, but as an adult, far down in the cavernously lonely well of writing a second novel, those words shone like a bright beacon far above, a place I know – a place I continue to heads towards through the arduous work of writing.

What’s art worth? A truer question, perhaps, would be: how unimaginable our world would be without art.

"This is Just to Say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

– William Carlos Williams

artwork by Molly S.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Black-Blue, Turquoise-Blue

What’s A Poem Worth?