Dave Read

Lessons from 2018 Sharon Springs Poetry Festival

Article updated September 12, 2019 by Dave Read

It was my good fortune to participate in a poetry workshop during the 2018 Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, along with nine other poets, which was run by festival-founder Paul Muldoon.

I was smart enough to ask colleagues in my weekly workshop in the Berkshires to help me decide between the two poems that I’d thought suitable to workshop with Muldoon, but then was too imperious to follow their decision!

My local group suggested that I bring “More Ways to Ponder” while I opted for “Cape Cod Post Card.” The group consensus was a two page poem that collects about a dozen epigrams loosely related to the topic of poetry; it has since been published in an anthology.

My choice, which I was very excited about, fell flat as a pancake at the workshop. It was a little mystifying that the regard of Muldoon and the others for the poem were so divergent from my own. But, aware that I must be ready to kill my darlings, I was over my disappointment by the time I was out of Schoharie county.

That poem was scrapped, but a new one was made around the aspect of the old one that had nothing whatsoever to do with Cape Cod. While it has yet to find acclaim out in the wild, nonetheless my poetry cohort agree it’s a worthy poem.

Late poet Donald Hall resources

Article updated September 6, 2019 by Dave Read

Following the appearance in a January 2012 edition of the New Yorker of his now-famous essay “Out the Window,” I became acquainted with Donald Hall and had the pleasure of three visits at Eagle Pond Farm, with trips to a succession of area restraunts. Also, I attended his last reading and poetry talk in Nov. 2017 at the University of New Hampshire, as well as his funeral seven months later. This is an aggregation of links to useful, entertaining, and eluciadting items related to Donald Hall, who died on June 23, 2018.

Donald Hall and Dave Read at UNH, Nov. 9, 2017; photo courtesy David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

The Web of Stories, “an archive of stories from people who have influenced our world…” – recorded at Eagle Pond Farm, Jan. 2005; there are 111 video clips of 5.5 minutes duration – Web of Stories;
Comprehensive, up-to-date, bibliogrphy and related info by the publisher of Poetry magzine – including 54 poems, several essays by and about him: Poetry Foundation;
His 2001 essay, “Death to the Death of Poetry,” is among the material posted here: Academy of American Poets;
In their own words: “This guide compiles links to resources on Donald Hall throughout the Library of Congress Web site, as well as links to external Web sites that include features on Hall’s life or selections of his work.” Includes White House video of President Obama presenting him the National Medal of Arts in 20120: Library of Congress;
NPR interview, 2014;
Interview by Peter A. Stitt, The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry, No. 43 (Issue 120, Fall 1991); The Paris Review;

Notice the pile of disused railroad ties above; Seamus Heaney collected a railroad spike here, then immortalized it in a poem, the monograph/broadside of which was one of Don’s prized possessions. When I learned that, after my visits to Wilmot, I looked up Heaney’s poem, and somehow wound up reading a different Heaney poem, which – if you’re not already exhausted, led me to make one of my own:

Machine Learning

The machine delivered
Seamus Heaney’s poem “May,”
where I found fontanel – a treat,
as if I’d been foraging morels,

but I’d asked for “Iron Spike,”
wherein he visits Eagle Pond,
home of Don Hall and Jane Kenyon,
poets he had a soft spot for.

– Dave Conlin Read

Trombone Shorty, Ben Harpur at Tanglewood, September 6, 2019

By Dave Read – Bob Dylan’s song from the Basement Tapes, Too Much of Nothing, comes to mind while reflecting on my last visit to the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood during the 2019 season, ironically, because both headliners that day delivered an evening’s worth of entertainment, and I could’ve gone home a happy man with my musical appetite fully sated at the conclusion of Trombone Shorty’s set.

Nothing but good music tonight – but was too much squeezed into one program? I think separate programs of more typical two set shows would have been better, allowing us to stretch out and savor the music, and allow the enjoyment to linger, rather than having to rinse the auditory palate and gear up right away for another hullabaloo.

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue 2019 Tanglewood concert review; photo:Hilary Scott.

If I had split after Shorty’s set, it would have been the dumbest decision I’d made since that time I wore my white bucks after Labor Day! Ben Harpur and the Innocent Criminals are that good. Just two nights earlier, we split the scene at the conclusion of the Mavericks rousing set, 100% incurious to hang around to find out what Squeeze sounds like. (We had taken a pass during the 1970s on the Second British invasion, which the advance publicity listed Squeeze as being in the vanguard of.)

Ben Harpur and the innocent Criminals 2019 Tanglewood concert review; photo:Hilary Scott.

I really was a little tired after the first set, because I’d got caught up front in the aisle where I’d gone to see what all the fuss was about and got trapped by aisle-clogging dancers, and eventually got caught up in the fun – the sort of infectious fun, with a pronounced aerobic aspect, that may be common in the Big Easy, but sure ain’t hereabouts! And speaking of dancing in the aisles, one could dust off the “cut a rug” cliche if you’re talking about the aisle in the Shed where the big green benches used to be, because they replaced the benches with beige carpeting!

But seriously folks, this was a real treat – two musicians with mastery of their instruments, no small feat in itself, but also two musicians sufficiently tuned in to what an audience wants that they assemble the right cohort of equally great players into bands for the performance of skillfully paced shows. One example from each set: Dan Oestreicher’s solo on baritone sax was out of this world as was the bit of business by percussionist Leon Mobley, a student of Babatundi Olatunji, namechecked in I Shall Be Free (1963) by the only musician who could bookend this report, Bob Dylan.

Mavericks thrill scant Tanglewood audience, September 4, 2019

By Dave Read – Now this was more like it – an unannounced young hard-working musician added to the bill for a concert by a band called Squeeze in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a bill that already boasted the Mavericks, with chastened former maverick Raul Malo included in tonight’s nonet from Nashville.

We mention that this band with a heavy Latin accent is based in the home of American county music because a mere four days earlier, the guest conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in their annual summertime swansong, Beethoven’s Ninth, Giancarlo Guerrero, a native of Nicaragua, is music director of the Nashville Symphony, with which august outfit the Mavericks have shared a program!

Too often these “popular artist” programs are nostalgia trips featuring groups that once were hard-working bands but have long since become franchises that attract audiences eager to reprise that brief shining moment – high school. If you want to see something funny, come to one and watch these incurious people attempting adolescent choreography with their imminent heart attack bodies.

Musical artists are restless people who keep moving from one unique project to the next one. Popular artists are fidgety by comparison; in concert, they are more likely to tweak an act resembling the one that got them up onto the big stage in the first place. They have become faithful keepers of some golden goose. So hooray for the young musician who ignored a nearly empty Shed and cut loose for her first time on the big stage. This is for certain – she’d look insane doing the same act at seventy five!

This was a Mavericks show for us, largely because an old pal took us to see Malo in concert at the estimable Iron Horse some years ago, and we wanted to repay the favor. The advance PR described Squeeze as emerging from the second British invasion. That would put them beyond our curiosity; we’ve been burned – er, given a splitting earache, by attending shows by unknowns; by hanging around to learn what all the fuss is about.

Giancarlo Guerrero conducts Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood, August 27, 2019

By Dave Read – To close the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2019 season at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero conducted the annual climactic Beethoven’s Ninth. The program opened with Arnold Schoenberg’s brief choral work Friede auf Erden, which translates to “Peace on Earth.” It has roots as a Swiss Yuletide poem, as Ode to Joy originated as a drinking song, making them perfectly suitable bedfellows for a Tanglewood afternoon!

Conductor James Burton’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus was outstanding; I am always in awe of the magnificient instrument they become, the synthesis of scores and scores of voices into some bespoke thing that pleases the senses as it moves the soul. For the Beethoven, of course, they are augmented by a solo quartet, soprano Nicole Cabell, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, tenor Nicholas Phan, and bass Morris Robinson.

Maestro Guerrero, a native of Nicaragua who is music director of the Nashville Symphony, conducts with a focused and bold manner. Without seeming at all histrionic, he commands your attention – there was one passage where it looked as if he were an augur boring through the podium.

The program, with the “peace on earth” preface concluding in time for the national bell-ringing, reflects the orchestra’s decision to participate in what seems like a misguided project of the National Parks Service, of all people, to mark the anniversary of the arrival in the Virginia colony of a ship carrying slaves from Africa. We say misguided because the only people who may be up in the air about slavery today are busy dismantling America’s National Parks, and generally making life miserable for everybody.

Furthermore, descriptions of the ship’s arrival in 1619 betrayed the attention to detail of a Philadelphia lawyer, because 1619 did not mark the arrival here of slavery, which was a tactic used by indigenous peoples of North America, as it was on every other continent. Slavery is more a defect of human character, than an aspect of nationality.

Except for Love reading in Cambridge

Porter Square Books in Cambridge hosted a reading for Except for Love, New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall on Aug. 16 – there’s one scheduled for the Bookstore in Lenox on November 7th. It was great fun to meet several co-contributors, and to hear their various Don Hall stories. I knew that I wasn’t alone as a benefifiary of his correspondence, but it was fun to hear how important it was for so many fellow poets, too.

After introducing me, Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the editor and publisher of the anthology, said that she considered the event a sort of afterparty for Hall, which is the title of my poem in the book. My pal Eddie O’Toole took time away from his Honduras project, for an old-school open-ended road trip; here is his cellphone videography of my four minute segment: