Mass MoCA Poetry Residency: Aftermath

The Mass MoCA/Tupelo press workshop ended yesterday morning, but I’m not home yet.

One of our cousins picked me up and B met us later at their home in Stamford, Vermont, which is his hometown. For the weekend, we are staying at the home of a high school friend, who was my classmate and B’s lab partner for physics.

The local connections and tour continue.  Today, B and I went on a car trip back to my hometown, Monroe Bridge, MA. We stopped and took some photos of where my house used to be, where Rowe Yankee used to be, where Sherman hydro station, the dam, and Tower Brook still are, where the town office and library still are, although the rest of the building which was my elementary school up through eighth grade is now offices for whichever power company it is that now owns what was New England Power when my father was superintendent for the upper Deerfield.

I keep having ideas and little fragments of poems pop into my head, so I scrawl them in my journal. I have also had some chance to tell B some of my experiences, which is helping me to process. I am looking forward to talking to some of my poet friends at home. I also want to share some of my drafts of Monroe Bridge-North Adams  poems with my mom and dad. There are some details that they can provide to help me be historically correct.

I realized that the chapbook I had hoped to write from this experience probably needs to be a collection instead. I find myself thinking of prospective titles and ways to organize the collection into sections, even the placement of some of the poems I have already written which will fit into the collection.  It’s exciting! It will be a big project and I’m not sure how long it will take to write, revise, and assemble it.

I told Jeffrey he could be the first one to reject it when it is done. 😉