2017 Fall poems for Binghamton Poetry Project

This afternoon is the Fall 2017 reading of the Binghamton Poetry Project. The Binghamton Poetry Project (BPP) is a community poetry initiative which brings graduate students at Binghamton University into the community to facilitate the writing of poetry by adults, teens, and children. I have participated in their workshops for several years. I will always owe them a huge debt of gratitude because it was my participation with them that led to my acceptance by my local critique group, which I now call The Grapevine Group, and to my beginning to publish poetry outside of the BPP anthologies.

BPP holds three workshops a year of five sessions each. We read and discuss some poems and generally write from prompts drawn from those examples. It is interesting as one often writes poems that would otherwise not have been written. Because we only have about fifteen minutes to write, there is not much time to ponder, so I often find myself writing about people or events that I have already had time to process. The first poem below centers on a topic that has appeared in other poems about my childhood hometown. The second is not a topic I have ever written a poem about because it was traumatic, but it was long enough ago that, when it fit the prompt, I ran with it. The third poem is about my friend Angie, whom I have written about often in both prose and poetry.

This year, we are reading at the Broome County Library where we usually meet. We used to hold our readings on Friday evenings rather than Saturday afternoons. This is the first time I have been able to make a Saturday afternoon reading. I’m curious to see if we have better attendance at this venue and time. (I am writing this post early and scheduling it to coincide with the reading.)

For the first time, I am planning to read a poem that is not in the anthology, the current version of a poem that I started working on at the Boiler House Poets’ reunion at MASS MoCA and have subsequently workshopped with both Grapevine Group and Sappho’s Circle. I can’t share it here as I need to keep it unpublished at this point. I am also not sure if it is in its final form, but I need to decide soon as it is part of a chapbook I am assembling for a contest. I am desperate to make this poem the absolute best it can be, but I am afraid I have lost perspective with it. There may be a separate post about it soon – again.

I know this post will look a bit different in spacing than my other posts. It is tricky to get poetry into the wordpress editor without having the spacing compromised and this is as close as I can get to proper spacing in the time I have today. All three poems are by Joanne Corey. Please comment if you are so moved.

Homecoming

The Eiler Brothers sent my parents a video

of our three-bedroom ranch

stained grey with white shutters

loaded on a flatbed

rolled three miles

up River Road

across the state line

to a new foundation.

 

The house cost them a dollar

and the filling of the old cellar.

 

I travelled back to visit the yard

white and yellow birches

spruce, balsam, hemlock

sugar and striped maples

lilies of the valley in May.

 

*****

 

Thanksgiving – 1981

 

After words from the phone call drifted to me –

black ice, accident –

I thought you were dead

and our already planned June

wedding would never happen

 

but the hatch had sprung

after the car landed

on its roof in the river

so that you could crawl

out, scramble up the bank,

 

get to the nearest building,

the hydrostation where my father

worked, where they put you

in a warm shower 

as hypothermia set in.

 

The next day, we went to see

the car where it had been towed,

chunks of river ice still inside,

a deep dent in the roof,

just behind where your head had been.

 

*****

 

To a friend

 

My dear Little Angel,

 

You would laugh at that greeting

because, as you would say,

you are – or were –

 

five foot twelve, which you thought

sounded shorter than six feet,

but your name, Angeline,

 

means little angel

and you aren’t here

to contradict me.

 

Your October twenty-fifth birthday

has passed twelve times without you.

Do you know I think of you each year?

 

Wonder if your hair

would be silver now

like mine…

 

If your toddler grandchildren

would like to meet

my infant one…

 

If you know,

wherever you are,

that they exist…