Last October, a group of poets sponsored by--as it happens--the Tupelo Press, got to spend a week in North Adams, MA at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Or MASSMoCA if you're a close friend. We had an extraordinary week working with Jeffrey Levine, Tupelo's publisher, and exploring this vast 19th c. complex and the wonderful art it houses. While we were at it, we held a reading for ourselves in the Boiler House. Joanne Corey, one of those poets, asked me to write about our week together there. Here's a part of the result. (The whole poem appears here.)

Poets Gather in the Boiler House to Read Their Work

We’re hoping to live a week in this aura

of ornate eaves, rusting metal,

hoping to put words to it. What

is the role of the poet?

On Berkshire mornings

the boiler house once poured out

a practicality of steam, kept workers

from freezing at the looms.  

My father spent forty years making nothing

but ball bearings. While children

dodged the huge plates

slamming out deafness and broken/arms. 

The lines in italics were each written by one of the poets who read that day--in the case of the excerpt, the first italicized line is the work of  Donna Fleischer and the second of Kyle Laws. The rest of the poem incorporates the lines from 6 other writers. 

The trick of using words picked up out of one context and put down in another is called "found poetry", and it challenges the assumption that words and their meaning are stable. Here the sense of the words shifts when they leave the original poem behind and are placed in the midst of a new piece. The whole thing fascinates me (if not a lot of other people). 

So here we are. Day 11, I believe, and I'm still keeping my head above water. (That sound you hear is me, paddling hard). I am so grateful to the chorus of encouraging voices and every one of my kind sponsors.  If you'd like to donate, go here and put your request in the note they ask you to write to me. Thanks again, everyone. You're the best.