A POEM OF MINE SELECTED FOR THE MARSHFIELD POETRY TRAIL

One of my poems that appeared

in the most recent issue of Free Verse (#78) has been selected for display along the Poetry Trail at the UW-Marshfield/Wood County Arborteum in Marshfield, Wisconsin. I got the news yesterday, in an e-mail from Linda Aschbrenner, editor of Free Verse and a member of the Marshfield Area Poetry Society.

"The Marshfield Area Poetry Society (MAPS) and the Office of Continuing Education maintain and change the poetry displays on a quarterly basis," Linda said. "Your poem was selected as one of seven poems. This quarter, the trail will feature poetry about birds. Members of the Marshfield Area Poetry Society select the poems for display."

In a follow-up e-mail, Linda reported that "we started the trail in 2000 and it's been fun. I like to think of squirrels and birds reading the poems as well as all the walkers in the Arboretum. Poems silently reposing in a slant of light, poems sometimes covered in deep snow or flecks of ice - but they are there! Poems in the woods!"

"Some of the themes we have had over the years," she said, are "poems by Robert Frost, the Romantic poets, Beat poets, Central Wisconsin poets, Ron Wallace's poems, poems by area students, poems relating to the seasons, poems published in the chapbooks from Marsh River Editions, poems by members of the Marshfield Area Poetry Society, poems from the anthology The Poetry of Cold, etc. etc. Generally, we feature short nature poems and they look as if they belong there - poems under the trees, the stars."

"We started the trail," she explained, "after Phil Hansotia (formerly of Marshfield, now living in Door County, Wisconsin) visited a poetry trail at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Perhaps other communities will start their own poetry trails! It's a great project for a poetry group."

I feel honored. What can I say but Wa-hoo! and Thanks!

The poem selected for posting along the Trail is one from my series, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." The birds mentioned in my poem are our brothers, the crows, and their "long shadows... the singleness of their homely/sorrows, the sharpness of their clattering."

I'm already making plans for a trip to Marshfield sometime in March, to see the display in person. It's nearly a three-hour drive to Marshfield, and three hours back, but, hey, it's for poetry....

Comments

[Dave]

Congratulations! That's a great way to get published. And that's a wonderful series; i'm really enjoying the ones you selected for "The Sweet Bite of Morning."

[Tom Montag]

Thanks, Dave. I think that's a great place for a poem, along the trail in an arboretum - "in the woods, under the trees, the stars," as Linda puts it. Thanks for the good words about Sweet Bite, too.

[David Brostrom]

Congrats on being one of the poets whose work will be on the Marshfield Poetry Trail! I love the idea of placing 'art' among the woods & prairie.
David Brostrom

[Tom Montag]

Hi, David--I especially like that the poems are along a trail where they might be noticed as a flower or tree or grass is noticed; as if they are all of equal standing. Imagine: Big Turkeyfoot and Poem....