Robert Frost Foundation poetry contest winners

The adult and youth winners of the Eagle-Tribune/Robert Frost Foundation poetry contest were recently announced.

Getting ready for upcoming talks, I've been looking for strong passages by North Shore writers that are very much about North Shore places, and not having luck finding exactly what I have in mind. The poetry contest's theme was "ideal retreats," and it was nice to see that a few winning poems conjured specific locations, not just idealized nature: Streeter Pond (Franconia, NH), Ward Reservation (Andover), Salisbury Beach.

Miscellaneous trivia, Streeter Pond is mentioned in the 1889 story by Annie Trumbull Slosson, "Fishin' Jimmy" which is the name of one of my favorite sections of White Mountain hiking trails.

The 185-year-old mill girl

Lucy Larcom died 117 years ago today, and Mass Moments has a great summary of her life and work. She's still often referred to as a Lowell mill girl, and her descriptions of replacing bobbins on massive machines as an 11-year-old are important social history. But in her memoir A New England Girlhood, I'm more drawn to her deep nostalgia for her earliest years in Beverly.

But there is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heartstrings. A town that still has a great deal of the country in it, one that is rich in beautiful scenery and ancestral associations, is almost like a living being, with a body and a soul. We speak of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother, and think of ourselves as her sons and daughters.

Her chapter on Old New England is worth a read for any visitor to Salem, to temper the manufactured Witch City with the history of its having been a hub of 19th century foreign trade.

That's Lucy on the cover of The North Shore Literary Trail, too.

Essex County poets

In a nod to National Poetry Month, Jim McAllister's recent column for the Salem News touches on many of the well-known poets who lived and worked in Essex County: Bradstreet, Larcom, Whittier, etc. But the poet who gets the most mention is someone whose name you don't expect to see alongside Olson and Updike: George Parker, of Parker Brothers board game fame. Who knew?

Read the article (and a charmingly baffling comment afterward, par for the course with the Salem News web community) online here.

Polis Is This on YouTube

If you missed the WGBH broadcast last week like I did, Polis Is This is available in its entirety on YouTube.

Polis Is This on WGBH

Via GoodMorningGloucester (a blog that is very friendly to my other major pursuit in life), WGBH will be screening Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf's film Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place on Sunday, April 5 at 7 pm. Boston.com reviewed the film today.

Pinsky reading Bradstreet

Robert Pinsky reads Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" at Poetry Out Loud. He writes, "This kind of plainness and directness demand great skill, and Bradstreet knows what she is doing."

More recitations every day throughout April, in honor of National Poetry Month.

Ipswich Poets or Poems about Ipswich

April is National Poetry Month, and as part of Ipswich's 375 anniversary celebration historian Chris Wright reads and discusses Ipswich poets.

Monday, April 6, 2009 at noon, $5
Ipswich Historical Society, Heard House Museum
54 South Main Street, Ipswich, 978-356-2811

(It was also 45 years ago today that Updike was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.)