SPRING 2022
MARTHA BOSCHEN PORTER FELLOW
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
THE BERKSHIRE TACONIC COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
In April 2022, we welcomed playwright Jerry Lieblich from Williamstown, Massachusetts as our Martha Boschen Porter Fellow.
“Going from writing poems in the quiet Berkshires to writing poems in the quiet Taconics (a whopping 45 minute commute) may at first glance seem… unnecessary. But as someone who has just had the extreme pleasure of a month writing at Millay, I can assure you, a 35 mile shift can make a big difference.
So let me back up a little bit. When COVID struck, my partner and I left our life in Brooklyn to come to Williamstown, MA, where she grew up. We thought we’d stay a few weeks. Two years and two cats later, we’re still there, enjoying the quiet, the slower pace. With this change in location, my writing changed. I had spent almost a decade in New York writing and making experimental theater. Now, living in the country, with a much smaller social circle, I found myself turning inward, and towards smaller forms – poems.
Writing poetry is a new practice for me, something I’m continually learning as I do it. (As David Antin says (misquoted), to be an artist is to continually do things one is unprepared for.) And while I’ve been able to develop a steady writing practice in Williamstown, it was only upon going to Millay that I had the space to begin looking back on my work from the last few years, and begin arranging individual poems into a collection. Maybe it was having meals cooked for me, maybe it was the stimulating conversation with five brilliant artists, maybe it was the ample grounds and woodland trails… something about the alchemy of Millay allowed me to deepen my practice, and expand into abundant time. I revised (sometimes radically) poems from the past two years; I experimented with arrangements for the manuscript; and, over the course of the month, I drafted a new long poem, “wake of days”, which I suspect will be the capstone piece in the collection. Not bad for just a few weeks.
But more than the work I accomplished, it was the mindset I was able to cultivate at Millay that I’m most grateful for. I felt unhurried, I felt attentive. I was able to think and experience and attend with depth and patience, in a way difficult to access in the hurly-burly of non-Millay life. The fruits of such a month of contemplation are long-lasting and mysterious – I will remain grateful to Millay for as long as I savor them.”
how, not what
a feather (hawk), useless but for
evidence (synecdochic) of
pattern (stripes),
tended
by thumb and finger (index)
pad, [name
for hooks on feather
strands] broken, [name for
feather strands] snapped off, for
[completion] (participants’) of
the hawk
feather, useless
but for seeing
through, [lines]
evidence (synecdochic)
composition (patterned, damaged), still
(hollow) [slows
air] lifts