POETRY AT FEATHERSTONE

Featherstone Center for the Arts and Literary Arts at Featherstone, welcome you to the Featherstone campus this summer for a variety of poetry readings and literary events. Please visit Literary Arts to learn more about upcoming writing workshops.

Photo credit: Laura Wilson

Billy Collins - CANCELED
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024
Time: 6:30PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Price: $30, open seating

UPDATE: Unfortunately Billy Collins has had to cancel his trip to the Vineyard, and the September reading is cancelled. We hope to welcome Billy to Martha's Vineyard in 2025!

The former U.S. Poet Laureate will once again be at Featherstone this fall. Join us Friday, September 13th, for a reading of his poetry.

Read about Billy's previous visits to Featherstone:
Billy Collins Brings Wit and Warmth to Featherstone, Vineyard Gazette, September 12, 2022
For Poet Billy Collins, Vineyard is Entrancing Isle, Vineyard Gazette, June 10, 2019

From the Poetry Foundation:
Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself.

Collins was born in 1941 in New York City. He earned a BA from the College of the Holy Cross, and both an MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. In 1975 he co-founded the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute in Florida, and a faculty member at the State University of New York - Stonybrook.

Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. In 2002, as U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. The reading was in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington D.C.

Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. A Publishers Weekly critic applauded the collection’s “strange and wonderful [images]” but believed that the poems—which are often “constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor”—” rarely induce an emotional reaction.” In contrast, reviews of Collins’s subsequent work regularly laud his ability to connect with readers. Discussing Picnic, Lightning (1998)and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995), John Taylor noted that Collins’s skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) was the first Collins collection published outside the U.S. It selected work from his previous four books and was met with great acclaim in the U.K. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence,” and A.L. Kennedy described the volume as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent and darkly funny.” Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems(2001), the U.S. version of Collins’s selected, had a tumultuous journey to print. The story, which garnered a front-page slot in the New York Times, originally cast Collins’s first publishers, the University of Pittsburgh Press, in an unfair light, accusing them of refusing to grant rights for poems requested by Random House for inclusion in Sailing Alone Around the Room. However, it later emerged that Random House had begun to produce the book without first securing rights from Pitt Poetry Press, a highly unusual move for a major publishing house to make. Dennis Loy Johnson reported on the controversy for Salon, noting that “ultimately it was Random House, not Pitt, that chose to delay the publication of Collins’ selected volume.” The battle between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press was public and uncharacteristic of the sleepy world of poetry publishing. When Sailing Alone Around the Room was finally published, in 2001, it was met with enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales.

Collins’s next books Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry(2005), Ballistics (2008), Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), Aimless Love (2013), and The Rain in Portugal (2016) have continued his sales streak by offering more poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination…to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. However, many readers find Collins a source of warmth, wit and surprisingly sure technique, and reviewers have consistently noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag has discussed Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.”

Poet Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

Previous 2024

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Celebrate Elise Paschen's Tallchief at Featherstone
Date: Sunday, July 14th
Time: 4:00PM - Free

Join us as Elise Paschen reads from her latest poetry collection Tallchief which celebrates her mother, Maria Tallchief - America's first major, prima ballerina and the first member of the Osage Nation to hold the rank who revolutionized ballet. The collection includes the poem “Wi’-gi-e” which inspired the title for the book and film Killers of the Flower Moon. The reading will be accompanied by archival footage of Maria Tallchief from the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, compiled by Caroline Cronson, Producer, Works and Process at the Guggenheim, with thanks to Curator, Linda Murray, and her staff, and to Kathryn Marshall, Program Manager, Works & Process.

Called “an essential voice for our times,” Elise Paschen’s next book of poetry, Blood Wolf Moon, will be published in 2025. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, she is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Tallchief. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem, and The New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tseng Island Launch Party!
Date: Saturday, July 13th
Time: 4:00PM - Free

Join literary companions Jill Jupen, Donald Nitchie, Jennifer Tseng & Emma Young to celebrate Jennifer's new book, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, poems made with her late father's English letters.

Jennifer Tseng’s first book, The Man with My Face (AAWW 2005), won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Open Book Award; her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the 2012 Marick Press Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen, alongside English originals; her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was a finalist for the Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award. Her new book, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, poems made with her late father’s English letters, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by University of Massachusetts Press in April. Currently a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jennifer is so very grateful to her beloved island friends for making Martha’s Vineyard feel like a forever home.

Jill Jupen spent five years as poet laureate of Martha’s Vineyard. Her chapbook "The Space Between" came out in 2017. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize nomination and has work published in The Green Mountain Review, Kayak, and others. She started and ran the Martha's Vineyard Poets Collective for twelve years. She’s written two plays: "The Fifty-Minute Hour" and "The Kingdom". Right now she is working on a book about how the French poets influenced Bob Dylan's lyrics with a grant from the Library of Congress.

Beginning with a love of language and a belief that literacy is liberatory, Emma Young is a writer, designer, and craftsperson. She is a collaborator across disciplines, and runs a design studio focused on typeset letterpress printing and handmade papers.Her collected poems, Book to Share, were published by Two Plums Press, and she is a contributing editor for The Brick Journal.

Donald Nitchie has lived on Martha’s Vineyard off and on his whole life. He received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia School of the Arts, and his poetry collection Driving Lessons was published in 2007. His poems have been published in the Cape Cod Review, MV Arts and Ideas, On The Seawall, and in the anthology Exploring the Cape and Islands Through Poetry. Since 2018 he has led Poetry Drop-In sessions, which consist of in-class writing assignments based on classic and contemporary poems.

Not your ordinary poetry reading: science, poetry, and memoir in three voices Dust is the Only Secret: Assent to Life
with Fan Ogilvie, Ursula Goodenough and Janet Holladay
Date: Saturday, May 18
Time: 4:00PM - Free

Join us on Saturday, May 18th at Featherstone for a book reading with poet and artist Fan Ogilvie and guests readers Usula Goodenough (professor of biology) and Janet Holladay (designer and editor of the series). They will be reading from Fan's new series of three poetry books: Dust is the Only Secret: Assent to Life (Book one: To Understand; Book two: To Incorporate; Book three: Then Let It Go). It includes passages and a scientific arc from Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature, and passages from Fan's early memoir, Knot: a Life

Past Events

Susan Kinsolving
Sunday, September 1
6:30PM - Free
From the Poetry Foundation:
Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, poet Susan Kinsolving earned a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts.

Kinsolving’s poetry uses dark humor, rhyme, and received form to explore loss, family, ephemera, and the natural world. In the New York Times, poet Carol Muske-Dukes praised its “powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and irony,” observing that “[i]t is compassion, tenderness for all the beauty and dross of the world, that turns her eye away from her own reflection and toward the enumeration of odd blessings.”

Kinsolving’s collections of poetry include The White Eyelash (2003) and Dailies & Rushes (1999), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her librettos have been performed by the Baroque Choral Guild and the Glimmerglass Opera. Kinsolving has won the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award as well as several international fellowships. She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Connecticut, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Noepe Center for Literary Arts presents
a reading with acclaimed writer: Naomi Jackson
Thursday, July 11th, 2019
5:30PM - Free

John Koethe & Fanny Howe
Sunday, July 14th, 2019
6:30PM - Free

John Koethe by Kevin J. Miyazaki

From the Poetry Foundation:
The author of several collections of poetry, including North Point North: Newand Selected (2002), Ninety-fifth Street (2009), ROTC Kills (2012), and The Swimmer (2016), John Koethe also publishes and teaches philosophy, focusing on the philosophy of language. Koethe began writing poetry as an undergraduate at Princeton University and earned his PhD from Harvard University.

Critic Andrew Yaphe calls Koethe “one of our foremost Romantic poets, an inheritor of the tradition of Stevens and Ashbery.” Koethe’s longer poems, occasionally formal or metered, show the influence of Elizabeth Bishop, William Wordsworth, Marcel Proust, Mark Strand, and Kenneth Koch. He regards his poetry “as music and I think of it in terms of movements and sounds and the way it flows rather than content.” As critic Robert Hahn notes, “Koethe’s poetry is ultimately lyrical, and its claim on us comes not from philosophy’s dream of precision but from the common human dream that our lives make some kind of sense. What Koethe offers is not ideas but a weave of reflection, emotion, and music; what he creates is art—a bleak, harrowing art in all it chooses to confront, but one whose rituals and repetitions contain the hope of renewal.”

Koethe received the Kingsley Tufts Award for Falling Water (1997), the Frank O’Hara Award for Domes (1973), and the Bernard F. Connors Award. His poetry has been included in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. He has been granted fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also received a lifetime achievement award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Fanny Howe by Kim Jensen

From the Poetry Foundation:
Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. More than a subject or theme, the process of recording experience is central to Howe’s poetry. Her work explores grammatical possibilities, and its rhythms are generated from associative images and sounds.

She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacDowell Colony. Her Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2001 and 2005, Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2008 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.

Howe taught for almost 20 years in Boston, at MIT, Tufts University, and elsewhere, before taking a job at the University of California at San Diego, where she is professor emerita. In 2012 she was the inaugural visiting writer in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her papers are housed at Stanford University. She lives in Massachusetts.

Noepe Center for Literary Arts presents
a reading with novelist: Bret Anthony Johnson
Thursday, July 18th
5:30PM - Free

Noepe Center for Literary Arts presents
a reading with poet: Justen Ahren
Thursday, July 25th
5:30PM - Free

Justen Ahren
Sunday, May 19th, 2019
6:00PM - Free
A Machine For Remembering is former Martha's Vineyard Poet Laureate Justen Ahren's second collection of poetry. Three years in the making, the book includes black and white photographs from several trips to Europe to work with refugees and document the stories of refugees living in camps and elsewhere on the continent. This is a book of listening and witness to one of the defining human crises of our times.
From the author's website:
Justen Ahren is a poet, photographer, musician and writing workshop facilitator. He’s had two published collections of poetry, A Strange Catechism and A Machine for Remembering. His poems have been set to music by Grammy award-winning Composer Glen Roven, and Cuban composer Ileana Perez Valezquez, twice commissioned by Wendy Taucher Dance Theater Opera, and once by John Sims for his Afro Dixie Project. A Strange Catechism what made into a dramatic monologue and performed at The Yard, Chilmark and the poems and photos from A Machine for Remembering were turned into experimental theater and performed at Pathways Projects. In 2018, his poem was exhibited at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts as part of Consensus, Sally Taylor’s artist’s game of telephone.
His photographic projects have taken him all over the world. He focuses on stories retained in landscape, residual memories and witness. He’s photographed refugee routes and landing sites in Italy, and Greece, as well as landscapes along the Mexico-United States border where immigrants are crossing. His photos have appeared recently in the visual arts journals HokTok and Cold Mountain Review, and in Bitten, award-winning science writer Kris Newby’s book on the origins of Lyme Disease. He’s had one solo show at the Feldman Family Art Space.
In 2019, Ahren released his first album in 20 years (after 1996’s Remembering) The War for the Valley is a musical response to the Syrian refugee crises and the stories he heard while working with refugees in Greece.
Beyond making art out of his experiences and interests, Ahren enjoys helping other writers find their way to creative abundance. In 2007 I founded Noepe Center for Literary Arts to provide writers with time and space to write. In 2013 he started the Italy Writing Retreat in Orvieto, Italy, which he leads. Currently he is developing his Enwritenment brand, workshops and online courses which guide writers as they establish a consistent writing practice.

Ahren was West Tisbury, Massachusetts Poet Laureate from 2013-2016 and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts Poet Laureate from 2017-2019.

Bill Hayes

Billy Collins
Sunday, June 9th, 2019
6:30PM in the Art Barn's Francine Kelly Gallery - $25
Read about Billy's visit here from the Vineyard Gazette

From the Poetry Foundation:
Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself.

Collins was born in 1941 in New York City. He earned a BA from the College of the Holy Cross, and both an MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. In 1975 he co-founded the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute in Florida, and a faculty member at the State University of New York - Stonybrook.

Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. In 2002, as U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. The reading was in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington D.C.

Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. A Publishers Weekly critic applauded the collection’s “strange and wonderful [images]” but believed that the poems—which are often “constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor”—” rarely induce an emotional reaction.” In contrast, reviews of Collins’s subsequent work regularly laud his ability to connect with readers. Discussing Picnic, Lightning (1998)and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995), John Taylor noted that Collins’s skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) was the first Collins collection published outside the U.S. It selected work from his previous four books and was met with great acclaim in the U.K. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence,” and A.L. Kennedy described the volume as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent and darkly funny.” Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems(2001), the U.S. version of Collins’s selected, had a tumultuous journey to print. The story, which garnered a front-page slot in the New York Times, originally cast Collins’s first publishers, the University of Pittsburgh Press, in an unfair light, accusing them of refusing to grant rights for poems requested by Random House for inclusion in Sailing Alone Around the Room. However, it later emerged that Random House had begun to produce the book without first securing rights from Pitt Poetry Press, a highly unusual move for a major publishing house to make. Dennis Loy Johnson reported on the controversy for Salon, noting that “ultimately it was Random House, not Pitt, that chose to delay the publication of Collins’ selected volume.” The battle between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press was public and uncharacteristic of the sleepy world of poetry publishing. When Sailing Alone Around the Room was finally published, in 2001, it was met with enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales.

Collins’s next books Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry(2005), Ballistics (2008), Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), Aimless Love (2013), and The Rain in Portugal (2016) have continued his sales streak by offering more poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination…to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. However, many readers find Collins a source of warmth, wit and surprisingly sure technique, and reviewers have consistently noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag has discussed Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.”

Poet Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

Summer Solstice Celebration
Monday, June 17th, 2019
6:00PM - Free
Margaret Emerson will be hosting an evening of poetry readings on our outdoor stage to celebrate summer solstice. Bring your own lawn chair and refreshments. Donations welcome.
Featured Poets: Jill Jupen, Christopher Legge,
Clark Myers, Donald Nitchie, Fan Ogilvie,
Annette Sandrock, Claudia Taylor
Dance by: Jesse Keller Jason
Music by: Mark Alan Lovewell
Fire Ceremony by: Carole Vandal