The Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA) is proud to host this Celebration of Curt Curtin’s Life and Poetry with Curt’s family and friends. In conjunction with this event, Curt’s wife (Dee O’Connor) has made a donation from his estate to establish an endowment to support an annual Curt Curtin Youth Poetry Award. This will further the mission of the WCPA by encouraging middle and high school students to pursue poetry. Should you wish to contribute to this endowment, please either mail your donation to WCPA, PO Box 804, Worcester, MA 01613 or make an online contribution at the WCPA website.

Copies of Curt’s poetry collections will be available for sale at the celebration, with all proceeds contributed to the endowment. The WCPA was founded in 1971 by Dr. Samuel Bachrach and Professor Michael True and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1972. With over fifty years of service to
poetry, it remains one of the longest-running non-profit poetry organizations in the United States. The Mission of the Worcester County Poetry Association is to develop, cultivate, and steward an inclusive creative space for the literary arts in Worcester County and to celebrate the talent within it. Some examples of that effort include:

1. Celebrating the rich literary history and creative energy of Central Massachusetts
   through public readings, workshops, festivals, scholarly conferences, and other
   programs.
2. Publishing the literary journal, The Worcester Review.
3. Collaborating with libraries, bookstores, colleges and universities, museums,
   churches, schools, community centers, businesses, and cultural organizations to
   promote poetry events.

As a parent or caregiver of a Worcester Public School student, you have a unique understanding of how your children learn to read, how well they read, and their reading habits. Worcester Education Collaborative (WEC) is very interested in finding out more about your thoughts on this topic. 

We have created a short online survey to collect this information. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey before Wednesday, January 15, using the following link or QR code:

passed away on November 28th 2024. We share this news with the heaviest of hearts, and will mourn his loss for a long long time. Please visit his obituary to learn more about what an incredible human and poet he was.

Bold Magazine invites you to meet Bruja Thevillain

Local Artist Linda Littleton of Webster, MA is the featured artist of the month November 1st-30th at Booklovers’ Gourmet, 72 East Main Street, Webster, MA. Her show will feature 20+ small original ink block prints of scenes, animals, plants and boats found in and around water (fresh or salt) including Fish, Heron, Beaches, Boats, Lighthouses, Eagles and more to treat your eyes to bright impressions of inks pressed from carvings on blocks. A public meet and greet with the artist will take place on Saturday, November 9th from 2-4 p.m. The show may be viewed during normal business hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-5, Wednesday 10-6. For more information call 508-949-6232.

Ink Block Printing has been traced back to 617 AD in China as a method to print designs, letters and art on paper, cloth, pottery and other surfaces.  Over centuries, this type of printing using a carved impression in a block of wood, linoleum, rubber etc. has evolved into a popular art for printing cards and art on paper and materials.

Linda Littleton is well known for her watercolors and acrylics, as the Webster Lake Artist with displays currently at Point Breeze and permanent work at Hometown Bank as well as numerous pieces in lake homes.  All of her sales at Point Breeze result in a donation to the Webster/Dudley Food Share through AJ Alkire.

She has a home studio, conducts paint nights and does commission work as well, working in all media, sizes and subject matter.  She is still an active member of the Rhode Island Water Color Society in Pawtucket having won 2 awards this year, one watercolor accepted into the National Show.

Linda previously taught for 36 years in Burlington and Framingham before retiring here and now lives with her forever partner John Lefebvre (and rescue dog Darla) on Webster Lake.  She has received numerous awards and recognition in Milford Ma where she resided for 26 years was head of the Arts Counsel there, Cultural Committee chair and president of the Milford Artist Guild, officer in the Blackstone Valley Artist Guild and displayed in many local restaurants/galleries in central Massachusetts in the past.  She was a member of the Cape Cod Artist Association, painting and displaying watercolors along the Cape/North Shore art venues and galleries.

###

A Poetry Book Signing & Open Mic with Alan Ira Gordon featuring “Pittsburgh and Other Poems”, will take place on Saturday, November 2nd at 2 p.m. at Booklovers’ Gourmet, 72 East Main Street, Webster, MA. To sign up for the Open Mic portion of the event, please call 508-949-6232 or email deb@bookloversgourmet.com.

About the book: Sometimes a sense of place is easy to identify and understand. In those instances, it can be a physical city, town, neighborhood or just a piece of property. Other times it can be a point in time, either past, present or future. And in yet other instances it can be a more exotic or alien sense of place, perhaps intergalactic, or multi-universe, even an alternate reality version of a well-known place and time, existing at a quantum point or merely within the minds of writers and readers.

All of the poems in this book explore in poetic form various ideas of sense of place, whether physical locations, points in time or ideas of place that could only exist (for now, at least) within the creative realms of science fiction, fantasy and/or horror.

Alan Ira Gordon is an urban planning professor at Worcester State University. His poetry publications include Analog Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and he’s a frequent contributor to Star*Line, the quarterly journal of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). Alan’s poetry has received eight Rhysling Award nominations, two Dwarf Star Award nominations and an Analog Magazine year’s best nomination (Second Place Award). He has three published poetry collections, Planet Hunter, The Doggo Book, and the just-released Pittsburgh & Other Poems (Hiraeth Books). Planet Hunter was nominated for the SFPA Elgin Award.

Alan guest-edited Issue #24 of Eye To The Telescope, the online publication of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). His poetry, short stories, and articles have been published in various genre magazines and anthologies, a list of which can be found on his website at www.alaniragordon.com.

We here at the WCPA, in partnership with The Poet’s Cauldron and Bedlam Books, are very proud to announce our newest poetry contest, FoxFest. FoxFest will celebrate the power of the spoken word in a Slam-style competition. Registration Required. FoxFest is named after beloved Worcester Poet Richard Fox and is sponsored by the Fox Family. To learn more about Richard, read below.

Richard Fox sought three-decker rainbows, fluent scout dogs, and illuminating espresso. When he was not writing about rock ’n roll or youthful transgressions, his poems focused on cancer from the patient’s point of view drawing on hope, humor, and unforeseen gifts.

He was the author of seven poetry collections: TIME BOMB (2013), wandering in puzzle boxes (2015), You’re my favorite horse (2017), embracing the burlesque of collateral damage (2020), Let sleep bless our arrival (2022), Once I was born to live (2022), DOUBLE CHAI: Poems for My Zady & Miscellany (2023)plus a chapbook: The Complete Uncle Louie Poems (2017). DOUBLE CHAI: Poems for My Zady & Miscellany, chronicled His grandfather’s life in “The New Country.” By relating these tales, the author also told his own story. Included in the collection are poems about heroes and living with cancer.

Richard, the 2017 Frank O’Hara Prize winner, always seconded Stanley Kunitz’s motion that people in Worcester are “provoked to poetry.

One Last Loop

by Richard Fox

Bailey Dog,
my shadow. Senses
pain, weakness.
Mirrors angst.

Cuddles.
His back, my hip.
Alert to coughing,
addled breaths.

Plan my funeral
procession. Measure
distances from service
to burial to reception.

Which shul shortens
the stress of riding
in grief? Want my family
unburdened by silence.

Choose a rabbi.
Music. Readings. Poems.
Ask difficult favors
that can never be repaid:

eulogies, pallbearers, obituary,
mourners to hold my loved ones
when dirt and gravel
strike wood.

Time is lost in voids.
Mortality, the inescapable escort,
sits next to me
in the backseat.

Bailey has diabetes.
We are old, ill males. Waiting.
Blind, he will guide me
through darkness.

To watch a recording of Richard Fox’s last Thirsty Lab Zoom Reading, please Click Here.

The Worcester County Poetry Association is now accepting applications for the 2025 Dan Lewis Fellowship to provide an aspiring Worcester County poet the means to fulfill a need in that poet’s development that might otherwise go unmet. The 2025 Fellowship award will be $2,500. The application deadline is November 1, 2024.

The online application form and details can be found at this link: The Dan Lewis Fellowship – Worcester County Poetry Association.

IN CONVERSATION WITH MARTÍN ESPADA

Martín Espada is an acclaimed poet, editor, essayist, and translator. He is also one of four individuals being honored this year with the Governor’s Award in the Humanities. Espada’s 2021 book of poetry, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry. We recently sat down with Espada at his home in Shelburne Falls to ask him about his craft, how the humanities intersect with his work, and how our present moment calls for “poems of love.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Martín, thank you for sitting down with us. Why don’t we start at the beginning. When did you first hear about the work that Mass Humanities was doing in Massachusetts?

I remember Mass Humanities from the eighties. I attended Northeastern University Law School in Boston and graduated from there in 1985. I went to work for an organization called META, Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy, a nonprofit, public interest law firm specializing in the rights of linguistic and cultural minorities. Camilo Pérez-Bustillo was my fellow attorney and close friend at META.

We decided to stage several poetry conferences and festivals geared towards a community nobody was serving—the Latino community. Camilo discovered the existence of David Tebaldi at Mass Humanities. And David Tebaldi came through big time.

For the first time, we had a budget. David Tebaldi was the first person with any state agency who recognized what we were trying to do. And we did it. Then we went back to the well for more money. We began our “cultural advocacy” with a focus on Puerto Rican literature and political struggle, then expanded to the Latino community and communities of color in Greater Boston.

When I saw that this award came from Mass Humanities, what clicked was the memory of David Tebaldi and those grants he gave us to do our work in the eighties.

And you were writing during this time as well.

My life as a poet and my life as a lawyer weaved in and out. I wrote my first poem when I was fifteen, stopped writing, picked it up again, went to college, and had the canon aimed at me. That was the end of my literary education.

The wise old men in my life, such as my father, Frank Espada, a community organizer and documentary photographer, and my professor Herbert Hill at the University of Wisconsin, where I got my undergraduate degree in history, said, “You’ve got to go to law school. You’ve got to be a lawyer. Poetry is nice, but what are you going to do with it?”

I was the first one in my family to go to college. We didn’t know there were alternatives. My mother once pulled me aside and asked, “What’s a graduate student? I thought once you graduate, you’re not a student anymore.” We had never heard of an MFA. Therefore, I went to law school. I made the social and political commitment I wanted to make to my community by being a lawyer.

I never gave up on the poetry. I published my first book right before I went to law school and my second book right after I got out of law school, because you do nothing when you’re in law school but law school.

I came to lead a double life. Eventually, the Boston media picked up on it: first The Tab, then The Globe. People were astonished that a poet-lawyer could possibly exist: My god! A poet-lawyer! It’s like a creature out of Greek mythology, with the body of a lawyer and the head of a poet. One of those identities would have to absorb the other one.

From META, I moved to Su Cliníca Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, across the Tobin Bridge from Boston: eviction defense, no-heat cases, rats and roaches, crazy landlords.

Legal services money is soft money, like any other social services, subject to cutbacks. The Reagan administration despised the federal Legal Services Corporation, where we got much of our funding, so there was a constant battle in Congress. We found other sources, but eventually, our budget was slashed. My position was consolidated with another lawyer’s position.

I could have bumped him because I had seniority, but Nelson Azócar was a friend of mine who’d come to this country from Chile after he talked his way out of being shot by a firing squad. That’s the gift of gab. Anybody who can do that should be a lawyer. I started looking. I wanted the life of a poet, whatever that meant. I ended up teaching at UMass Amherst in fall 1993.

UMass was looking for somebody who had one book. I had four. I made the transition into teaching there in 1993.

How do you see the public humanities intersecting with your work, both as an educator and poet?

Let’s take a shining example: the Clemente Course in the Humanities. I knew the guy who started it in 1995: the writer Earl Shorris. He was writing about my work in The New York Times Book Review back in the eighties. I wrote him a thank you note. That’s how we met.

I remember when he came up with the idea. And strangely enough, it eventually circled all the way back to me. I read my poems for the Clemente Course in Worcester through James Cocola and the Clemente Course in Brockton through Corey Dolgon. Corey and I tried to make it happen in person, but we ended up doing it on Zoom twice during the COVID era. This was more than a matter of serving the Brockton community—this was a matter of serving that community during the pandemic.

I’m still impressed with the vision of the Clemente Course, still impressed with the students. I’m deeply gratified when I’m able to connect in that way. Poetry should go where it’s least expected. Poetry should go where it allegedly does not belong. Poetry should go to a so-called “non-traditional” audience which is, in fact, the most traditional audience of all. Over and over, I’ve seen it work. The Clemente Course is an excellent example, but you need a big soul like Corey Dolgon to build that bridge between people.

On your website, the description for your book Floaters suggests “Espada knows that times of hate call for poems of love.” Can you speak a little more about this notion?

When I say “times of hate call for poems of love,” I’m thinking of “Floaters,” the title poem of my last book, about two Salvadoran migrants who came to be known simply as “Óscar and Valeria,” father and daughter, who drowned crossing the Río Grande. A photograph of their bodies went viral, sparking outrage, sparking grief and also sparking “trutherism.” A post in the “I’m 10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group charged that the photograph was faked. Between the photograph and this Facebook page expressing the racist bile of certain members of the Border Patrol, I had to respond. That’s how the poem came about.

“Floaters,” by the way, is a term used by certain members of the Border Patrol to describe those who drown crossing over. The hate is apparent.

When I say “times of hate,” it should be obvious we’re surrounded by hate. What do I mean, then, that you respond with poems of love? The first part is to perceive a poem like “Floaters” as a love poem that is motivated by a sense of compassion and a sense of connection that we associate with love, not romantic love, but the love we may share for our fellow human beings.

I also mean it on a more literal level, too. Times like this call for love in any iteration. There are also love poems in that book.

What is the role of that process of finding love or connection in this landscape?

I believe that poetry humanizes, that poetry can provide the kind of intimate human details so often missing when we talk about political or social issues. No matter where we are on the spectrum politically, it’s often reduced to abstraction, reduced to statistics, reduced to categories. Poetry, instead, insists upon the image, all five senses on paper. We’re insisting on giving history eyes, ears, nose, mouth, voice, insisting on looking into the hands and saying, “this, too, is human.” And telling the stories.

I am a narrative poet. This is my vehicle, my mechanism for telling stories. But I tell certain kinds of stories. That’s my effort to humanize the dehumanized. Recognizing that, I’m realistic. I’m up against this tremendous machine of dehumanization that works tirelessly into the night.

Why narrative poetry?

I work from an aesthetic of clarity. I intend to communicate. It may not look like some of the poetry you’ve seen before, poetry you gave up on. Believe me, I gave up on the same poetry. That’s one of the reasons I landed in law school. But I intend to communicate. There are enough barriers that I need to leap, whether they are cultural, linguistic, political, social, historical. I don’t need to be coy about it, or “too clever by half,” as the saying goes. I want to speak in such a way that I’m understood.

Martín, thank you for your time, and congratulations on receiving the Governor’s Award in the Humanities this year.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WORCESTER,
Massachusetts
PO Box 804, Worcester, MA
01613
worcestercountypoetry.org
wcpaboard@yahoo.com

The Worcester County Poetry Association is pleased to announce the 2024 Rain Poets and their poems! This year’s project has expanded from our typical thirteen to include an additional twelve poems written by school-aged poets in Worcester County. A team of volunteers will paint these poems at bus stops around Worcester and at the schools of the winning student poets using Rainworks’ hydrophobic paint and stencils as large as 18 square feet. The poems will be visible to pedestrians in Worcester during inclement weather throughout the summer. We will prepare our stencils and paint over the last weekend of August, with a rain date of September 13th-15th.

2024 Rain Poets, in no particular order

Lea Bisceglia with “A Walk in the Woo”
Laura Solis-Matthew with “[tripping over cracks]”
JE. rome with “Dear Worcester,”
Lori Cornelius with “[Bumpy sidewalks]”
Emma Couillard with “Goldenrod”
Sarah Chestnut with “I turn back, umbrellaless”
Rosanna Garcia and Leticia Garcia Bradford with “Aging in Place”
Pamela Gemme with “Worcester Pouring Rain”
Edward Beale with “You Belong”
Maia Campbell with “When you asked me to go”
Elizabeth Bacon with “Cherry Blossom Snow”
Marissa Eleni Lourake with “[Bridges and benches – Elm Park]”
Fadi Yousef with “Quinsigamond Lake”

Grades 9-12

Asa Oywech with “The Divine Voices of Worcester”
Leandro Jean-Pierre with “[Growing up in Worcester’s embraces]”
Aidan Moon with “A place in my heart”

Grades 6-8

Isabella Frauches with “[I feel each drop of water soaking my clothes]”
Dylan Stankus with “The Summer Side”
Jaryn Hazard with “Nature of Spring”

Grades 3-5

Cyrus Acquista with “Busy days and relaxing nights”
Lily Joh Chestnut with “Peace”
Finn Horan with “[MCAS buy the gum]”

Grades PK-2

Carmyne Acquista with “Burncoat neighborhood”
Joel Cummings with “[Out my window I see birds;]”
Noah Cummings with “[I like nature camp]”

2024 Rain Poetry Honorable Mentions

Maia Campbell with “Bancroft’s Notes”
Elizabeth Bacon with “Treat Athlete”
Peter Horan with “[Cone Island’s hot dogs]” (6th Grade)

The selected poems will be painted around the City of Worcester on the sidewalks, primarily at bus stops distributed equitably throughout the city’s districts. This year’s locations will be posted on our website, on Facebook, and our Instagram account, so please consult these resources when organizing your rainy-day scavenger hunt to try to visit all twenty-five before the sun dries the pavement.

We encouraged submissions from poets of all ages, walks of life, and in any language, that spoke to the poets’ experience of Worcester. The poems were selected in blind readings by a panel of judges that included Worcester Poet Laureate Oliver de la Paz, WCPA Board Member and 2022 Rain Poet Tarique Cooper, Clemente Graduate Walter Molina, 2021 Rain Poet and Worcester Writers’ Collective director Brett Iarrobino, and 2023 Frank O’Hara Prize winning poet Rebecca Cross. The 2024 Rain Poets will be invited to read their poems at a ceremony open to the public this fall.

Should you wish to participate in painting these poems around Worcester and attend the reading later this fall, please contact our Rain Poetry Team at rainpoems@irenaworcestercountypoetry-org.

About the Worcester County Poetry Association

The Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA) was founded in 1971 with a threefold mission:
celebrate the rich literary history and creative energy of Central Massachusetts through public
readings, workshops, festivals, scholarly conferences, and other programs; support the publication of
the literary journal, The Worcester Review; and collaborate with libraries, bookstores, colleges and
universities, museums, churches, schools, community centers, businesses, and a variety of cultural
organizations to promote poetry events. The WCPA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.