She feels connection with a flower 
that floats unplanted,
without soil or roots, a ghost,

with a fragile existence,
choosing to remain unseen, 
content to be found 

opening its white petals 
like leaves of a sacred book,
more air than matter.

She is not the kind
who prefers solitude,

still, like the Ghost Orchid
she finds herself floating
between before and after,
waiting, not to be found
but to find for herself
a place for new roots.
ost Orchids

Several years ago, a friend told me that she was she was reading The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, book which tells the story of the poaching by plant dealer of rare orchids called Ghost Orchids that he planned to clone and sell. I had never seen a Ghost Orchid, did not know that they existed. I looked up the plant and became fascinated with this flower that is aptly named because its white flowers have a vaguely spectral appearance, and they seem to hover without roots in the forest due to an illusion created by the leafless plant. Thus, the orchid became the metaphor for my book - Ghost Orchids. The first poem of the book defines this metaphor. The "She" of the poem is, of course, the author who prefers not to use the first person in this book. 

    
She Introduces Herself

She feels connection with a flower 
that floats unplanted,
without soil or roots, a ghost,

with a fragile existence,
choosing to remain unseen, 
content to be found 

opening its white petals 
like leaves of a sacred book,
more air than matter.

She is not the kind
who prefers solitude,

still, like the Ghost Orchid
she finds herself floating
between before and after,
waiting, not to be found
but to find for herself
a place for new roots.
 
The poems tell the story of changes in my life, my husband's death, my decision to move from Vermont, our home for 25 years to Northampton, Mass, where my youngest daughter and her family live.  In the first section, I introduce the speaker's sense of loss and stagnation, her inability to write, her grief for those who have died, in the second, she begins to fight off depression, and in the third she explores a series of changes and what they mean. The fourth struggles with her role as ghost orchid, and in the fifth she begins "to find new songs (poems), the comfort of color, the sixth section, and in the seventh she has found new roots, a new home- 
as in the last poem she writes:

            her poems are
            a scroll of written worlds
            of yesterdays and tomorrows, 
            she can keep these roots. 

 This book is a story of a loss and change, of leaving a place I loved, the loss of my husband,  of the home we built together, of how leaving behind the world where I belonged for so long, was a terrible loss, of how difficult it is for one who is now 84 , to begin a new life, to belong to a new community, to make new friends, to feel at home. 

It is the writing of this book of poems that has helped me to find comfort and challenge in my new roots, the new built from the world of my past. 

​

Travel has been a significant part of 2019 for me. In February I spent a week in Culebra, Puerto Rico on a women's writers retreat led by Patricia Lee Lewis, a week that was so fruitful that we are doing it again in 2020.
 
My other travel has been birding with daughter Sarah - in Nome Alaska in June when on our way to Alaska we spent two days in Seattle with my brother Fred and wife Dee and family, a special treat. This fall we went on a Cornell Institute of Ornithology trip to Little Saint Simon Island in October, and I joined a trip with friends to Monhegan Island with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, where we saw lots of birds and a huge fall out of Monarch Butterflies.  
 
All of these events were wonderful, but I've saved the best for last - two weeks with my beloved college room-mate on an Overseas Adventure trip, Hidden Gems of the Dalmatian Coast and Greece. We traveled in a small ship with about 50 passengers - were gone from August 6 to 24 and had a fabulous time.  
 
Oh yes, I should add that as we do every summer, Laura and Dan an I rented a house on Lake Fairly Vermont for a week in July and plan to do this next summer as well.
 
Writing events included a Friday morning workshop with Ellen Dore Watson, and several with poet and fiction writer Patricia Lee Lewis including the ones in Puerto Rico. I also participated in 30 Days in November, a fund raiser for The Center for New Americans for the second year.  Each participant writes a poem for 30 days.  This event raised over $60,000.
 
I am also about to finish a manuscript for my fourth book of poems which I hope Does Madres will publish - they did a wonderful job with my last book. On that more when it happens. Fingers crossed.
 
Oh, yes. I'm in good health with the usual ups and downs of growing old that I ignore as much as I can.
 
 And Christmas?  Amy, Michael and Annabel are coming from London,
Emily and her friend Jeff from New York, and Sarah and family will join Laura and Dan and me at the Katz/Berger family for a Northampton Christmas.
 
To all my dear friends and family, my wishes for a joyful Christmas and a Happy New Year. I miss you all.
 
Phyllis

Born out of the course I taught with Donald Sheehan  (see my blog “ Finding Poetry,”) Deming Holleran, one of our students, and I formed a poetry workshop. This monthly workshop met regularly for twenty-one years.  We often gathered at Deming’s Hanover home and named our group Still Puddle because as Deming told us, the Holleran lap pool was “puddle -sized compared  to the real “Still Pond” that was her mother’s. During our years as a poetry group we published two books of four poems each from our group: The Still Puddle Poets 2006, and  The Still Puddle Poets New Poems, 2008,  and many of us have also produced books of our own.  Later we met at my Norwich home or at Nancy Crumbine’s.
 
The format of the workshop was to send our poems out before we met, so that would already have responded to them.  This worked very well, though inevitably some of us did not have time to send our poems before the meeting. Still, when poems were sent before we met, each of us was able to read a poem that we had already created, and others would have already commented on them, and this made for a very good critique for each poet.  This is my favorite type of workshop!
 
Sadly, as time went by, our lives changed.  I needed  to look after my husband and Deming was in Florida during the winter. We met when we could, but when my husband died, and I decided to move to Northampton, it was clear that Still Puddle would not continue. As Deming commented of the last of Still Puddle,  we had had “a good run for our money.”

​ 
When I was six, I wrote a poem about a young medieval knight, and my teacher said I was a born poet, but that was the only poem I wrote for sixty years.
 
I grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. Years later I learned that Donald Hall had lived on the next street. I never met him then, though we did buy our milk from his father. My father was a professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale; my mother had been a professional dancer from age six to eighteen, when they were married and she gave up her career.  She danced when she could, but had lost the passion that made her dance. My father was the head of our house, and she quickly learned that he was and would always be tyrannical.   In high school my English teacher introduced me to T.S. Eliot – I loved his work, his poems awoke me to what poetry could be, but I didn’t dare to believe I could write poems like his. I could read poems and enjoy them, but that was all.
 
In my college days as a English major I met all the English greats, from Chaucer on, buried myself in the language and music of their works, loved the sounds and colors of poetic language, but never wrote a poem.
 
In graduate school I studied Homer , Vergil, Horace and wrote a dissertation about the great Greek writer of odes, Pindar, but again was  never moved to write a poem of my own,  though I had a much better sense of how poems were created. I taught Latin and Greek, co -authored a book for teachers of Ovid, loved digging deep into how ancient poetry worked, came to understand and appreciate the ancient poets ,but did not feel a calling that I knew  those writers had.
 
The door to writing my own poems was waiting for me although I did not know it. When we moved to Vermont, I became  an adjunct at Dartmouth College, teaching  Latin for the Classics Department, and issues pertinent to ancient and modern women in Dartmouth’s Women’s and Gender Studies Department.   When Donald Sheehan, an adjunct in the English department, and  also Director of The Frost Place in Franconia, asked me to teach a course with him on ancient and modern poetry, I joined him for the first of several courses for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. Out of our first seminar came a call from some of the students for a poetry workshop, and as Don’s plate was already too full, I agreed to sponsor it. This workshop met monthly, sharing poems ahead of our meeting, and giving each poem a full critique. We published two books of our poems, and stayed together as a group for many years.   To my surprise, I began write poetry then and could not stop. The door so long closed for me had opened.  I had found my passion, and albeit the call came late it came fully, and owns me now in the years I have left, each day grateful for the gift of  having the time to live fully the joy of  find the words and music that are poems.
 
 

On November 12, 2017 I attended an event celebrating the first AbelMeeropol Social Justice Award (see the blog written by Ellen Meeropol, President of the Straw Dogs Writers Guild).  The event, included a stunning performance by Pamela Means of Abel Meeropol's incredible "Strange Fruit and a reading of her powerful and moving poems by Patricia Smith.  I urge you to visit Ellen Meeropol's blog:
http://www.strawdogwriters.org/social-justice-writing/blog-ellen-meeropol.  Out of this amazing evening came the following poem.
 
 
Voicing Social Justice
         For Patricia Smith
 
It doesn’t grow on its own,
takes more than a village,
thrives best when fed
by concern, by passion
that cannot be denied,
by voices that are so loud,
so true, so angry that they
rouse what is sleeping
in us, make our hearts
beat faster, our breath
deeper, voices that insist
we feel the pain, torture
terror, of those denied
tolerance and respect,
those who day and night
live with fear that will
only go away when all of us
acknowledge that we must
add our voices to theirs,
letting ours ring out
with the same conviction
same passion, same resistance,
never quieting until social justice
is a given.
 
Phyllis Beck Katz ©

​Moving On
 
It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog.  I have moved to Northampton and am slowly joining a new and wonderful community of writers. This week I will participate in a six week Tuesday evening poetry workshop held by Janet MacFadyen, poet and Managing Editor of Slate Roof Press. I am very much looking forward to this event which heavy snow and ice has postponed twice.
 
As the months lengthened since my husband’s death, I gradually began to touch my grief and write from it.  You will find three new poems on my website that emerged from that deep well:
“Predators,” “Fall Out at Sabine Woods,” and “Meditation on a Boat of Arrows.” I have also been writing in response to the great tragedy of the endless thousands of refugees driven from their lands.  Here is the poem:
 
Like a Murmuration of Starlings
for Helen MacDonald

Listen to the desperate tread
of  thousands of feet fleeing 
chaos to live in other lands   
locked out, arrested, or sent back.
Listen as their numbers multiply
and their murmur builds and rises

just as a flock of starlings
flying together for safety 
from their predators
in one great swirling cloud
a darkly murmuring planet
seems a living, pulsing
alien presence 

till landing one by one 
each is transformed again
to single birds, refugees,
whose needs are ours – 
freedom from fear, food,                      
a place to safely sleep,
where murmurs slow and soften 
like lightly falling rain.

©Phyllis Beck Katz
 
I remember at one workshop in Vermont a participant stated bluntly about a poem I had shared that he did not like political poems. No doubt he would have said it again about this  poem.  I was quite surprised at his reaction as my mind rapidly scanned poetry over the ages that has explored and continues to examine the political – I’m thinking of Sophocles, Aeschylus, of Vergil, of Dante, of Whitman, of Ginsburg, of Maxine Kumin, of Adrienne Rich, and of so many more poets who explored the political in their poetry.  One of the most memorable  books I have read is Carolyn Forche’s  anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century of Witness, Norton, 1995, a collection of poems that range from the Armenian Genocide (1909-1918)  to the struggle for democracy in China (1911-1991).
Yesterday, February, 12, 2017, the New York Times Book Review featured an article by Tim Parks, Roving Eye with the following subtitle: “Is the literary world becoming more political? He argues that “it is the enthusiasm, the militancy that is disturbing, not the goal” and concludes with these words: “Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.”  I would argue that there will always be excessively melodramatic political poems but at the same time where will always be remarkably well-crafted and moving works, literature written for and with the passion that comes from the heart, no “getting off on it” involved.
 
 
 

Through the long days of fall and early winter, I watched my husband of 56 years struggle once more to defeat the lymphoma that had plagued him for 14 years.  As the weeks passed we came to understand that there were no more treatments that could save him, that he was too weak and tired to go on, that he was ready to let go.   He died on January 25, 2016. 
 
I am still not ready to write new poems, though I can feel them murmuring deep inside me.  Today I offer as a memorial to him  two of my published poems:  “Losing”, one of his favorites, and “Curriculum Vitae at Seventy Four,” written six years ago, but as accurate an reflection of how we had lived our lives together as it was when I wrote it.
 
Losing
 
The yellow eye of a bright blue
forget-me-not in my garden
looked up at me today,
reproaching me for absent-mindedness
I planted it last year, and I’d forgotten
where it lay.  That look is haunting me.
Yesterday I lost my iPod, the day
before, some pills I thought
were safely stored. 
And last week, a book
I knew I’d bought and put upon a shelf
vanished.  Words too are so much harder
to retrieve.  I know I had them,
but they no longer
come on cue, waiting until I think
they’re really gone and then
emerging. And yet forgetfulness
is just a symptom. A while ago
I lost another dog
to old age and disease,
a timid Springer Spaniel
who barked at bikes and boxes
but no one every feared.
That isn’t all. I’ve lost a younger brother
and a much beloved friend.
That losing comes with loving
is, I know, a given.
Still, loving is a habit
that I cannot break – a bird
whose nest is plundered
every year, I build again
in the same fragile place.
 
 
 
Curriculum Vitae at Seventy-Four
 
Did I dream when we were young
and full of hope, we’d always dance all night,
work all day without a sign of weariness?
 
Our yesterdays have vanished
as quickly as the breath of summer
I felt this morning brush my lips as I awoke.
 
What we have done in all our years
is printed on pages
soon forgotten like dusty books
aging on shelves that no one ever visits.
 
But in early dew to have traced the tracks
of the fox’s journey through the meadow,
pattern of turkeys’ passage in the snow,
to have seen a shower of Perseids,
 
to  have seen the glow of Northern Lights,
have sat beneath the reddening maple tree
beside the pond, listening to the silence
of leaves floating on its surface,
 
to have watched the growing
of our children’s children
and to have held each other through times
of pain and darkness
 
will have been enough.
 
 
Both poems are printed in my book All Roads go Where They Will,
Antrim House Press, 2010

"The Vermont Poet Laureates - (From the Library of Congress Website)
​
According to a February 7, 2003 press release from the Vermont Arts Council, "Robert Frost was declared Poet Laureate in 1961 [upon the adoption of Joint House Resolution 54 by the General Assembly]. In 1988 Governor Kunin re-established the position. (Reference: Executive Order No 69, 1988) Galway Kinnell was the first State Poet named for a term of 4 years as a result of this order in 1989." The Arts Council further notes that "the four-year appointment will be made by the Governor based on the recommendation of a distinguished panel. The panel will make its recommendation based upon how well the nominated poet meets the following criteria:

• The Vermont Poet Laureate is a person who is a resident of Vermont; (Vermont being his/her primary residence)
• whose poetry manifests a high degree of excellence;
• who has produced a critically acclaimed body of work;
• who has a long association with Vermont.

"The poet being nominated must agree to participate from time to time in official ceremonies and readings at the Vermont State House and other locations.
"The poet selected shall receive an honorarium of $1000 provided by the Vermont Arts Council."
The position was known under the title of "State Poet" from 1988-2007. The position was redesignated "Poet Laureate" by Gov. Jim Douglas at Ruth Stone’s investiture in 2007.
Vermont  Laureates: 
Chard deNiord, (November 1, 2015 -November 2016)
Sydney Lea (November 4, 2011-November 1, 2015)
Ruth Stone (July 26, 2007-July 2011)
Grace Paley (March 5, 2003-July 25, 2007)
Ellen Bryant Voigt (1999-2002)
Louise Gluck (1994-1998)
Galway Kinnell (1989-1993)
Robert Frost (1961-1963)

Sydney Lea has just competed his four year term as Vermont Poet Laureate. During his tenure, he published he visited over 111 Vermont Public Libraries, gave readings all over the state, wrote a monthly column about poetry for The Valley News, produced several new books of poems and essays and encouraged and supported  numerous Vermont poets.  I  have greatly benefited from Syd Lea's generous review of my second book of poetry, Migrations,  and from his support and encouragement of the event I held to celebrate the publication of the essays of the late Donald Sheehan. I know there are many more local poets who have also been recipients of his encouragement and advice. 

​Among the number of Syd's poems that have touched me, one, that wonderfully  articulates the negative effect of literary theory on the appreciation and emotional response to a poem,  is "I Was Thinking of Beauty."  With the permission of the poet, I offer the poem in full below. 

I Was Thinking of Beauty     
                                                                                    _______for Gregory Wolfe
 
I’ve surrendered myself to Mingus’s Tijuana Moods
on my obsolete record machine, sitting quiet as I sat last night.
I was thinking of beauty then, how it’s faced grief since the day
that somebody named it. Plato; Aquinas; the grim rock tablets
that were handed down to Moses by Yahweh, with His famous stricture
on the graven image.  Last evening, I was there when some noted professor
 
in a campus town to southward addressed what he called, precisely,
The Issue of Beauty. Here was a person who seemed to believe
his learned jargon might help the poor because his lecture
would help put an end to the exploitations of capitalism –
which pays his wage at the ivied college through which he leads
the impressionable young, soon to be managers, brokers, bankers.
 
He was hard above all on poems, though after a brief appearance
poetry seemed to vanish. It was gone before I knew it.
The professor quoted, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, then chuckled.
He explained that such a claim led to loathsome politics.
I’m afraid he lost me.  Outside, the incandescent snow
of February sifted through the quad’s tall elm trees,
 
hypnotic.  Tonight as I sit alone and listen, the trumpet
on Tijuana Gift Shop lurches my heart with its syncopations.
That’s the rare Clarence Shaw, who vanished one day, though Mingus heard
he was teaching hypnosis somewhere. But back again to last evening:
I got to thinking of Keats composing and coughing, of Abbey Lincoln,
of Lorrain and Petrarch, of Callas and Isaac Stern.  I was lost
 
in memory and delight, terms without doubt nostalgic.
I summoned a dead logger friend’s description of cedar waxwings
on the bright mountain ash outside his door come middle autumn.
I remembered how Earl at ninety had called those verdigris birds
well-groomed little folks.  Which wasn’t eloquent, no,
but passion showed in the way Earl waved his work-worn hands
 
as he thought of beauty, which, according to our guest,
was opiate.  Perhaps. And yet I went on for no reason
to consider Maori tattoos: elaborate and splendid,
Jamaicans shaping Big Oil’s rusty abandoned barrels
to play on with makeshift mallets, toxic junk turning tuneful.
The poor you always have with you, said an even more famous speaker,
 
supreme narcotic dealer no doubt in our speaker’s eyes –
eyes that must never once have paused to behold a bird,
ears that deafened themselves to the song of that bird or any.
Beauty’s a drug, he insisted, from which we must wean the poor,
indeed must wean ourselves. But I was thinking of beauty
as  something that will return – here’s Curtis Porter’s sweet horn –
 
outlasting our disputations. I was thinking it had never gone.
 
copyright 2013. Sydney Lea. I Was Thinking of Beauty, Four Ways Books, 2013.