Dorothy Derifield's work has received an editor's award from Plainsongs, and has appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly and Harvard Magazine, among others. She is the director of the long-running literary series Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain and is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets. She is the author of the chapbook, The River and the Lakes.
She lives in Roslindale and teaches poetry groups at Sherrill House, a nursing home in Jamaica Plain.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
FRACTAL MATH, A QUIZ
If a train leaves Grand Central heading west at 6 am
and a train leaves Union Station heading east,
which train will you be on? Show all
equations.
If your window is 30 inches wide, 50 inches
long, and your yellow curtains are too short,
what do you see from the window? The mailman
passing or the back where the land slides
away from you? Subtract trees from sky.
Add rain.
If you weigh 150 lbs. but every pound you ever lost
is added to your weight, will the moon pull you
roughly over the rocks, leave you bleeding
among her other lovers?
Carolyn Gregory’s poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Main Street Review, Bellowing Ark, Art Times,andSeattle Review. She is a classical music and theatre writer for Stylus. A book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009. Another book, Scenario, will come out in 2011.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
Taking Measure
Last night late, we drove past the river, shimmering silver under moonlight, a long stretch beside a dark road. You turned on the CD player, Visions of Johanna drawing out its long melodic line about beauty and belief. I told you I can't cry. You changed the music to the blues.
Earlier, we sat watching the play, drawn in by lunatics held in a cage. One spoke to noone and another banged against restraints.
On stage, good and evil warred between two men, one bent on sensual glut, the other pure but unable to unlock the kingdom. One spoke for human rights, the other praised the body, denouncing progress.
Dominance-submission, sense and nonsense. This is the war that pitches revolutions inside the soul. Fire hoses blast water on what remains.
One man's stabbed at another's expense. A raging woman changed history at the turn of her knife.
Afterward, we ride together through the dark, taking measure of our own demons. My sadist slashed your poet. Your accountant buried me under mountains of nickels.
The slide guitar draws out its slippery chords
as a black man wails about losing his job,
his home, his dog
and on through the traffic lights.
Holly Guran is the author of the chapbook River Tracks which won honorable mention and was published by Poets Corner Press fall 2007. Growing up near the banks of the Hudson River led her to explore time and love in the way water invites.
Holly received an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review, placed second in the journal Explorations poetry competition and was a featured poet in The Aurorean and Bellowing Ark. Her poems have appeared in a variety of small press journals including 96, Inc., Hummingbird, Labyris, Poetry East and Connecticut River Review and in The Breath of Parted Lips, a Cavan Kerry Press anthology.
Holly's connections to Jamaica Plain include coordinating a reading series, Working Poets, which featured poets and musicians. She is retired from a long career at Roxbury Community College in Boston where she worked as counselor, teacher, administrator and grant writer.
Detailed etchings of people and nature, these poems luminously reflect the waters, urging us to look into the depths.Judy Katz-Levine, author of Ocarina
. . .a book of survival and growth as, on new rivers and compiling her 'catalogue of marsh and season', Guran delineates a past, a present and a future with care and love. Susan Donnelly, author of Transit
Audrey Henderson is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh and has written frequently for BBC radio. She was a finalist in the 2008 IndianaReview 1/2 K Award and won second place in the 2008 River Styx International Poetry Contest.
In addition she won recognition as a Special Merit Poet in the 2009 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Contest and was a finalist for the 2009 Philbrick Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Sow’sEar Review, the Roanoke Review, Timber Creek Review, Verandah and Taproot Literary Review among others and she has published a short story in the collection Tales to Tell. Her work will appear in the Comstock Review this fall.
She lives near Boston's Emerald Necklace, where she is a long-time volunteer at the Arnold Arboretum, guiding groups of third to sixth graders in the Field Study program. Her full-length poetry manuscript Airstream was completed this spring.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
Green Valentine
Over-wintered apples sagged, oozing liquor.
Lime green parakeets, two escapees
from the tropics pecked at them, grew silly.
On Madison that day two green parrots,
emerald in fact, were locked behind the grille
of an antique shop-- some old emperor’s good luck.
Susanna Kittredge has recently returned to the Jamaica Pond Poets after several years on the west coast. While there, she received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from San Francisco State University. Her poems have been published in many print and on-line literary journals, including Salamander, Bang Out, 580 Split, Instant City, Parthenon West Review, 14 Hills, and Shampoo (edited by former Jamaica Pond Poet Del Ray Cross). Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Sidebrow (Sidebrow, 2008) and Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006). In 2007 she read in KALW radio’s West Coast Live Poetry Jam.
Susanna is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching Elementary Education and Moderate Needs Special Education. Her interests include whales, birds, crochet, Franklin Park, unusual foods, and the human condition. She lives in Jamaica Plain with three adult humans and a beautiful golden retriever.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
Breakfast
From The White Whale
Ishmael, it’s time to break open the starvation of sleep
and fill it with coffee and hot rolls; or, like our cannibal,
with rare steaks passed harpoon-wise across the dining table.
Most mornings I push spoonfuls of yogurt
past lips swollen with slumber,
no good for forming words at this dim, dawn-cracked hour.
In the blue light, my skin is pale and begging to burn.
I’ve been coddled so long by roofs and trees and fresh dairy products,
my fussy gums unmolested by hard tack.
There’s an amnesia to morning, a rumpled fleeting innocence
of yesterday’s convictions. My bags are packed
and waiting patiently in the corner
while I become reacquainted with purpose.
Using humor and memory to celebrate people and place, Alice Kociemba is the author of a new chapbook Death of Teaticket Hardware (2010), the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. She is a member of Jamaica Pond Poets, a weekly collaborative workshop and directs of Calliope – Poetry Readings at West Falmouth Library, a monthly poetry series. www.calliopepoetryseries.com.
When asked, “How did you get interested in poetry?” Alice credits Emily Dickinson with saving her sanity after she suffered a severe head injury in 1986 and couldn’t read, drive or work for six months. Shortly thereafter, Alice wrote her first poem, seizure, about her experience. As well as working on her first volume of poetry, Seizure and Other Disorders, her recent poems have or will appear in Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, Plainsongs, Slant, Roanoke Review and Salamander.
A frequently featured poet, she been described as “the best storyteller I have ever heard”. She has read at Chapter and Verse, opened for Robert Pinsky at the Brookline Poetry Series, and was a panelist and featured poet at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and she featured at the Provincetown Poetry Festival. She facilitates a monthly Poetry Discussion Group at the Falmouth Public Library, an outgrowth of “What’s Falmouth Reading?” of the Favorite Poems Project. Having grown up in Jamaica Plain, Alice now lives in a home overlooking wetlands and works as a psychotherapist in Falmouth, MA.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
seizure
sunlight flashes
random patterns through
barren limbs of tree.
fractured thoughts,
strange sensations,
eyes that do not see.
countless bruises,
senseless stupor,
time that's lost to me.
mere intuition
or premonition;
seizure's prophesy.
Dorian Kotsiopoulos won second place in the 2011 Common Review/Great Books Foundation fiction contest. She took third place in the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts contest for New England Poets. In July 2011, she was the poetry feature at the Brockton Public Library. At the Fuller Art Museum, she read poetry in the galleries as part of an NEA Big Read grant. She participates in the poetry workshops at the William Joiner Center at UMass Boston.
She lives in Canton, MA and works as technical writer/editor.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
At the Edge of a Swamp
A plop, a flutter, a lazy flap of wings, a great blue heron lands in the tall grass.
Feathers, the grey-blue color of age, flap, and with a flick of his wings, he begins to lift.
Before he rises, his hard, gold eyes meet mine. He looks at me, good and long.
Tucking his neck into an S, wings luminous as waves, he carries me away.
Jim lives in Hyde Park, but routinely imagines himself at the Pond. He also imagines the Pond in Vermont, so his claim to Jamaica Pond status is imaginary at best. On the other hand, he is a poet, at least he imagines himself a poet and writes, although weirdly, at every opportunity to prove to himself that he has an imagination. Some people are fooled.
He is also a partner and the CEO (an imaginary title) in a real caramel company (at least the state thinks so) with two and a half employees that makes real caramels, at least they taste real, although they don’t taste like any caramels you might have had before, so their reality is also in question. He used to own a restaurant, but that has been relegated entirely to memory, although he goes on dreaming about it. Its former reality is a testament to thirty years being the blink of an eye.
Every organization or loose association of people ought to have its poet laureate.
I would like to be poet laureate of the Pervious Concrete Association.
I would meet regularly with the members and the witch doctor.
We would all feel safe and uplifted
or grounded together.
We would mingle in the lobby before meetings.
I would dream enough for all of us,
especially during discussions
of the Maine Department of Transportation's RFPs.
I would draw attention to the sight and sound of ME DOT RFP
and the doctor would conjure the rumble a small airplane would make
as it rolled across a pervious runway in the rain.
Where once it would have been grounded, bogged down in mud,
my poetry will rise off the concrete and fly across Penobscot Bay!
Jennifer Markell has lived in Jamaica Plain for over twenty years. She wrote her first short story “Billy and the Talking Sun” at age 6. The story received great acclaim from her mother and the next door neighbors.
Years later Markell received an M.A. in fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. Somewhere along the way she veered off into poetry and has not returned since. Markell’s work has been on display at Boston City Hall and is anthologized in Poetry From Sojourner, a Feminist Anthology.” She was a featured poet in The Aurorean (spring 2008) and has been published in a variety of literary magazines. A chapbook of Markell’s poetry, Leaving the Green Elm Market, was published in 2005 by Sheltering Pines Press. Two poems, "Girl" and "Dinner Guest" will be published in 2012 in Main Street Rag, and "King's Canyon" (below) is forthcoming in the Atlanta Review. In her work as a therapist and writer, she is passionate about the power of words to touch and transform lives. Markell is frequently found at work in her urban backyard, coaxing plants, vines, and a stubborn peach tree to bloom.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
King’s Canyon
Battered by millenia
of fire and flood,
the sequoias stand,
sentinel of the groves.
Their towering crowns
cloak kinglets and vireos,
grizzled limbs scaffolding
a company of wings.
Runners tread the ancient
on Nike Air
wired with headphones,
timers set to measure their speed.
The sequoias breathe
in and out.
Below, a haze of pollution
rises from the San JoaquinValley where
artichokes are dusted and parceled,
prepared for hearts’ removal.
Sandra Storey's collection,Every State Has Its Own Light,was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines, including the New York Quarterly and New Millennium Writings.
Storey was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and lived in Southeast Asia from 1968 to 1972. The editor and publisher of two neighborhood newspapers and a former English teacher, she is the co-author of a non-fiction book about ordinary people who influence public policy published in 1992. She wrote poetry from 1980 to 1988 and resumed in 2004, joining JPP in 2005. She has been a featured reader at many Boston-area venues.
Her work has been called “both witty and tender.” One reader said her poems “invite readers in and ask us to get involved. They seem simple at first, but, once in, we discover they are complicated.”
Following is a sample of her poetry: Where the view is unobstructed
the sun setting looks just like
the sun rising
split in two on the curved horizon
balanced on the edge
of the same half-lit, hopeful worlds
the yin and yang once were tears
the dots in each, the pairs of eyes that cried them
now light and dark are twirling cheek to cheek
the sun setting is the sun rising
far away, just out of sight
Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher and psychotherapist. He grew up on the plains of eastern Montana, and a strong sense of place pervades his poems, whether that place is the prairie, the city or the inner spaces we inhabit.
His poems have appeared in Salamander,The Aurorean, Bellowing Ark, Red Owl Magazine, and in Diamond Dust, an on-line publication. He received an International Merit Award in 2003 for a poem published in Atlanta Review, and in Spring, 2007, he won an Editor’s Prize in Plainsongs. He is a contributing author to the first anthology of the Jamaica Pond Poets titled This Great Gift, collected poems of grief and healing, and to a collection of essays in honor of his philosophy teacher, Henry Bugbee, titled Wilderness and the Heart, Henry Bugbee’s Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory. Gary is currently working on a poetry manuscript titled Having Listened, and on a prose manuscript titled Parmenides, Poetry and Psychotherapy.
Hehas participated in many poetry readings and open mikes in the Boston area. He was a featured reader at Calliope, a reading venue in Falmouth on the Cape in 2009, at A Tapestry of Voices, in Boston,in 2006, Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain, in 2005, and again in 2008, and was the opening reader for the Brookline Booksmith Poetry Series in 2004. He was the featured reader at an annual fundraising night of poetry and music, 1998 to 2004, for the Friends of the International School of St. Petersburg, Russia. He is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.
Following is a sample of his poetry:
Ever
As if the old granary smell
would ever vanish,
or the cedar fenceposts
never rot off.
As if the harnesses hanging in the hayloft
would ever shed all those spider webs
maybe someday even, find the sweaty back
and haunch of another horse.
As if the dealer at the Ranger Bar would ever smile,
the bartender show above her knees,
or my father drive the old truck home
in time for evening's barn chores.
As if any of us would stay there waiting
beside the one gray and open door.
Home
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