When my private-time writing returned to poetry shortly after relocating to New England three decades ago, my attention turned to this unfamiliar place where I was now living. Quite simply, it felt much different than any of my previous locales, and the spirit of specific locations has always been a central concern in my literary ventures.
My personal writing has often been a way for me to assemble thoughts and impressions. In many ways, it’s the way I work through a problem or gain focus on an issue. So when it came to the exercise of looking at my new environment, I soon envisioned a set of poems along the line of a monthly almanac or even a calendar of words rather than color photographs.
I’ve long had a fondness for those large monthly calendars anyway, and by the time I got serious in pushing the almanac, I had a good selection of images to draw from as additional inspiration. Just what images does the region conjure up, anyway?
That’s when New England’s famed Winged Death headstone engravings came into play, and each month began to compress the overlapping centuries this corner of the United States embodies – more so than other parts of the nation, at least.
New England also has a strong tradition of authority and dissent. The Puritans, after all, came to these shores in their dissent from the Church of England, and Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and their followers in and around Salem, just north of Boston, were soon challenging the Puritan hegemony before being banished, in waves, to Rhode Island. Early Quaker firebrands were soon adding to that upheaval, and that’s included in my spiritual legacy.
What emerged from all this is a craggy, even Baroque, collage that reflects the evolution of the Yankee character in its landscape of harbors and mountains. It’s now available as a free PDF as my latest Thistle/Flinch edition. To read more, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 