by daithi’
On February 14 during the Sunday Afternoon Poetry reading at the Jaquith Library, PSOV member Elizabeth McCarthy asked featured poets Mary L. Collins and Rick Agran if they found it difficult to write poetry in this time of political and social conflict without it sounding like a raging commentary. Mention had been made of the book, The Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest & Witness, to be published this April. So, it seemed only logical to ask the editor, Sharon Darrow, to share her thoughts about the upcoming anthology. Thank you, Sharon, for the interview!
Q1 What prompted you to consider an Anthology focused upon these difficult national times?
In January 2025, I watched with horror and sorrow as our government departments and programs were decimated. By the time the Super Bowl rolled around all I could do when they played the Star-Spangled Banner and America was weep, so I wrote a poem about it. I often write with a group of poets at the Barton Library and we all began writing poems of protest. I realized that the need we had at that time to write those poems was probably felt by many others. In my teaching career, I was a workshop leader and I decided I needed a workshop dedicated to writing and reading protest poetry and songs, and if I needed it, maybe others did, too. I put out a notice to the poets who had been coming to the open mic sessions in Lyndonville and in St. Johnsbury, and to PSOV poets. A small group of us met for four weeks and wrote and listened and read others’ poems of protest and witness during other fraught times in our country and the world, and when it was over, we decided the poems needed to go somewhere. That’s when the idea of a small anthology took hold. Small! Well, not so small in the end. I invited poets I’d known in Chicago and in my work at VCFA and announced it with PSOV. Poets told their friends and they told others, which means we now have poems from all over Vermont, the U.S. and Canada, in English, French, and Spanish (with translations) from 89 poets.
When I was leading the protest poetry and song workshop in St. Johnsbury, then planning for the anthology, and, certainly, while I was working on compiling the poems, I felt strong and effective, as if I were doing something to resist, and to resist loudly. I still feel that way about the anthology, but after Renee Good’s murder I hit a kind of slump unlike any I’d had this past year. I’m sure others have felt this near paralysis, but I had managed to avoid it. I think it took another public murder, the execution of Alex Pretti, to shake me out of the kind of stupor (news- watching and doom-scrolling) I was in and make me realize that there was more to do.
Now, we have to get the book out to readers. In a way, I wish it were still open for submissions because those who have died and others who have been harmed or disappeared need to be remembered. I know poems are being written about them, but we have to stop adding to the manuscript and get it published. Obviously, there are new things to protest and witness every day with this horrific regime, and new poems that need writing.
Q2 What do you hope the anthology will do?
I hope it continues to give me courage to do whatever I need to do, and to encourage others to let their voices be heard along with mine. In written form, this anthology will go onto home, school, and library shelves and be archived with my other books at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum where it will attest to what we are feeling, thinking, and doing at this strange time in the history of the United States of America. It will be there, I hope, for many years as evidence of our presence at this time and of our resistance. Maybe other editors will take up the challenge and go forward with other anthologies, both on paper and online. I hope so. We must never stop speaking out and writing our poems.
Q3 Where can folks go to hear poets read from The Country in the Mirror?
We are in the process of setting up events. More are coming, but so far, we have the Book Launch at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury hosted by Tunnel Books on April 25 at 4pm and on April 26 at 4:30pm at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier. Also, a reading in Chicago on May 2 at 7pm at the Tiger Room Salon.
Q4 Where can I buy or order a copy?
Pub date is April 21 and can be preordered from Rootstock Publishing of Montpelier: https://www.rootstockpublishing.com/rootstock-books/p/the-country-in-the-mirror It will be available for bookstores to order and online.
Q5 Anything else that you would like to share?
I am not a physically brave person, so what I’ve seen my friends do in going to the streets of Chicago and in Minneapolis, which almost became my home instead of Vermont, I am so impressed and filled with admiration. They are doing what I might not be able to do, but something I can document through poetry. I can gather other poets’ words and hope they might give us all courage to do what we find necessary as time passes. Poets and poetry have figured into all the struggles in the past and will in the future. We are simply today’s poets with today’s poems, and, right now that is enough.
Editor of The Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest & Witness
Sharon Darrow is a writer and educator with over 20 years of experience on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sharon is the author of fiction and poetry for children and adults. Poems, short stories, interviews, and personal essays have appeared in literary journals Rhino, Folio, Whetstone, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Columbia Poetry Review, Great River Review, Other Voices, The Writer’s Chronicle, and In the Middle of the Middle West. Currently working on memoir in poems and speculative fiction, her most recent books are “Worlds within Words: Writing and the Writing Life;” “now in a far sky: Vermont Poems;” and “Rainbow a Poem.” (RootStock )