On October 4th, the Poetry Society of Vermont (PSOV) and the New England Poetry Club (NEPC) held their first joint venture, “The Collaborative Poet: A Day of Readings and a Workshop,” in West Brattleboro, Vermont. The event featured morning readings, a craft talk on collaboration, and an afternoon workshop.

The event brought poets together for what was described by attendees as a wonderful, inspiring day. Cindy Ellen Hill, PSOV/NEPC member and main organizer, shared her excitement, and thanked all for coming to the first PSOV/NEPC Collaborative Poet event!

I am so thrilled to have met you all and to have had this chance to share poems and community with you all. It’s a bit of a tough world out there–how wonderful to spend some hours in positive literary creativity with friends new and old.
The readings by Richard Michelson, Gail Thomas and Scudder Parker were downright enchanting and highly inspirational!
And my heart was so lifted with gladness to see you all diving into poetry collaborations.
I wanted to share two more collaborative poetry thoughts with you all.
The first is a book recommendation: The Making of Poetry, by Adam Nicolson. It is about the year that Coleridge and Wordsworth spent living near one another in the late 1790s in England’s Quantock Hills, constantly talking, writing together, and coming out with the best poetry of their careers. Author Nicolson went and lived in their footsteps for a year, along with an artist, creating this “after” book about one of the greatest poetry collaborations of all time, in which both romanticism and the seeds of modernism were born. It will be a lovely read by the fire this winter!
And the second is the link to the collaborative poetry-music-images video I mentioned in my wee talk, which I made just a couple weeks ago at an interdisciplinary creative residency at In Situ Polyculture Commons, which is in Saxton’s River, Vermont. It’s a peaceful twelve minutes to watch over a cup of tea or glass of wine — I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you so much Cindy and David [Miller] for organizing this joint venture of the Poetry Society of Vermont and New England Poetry Club! It was a great opportunity to get to know each other and I am very impressed. The workshop was fun, the readings were inspiring, the food was great, and company was very enjoyable. I’m so glad to have made new poetry friends to the north. Thanks for your hard work in putting all of it together. ~Linda Haviland Conte, Vice President of the New England Poetry Club

The Poetry Society of Vermont wishes to offer a special thanks to Cindy Ellen Hill for bringing this event to life and enriching our poetry community. Also, we wish to thank David Miller, NEPC Programming Chair and Buffy Aakaash, PSOV Treasurer/Editor for their organizational skills in making this event happen, as well as the presenters; NEPC members Richard Michelson and Gail Thomas, PSOV member poet Scudder Parker, and of course all of the PSOV and NEPC members who attended.