Vermont Poets

Revelers in the Natural Rhythm of Things

In the pantheon of Vermont poets, one name garners instant recognition—Robert Frost. He was the literary comet that blazed across rural New England in the first half of the 20th century.

Almost 60 years after his passing, he is still revered for writing lyrical poetry that examines fundamental questions of human existence. Channeling the country folk of New Hampshire and Vermont, he found universal truths in their everyday hardscrabble lives.

Vermont Poet Robert Frost — Photo Credit: The LIFE Picture Collection

Besides Frost, the state boasts a band of poets who have created a notable catalogue of work. While diverse in form and style, they share a love for the people and landscape of “our brave little state.”

In 2017, two former Vermont poet laureates, Chard deNiord and Sydney Lea undertook the laudatory task of collecting an anthology of modern Vermont poetry from Robert Frost to contemporary authors. Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry offers readers a clear understanding of the “breadth of poetry that has been written about Vermont and its people.”

In her Seven Days newspaper review, Margot Harrison says this about the collection:

Readers who follow Vermont poetry will dive into this volume as if it were a reunion with old friends — wildly diverse friends whom it’s strange yet stimulating to encounter in close proximity.

While the anthology is rich in style and content, my short list of favorite Vermont poets is not as eclectic; certainly not representative of the modernistic/experimental schools of poetry.

My favorites are members of what some call the Green Mountain School of Poetry. They share a penchant for plain-spoken but sublime language, evocative imagery, and sharp dialogue. Above all, they believe what former Poet Laureate of the USA Billy Collins says about the creative process.

A poem should be “felt and enjoyed without leaving one “brooding about is meaning.”

Here then is my short, subjective list:

1. Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) won four Pulitzer Prizes and delighted everyone from students to presidents. My favorite Frost poem is The Need of Being Versed in Country Things. In telling the story of a tragic fire at a farmstead, he acknowledges that life is a series of “shocks” but never the cause for drowning in self-pity.

2. Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems, and was named Vermont Poet Laureate four times. In straightforward language, punctuated by striking imagery, his poems examine life and the inevitability of death as well as the regenerative power of love and nature.

Vermont Poet Galway Kinnell — Photo Credit: timesargus.com

I’ve always admired his poem Daybreak. Using unexpected, beautiful imagery, he compares starfish tiptoeing across a muddy tidal bank to the stars in the night sky. Here’s an excerpt:

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.

3. David Wolf Budbill

David Wolf Budbill (1940–2016), the poet of small town Vermont, wrote eight books of poetry. Goodreads calls his poetry “deceptively simple,” and filled with “light and longing.” His narrative poem Judevine, often produced as a stage play, tells us about the heart as well as the hardship of life in northern Vermont.

Vermont Poet David Wolf Budbill — Photo Credit: Burlingtonfreepress.com

Here are a few haunting verses of his Winter: Tonight: Sunset :

I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

“Winter: Tonight Sunset” from While We Still Got Feet published by Copper Canyon Press 2006. www.coppercanyonpress.org

4. Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) taught at the University of Vermont and the State College in Johnson, VT. Writing in the New York Times at his passing, William Grimes said: “Many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship, addressing loneliness, insanity, and death.” According to the Poetry Foundation, his poetry is “characterized by a calm, tightly controlled, and relatively "plain" language that belies the intensity of feeling behind the words.”

Vermont poets Hayden Carruth — Photo Credit: The Ruland Herald, Vermont

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites. Note how he seamlessly juggles “universal opposites” while addressing dissimilar issues in Emergency Haying:

Coming home with the last load I ride standing

on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor

in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung

awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform…

And of course I think of another who hung

like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced

by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat

is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended

on two points of pain in the rising

monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

“Emergency Haying” from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems by Hayden Carruth, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006. www.coppercanyonpress.org

5. T. Alan Broughton

T. Alan Broughton (1936-2013) was a long-time University of Vermont English professor and poet who founded UVM’s Writers Workshop. I took Alan's Creative Writing course one Spring semester and am still influenced by his perspective on good writing, the writer’s craft, and the imperative of communicating from the heart—not just the head. He was a believer in accessibility, “simple and clear,” and the need to “bring poetry out of the clouds” and “down to the street.”

vermont poets T. Alan Broughton — Photo Credit: hudsonriver.com

I especially like the authenticity, originality, and humorous seriousness of his poetry. A favorite is the narrative poem Man on the Moon. It tells the story of an aging fellow, struggling to cope with the indignities of life, who desperately tries one last time to find true love:

…and when I got to my car I sat there

for a while with my keys clutched in my hand

and I started to cry just a hungry old man

and all the way home I said out loud

Peter you old fool you old fool Peter.

“The Man on the Moon” from The Man in the Moon, Barlenmir House Publishers, NY, NY, 1979.

6. David Huddle

David Huddle is emeritus professor of English at the University of Vermont, an enlisted Army veteran, and a long-time teacher of autobiographical and creative witting at the university (one of the best courses I’ve ever taken) and the Breadloaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont.

His nine books of poetry as well as novels and short stories, are known for clear, poignant storytelling, a wry sense of humor, and a deep understanding of human nature.

Vermont poets David Huddle — Photo Credit: University of Vermont

I’ve always been moved by Elegy, published in Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems, which speaks of the pain of Alzheimer’s disease.

You cut lilacs in April—

once I caught you smiling

at a bouquet as if it had told

you something scandalous.

Daffodils made you grieve

they went away so fast,

but irises—now there was

a flower a country girl

could appreciate…

At eighty, dying away

from home, you looked for the red

azalea on the windowsill,

and at thirty, you had a boy

help you tack up kite string

for morning glories to climb.

From Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

7. Chard DeNiord

Chard DeNiord is a Vermont poet and teacher who served as the state’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2019.” His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (2011) is a collection of conversations and reflections on [senior] 20th Century American Poets, including Vermont Poet Laureate Ruth Stone.

Chard DeNiord vermont poets — Photo credit: The Providence Journal

One of my favorite DeNiord poem’s is Confession of a Bird Watcher. In it, he brings to life the daily ordeals of living creatures, struggling to survive in our materialistic world. Like many great poems, you can read it on a surface level, but dig deeper to find the poet symbolically examining his own thoughts about his feelings.

Here’s an excerpt:

I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds

mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do,

how else to live among them and keep my view.

…I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside

who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window

I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you.

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