Comments on: The Poet Laureate Among Us

By: Dede Cummings

Dede Cummings — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:40:58 +0000

What a great story! I can’t wait to read Natasha’s work, and wish she could come to the Brattleboro Literary Festival … maybe? I am on the volunteer committee, and it would be an honor to have our newest Poet Laureate come down to the southern part of the great state of Vermont! I attended Bread Loaf as a poetry contributor in 1978, and it was a life-changing experience for me, then a 19-year-old waitstaff worker. Example: I poured tea for Toni Morrison and John Irving, and no one had ever heard of them, at least none of us on the wait staff! It was a thrill to hear them read that summer and realize they both would become hugely

popular and great writers! Congrats to Ms. Trethewey for her rise to fame, coming up through the program.

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By: Mary Elizabeth Nordstrom

Mary Elizabeth Nordstrom — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:26:42 +0000

Proud to know that the new US Poet Laureate will be a fellow-Middlebury alumna. Over the years as mother of five, I have dashed off poems that I am beginning to find and collect.By now, I have long been the grandmother of five others, and it occurs to me that someone might want to take on a mission of encouraging octogenarians to journal via poetry. Lots of people are living to 105 these days, so they will need something new to fill those years. I went to my first poetry workshop wince moving to Maine in 2004, this past weekend When we lived in North Carolina, I attended poetry sessions at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, 1987 and 1988,

visiting my daughter’s family so I could attend two summers as a day student. Just tossing out the topic of senior journaling with poetry as one possible project for Natasha Trethewey to consider. (Middlebury ’46)

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By: Myra Shapiro

Myra Shapiro — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 17:37:53 +0000

Because Bread Loaf will always be dear to me (my MA from The Bread Loaf School of English, 1973, Robert Pack my important teacher of poetry before I began writing poems), I was thrilled to read about Natasha Trethewey in the Blue Parlor. She is a poet important to me from Domestic Work on, the one who, a few years ago, asked me where the word “chenille” came from when I mentioned my father moved us from NY to Dalton, Georgia to manage a chenille bedspread factory, and I’ve been working on a poem about the word ever since. Literally, her attention to history inspires. It’s as if personal history grows to history-at-large, a wonderful way of

feeling we mortals matter.

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