I’m a poet who sometimes writes prose, but has always returned to poetry.
I’ve taught writers of all ages, and still carry in my heart what young students said about fairness and its absence, and what older students said about loss and rediscovery and redemption.
I’m also an amateur naturalist, these days focused on the habitats in a few acres of western Maine, under a wide sky.
Born in Maine, I grew up in New York State. As an adult I’ve lived mostly in Massachusetts. All my life, we—both my family of origin and the family I helped create—often visited an old farm in western Maine. Now my husband and I have resettled here, and I raise poems and a few green beans.
You might be interested in three other websites:
A blog written after I retired from classroom teaching, ayeartothinkitover.com, celebrates what I learned from working with young adolescents. (I’m glad to say that this blog still attracts a steady trickle of visitors from all over the world.)
The essays in Teaching at Touchstone originally appeared on the school website, to help parents understand what we were up to. Several relate directly to writing, and to listening to each other.
Villages explores various meanings of community, including across time, and across digital space.
This new website’s home page offers introductions to my books, with sample poems and some recordings. The importance of both family and the natural world can’t be missed.
In fact, the poems often wonder, up front or sidewise, about what we all need from each other, in order to be vivid individuals within strong communities: families, tribes, marching bands, watersheds, countries, worlds.
Something else matters to me enough that I wanted it to appear in the website. Each book and every poem speaks, at some level, for the communities that helped me hold onto and deepen my poetry life– through years of classroom teaching and never enough sleep; through attacks of gravity and mortality both. So there’s a section introducing some of those communities.
I’m grateful for the wild good fortune of many overlapping villages: branches and layers of family, small communities of poets and readers of poetry, storytellers and musicians and activists and birdwatchers: wild miscellaneous people holding to whatever holds us together.
You can read that either way: held together in each of our complicated selves, and holding together in communities that make sense and sing.
So this website is here above all to say thank you, and thank you again: to you, taking time to read this, and to all of you still carrying various important flutes, or flags, or flames.
Polly Brown / Poet 