Chard deniord biography of donald

He lives in Westminster West, Vermont. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from to Search Submit. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Page submenu block find poems find poets poem-a-day literary seminars materials for teachers poetry near you. Confession of a Bird Watcher.

Chard deniord biography of donald

Read Poem. In the Grass. The Percherons. The Singer. Sunday Calls. This Ecstasy. Dream of Heaven. The Gift. Goddess of Maple at Evening. The Double Truth. See Full List. The Best Poem Of Chard DeNiord Confession of a Bird Watcher The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still, slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow, prehensile bones.

Chard DeNiord Comments. Poems About. Best Poets. Best Poems. Both Tom and Wright found language that crossed over from themselves to their reader in an ironic alternating current that ran through their lines, transforming difference, strangeness, wildness, and "the other" into highly charged compassionate expression. Nothing could have been better for Tom's poetry or more fortuitous for his career than the risk he took in embracing realism with both spare disinterestedness and genuine sympathy.

Perhaps he described his shift to a more emotionally complex style best in an interview he did in the same interview with Cerise Press mentioned above: "There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. Tom was happy but also overjoyed to be back in his hometown of Easthampton, Massachusetts in the summer of to read from his new book at the time, Children Made of Sand.

The place was packed with Tom's high school classmates, family friends, cousins, and former workmates. Tom had worked several jobs growing up in Easthampton as a pot washer, mill worker, and assembly-line hand at the now defunct chard deniord biography of donald that made elastics for undergarments. Gary Metras was also there, the publisher of Adastra Press and old friend of Tom's who had printed several letterpress chapbooks and broadsides of his poems, including "A Boat in the Forest".

People who hadn't seen him in decades stood in line to give him long hugs. When he finally started to read, his voice began to catch, and then tears welled up in his eyes. He ceased reading for a few moments that seemed to condense the time he had been away into a few seconds. He had returned also in many of his new poems to his childhood and adolescent memories of growing up at his family farm at the base of Mt.

Tom that loomed over his house like a pastoral prophecy—his native Parnassus. He was back home and everyone was young again, hanging on his words, although most didn't read or care much for poetry. Tom had broken through time's door and suspended his old friends and fellow townspeople in both the timelessness of his new poems and his love for his town that emanated from his familiar voice, his poems, and his childhood stories that suddenly appeared to him with so many forgotten but now remembered details in the mirrors of the faces turned toward him.

He knew they wanted to hear the simple truth. Nothing fancy or too poetic. Nothing too sophisticated or "thinky thinky" as Tom often referred to postmodern poetry. But something clear, moving, and accessible on first reading. And he obliged with poems that bore no trace of the surrealism that had lured him away to Boston and then Iowa so many decades ago.

He concluded, if my memory serves me correctly, with this poem: Dead Horse At the fence line, I was about to call him in when, at two-thirds profile, head low and away from me, he fell first to his right front knee and then the left, and he was down, dead before he hit the My father saw him drop, too, and a neighbor, who walked over. He was a good horse, old, spavined, eating grass during the day and his oats and hay at night.

He didn't mind, or try to boss, the cows with which he shared these acres. My father said: Happens. Our neighbor, named Malcolm, walked back to his place and was soon grinding toward us with his tractor's new backhoe, of which he was proud but so far used only to dig two sump holes. It was the knacker who'd haul away a cow. A horse, a good horse, you buried where he, or she, fell.

Malcolm cut a trench beside the horse and we pushed him in. I'd already said goodbye before I tried to close his eyes. Our neighbor returned the dirt from where it came. In it: stones, stones never seen before by a human's, nor even a worm's, eye. With the back of a shovel we tamped the dirt down. One dumb cow stood by. It was a Friday. For supper we ate hot dogs, with beans on buttered white bread.

Every Friday, hot dogs and beans. There are far too many funny, profound, memorable, original, human things to recall about Tom. I haven't mentioned his instant agreement to join the New England College MFA faculty at the inception of that program innor his participation in the Spirit and Letter Workshop in Patzcuaro, Mexico from towhich he helped me direct.

I'm sure that all of Tom's friends felt as enriched as I did by his rare company. As I write this I'm saying to myself I shouldn't be writing this. Tom passed too soon. My memories of him are charged with the same current that his presence transmitted, which only exasperates my grief. He was both king and court jester, chard deniord biography of donald the fine line between the two with perfect balance.

Stanley Kunitz famously described him as "sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time. I like to think Tom is gazing down on the world from high atop Mt. That he floats up there like a cloud in a different shape every day with omniscient vision and that silent voice he heard when writing poems and paid tribute to in his poem, "The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently".

That the thunder that pounds up there on summer days is Tom with his new shotgun blasting away at the universe, and that the rain is his pellets falling on us as lead turned to water from which we drink and are "whole again. Such thinking makes no less sense than a friend's sudden permanent departure, but it does live differently in our hearts as more of a believable fantasy than the darkness in which so many black dogs roam.

To me, it makes me feel more alive, reading good poetry. Your poems will live on in us. Farewell, dear friend. They became fast friends and remained close for the next 32 years. Chard is the new Vermont Poet Laureate. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz. Ode to Tom We just started walking in Uruapan one afternoon after a long week of working too hard in Patzcuaro.

Tom said, "Let's go for a walk. See where we end up. I said, "Sure.