The News from Poems: Celebrating Six Seasons of Reading Local in Vermont

Mud April First by Burt Porter Now as we watch the snow retreat We estimate how many feet Of brown and flattened April field Read more >	Spring I Went Out Walking by Grace Paley My poems had gotten so heavy I went out walking in the springtime woods and I Read more >
Summer Cicadas by T. Alan Broughton In the evening of the season when the locusts left their bodies, Read more >	Fall Starting the First Fire, Autumn by Baron Wormser Once again we start to act hospitably. Today we blackened the stove, swept up The spiders from the wood box, split kindling. Read more >
Stick Concerning Necessity by Hayden Carruth It’s true we live in a kind of rural twilight most of the time giving Read more >	Winter Winter Storm by Julia Alvarez It’s snowing hard in the Green Mountains, I haven’t seen Mount Abe all morning, Just the white blur of an expanding storm Read more >

“It could be verse” began as a monthly poetry column first published by The Chronicle of Orleans County in Barton, VT in April 2007. Each column features a poem of season and place by a Vermont writer. The purpose of both the column and this website is: to put poetry where people can find it. Another goal is to help Vermonters to “Read Local” (as a natural continuation of the “Buy Local” and “Eat Local” campaigns). Because there are so many extraordinary writers in our communities, the column serves as an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the diverse poetic voices in this state, our literary terroir. This website features a selection of 18 of the 50 original columns (published in The Chronicle from 2007-2011). In January 2012, the monthly poetry column became a syndicated project issued from this site, offered gratis to all Vermont newspapers to publish at their discretion.

Visitors to the site are encouraged to sign up to receive the column directly each month. Teachers searching for creative ways to incorporate more poetry into their curriculum can click on the “poetry in the classroom” tab for some sample lesson plans and writing prompts.