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Date: 4/24/2023
EASTHAMPTON — Poet Carolyn Cushing lost her partner, John, in 2012. Eleven years later, still fascinated by grieving as a path for spiritual enrichment, Cushing was named the city’s new poet laureate.
“Ten days after my partner John died in a car crash, I had a job interview,” Cushing wrote. “I started that job 31 days after John’s death. In the immediate aftermath, I worked and I grieved. I am not special in this regard [because]…lives changed by death demand action.”
Cushing sought wisdom about grief in the mythology of ancient cultures. The Egyptian story of the death of Isis and the mourning of Osiris, his sister and wife, is thousands of years old. The mythic story suggests that grief is not transcended, but rather becomes one of the many pieces of a shattered life that a survivor must use to rebuild and carry on. That rang true for Cushing.
“As I spent time with her story and her energy, [Osiris] worked her magic on me,” Cushing wrote in her blog. “I wrote. Just words at first, but then they took the form of poetry, Tarot rituals, musings on nature.”
Cushing is a recipient of grants from the Easthampton Cultural Council and Massachusetts Cultural Council. She was a finalist for the Philbrick Poetry Award of the Providence Athenaeum in 2012 and the Tarantula Poetry Contest in 2018. According to the website of Easthampton City Arts, Cushing was involved in the Poetry Oracle in 2020 and the Chapbook in the Street program in 2022 because she likes “dynamic formats.”
Poetry belongs in new places and poets need to learn new skills. Cushing understands the value of community support and involvement for intuitive writers. In her two years as poet laureate she’ll apply her energies into two “strands,” one for learning and teaching poetry, the other for spreading poetry to where it hasn’t been found before.
“I’m putting together a project called, poetry in unexpected places...so that people can stumble across it,” Cushing said. “Sometimes you don’t know you’re looking for a poem, then you come across a poem, and it helps you through whatever challenge you’re facing.”
Cushing intends to organize a reading series for fellow poets, probably in 2024. The second strand of her efforts will be to stage a series of workshops and learning opportunities for those who work in language.
“My other strand is to do some programming, workshopping, for poets to grow our skills and our vision of the contribution we can make,” Cushing said. “There are some skills of presenting our work in new ways, dynamic ways, and also refining our own visions of the contributions we want to make to our communities.”
Cushing runs a website, soulpathsanctuary.com, and a newsletter. The site shows tarot is a major element of Cushing’s poetic and therapeutic practice. The images of the deck are based on archetypes, personas and figures roughly equivalent to states of mind, social identities and the stages of life for men and women, with numeric symbolism adding a further degree of mysticism. The cards offer intuitive prompts enriched by the history of the deck and images, as well as the seeker’s own connections and ideas.
“Tarot cards are just bits of paper [and] they don’t have intrinsic power,” Cushing wrote. “But their images and symbols, as well as the accruing of meaning over centuries, can make of them guides and instigators for connecting with the extraordinary, the mythic, the great forces that run under our everyday lives.”
Cushing published a number of books of poetry. Collections for sale on her website include “Broken Open Heart in the Imaginal Realm,” “49 Days and the Green Door of Death,” “Eternity Box: 1st Anniversary of a Death,” and “Speak Soul to Soul.” According to Easthampton City Arts website, she also published many poems in journals and magazines, especially in tandem with tarot images.
Cushing was inaugurated as Easthampton Poet Laureate at a reception on April 22 at the ECA Gallery, downtown. The poets laureate for the last two years, Alex Woolner and Jason Montgomery, were there to pass the torch.
“Poetry has a power that is a little mysterious, a little indirect,” Cushing said. “It’s the kind of power we need for these times of great change.”