Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 11/3/2021
NORTHAMPTON/AMHERST – Available Potential Enterprises (A.P.E.) is sponsoring an Open Field Press launch of three news books of poetry from Trish Crapo of Leyden, Anne Love Woodhull, and Bill O’Connell, both from Amherst.
A launch reading for their new books will be conducted on Nov. 5 in the Workroom at 33 Hawley St. in Northampton. The doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a meet-and-greet with the authors, while the reading begins at 7 p.m.
Crapo’s book of poems, “Adrift, a Rowboat,” explores the life and loss of her sister who died of breast cancer in 2008. Some of the poems follow Crapo and her sister as children, while others deal with her sister’s diagnosis of the illness. The book also analyzes grief and the idea of coming out of grief, while the cover uses a watercolor of her sister’s.
“All of us have lost somebody, or will at some point,” said Crapo. “What I hope is the book can be helpful to people as opposed to just being my personal story. I don’t want it to be selfish in any way.”
Some of the poems were written as Crapo’s sister became ill, while others were collected from past work. “Once you start to put a collection together, you start to see where the gaps are,” said Crapo. “There were some poems that I wrote to become part of this sequence.”
Meanwhile, Woodhull’s book of poems-titled “Racing Heaven,” spans a time when she lost her husband, daughter and mother. Much of the book focuses on her husband, while the overarching theme explores a stream of love and life in the midst of death. The poems visit the “depths of place and remembrance as well as the joy of spirit still present in the world.”
“I am most interested in exploring relationships, and things that happen between people, and because of people, and about people” said Woodhull, adding that she almost never knows what a poem or a collection of poems will be about when she first begins a project. “The other book I wrote is quite like that too. It just ends up being about, what are all the aspects and elements of human relationships.”
O’Connell’s collection of poems, which are titled “When We Were All Still Alive,” explores specific times and places that he hopes will resonate with himself and others. While he does not explore one specific topic in his writing, O’Connell’s poems cover nature, science, workings of the mind, as well as our human connection to nature. He also pursues even more personal topics like his Catholic upbringing and the importance of memory.
“This collection spans 20 years,” said O’Connell. “They are sort of the best poems that have come out of that time span since my last book.”
O’Connell said he wakes up early every morning to write, walk, and consume the nature around him. “I don’t want to be an intellectual poet or live in my head,” said O’Connell. “I want to live in my head and in the world. I want the poems to be clear, and I want the reader to enter them.”
All three writers are well-known mainstays in the area and are active members of Group 18, which is the decades-long critique group founded by poets Jim Finnegan and Linda Gregg in 1986 with Jack Gilbert as one of its longstanding mentors. Group 18 includes many renowned poets, Crapo, Woodhull, and O’Connell included.
When asked what Group 18 has meant to them over the years, both Crapo and Woodhull agreed that it is rigorous but professional place for worthwhile critique. Woodhull compared it to being in graduate school. The group meets every Monday, and then takes a break in the summer. The idea is to show up with at least some semblance of a poem each time, even if it is just in its raw form. Currently, there are 11 members. Both Woodhull and Crapo credit Gilbert for being an integral and rigorous mentor who aimed to make each group member a better writer.
“The idea is to bring something and have other people think about it and make it better,” said Crapo, when describing the group. “We don’t always agree. If it starts to seem like we are agreeing too often, we usually bring that up. Like, ‘are our poems getting better, or are we just being too soft now.’”
Crapo entered the group with creative experience as a writer, and she was also a journalist and professor in the past. Woodhull, meanwhile, told Reminder Publishing that she was a beginner when she entered the group. “I worked very hard at it, because it was a form that felt right,” said Woodhull. “It meant a lot to me to have a form for expression.”
O’Connell was invited to join Group 18 after studying at a poetry conference with Gregg and Gilbert in the 1990s, and he has been there ever since. “One thing that Jack Gilbert always talked about was always try to write the big poem…don’t nibble around the edges, go for it,” said O’Connell. “And that sort of stuck with me.”
All three books will be available for purchase and signing after the reading, and Crapo said that they should be available on the Open Field Press website at some point in the near future. To learn more about Open Field Press and learn about some of the other publications that have been released under that tree, people can visit the website at http://www.openfieldpress.org.