The Woods Hole Public Library has organized a poetry discussion based on “Common Threads,” an annual publication and outreach program produced by Mass Poetry, a non-profit state-wide group, which has the goal of facilitating poetry discussion groups throughout the state each year in an effort to broaden the audience for poetry and support poets and poetry in Massachusetts.
The Library’s event will be hosted by Prosser Gifford who has retired to Woods Hole after a career in academia and at the Library of Congress, and who serves as President of the Library’s Board of Trustees, and who would like to make this event an annual celebration of poetry in his community.
The poems which will be discussed were chosen by “Common Threads’ ” guest editor and poet Alice Kociemba, who says “The overarching theme of this fifth edition of Common Threads is love, a reverence for life and a zest for living that is intensified at moments of birth and death, the cherishing of one’s birthplace and the longing for what has been left behind, a passion for peace and respect for poetry itself as its’ witness, and finally, the precious and precarious beauty of nature. Each of these eight poems reveals love’s common threads.”
All of these poets live in Massachusetts. Some, such as Mary Oliver, will be very familiar; others will be new, and wonderful, such as Deborah Digges. A full listing and complete text of the poems is available at www.masspoetry.org, or simply google Common Threads.
This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome, no matter their experience with poetry. For more information, call the Library at 508-548-8961.