Polly Brown / Poet

Welcome, visitors! Some buttons still lead absolutely nowhere, but the ones for each of the already-published books will lead you to sample poems and recordings. Please explore what’s here, and return again soon for more.

Design and cover photo by Sarah Bennett / shbennetbookdesign.com

Stitching gathers poems of quiet action: observing, standing witness, moving forward, mending, singing.

From Jeri Theiault, author of Self Portrait as Homestead: “Polly Brown shows us how to carry on ‘stitch by stich,’ drawing themes of heritage and nature together like ‘two sides of a wound,’ incorporating the past into the present, and making of these wounds, not just a healing, but warmth and heirloom, a patchwork to cherish and hand down.

Other Books by Polly Brown

Pebble Leaf Feather Knife

Cherry Grove, 2019

Every Other Thursday Press, 2001

Finishing Line Press, 2008

Evolution: Poems Across Seven Decades

by Jeanne Sawyer

Heron Pond Press, 2018

Like a number of poets before her (Donald Hall comes quickly to mind), Polly Brown has moved back to occupy her rural ancestral home. She is engaged there in farming memory.~ Reading Polly Brown’s poems, I find an unusually permeable membrane between human nature and the natural world. Frog, trout, deer, red-eyed vireo; maple, birch, goldenrod, fiddlehead fern–and grandparent, parent, child, grandchild–all seem to be elemental parts of the landscape, entwined with all its green urgency, subject to its mortal weather. But the effect of Polly’s approach is often a remarkable sense of at-homeness in the world–and thus the poems comfort even as they challenge. Steven Ratiner, author of Grief’s Apostrophe

A way to share the world

Poetry communities and influences

Re-rooting in Maine

Welcoming libraries. In a small town, two lively independent bookstores. Poet activists. A reading series where I feel at home. And organizations that encourage and connect writers from all over the (huge) state of Maine.

Every Other Thursday

Since 1986–and still, thanks to Zoom–I’ve met twice each month with this wonderful group of mostly-Boston-area poets, to workshop and celebrate poems. We also run Every Other Thursday Press.

Touchstone Community School

I spent decades working with wise, creative colleagues and hundreds of brave and funny young writers; they all convinces me that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are functionally magic powers.

William B Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences

The Joiner Institute’s Summer Writing Workshops gathered American veterans of the war in Viet Nam, writers and veterans visiting from Viet Nam, young veterans from more recent wars, and people (like me) trying to understand the shadow of war for a family member. The workshops are no longer running, but I still treasure help I found there for writing about hard things.

Wake Up and Smell the Poetry

Cheryl Perreault, a genius at empowering individuals, with a gift for nourishing communities, ran a poetry venue at Hopkinton’s HCAM studio, just a few blocks from my house in Massachusetts. The venue has changed hands and names, but videos remain. Cheryl has led me to other groups of poets, and invented new ways to nourish those communities right through the Covid epidemic.

Worcester County Poetry Association

Through years of living midway between Boston and Worcester, I feasted at both tables! WCPA gave me an award that was a crucial shot in the arm; published my poems in their journal and nominated them for prizes; offered years of opportunities to lead workshops for students at St. John’s and Bancroft and a one-time, memorable workshop for adults in the backyard of Stanley Kunitz’s childhood home, next to the pear tree.

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