[V]ermont’s new Poet Laureate, Chard deNiord, has devoted much of his career to talking with poets.
He’s interviewed some of the country’s most distinguished older poets — Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Ruth Stone, Galway Kinnell and Maxine Kumin — conversations published for posterity in national literary journals and in his 2012 book, “Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century Poets.”
“I’m working on interviewing younger poets across the nation now, and I’d like to do something like that with Vermont poets,” deNiord said during a telephone interview last week.
“I’m just figuring out what I’m going to do over the next four years. I’m going to continue many of the things that (former Poet Laureate) Syd Lea was doing. I’m going to collaborate with other Vermont poets and determine how to get poetry into the homes, schools and libraries of the state.
“I want people to feel that I am going to continue to celebrate Vermont’s rich poetry legacy as other poet laureates have done stretching back to Robert Frost,” said the 63-year-old deNiord, who lives in Westminster West and is a tenured professor at Providence College in Providence, R.I.
Lea, a Newbury resident, followed Stone in 2011 as poet laureate and served until Monday when deNiord was installed. He also served on the committee that selected his successor.
“I’m very enthusiastic about him . I don’t know him that well. I read with him one time and liked him,” Lea said.
“I really like his poems. It’s poetry that’s accessible, not that it’s not deep, but it’s like Frost. I have an obscurity bias, and he doesn’t qualify for that. Poetry is no good if it’s only for people who know about poetry. His poems are for everyone.”
In an interview published on the Providence College website, deNiord said he writes his poems for a wide audience.
“I really want everyone to read my poems. I would like people to read my poetry and see that it is as an essential language for the everyday dramas in our lives.”
In his new book, “Interstate,” deNiord pays tribute to Stone, a poet he greatly admired. His poem channels Stone’s voice and how she thought about the inspiration of writing poetry:
The Gift
In memory of Ruth Stone
(June 8th, 1915—November 19th, 2011)
“All I did was write them down
wherever I was at the time, hanging
laundry, baking bread, driving to Illinois.
My name was attached to them
on the page but not in my head
because the bird I listened to outside
my window said I couldn’t complain
about the blank in place of my name
if I wished to hold both ends of the wire
like a wire and continue to sing instead
of complain. It was my plight, my thorn,
my gift — the one word in three I was
permitted to call it by the Muse who took
mercy on me as long as I didn’t explain.”
DeNiord was born in New Haven, Connecticut, but grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, where his father practiced medicine.
While he was studying at the Kent School, a preparatory school in Connecticut, deNiord started writing his first poems. He had considered following his father into the medical profession, but at Lynchburg College, he changed his major to religious studies and went on to receive a master of divinity degree from Yale Divinity School. After graduation, he was a candidate to be ordained as an Episcopal priest when the bishop suggested that he work in another field for a few years, noting that working in the outside world would make him more empathic as a priest and expose him to the circumstances of his parishioners.
After working for five years as an inpatient psychiatric aide at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, deNiord realized was better suited for a teaching career and writing poetry.
“I was 31 when I entered Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was really excited to have been accepted, but I had to get jobs to help support my family. I had a wife and two young kids,” he said.
He received his masters of fine arts degree in 1985 and landed a job teaching at the elite Gunnery School in Connecticut, but he was fired for supporting a student boycott over the headmaster’s refusal to recognize Martin Luther King Day. His stance helped land him a position teaching religion and writing at the progressive Putney School, where he stayed for the next decade.
While at Putney, deNiord published his first book of poetry, Asleep in the Fire, in 1990. He joined the faculty at Providence in 1998 and has received a top teaching award. While retaining his job at Providence, he also cofounded in 2002 the masters of fine arts in poetry program at New England College, in Henniker, New Hampshire, and directed it until 2007.
“We had a little seed money and attracted 10 students in the beginning and got it off of the ground. We had an amazing faculty. When I left in 2007, it had grown to 63 students.”
DeNiord has published 11 books and dozens of essays and interviews.
He is working on another series of interviews with American poets and some other projects in addition to serving as poet laureate.
“I’d love to focus on Vermont poets. Vermont has some very interesting poets, and it’s going to be an interesting four years,” deNiord said.
And his name? It’s French Huguenot, “probably comes from a French town spelled deNiort, and my name, deNiord, is a bastardization of that. Chard is short for Richard, my father’s name. My mother didn’t want me to be called Ricky or Dick, so she called me Chard.”
Here’s another poem from “Interstate,” a book title inspired by his long commute from Westminster West to Providence on Interstate 91 and the Massachusetts Turnpike:
Grouse Call
Do si do and say hello
to drummin’ bird. Slow
it down then pick it up.
One and a half and let
her go. It’s right by right
by wrong you go. Turn
to your left and freeze
the doe. Promenade
to the field below.
It may be the last time,
I don’t know. Allemande
right with Mr. Crow.
You can’t go to heaven
when you carry on so.
Yellow rock, red rock,
oh by Joe. Dangle now
outside the know, tim’rous
beastie, beastie, O!
Warren Johnston can be reached at wjohnston@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.
