by Verandah Porche
Verdant Books, 2012
Intensely personal poetry only works if readers can recognize something of themselves, or some universal truth, or something fun or beautiful in the prose. If it’s there, the poet and reader achieve some sort of mental synthesis – sort of like a grafted white pine.
If you lived through the 1960s and ’70s in the rural Northeast, you’ll see yourself in Verandah Porche’s new collection of poetry, Sudden Eden, at which point my guess is that the graft will take. Porche, a city girl from Teaneck, New Jersey, moved to a ramshackle Vermont farm in 1968 and went on to become a minorly famous figurehead of the back-to-the-land movement. You’ll recognize the tension between the play-farmer artists and the granite locals in these poems. Not surprisingly, the book’s release has garnered a lot of nostalgic press in Vermont about that tumultuous time.
But if you didn’t live through that era, there’s still plenty that’s universal and beautiful in these poems. I was born seven years after her commune, which is to say I never knew rural Vermont (I could be speaking for any rural state here) without a countercultural influence. Our role models growing up were sixth-generation dairy farmers who listened to Paul Harvey and organic hippie farmers who liked the Grateful Dead – they were all part of the same place.
For me, and I suspect for many of you, you’ll find that the poems in Sudden Eden work just fine as homages to rural life – and Porche is as good a chronicler of this as anyone I know. We collect chanterelles with her (“a trill of thrush made edible”); split and haul bucks, and forests, with local boys; marvel at the overlapping home ranges of Arctic Cats and Firebirds. That she can write poems about the sticks with such authenticity is not surprising, considering that when other back to-the-landers moved back to the city, Verandah stayed. Forty-four years later she still lives there. Her life’s work has been to help kids in schools and factory workers and seniors and people in crisis centers tell their stories; to help them fall in love with language. If there’s a touch of affection in that last line it’s because I was one of those people – a fourth grader in Shaftsbury Elementary School enthralled with this strangely named lady and the wild words that fell off her tongue.
Verandah the writer can be a mad hatter, for sure, in that distinctly late 1960s Trout Fishing in America way. In one poem she uses the sound of every letter in the alphabet to make words (CroK balls); in another she instructs a reader to fill a black sky-speckled kettle with a rolling boil. Steam quart jars. Can light. Seal and cool. But she can also be simple and spare. “100 Years of Squares and Reels” evokes a wintertime dance in a hill-town grange hall, a milk maid in a pretty red dress. The lines in the poem are as sparkling clean as fresh snow.
In “Blue Seal” she opens with the phrase:
Did you ever fall open
Like a hundred-weight
Of Blue Seal Dairy Ration?
And could have ended the poem right there.
The very best poems in Sudden Eden are playful, challenging, odd, and disciplined, which I guess is another way of saying a mixture of the 33-year-old woman pictured on the front cover and the 68-year-old woman on the back. “Stovepipe,” which ran in the Autumn 2010 issue of Northern Woodlands, paints a spare, gothic image of a fire being laid in an old farmhouse. Dusk (“the light bent down as if to milk”); young tough country kids juxtaposed with an ominous image of a stovepipe thinned to lace. In nine lines she paints an image full of mystery and magic and foreboding. And then on the third, or fourth, reading, you notice that it’s an acrostic – the first letter of each line spells STOVEPIPE. The mad hatter at work.
In “Trouble Time” we’re shown a woman in bed lying next to an unfaithful spouse. It’s winter and it’s late and he’s sleeping. She’s awake and thinking, heartbreakingly, Let I be she. The poem’s last line:
O soothe, sooth, soot.
Subtract me.
Is soo Verandah. So playful and poignant at the same time.