BRATTLEBORO — Vermont's newest poet laureate, Chard deNiord, writes lyrical poems about what he calls “immense particulars.”
“I concentrate on details that become large and important,” deNiord says.
His subjects can be the seemingly plain things in life, like close friends lost, marriage, and farm life in Vermont (which he learned about when teaching at the Putney School, which has a farm on its campus). But he transforms the mundane and familiar through poetry, as can be seen in the first half of his lyric poem, The Thin Path:
* * *
§The quiet I keep on the thin path
§to the beach is the hardest.
§The sound
§of your voice below and the waves unrolling
§against the shore of broken stones
§is an oracle, my future now
§of loving you.
* * *
DeNiord may have been professor of English at Providence College for the last 16 years where he teaches literature and creative writing, but he calls Vermont home. Since 1989, he has lived in Westminster West with his wife, Liz. He has published all his poetry while living there, beginning in 1990 with his first poetry collection, Asleep in the Fire.
DeNiord has written five subsequent books of poetry, including Interstate, published this September by University of Pittsburgh Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of poetry in America.
In 2012, DeNiord also authored a book of essays and interviews with renowned poets called Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century American Poets. The poets featured in the collection include Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, and Maxine Kumin, among others.
“I was stunned and humbled by the appointment of Vermont Poet Laureate; I didn't expect it at all,“ says deNiord. “Gov. Peter Shumlin wrote a nice letter to congratulate me, and he expressed his hope that I would continue to promote poetry in Vermont.”
As Vermont Poet Laureate, deNiord will succeed such extraordinary and internationally known poets as Sydney Lea, who was named to the post in 2011, as well as Ruth Stone (2008-2011), Grace Paley (2003-2007), Ellen Bryant Voigt (1999-2002), Louise Gluck (1994-1998), Galway Kinnell (1989-1993), and Robert Frost (1961-1963).
DeNiord will begin his laureateship officially on Nov. 2, when an installation ceremony is planned at the Statehouse.
The appointment of poet laureate is for four years and has no particular duties.
“The position is honorary,” say deNiord. “There is no one to tell me what to do.”
But don't expect from him any odes on the Statehouse or sonnets to open the state Senate.
“I really do not write occasional poems,” he says. “But I do hope to continue to promote poetry in Vermont. I want to be an active ambassador to encourage the people in Vermont to try out the best in poetry.”
DeNiord told Seven Days that as poet laureate he wants to help Vermonters, especially young people, hear and appreciate poetry as “essential language” that need not be reserved for weddings, funerals, and other special occasions.
His work as poet laureate will continue the same mission he has had in his teaching of both literature and creative writing.
“I think it is important to show people how poetry does connect to their own experience,” deNiord explains. “So many people are afraid of poetry. They claim they don't get it. So I ask my students if anyone has experienced his or her dog dying, and then I show them a poem written about the death of a dog. I want to reveal how how poetry can appeal on an experiential level.
“My mission is kind of old-fashioned. I want to expand the readership for poetry. Poetry truly is for everyone. Walt Whitman once said that the poet absorbed the country passionately as the country absorbs him. In this day and age, with the increasing dangerous idea in our culture that art is not as important as science or business, and that language is something best reduced to text messaging, I want to propose an alternative.”
DeNiord knows it is true that when compared to popular novelists or pop songwriters that poets may not sell a lot of books.
“But they still have a great impact on our culture,” he says. “If you look beyond the number of books sold, you can see how much poetry is prevalent in other ways. I am shocked by how many people who come up to me and say they were moved by a certain poem of mine, even though they have never read any of my books. These readers may have found the the poem on the Internet in some blog or in some journal. Poetry is now out there, everywhere.”
Yet poetry was not always the obvious vocation for deNiord.
Born on Dec. 17, 1952, in New Haven, Conn., deNiord was raised in Lynchburg, Va., where he attended Lynchburg College. The son of a doctor, deNiord anticipated going into the medical profession as well until his college professors introduced him to religious studies, which he chose as his major.
DeNiord graduated from Lynchburg College in 1975 and went on to earn his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School in 1978. DeNiord then envisioned himself becoming a minister. But before pursuing ordination, a little like the advice the Mother Superior gave Maria in The Sound of Music, an Episcopal bishop thought it would be a good idea for him to get a job for a while in the secular world.
DeNiord instantly saw the wisdom in this. “I married at 18 and I had a wife and two kids to support,” he says.
He took a job as an inpatient psychiatric aide at the Connecticut Mental Health Center on the research unit, working with as many as 80 patients. Although he had no formal experience, deNiord had been given so many in-service trainings that by the third year he felt he knew as much as if he had earned a degree as a psychiatric nurse. At that time, he began working with outpatients, which continued for another two years.
DeNiord found this work rewarding, but he still felt something lacking in his life.
“All along I had been writing on the side,” he says. “Writing was very important to me. You could say it was a need or an obsession.”
So after five years, he left health care to pursue poetry.
DeNiord attended the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received his MFA in 1985. “Our whole family moved out there,” he says. “It was a crazy thing to do. We had no money or job. My wife had to work.”
Nonetheless, the change was successful, and deNiord found his time at Iowa to be a terrific adventure. “I was at the right age to make the most of the experience of the Writers' Workshop. I think many who go to writer programs are too young. But being 31 or 32, I had enough experience and interests to really benefit from it.”
DeNiord then began teaching English at a prep school in Connecticut, The Gunnery. He lost that position when he tried to help his students make Martin Luther King Day meaningful with a series of programs, after the school administration refused to allow students to take the day off.
“The headmaster fired me on the spot,” he says.
“This was awful for me because I still had my family to support, but you know, my life has been filled with lucky breaks. After being fired, I called up The Putney School in Vermont for a job, and it turned out, not only did they have a half a million dollar grant to establish the Endowed Chair of Comparative Religions and Philosophy, but the director was going to be in my area next week, and if I could get over to the Farmington, Conn., McDonald's she could interview me right away. I researched all I could about the Putney School, which I think impressed them. Anyway I got the job, which I held for nine years.”
In 1998, during a sabbatical from The Putney School, deNiord began his association with Providence College, replacing someone who also was on sabbatical. “At first, my position there was temporary,” says deNiord. Only much later did he become part of the permanent staff at the college.
When he returned to The Putney School, there was a new headmaster, Brian Morgan, who wanted to hire his own faculty. “He told me that my service would not be needed anymore,” says deNiord. “I said you can't fire me; I have tenure.”
DeNiord stayed a few years more at The Putney School, but he knew his days were numbered there. So once again he found himself having to search for some way to support his family. It was then that he initiated a MFA program in creative writing at New England College in New Hampshire, which has developed into one of the best in the country.
“I am very proud of this,” deNiord admits. “That program became as good as it is because we had some amazing teachers willing to work there, such as Galway Kinnell or Maxine Kumin.”
After he was offered a steady position at Providence College, deNiord for a while taught both there and at New England College. But, in the end, he says, it proved to be very exhausting and now he only teaches at Providence College.
Through it all he has continued to write poetry.
“If I knew what I know now I wonder if I would have pursued a career of a poet,” deNiord says. “But when young, in your ignorance you have courage. You have no idea how hard success will be. If you just love writing it hardly matters, even if it becomes a foolish obsession.”
DeNiord writes primarily lyrics or lyrical narratives.
“In the beginning I was very concerned about emphasizing craft,” he says. “I thought you couldn't be a poet unless you mastered form. So I felt the need to write a successful sonnet, or use blank verse or rhymed couplets, just to show I could.
“Now I primarily write in free verse, although I sometimes still use more traditional forms. I think this back and forth dance brings an interesting aesthetic tension in my writing.”
DeNiord's artful use of free verse can be seen in the second half of his poem, The Thin Path:
§I am caught beneath
§the tilt of maples and cry of difference
§between ten thousand things: leaf
§and stone, rail and wave,
§me, you.
§I feel restored
§in this descent, naming blossoms
§along the trail, hyacinth, lilac
§and roses.
§I feel a table has
§been righted in my heart, and I
§am ready now to place a vase
§at its center with a single flower.
DeNiord says some readers are intimidated simply by the words being laid out in verse.
“I was saying to my friend, the poet Carolyn Forche, whose prose poem The Colonel has become incredibly popular, that even this work would not have all its readers if it were set in free verse lines,” he says. “In prose poems such as The Colonel, and even in lyrically written novels, people are reading poetry all the time, and often they are not aware of it.”