By Lorrie
Hoeh
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| Bruce Guernsey at Mill Hill Inn |
Entering
the charming and comfortable parlor of the Mill Hill Inn is always a
pleasure, but with an added fillip of excitement on October 17 at the
prospect of WMSC’s first Down Home Maine presentation of the
semester. Wednesday night’s guest was poet Bruce Guernsey, who
spends part of each year in his home on Paradise Road in Bethel with
his wife, Victoria.
After a brief interlude of wine, munchies, and visiting with old and new acquaintances, we were called to order by Saranne Taylor, who introduced Bruce. His first reading from his book, From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010, was “The Apple.” He explained that the visual appearance of poetry differs from that of prose, because in poetry the “lines try to do something different from sentences.” The shape of an apple showed on the page.
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| Saranne Taylor introducing Bruce Guernsey |
We were
treated to Bruce’s readings of several of his favorites, including
“The Well,” “The Dump Pickers,” “June 21st,”
“Transplant,” “Toad,” “The Skull” and others. “The
Skull” evokes such vivid mental pictures that it was printed in the
Journal of Medicine, from which Bruce received $50! One of his poems,
"The Letter X," he worked on for ten years, and it was no
surprise that it ended with the letter "X." Copies of From
Rain were available for purchase and autographing. We were all
most appreciative of Bruce’s gracious and entertaining
presentation.
Bruce
Guernsey was born in New Hampshire, is Distinguished Professor
Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University, where he taught for
twenty-five years. He has also taught at William and Mary, Johns
Hopkins, and Virginia Wesleyan, where he was Poet-in-Residence for
four years. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The
American Scholar, and many of the quarterlies. He is a former
editor of The Spoon River Poetry Review. Guernsey has
received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, and the
Illinois Arts Council; moreover, he has been a Fulbright Senior
Lecturer in American Poetry in Portugal and Greece and has twice
sailed around the world as a faculty member with Semester at Sea.
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| Harriet Gilpatrick and Mary Haberman |
photos by Lorrie Hoeh
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information about Western Mountains Senior College visit our website
at http://sad44.maineadulted.org/western_mountains_senior_college
