Reading to Launch Anthology, Share How Poets ‘See Things’

By TERESA WINCHESTER
ONEONTA

The Oneonta Literary Festival 2024-25 will present The Bright Hill poets on Tuesday, November 12 at 7 p.m. in the Morris Conference Center’s Craven Lounge on the SUNY Oneonta campus. Twelve poets from the “Seeing Things” poetry workshop will showcase their work in celebration of their new anthology, “Seeing Things 2.” The reading is free and open to the public.

Reading at the event will be workshop members Diane Bliss (Middletown), Allison Collins (Unadilla), Jesse Hilson and Mary Ladany (Bovina), Bertha Rogers and Lynne Kemen (Franklin), Julene Waffle (Laurens), Vicki Whicker (Burlington Flats), and Elizabeth Huntington, Bhala Jones, Pam Strother, and Julie Suarez (Oneonta). The anthology was edited by workshop director Robert Bensen, former Hartwick College professor and director of writing (1978-2017).

The reading is sponsored by the Bright Hill Press and Literary Center in Treadwell, as well as by OLF partners Hartwick College, SUNY Oneonta, the Community Arts Network of Oneonta and Huntington Memorial Library.

Elizabeth Huntington is a learning specialist at SUNY Oneonta. Her poetry has been published in several literary journals, and won the Lane Literary Guild’s (Eugene, Oregon) Writers at the Hult award.

Huntington has been writing poetry since age 6 but describes herself as a “closet poet.” In 2020, having recently lost her husband while also trying to carry on during the pandemic, Huntington, at the urging of Bensen, joined the Seeing Things workshop.

“It was a wonderful thing to be with people who use words well. I had missed being part of a community,” she said.

Speaking of her preference for lyrical poetry, Huntington said, “The sound and the music of poetry are appealing to me. I like words that have sensory detail.”

Huntington especially admires the way Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver amplifies the details of ordinary life and invites the reader to “hold the world up into the light, revealing its poignancy.”
She correlates this way of writing with her work as an academic coach.

“I get joy out of watching someone recognize potential and begin to fulfill it,” she said.

“Seeing Things 2” features five poems by Huntington: “Husband” deals with the loneliness one can feel even in a good marriage. Describing day’s end, “Lullaby” uses rhyming and repetition to create a lullaby’s soothing sounds. “If” lists the possible repercussions of things that happened and things that did not. Her poem “Cairn” is a “literary grave marker,” set up on the page to look like a funerary mound. “Degas: Lost Oeuvre” evokes the well-known impressionist painter, who became blind in his old age—a situation which aligns with the theme of “seeing things.”

Hartwick College graduate Allison Collins edits “Upstate Life Magazine.” She is a frequent contributing writer to the Oneonta “Daily Star” and also writes for “Kaatskill Life Magazine.” Her works have appeared in numerous literary journals. “Seeing Things 2” contains five of her poems.

“I’ve been writing most of my life. Writing is like a check valve in my brain. I just need to open it up occasionally and bleed the line. I write a lot about my day-to-day life. My themes are domestic, home-centered. Life can be crazy and poetry can offset this craziness, can make an insular life better,” Collins said.

Her sensual poem, “Clasped,” explores intimate impulses. Knowing the chain of her necklace is knotted, the subject puts it on anyway, wanting to wear “something shiny” to seduce her lover. He notices the knots and begins to undo them: “My own hands found pockets,/wings folded,/and I watched you/undo small links of gold/but also, me.”

Two of her poems, “Flying Changes” and “Flight,” deal with escape from mundanity. Collins literally wrote the former poem “on the fly.”

“I wrote it on my phone, on the way home. I do this all the time. Sometimes, I just write the beginning lines,” she said.

One of Collins’ pieces is a translation of a French poem by Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960).

“I had never done a translation, didn’t even know French. I translated first line by line and then made it my own,” Collins said.

Her translation was chosen for publication in a bi-lingual poetry journal and subsequently translated into Spanish as well.

Collins characterized the Seeing Things workshop as a “safe space, constructive and supportive.” She said she has noticed a “definite uptick” in the publication of her poems since participating in the workshop.

Bhala Jones moved to Upstate New York in 2008. Prior to that, she had spent 30 years as a dancer and choreographer in New York City, performing with the New York City Opera and choreographing for the Brooklyn Music School, among other related professional undertakings.

Jones has been writing “more or less forever,” but, early on, did not take her writing seriously. Currently, however, she boasts a respectable canon of published short stories and poetry. Four of her poems appear in “Seeing Things 2.” Her themes generally deal with “women who have serious problems.” She is particularly drawn to Cassandra, a figure in Greek mythology, whose predictions for the future, though valid, were never taken seriously. Cassandra, Jones believes, is emblematic of how women are viewed by society in general.

The vivid language of “Cassandra in the Ashes” that describes the devastating aftermath of war for Trojan women also evokes current scenes in Ukraine and Gaza: “We have been here since just after dawn/my mother, my sisters, and I,/huddled among the women/as if we could hide here./We are hot. Thirsty. Dirty./Our hair damp with sweat,/falls in tangles like snakes.” The refrain “Andromache is crying”—Andromache was the wife of Hector, a fallen Trojan war hero—introduces each of the poem’s five sections elaborating on the dreaded fate awaiting the women: separation from one another, rape and enslavement by the victors. Nevertheless, Cassandra (Hector’s sister) stoically confronts her fate: “Andromache still cries/but I look up/into the face above the boots,/and try to smile.”

Jones’ poem “Incident” starkly reflects her feelings about women as victims and evokes a traumatic occurrence from her youth. In the poem, a young girl, reincarnated into an owl, looks down from “high in the willow where the dance is still going on.” The “incident” in question is the jarring transformation of a sweet moment of a young girl at a party (“I see the dress is there its swirling white chiffon”) into the brutality of a gang rape. “They took turns and snickered as they watched each other./They tittered and shoulder punched /and giggled sharing this male joke.” The owl figures as a mechanism for dealing with trauma: “All this might make me weep, but I am a white owl on a high branch/and it has nothing to do with me.”

Like Huntington and Collins, Jones spoke highly of Bensen’s workshop.

“The workshop is like family, better than family. I’ve met a whole bunch of wonderful teachers all at once. I credit Bob (Bensen) for creating that atmosphere,” Jones said.

“Seeing Things 2” is now available in local stores, including the Green Toad Bookstore in Oneonta, Five Kids Bakehouse in Gilbertsville and the Gatehouse Coffee Shop in Morris.

The remainder of the 2024-2025 Oneonta Literary Festival schedule may be accessed at https://suny.oneonta.edu/english/literary-festival.