Featured Poet: Hope Jordan, Canterbury

Hope Jordan's poems have been published in such journals as Many Mountains Moving and Green Mountains Review; and her fiction appeared in the anthology Scream When You Burn. A trustee of the NH Writers Project, she has attended the Chenango Valley Writers Conference at Colgate University and is a long-time member of the Yogurt Poets, a writing group based in Concord, NH. Jordan has a dual degree in English and Magazine Journalism from Syracuse University, and is completing her masters degree in teaching writing at Plymouth State University. She was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire, and coached the inaugural NH Poetry Slam Team in 2007.

Of her featured poem, Hope writes:

I moved to New Hampshire twenty years ago and have been in love with it ever since. I'm lucky enough to live within a short walk to the Merrimack River; that's where I go when I need to decompress. I write a lot about the land here and I used to write a lot of free verse; it wasn't until about five years ago at a conference that I became reacquainted with writing in form. I try to let the poem tell me what kind of form it wants to be in. This poem came from an exercise I did for a graduate level poetry class at Plymouth State, with Liz Ahl. 

Merrimack

River pushes up
sky sinks down

Slow, the drift
the buoyant sprawl

Root, mud and rock
the current shifts

An early star
gleams in the treeline

Peace, the cliff swallows
speak with their wings.