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New Hampshire Poet Showcase
From NH Poet Laureate, Pat Fargnoli

At my request, The NH Arts Council is providing me with a link to the poet laureate page on their website in order that I may showcase poems by a number of New Hampshire Poets. The poets will be by my invitation only, but I plan to include both the famous and the less famous ....those who are seriously working at poetry craft from many areas of the state. A different poet and poem will be presented every 2 weeks.

Featured Poet: Meg Peterson, Plymouth


Meg PetersenMeg Petersen is the director of the Plymouth Writing Project and a founding editor of the Plymouth Writers Group Anthologies of Teachers Writing. Her poetry has appeared in Concrete Wolf, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, Garden Lane, English Journal, The Leaflet, The International Journal for Teaching Writing, the Plymouth Writers Group Anthologies, and other publications. In 1997, she was named New England Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Recently her poem, "Bringing Down the Ceiling" was featured in a poetry month display at the New Hope Gallery in Bristol, Rhode Island. Her work appears in the new anthology Regrets Only  from Little Pear Press.

Of her featured poem, Meg writes:

This poem came out of the quite literal experience of having to take down a horsehair plaster ceiling.  I had a lot of time to hone the images as I worked at it over the course of a weekend. I thought about a story my friend Robert Miller wrote in which he used a falling ceiling as a "metaphor too perfect to name".  The last line emerged in revision, surprising me with how it made me rethink the whole experience.


Bringing Down the Ceiling

Seek out the shadowed slits into which
the metal blade might fit.
Find the point of pressure
and steady yourself.
Exploit the hidden fault lines
in the plaster.
Brace your weight and push-
not strong, but cautious,
as if to pump brakes on glare ice.
Expose yet another row
of bare wooden slats.
Try not to breathe
until the dust settles.

Remember how we go about our lives
believing the ceiling, the walls, the frames
will hold
And as the pieces crack and plummet,
as the heavy horsehair plaster falls,
splits and drops like strange rain,
lands with a thud you will hear
in your dreams,
remember all those times the metaphor
arrived too perfect to name, too whole
to swallow, and wonder
if you can ever know you love anything again
until you have split apart its seams.

(first published in Concrete Wolf)

For more information about Meg Petersen visit...

Click here for a list of previous Poet Showcases

 

Last updated: September 19, 2007

 
 
 
 
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