The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

This session brings together six poets from Massachusetts to reflect on the topic of grief and resilience. Each poet will consider a question related to the role that writing poetry has played in helping them either to share personal experiences of grief or the wider grief and brokenness in the world. They will also explore how generating poems may have helped them to move toward some degree of resilience, if not resolution or acceptance of a loss. Then each poet will read 2-3 of their poems to illustrate how their writing has amplified our understanding of grief.

We plan to structure the hour for our session as follows:
• The moderator will welcome the audience, briefly introduce the poets and the topic. (3 minutes)
• The poets will each speak for 7 minutes, combining reflections and reading their poems.
• The moderator will facilitate a 15-minute Q&A with the audience, directing questions to poets on the panel when needed.

At the beginning of the session handouts will be provided with the following questions that have been generated by the poets in this session. Each poet will choose one to respond to as a way of sharing their writing process and a few of their poems:

Poetic form: How have you used different poetic forms - such as a crown of sonnets or a villanelle, to name just two - to access fresh language and help you pry loose subject matter that can be hard to write about directly?

Unexpected themes and metaphors: The poets on this panel have each written about the loss of people close to them - be it a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend - or grief in relationship to someone who is still living. What particular themes or metaphors have emerged in your writing about loss that might not have occurred to you before you wrote these poems?