PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project continues its literary series, Next Stage Speaks, on Friday, Sept. 26, at 7 p.m., with Verandah Porche, hosted by poet Chard DeNiord.
There is a suggested donation at the door of $10.
Porche, a poet, performer, and writing partner from Guilford, is the author of two books of poetry, “The Body's Symmetry” (Harper and Row, 1975) and “Sudden Eden” (Verdant Books, 2013).
She has also edited several volumes of poetry and personal histories, including “Ordinary Mystery,” “Infusion Musings from the Oncology Clinic, Springfield, Vermont” and “Broad Book Anthology, a Play of Voices,” a collection of personal narratives that honor the lives of elders in Guilford.
For the past 35 years she has worked tirelessly throughout southern Vermont as a visiting poet in schools, literacy and crisis centers, hospitals, factories, nursing homes, senior centers, a 200-year-old tavern, and an urban class neighborhood.
The Vermont Arts Council presented her with its Award of Merit in 1998, and in 2012 Marlboro College honored her with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
About Porche's most recent book, “Sudden Eden,” Maxine Chernoff, an esteemed critic and poet, wrote, “Verandah Porche is a wise poet who knows her land and its neighbors and the deeper truths of living a rural life in which 'Late fruit/ keeps its edge as frost/ fleeces the pasture.' These poems are about the investments one makes in life, in its loves and causes, its earth and trees, its human community.”
The Next Stage Speaks format includes poet Chard DeNiord conducting an interview with the featured guest about their career and recent works. The interview is followed by a reading, then followed by a Q & A.
DeNiord is the author of four books of poems. His fifth book of poems, “Interstate,” is forthcoming in 2015 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. A co-founder of the New England College MFA program in poetry, he works as a professor of English at Providence College and lives in Westminster West.