Guilford Poets Guild

Dear Fellow Poetry Lover:

Despite hunkering down this past year, the Guilford Poets Guild has been busy. While we had to cancel our regular poetry readings at the Guilford Library last spring because of the pandemic, we were able to resume them via Zoom in the fall with readings by Priscilla Ellsworth, Charles Rafferty, and Ginny Lowe Connors. We hosted a virtual Holiday Roundtable reading in December, and we are currently working with Guilford High School to coordinate an event with student poets this spring.

In 2019, we published the 20th Anniversary Anthology, our third anthology of shoreline poets. The theme was “Our Changing Environment”—although none of the poems considered a pandemic. Copies of the anthology are available at Breakwater Books, the Guilford Art Center, and here on our website.

Our website also includes books published by our members, videos of poetry readings, upcoming events, and news items. During the pandemic, the site featured “Poems in a Pandemic,” “Ekphrastic May: Poems from Home,” and a series of poet interviews during National Poetry Month.

And so we press on, meeting twice a month on Zoom to share and polish our work, and making plans for our 2021 Second Thursday Readings starting in the Spring.

We wish you the best in this challenging time and, if you care to contribute, we deeply appreciate your support. Donations can be made by mail or by using the Donate button below

Stay well, stay safe, vaccinations are just around the corner,

Carol Leavitt Altieri, Evelyn Atreya, Gwen Gunn, Juliana Harris, Margaret Iacobellis, Karen Gronback Johnson, Norman Thomas Marshall, Nancy Meneely, Jane Muir, Patricia Horn O’Brien, Sharon Olson, Jen Payne, Elizabeth Possidente, Jane Ulrich, Edward Walker, Gordy Whiteman

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In December, we’re highlighting some of our favorite holiday poems and writings. Sharon Olson writes, “Recently Poetry Magazine published online a poem by W. S. Di Piero. I suspect he is not well known, but he is one of my favorite poets. Because he taught at Stanford near where I lived, I met him a few times and we even exchanged some limited correspondence. Di Piero’s poems often are concerned with the lives of the working class people, like the ones he grew up with in South Philly. His poem “Chicago and December” is a personal meditation of his reactions walking around that city, about the commercialism of the holiday decorations, but more importantly he invokes the change of seasons, marked by the flight of birds.”