Welcome to The Poetry Lounge with Adrian Frandle, a new monthly column that highlights how poetry is found in our everyday lives, celebrating local poets and literature in Stratford and beyond. Join Adrian and explore all poetry has to offer through conversation with literary personalities, close readings of poems new and old, and discover the richness of the poetry all around us.
Seeing New Englandly
By Adrian Frandle
“Because I see — New Englandly,” is a short line from Emily Dickinson’s poem The Robin’s My Criterion for Tune that connects a close awareness of her New England surroundings with the way she sees the world through poetry. What would it mean for us to “see New Englandly?” For me, it signals that poetry is embedded everywhere and anywhere we reside, if we learn to properly notice it.
In Stratford, “where forest meets shore,” we are fortunate to have within walking distance a richness of natural resources, a common font of poetry. We have all read poems in grade school about trees and birds, forests and the raging sea. Whether ancient Greek poetry, or Robert Frost and his peers, up to recent U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and many other contemporary poets like Carl Phillips and Jorie Graham, nature is a primary focus. But when I say poetry is everywhere, I mean it’s also laced in the cracked sidewalks we traverse each day, in the cars passing alongside our commutes to work, in work itself and in the relationships with people we meet, the neighborhoods we inhabit. A focus of this column will be the ways that poetry intersects with our daily lives, in the here and now.
I moved to Stratford about six years ago, in the thick of a corporate life of drudgery and desperate for change. In the midst of my burnout, I received a box from my mother, who was cleaning out the garage. It contained high school photos and corsages, and among the stack of old memories were several pages of poems and stories, scrawled on the back of napkins and large ruled notebook papers. I was reminded that I’d always written—to process how I thought and felt, but had put that all to the side after college when I felt like I had to “get serious” (and find a job to pay the rent, which poetry only does for the lucky few…very few).
While still working, I risked a return to writing and enrolled in an online poetry class in the evenings. That single class with brilliant poet-teacher Joy Priest put me back on a path that I haven’t stopped walking since. I eventually started publishing in small indie literary magazines and later received an Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry. Now I run retreats for poets and artists, give readings around the country, edit, publish, and more.
I met recently with Crier columnist and poet, Norah Christianson, over tea at my house in Lordship. Green was just beginning to wriggle itself out of the trees outside. Her blue sweater, azure earrings and piercing eyes reflected the bright sky over the Long Island Sound as we discussed Stratford, our experience of living in community, and poetry’s openness: its ability to treat any subject, to find hidden beauty and make the familiar seem wonderfully strange.
I hope this column will mirror the essence of our conversation and highlight that hidden beauty around us through conversations with local poets and literary personalities, close readings of contemporary works, and engaging with poetry that connects us to the rich traditions of local life so that we may, like Dickinson, learn how to better see New Englandly. Which is to say, it is never too early or too late to begin–or continue–reading and writing poetry. Both are skills that require only good faith effort and a little encouragement, which together we’ll discuss in columns to come.
Adrian Dallas Frandle is a poet, editor, and former chef. He has served as Poetry Editor for several small presses. His chapbook “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” was published in 2023 by Kith Books. Most recently, their work has been featured in Poet Lore, Honey Literary, Hooligan Magazine, & The Connecticut Literary Anthology (Woodhall Press). He holds an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College. He and husband Michael Todd Cohen, steward Lordship House, a private home with public programs, including funded artist fellowships and a national free library-by-mail, to celebrate and serve the literary community.
