Featured Poet: Parker Towle, Franconia
Parker Towle, of Franconia, has published three chapbooks, SEARCH FOR DOUBLOONS, Wings Press, 1984; HANDWORK, Nightshade Press, 1991; OUR PLACES, Andrew Mountain Press, 1998. He edited an anthology of previously unpublished poems of others from Andrew Mountain Press called EXQUISITE REACTION, in 2000. At The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire he served for fifteen years on the local and advisory boards as well as the faculty of the summer festival. Since 1997 he's worked on the editorial board of THE WORCESTER REVIEW, and edited their special issues on Frank O'Hara, and Stanley Kunitz (with Cleopatra Mathis). His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart, and appeared in four anthologies. In fall 2005, he organized a reading at Dartmouth College in support of The Frost Place, by readers from New Hampshire and Vermont spearheaded by Maxine Kumin and David Huddle.
He practices neurology at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic and teaches at the medical school.
Of "Hooking Rugs and Ice Fishing: Parker writes:
"This story, carried in hospice practice in the "ballad tradition," I presume, was told at the Frost Place during the festival some years ago by, Don Sheehan, our first director, (for 26 years or so until 2006) as an illustration of the sly and unexpected messages that language carries. In typical practice of the narrative, hearing it for the first time, when Don's talk was over I sat in the barn and scribbled it down as fiercely as I could, no doubt adding one of many new spins, enacting the "creative" process we call memory."
Hooking Rugs and Ice-Fishing
He volunteered with a dying patient
expecting to go through the five stages of grief
at the first meeting. Instead
she talked about hooking rugs:
the needle, the thread, the cloth,
the rhythmic movement of the hands.
He tried other matters in conversation --
she talked of hooking rugs
On the next visit she spoke of intricacies
and hardships of ice-fishing that her husband
had done before his death. Week after week,
hooking rugs and ice-fishing
Angered, he said to friends,
"I can't go on with this
interminable hooking rugs
and ice-fishing."
One day as they sat
in the hospital cafeteria,
she going on, he bored and vexed
with hooking rugs and ice-fishing
the room
went silent, air turned
a luminous shade of green, hooking
rugs and ice
fishing stopped. She leaned over and said,
"I could not have done this
without you,"
then on again with hooking rugs
and ice-fishing. Soon after she died. At the funeral
relatives said to him, "Thank you,
all she ever spoke about
was you"
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