Featured Poet: Dorinda Wegener, Wilton
 Dorinda Wegener holds a MFA from New England College where she was a Joel Oppenheimer Award recipient. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, The Marlboro Review, Sou’wester, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Bitter Oleander and Salamander. She is actively seeking a literary press for her first full length collection, All I’s and O’s. Dorinda has had the honor of reading with the louderARTS Project in New York City, and her poems, “The Harvest” and “Evening Service,” were both finalist for the Marlboro Prize as judged by poet Edward Hirsch. As a child, Dorinda lived in Robert Frost’s first New Hampshire home prior to his famous farm.
Notes on “Homestead”: “Homestead” was the first poem written after the MFA process. It began as a response to the debate on sentimentality and its role within poetry, but soon evolved into a direct, personal address to sentiments: love, pity, nostalgia, fear. As I wrote through the drafts, I noticed the images were representative of endings: graduate school; my childhood through my own child’s growing; the loss of family and the definition of ‘family.’ Traveling through such melancholy, I knew I had to successfully ground the poem. New Hampshire, being my “home state,” held the resolution: all the vegetation written into “Homestead” is native, a natural heritage to juxtapose my maudlin mind. I hope you enjoy the poem; I am especially fond of the last two lines. “Homestead” first appeared in The Antioch Review.
For more information about Dorinda Wegener:
|
