“Every poem tells a story, and every poem is in some way about love,” says Rennie McQuilkin, author, teacher, publisher and founder of the prestigious Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. Just as I firmly believe that our ability to run long distances has been passed down over thousands of years in order to insure survival, so too has our ability to share stories, usually in the form of poems, since rhyme and meter make the stories so much easier to memorize.  Humans have been memorizing and telling stories for a much longer time period than we have been reading. Unless one happens to be descended from a long line of elites, we need to only reach back a few generations in order to find an illiterate, although illiterate does not designate a lack of intelligence, or even the absence of a mental cache of poems and stories. Students residing in countries where paper products are doled out sparingly continue to rely on the human brain’s amazing capacity for memorization. One would be amazed by the volume of poetry that can be spouted by someone who was educated in Jamaica. Personally, I have been dazzled many times by West Indies accents delivering Wordsworth or Walcott. Why run twenty six and two tenths miles, well why not, since we can? Why commit the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet to memory, well why not, since we can? This may not be the most convincing argument that I can present to a fourteen year old, which is why I am trying to start my nearly three year old off on a steady diet of beautiful stanzas.

During his introduction of Sandy Sergio’s performance of her new book That’s How The Light Gets In at The South Glastonbury Congregational Church, Rennie also introduced my daughter, “We have two year old Annie Nokes in the audience tonight, a first time poetry reading attendee”. Back when I wrote poems for Rennie’s class at Miss Porter’s School, I began giving hour-long speaking tours of The Hill-Stead Museum, a twenty-nine room mansion full of Impressionist Masterpieces such as Edgar Degas’ Dancers in Pink, back in 1991, at the age of sixteen. So incredibly young and naïve an age, I certainly took for granted my personal interactions with literary luminaires such as poet, James Merrill, and budding politicians such as Jodi M. Rell, who eventually served two terms as Connecticut’s governor. At the time, I suspected that I might grow up to be some type of a feminist social critic like Naomi Wolfe who penned modern feminist text, The Beauty Myth and more recently Vagina. Wolfe, who is most famous for telling Al Gore to don earth tones, was one of the many revolutionary authors and artists who visited my high school English classes while I was a student at two private high schools and later at Colgate University. Would I be a poet? Would I be a museum curator? Would I be a political advisor picking out neckties and/or pencil skirts? Fortunately, I became like Rennie McQuilken, an English teacher with a passion for writing.

When I was sixteen I had no idea that there is such a job as a reading administrator, but I’m qualified by the State of Connecticut for that job too. Luckily, my school is near a large body of water, and in the same town where Art as Muse; Imaginary Realms will be performed by the East Haddam Stage Company starting on Thursday, May 16th. For more information about this and other performances, please visit www.ehsco.org.  I first felt the pang that poetry coursed through this town when during the second mile of my 37th  birthday run. Five deer crossed my path, unmolested by truck or tractor, near the banks of the Salmon River. On the thrilling downhill portion of the run from the high school in Moodus to the Connecticut riverfront village of East Haddam, very few vehicles passed me, this being a low-traffic town at a low-traffic time of day. As I left the village, the uphill portion of my run thrilled me in a different way as I panted smugly up the hill, thinking how a woman possessing thinner thighs would not be trotting upward and onward through mile six, but walking on her rare, thin catwalk limbs, useless to confront such an incline. As the route leveled out in the last mile, I slowed down enough to count the cows chomping away at the tall haystack in the center of their metal pen, ten fawn colored cows, twice as many domestic as wild creatures. Of course the cows echoing the whitetails proclaimed: Look to nature! Even in this rural place, we are at least doubly overrunning the wild.  I should incorporate some acknowledgement of nature into my school day, which could simply be conserving copier paper and part of the non-renewable one gallon of oil used to produce one measly laser printer cartridge.

Rennie McQuilkin’s promise to me before the reading in South Glastonbury that Alexandrina Sergio’s poetry would provide my daughter and me with accessible stories proved true. I highly recommend visiting www.antrimhousebook.com for more information about recently published books and opportunities to meet and witness performances of authors such as Sandy Sergio. Also, make sure to attend one of the performances of Art as Muse; Imaginary Realms. Annie happily doled out hugs to the actors and musician after Saturday’s performance. Here is Annie posing with Alexandrina Sergio, author of That’s How the Light Gets In.