Poetry Friday--Heading to the Mass Poetry Festival!

From the 2012 festival--some of the poets whose work appears in Villanelles edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali ("Everyman's Library Pocket Poems," Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
Okay, you are going to be soooo envious! Here's a partial list of who will be speaking or reading at this year's Mass Poetry Festival being held today through Sunday in Salem, MA: Martha Collins, Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Gregory Pardlo, and Charles Simic.

I'll be staying in a B & B for two nights and I'm expecting to thoroughly enjoy my immersion in poetry! Before I head out, though, let me share a poem by one of the attending poets not listed above, Ada Limón. Limón's Bright Dead Things: Poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.

Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America

It’s a day when all the dogs of all
the borrowed houses are angel footing
down the hard hardwood of middle-America’s
newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors,
and the world’s nicest pie I know
is somewhere waiting for the right
time to offer itself to the wayward
and the word-weary. How come the road
goes coast to coast and never just
dumps us in the water, clean and
come clean, like a fish slipped out
of the national net of "longing for joy."
How come it doesn’t? Once, on a road trip
through the country, a waitress walked
in the train’s diner car and swished
her non-aproned end and said,
"Hot stuff and food too." My family
still says it, when the food is hot,
and the mood is good inside the open windows.

Read the rest here and you'll learn what role the dogs play!

Buffy's Blog is where this week's Round-Up is taking place. Drop by and stay a while!