Mary Clare Powell poetry reading and book launch: “Weeding”

The LAVA Center will host a poetry reading by Mary Clare Powell on Friday, June 7 at 6 pm. Powell will read from her latest book, Weeding, a collection of poems about weeds illustrated by photographs, drawings, and voices of other poets and writers about the value of paying attention to weeds.

“Weeds have taught me to take root where I land,” said Powell, “and to proliferate there, to welcome whatever comes, to receive what is given, to be exactly the weed I am. Weeds are scattershot, random, and determined not to be organized. I spent several years compiling this volume, collecting quotes, drawing sketches, writing poems, and simply receiving the pieces I hoped might become part of some delicious whole. This book is the result of paying attention to those plants that we often forget to notice.”

“Weeding is pure joyous Mary Clare Powell quirk,” said Janet MacFadyen, author of State of Grass. “Funny, delightful, and spiritual. I can’t think of anything else out there remotely like it.”

Carolyn Cushing, Easthampton Poet Laureate, said, “At the heart of this book is an invitation to enter the world of the weedy and the wild, to learn from the unorganized, to notice the waste spaces at the side of the road. Mary Clare has given us a beautiful book to guide our own noticing and increase the flow of love in this perfectly imperfect world.”

The reading will take place at The LAVA Center, 324 Main Street, Greenfield, MA, on Friday, June 7, at 6 pm. It is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.

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About the book:
Weeding is Mary Clare Powell’s latest (and perhaps last) poetry book in which she celebrates weeds (and all living things) with poems, drawings, photographs, words of other writers, and all kinds of delight. For this book she’s pulled out all the stops in her joy of being alive and being with plants, friends, the earth, and sky.

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About the poet:
Mary Clare Powell, a poet, a writer, and teacher, lives in western Massachusetts. For most of her life she’s been a teacher—from high school English in Baltimore County, MD to Taipei American School in Taiwan, to classes at UMass Amherst and ending up at Lesley University in Cambridge MA for 25 years. She taught teachers how to integrate all the arts (drama, poetry, storytelling, music, dance, and visual arts) into their K-12 curricula. Retired now, she offers writing/poetry classes at libraries and works with individual writers. At 81, she gardens (spry, nimble, and vigorous) and writes increasingly light-hearted poems.