I recently saw an exhibit on the second floor of the Provincetown library: a case alongside the Rose Dorothea containing a whaling harpoon and line, a few images, and a […]
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Learning From Lichens
Susie Nielsen explores intuition and influence via a poem by Jane Hirshfield
In our thing-filled culture, our super-documented lives, what happens in the liminal spaces? What happens in those nothing-moments as we leave one place (either physically or mentally) and move toward […]
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Wind-Scoured and Gleaming
Marge Piercy’s instructions for living
Last month’s pre-Christmas storm is one we’ll be remembering for years. The damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure is heartbreaking and terrifying. Wildlife, too, took a beating, with many sea […]
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Pilgrims in Provincetown
Robert Strong queries colonial legacy on the Outer Cape
The overlapping stories of the Outer Cape are so thick and rich that it’s hard to hear them all: Nauset and Wampanoag people, Viking explorers, Basque fishermen, other European explorers, […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: From Primrose to Precambrian
Debbie Nadolney considers deep time via a poem by Rita Dove
Debbie Nadolney is someone most art lovers (or music lovers, or convergence lovers) in Provincetown know. She arrived on the local gallery scene in 2012 when she opened AMP — […]
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Afloat at Land’s End
Maria Nazos’s ‘Cape Cod Pantoum’
For all the beauty of the Outer Cape, for all the luck we feel to live in this gorgeous place, it isn’t all dreamy sunsets and fabulous gatherings. Not all […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: Pushing the World Away to See It Anew
Alexander DuToit brings Sam Hamill’s heron into the darkroom
This month I asked Alexander DuToit, a senior at Nauset Regional High School, if he’d “Mad Lib” a poem — that is, take an existing poem and swap out everything […]
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A Poem That Loosely Follows Summer’s Brush
In Kimiko Hahn’s Wellfleet sojourn, a jumble of memories, worries, and relationships
Summer unfurls to reveal the Cape Cod most people imagine: sandy, sticky, hedonistic, salty. There’s a looseness to the air. Right now, the lush chestnut tree outside the window is […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: To Spring on Cape Cod
Jessica Smart brings Mary Oliver home with peepers, lilacs, and whales
Mary Oliver’s voice, vision, and words are beloved around the world and uniquely tied to Provincetown, where she lived for many decades. Her poems have introduced countless readers to ponds, […]
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Rereading History in Poetry
John Bonanni explores the truth of ‘Patient O’
When I was a kid, history class bored me. It was all dusty, musty dates, laws, and names. I have a hunch I’d have been more interested if I’d been […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: Getting Lost in the Making
Sim Fidel shares a shift drink with Pablo Neruda
One thing I love about the Outer Cape is how, more often than not, the person working at the grocery store, gas station, library, restaurant, hardware store, or coffee shop […]
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Not Just Another Poem About the Moon
Donika Kelly writes of ‘feelings,’ namely love
I have a lot of feelings and always have. In fact, it’s why I began writing poems in high school. Feelings! So many feelings. Feelings that needed a safe place […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: A Starter Kit
Swapping noun for noun, verb for verb, to create something new
Poets build poems within the shells of earlier work, caterpillar to moth. We learn to write by reading and echoing until something clicks that feels genuine and new. I love […]
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Digging Dugan
A poem in which what seems dark and bleak becomes, somehow, hopeful
Poetry is an invitation to slow down and think more deeply about experiences, observations, perplexities, beauties, enragements, and delights. Good poetry helps us see more honestly and accurately. Sometimes poems […]
