Vermont Jewish Poets – Summer Gathering

A day to read our poems, to write and to deepen connection

July 27, 2025
10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Beth Jacob Synagogue
10 Harrison Ave., Montpelier, VT 05602

Beth Jacob Synagogue is wheelchair accessible, microphones will be used

More information: Email Judy

PLEASE REGISTER

What to expect:

Round-robin reading in which each person will read one poem to the group

Special reading by Featured Poet Jane Shore

Jane Shore’s six books of poems have garnered many prizes—including the Juniper Prize (1977), the Lamont Prize (1986) and the 2010 Poets Prize. She’s

been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton. Widely anthologized, her poems appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Yale Review. That Said: New and Selected Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. A Professor Emerita at the George Washington University, she lives in East Calais, VT.

Generative workshop by Jane Shore: Good Poets Steal

T.S. Eliot wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least different.”
In this workshop we’ll explore a process of deep learning from poems that we love, basing our own drafts on works we admire. I will share a poem of mine I consider almost done and the original it is based on, with revisions I made over time until it became my own. But how much is mine, how much remains of the original—and at what point does it cross over enough to become a real poem, a poem that sounds like me; an echo, not just a copy? As the mud is still wet, I’ll invite your suggestions for further changes. I find making these hybrid/homages to be an exciting way to stretch my poetic muscle in terms of subject matter, vision, language and tone, and to open up new vistas when I am stuck on what to write. I’ll provide a list of favorite “Imitations” by others.

Please bring a poem you love, are intrigued by, wish that you had written yourself. It can be a poem by another poet written in English or a translation. Bring these to work with during our session, plus anything that also may inform the poem—the backstory, wiki, etc. Bring your computer or paper and pen, whatever your normal process is. By session’s end, you may well be on your way to have a workable draft to take home.

I find this quote by Robert Lowell from the introduction of his book, Imitations, to be helpful in this process: “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment…I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as the original poem.…I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.” Though Lowell writes of translation, we can use his approach to make our own ”imitations” ring true for us.

Book swap, your own or books you’d like to trade

Time to schmooze and move around

BYO brown bag lunch, fruit and water supplied