Leaving Pico

We heard Pico from the kitchen
where the living sat rolling
cigarettes in their thick fingers,
their bottles of Narragansett
in front of them on the table
where they sat and said verde,
green, like the backs
of certain fish or the throats
of the small birds that suck
at blossoms along the white-washed
fences in late spring:
green and clay roads, they said,
and the rolling walls
brushed white with lime,
and how many trunks
in the hold of a ship,
what dishes, what cloth, how many
rosaries and candles to the Virgin,
and the prayers for the old dead
they left to sleep under the wet hills
(the green hills, and at night
light from the oil lamps
and sometimes a guitar keening
and windmills that huddled white
over the small fields of the dead)
and all the time they were
preparing themselves behind
their violet lips and heavy eyes
to sleep in this different earth
consoled only by how the moon
and tide must set themselves
pulling off to other darkness
with as little notion of returning.

Frank Gaspar

Portuguese Heritage

Once Removed:
Portuguese-American Poets of Azorean Descent

 June 5, 7pm
Mezzanine Conference Room
Boston Public Library
Copley Place
Boston, MA

(T stop: Copley, Red line)
Directions
Sponsored by:
Instituto Camões - Portugal

The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, in partnership with the Boston Public Library and the Boston Portuguese Festival, and with the collaboration of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture (UMass Dartmouth), organize a reading of works by three American poets with Azorean ancestry: Frank Gaspar, Nancy Couto and Thomas Braga.

Come listen to inspired works as they are meant to be heard, and have a chance to discuss them with the authors themselves.

This is also a prime opportunity to visit or revisit one the most outstanding public libraries in the US and browse its rich collection, right in the heart of the capital of Massachusetts.

Special thanks to David Tebaldi, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Frank Gaspar
Frank Gaspar is the author of four books of poetry – The Holyoke (1988), Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death (1995), A Field Guide to the Heavens
(2002), and Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004) – as well as the novel Leaving Pico (1999). His writing has won a Natl. Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the 1988 Morse Poetry Prize, the 1994 Anhinga Prize, the 1999 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, a California Book Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Born and raised in Provincetown, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of California, Irvine and teaches at Long Beach City Coll. in Southern California.

Nancy Vieira Couto
Nancy Vieira Couto’s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Giant Book of Poetry, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her book, The Face in the Water (1990), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is also the author of a chapbook, Carlisle & the Common Accident. Her awards include two National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowships, a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, and a Constance
Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Grant. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she has an M.F.A. in English from Cornell Uni. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and is poetry editor of Epoch.

Thomas J. Braga
Fascinated by and connected to his ancestral culture, Thomas J. Braga is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, Motley Coats: Poems. Braga was born in Fall River in 1943. He received his BA in French and the Modern Language Award from Providence College in 1966. The recipient of a NDEA Fellowship, Braga earned his Ph.D. in French Literature
at Rice University in 1970. He taught at California State College, San Bernardino and Plattsburgh State University of New York.
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