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Both poets spent their entire careers in or near the Northeast Kingdom, turning the ordinary events of their daily rural lives into memorable speech that appealed directly to their fellow Vermonters, as well as to readers outside Vermont. Both poets found their “destiny’s brook” — that “watering place” Robert Frost describes at the conclusion of his poem Directive as the source from which the poet drinks to “be whole again beyond confusion.” Indeed, both David and Leland wrote beyond confusion with spring-like clarity, chronicling what David called his “happy life” and Leland his “galvanized” and “winter ready” life.
Leland’s family roots extended back seven generations in Vermont, to the early 18th century. Although poetry was his avocation (only a very few poets can earn enough to make a living on their writing), Leland, a polymath, worked as a Morgan horse trainer, a book printer and designer, a dairy farmer, a logger, a carpenter, an Elderhostel instructor of astronomy, birding, canoeing, and autobiographical writing.
He received his BA from UVM and an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he was offered a teaching job following his graduation in 1976. He chose instead, however, to return to his hometown of Barton, Vt., and wed his yen for writing to his love for working on his family dairy farm.
Novelist and longtime friend of Leland, Howard Frank Mosher, wrote of his Northeast Kingdom neighbor and former student, “He wrote from the inside out (with) very little interest in conventional success. Instead, he stayed close to his material.”
The author of seven books of poetry, Leland never tired of writing his Vermont georgics, pacing off his meters in his writing studio, divining inspiration in everything from fishing to canning and pickling. His poems translate Vermont life from the fields, forests, skies and waterways to the page. In his best poems, of which there are many, Leland’s plain-speaking narratives about pastoral and agricultural ingenuity emanate hard-won wisdom, reminding his reader of the ecstatic “delight” one can experience in even a “miniature scene.” Here is the last stanza of one of Leland’s recent poems from his book Winter Ready titled In The Cranberry Bog.
I’ve knelt picking, looking close,
like this in Labrador,
where each tiny hillock, moss-topped,
through which dew berries push,
is a small tableau in late August
of a New England round mountain
in mid fall. I’m surrounded
by a number of the latter this gathering day,
but, knees wet, hands cold, senses startled,
I focus on the miniature scene,
and feel delight as large
as if the part were the whole,
as if there were a whole.
Green Writers Press in Brattleboro published Leland’s most recent book of poems titled Galvanized, New and Selected Poems, in April.
David Budbill, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, moved to Vermont in 1969 after studying philosophy and art history at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, then earning a master’s degree in theology from Union Theology Seminary in New York City in 1967 and teaching for two years at Lincoln University in Oxford, Penn. Once ensconced near Judevine Mountain in Wolcott, Vt., David found his home, moving only as far as Montpelier during the last year of his life.
David was inspired as much by the rural drama of Vermont life as he was by the conditions and landscape of northern Vermont’s austere weather, pastoral beauty and camaraderie with his neighbors, including his dear friend and mentor Hayden Carruth. He was the author of eight books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, a picture book for children, and dozens of essays, introductions, speeches and book reviews.
In a review of his book, Happy Life, a writer for The New York Times wrote, “Nesting on Judevine Mountain in Vermont, where he has lived for some 40 years, David Budbill is a no-nonsense free-range sage who celebrates tomatoes in September, the whistle of a woodcock and sweet black tea and ancient Chinese poems.”
David was gifted as both an expansive and an epigrammatic poet, alternating between his elaborate dramas, such as his much celebrated play Judevine, and his distilled poems in Moment to Moment that were inspired by the Chinese Cold Mountain poet Han-shan. He carried on this aesthetic dialectic throughout his career, witnessing ecstatically to the good life in Wolcott, while also economizing his language in spare, lean verse.
What to say about the influence and appeal that David had on his readers? I can think of no better testimony than that of a former student of mine during the mid-’90s at the Putney School named Abby Braithwaite, who was moved to write the following letter to David shortly before he died.
Dear David,
I discovered you, thanks to my parents, as a kid growing up in the Northeast Kingdom, with Bones on Blackspruce Mountain and Snowshoe Trek to Otter Creek. I remember loving the stories, and feeling a strong sense of ownership, reading stories that took place in Vermont, by a writer from Vermont.
Then, in high school I discovered your poetry, and again it was transformative, with the background of high-falutin’ poetry, to find poetry about my place, to feel the resonance of language within that. And my dad started making sure I saw all your plays, and took me to your readings, and brought your person to your work.
And in college a quote from one of your plays graced the cover of my writing journal…. something along the lines of “Do not mistake my humility for ignorance, I certainly do not mistake your arrogance for intelligence.”
And then, when working in the woods with troubled youth when I was in my 20s, Moment to Moment came out and came into the wilderness with me, pages dirt-smeared and dog-eared as I shared your words with kids trying to pull themselves out of tortured adolescence and get on with their lives. Poems like Trying to Be Who I Already Am were read around many a campfire in the damp of North Carolina mountains.
I can’t tell you how many times I have shared your poems, as I grapple with my own need for solitude and community. Now I am 40, finally finding moments here and there to write, to pull time away from kids and work and get words on the page. And there is no question in my mind that your clarity, your humor, your mountain spirituality and your frankness have been an influence on me as a writer. If I can call myself that when I barely write, these days. But it’s all in there.
I look forward to reading your upcoming book, Broken Wing. In the meantime, I wish you grace and peace as you settle into your new normal, and figure out how art and life will commingle in this juncture. You have been so generous and public with all that you have lived until now. Thank you for that. We will keep reading.
Wishing you some Vermont spring sunshine, from my transplanted self in the Pacific Northwest.
Abby Braithwaite
a life-long reader
I don’t know how to improve on Abby’s letter as a way of celebrating and acknowledging the love so many Vermonters hold for David’s poems and stories.
David wrote a poem called Sometimes in 2008 that captures the intense love he held for his life and vocation as a poet — a love with a deeply human sensibility that instilled in him a wide-ranging, compassionate vision of the world itself as his spiritual home away from home.
Sometimes
Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,
warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when
it seems like all this will go on forever,
when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,
then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,
and in the evening one night make pickled beets
and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,
and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor
and make grape jam,
when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,
through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,
when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear
or somehow be taken away from all this,
at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love
with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly
I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony
and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,
in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with
the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,
I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I’ve got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I’ve got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.
Leland and David’s voices will live on in their poetry as a part of the rich poetic legacy of Vermont, inspiring a new generation of Vermont poets to discover their own “destiny’s brook” from which to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
Chard deNiord is Vermont’s poet laureate. He lives in Westminister West.