HANOVER — Carlene Kucharczyk’s first encounters with poetry were intertwined with her interest in music.
She went to an arts high school in Hartford, Conn., for vocal performance and wrote song lyrics, then went to Wagner University, in New York City, to continue her vocal studies.
But a college creative writing class tuned her in to the musicality of the written word. Poetry, she found, had always been there.
“I really love using language and playing with language in ways that seem musical,” Kucharczyk said.
Kucharczyk’s first collection of poems is titled “Strange Hymn,” a reference to her curiosity about how music and language link the physical and the spiritual.
Published last year, “Strange Hymn” won the Vermont Book Award for poetry this spring, and its author has been enjoying the modest rise in visibility that comes with being an award-winning poet in a poetry-loving state. She’s been going to readings at bookstores around the state.
“I feel like Vermont is the place that I love the best,” she said in an interview in Hanover. “Vermont has been really good for me, and really good to me.”
Kucharczyk grew up in Central Connecticut, and after college on Staten Island, where she switched her major from vocal performance to English literature, she lived for a time in Atlanta. She had a job proofreading websites for AT&T. Any music in the language would have been incidental.
So she applied to master of fine arts programs in poetry and went to North Carolina State University.
“I definitely learned a lot about craft in my time there, and my cohort was very encouraging,” she said.
It was during the two-year program that she reworked and expanded on poems that would become “Strange Hymn.”
“It took me a long time to realize I had a book, even though I had all the individual pieces and poems,” Kucharczyk said.
After graduate school, Kucharczyk stayed in North Carolina for a few semesters, teaching and writing. It was then that she met poet Vievee Francis and worked as her assistant. Francis departed for Dartmouth College, and Kucharczyk went to Vermont for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson, Vt., in September 2017.
She ended up taking a job there coordinating the writing program. “Then I just fell in love with Vermont and decided to stay,” she said.
For the past five years, Kucharczyk has lived in West Woodstock, and for a little over two years, she’s worked at Dartmouth, a job that puts her amid a strong creative writing faculty, including Francis.
The festivities surrounding the Vermont Book Award have been keeping her entertained, but she has a writing plan on the horizon. She’s the recipient of a two-week fellowship at the New York Public Library, where she plans to study the Shelley Circle Collection, letters and other ephemera surrounding Mary Shelley, the 19th-century author of “Frankenstein,” among other works.
Kucharczyk had a research assistantship with a professor who was working with the Shelley collection that required her to do a lot of proofreading. She ended up using some of the letters as springboards for her own poems.
“I just started saving the bits of language,” she said. That work has been dormant for a while, and she’s looking forward to reviving it. “I’m hoping that will be a book for me.”
In the meantime, she’s got a few more readings around the state associated with the Vermont Book Awards, at 6 p.m. on July 9 at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, at 4:30 p.m. on July 11 at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro, and at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 10 at Phoenix Books in Rutland.
Anti-war movie
“An Artist Responds to War,” a documentary about Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann, screens at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. Among Vermont artists, it’s hard to imagine a figure more consistent, and insistent, than Schumann, who has been leading the Glover, Vt.-based theater company for decades in making work that takes plutocrats to task and celebrates the human spirit.
Tickets for the screening are $15 in advance and $20 at the door, but the notice sent to me says that no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Following the 45-minute screening, filmmaker Robbie Leppzer will talk on stage with human rights activist Mohsen Mahdawi, which will be followed by an audience Q&A.
Underground art
“PatchWork,” an art project that included eight months of quilting bees and conversations, concludes on Sunday with an event from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Lebanon ArtWays Tunnel downtown. The event “weaves together murals, food, locally crafted quilts, performances and a family-friendly dance party” in the rail trail tunnel.
The event is free and open the public and will go on rain or shine.
TED and Twyla
TEDxWoodstock, an outpost of the internet famous TED (technology, entertainment and design) Talks, holds a series of events on Saturday afternoon that include a keynote speech and workshop with celebrated choreographer Twyla Tharp. For tickets to the multiple events, which range in price from $30 for a student up to $125 for Tharp’s master class onc creativity, and more information, go to tedxwoodstock.com.
