The Poetry Porch 1: Poets


About Joyce Wilson

Joyce Wilson, editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997, has taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University. Individual poems have appeared in literary journals such as Alabama Literary Review, Ibbetson Street Magazine, Wilderness House, Mezzo Cammin, and Poetry Ireland.

Book publications:
The Springhouse 3 (2023)
Take and Receive (2019)
The Need for a Bridge, a chapbook of twenty poems inspired by the Fore River Bridge (2019)
The Etymology of Spruce (2010)

LITERARY background

Taking day and evening classes as a special student at Harvard University for most of the 1980s, Joyce received a B.A. through Harvard Extension in 1984 and a M.Ed. from the Graduate School of Education in 1987. During that time, she studied writing poetry with Seamus Heaney, writing about poetry with Helen Vendler; she also took fiction workshops with Monroe Engel and Anne Bernays, and nonfiction with Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe, as well as many seminars in English and American literature.
In the early 1990s, she served as director of South Shore Poets, organizing forums in public libraries for participants to read their original poetry. She received funding from the Mass Cultural Council to direct these readings, and in 1993, to publish an Anthology of South Shore Poets representing the work of 35 contributors. From 1992 through half of 1996, she worked as Assistant to the Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room of Harvard College Library, where she was also Managing Editor of Harvard Review.

OTHER

Wilson has lived with her husband John Goldie at the same address in Scituate, Massachusetts, for over 40 years. Their daughter is a writer and critic based in Beirut, Lebanon, and Geneva, Switzerland.

Information about READINGS in 2023.


An index of Wilson’s work online:

“The Octagonal Schoolhouse”

Venice at Twilight
On Spring Valley Road
Mother Archie’s Church
What I Heard That Day on the News (Ferguson, Missouri, 2014)
Still the Same
The Need for a Bridge
Musical Interludes
One Cow Stands Quietly
Wingèd Creature
Commencement
Lines to Allegra
Taxi in Millers’ Glenn

    On the Advantages of Driving
    Idlers
    Loosestrife
    Snow
    The Rodin Drawing
    Spiders

Sonnets:
     The Ritual Bath
     Sonnets for Sunflowers
     Fire Alarm Tripped at 6:00 a.m.
     On the Loss of a Ring
     Our Cat Explains His Abscess
     Unemployed
     Three Signs near Granby, Mass.
     Summer Wild
     On Opening a Book of Poems by M.D.
     Two Temperaments

Essays and Reviews:
If By Song by Marcia Karp
Tremors by Cammy Thomas
On Two African American Churches
Album: Spring Valley Church
In Code by Mariann Corbett
Powow River Poets Anthology II
My Poems for the Pandemic
In Praise of Manhattan by David Katz
Why We Go by Twos by Linda Stern
Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola
Know Thyself by Joyce Peseroff
Not Elegy, But Eros by Nausheen Eusuf
Encountering Vulnerable People and Well-Wrought Poetry in the Work of David Ferry
The Poets’ Theatre presents Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas
Heaney and Walcott Return to Boston in 2013
The Education of the Soul, on poetry by Jennifer Barber and Jennifer Clarvoe
News from the Village: Aegean Friends by David Mason
Blue Front by Martha Collins

Interviews:
Creating a Book of Irish American Poems: an Interview with Daniel Tobin
Twelve Questions, an Interview with Gail Mazur
Literature and Giving Care, an Interview with Rachel Hadas
On Literature in Vietnam: an Interview with Fred Marchant
Approaching Elizabeth Bishop: an Interview with Lloyd Schwartz
Paradoxical Beauties, an Interview with Rafael Campo
The Future of Poetry, an Interview with Robert Pinsky
A Lesson in Translation, an Interview with Seamus Heaney, 1986

Other: Christmas in Cairo.

Profiles on Mezzo Cammin Timeline:
The Achievement of Eavan Boland
On Julia Budenz, The Form of the Long Poem: To Find the Self She Recognized
On Etel Adnan, The Poetry of Suffering
TBA: On Diana Der-Hovanessian, Building Communities


The Weaver and Other Poems,a chapbook, is available on-line by request.

Copies of the Anthology of South Shore Poets are at most South Shore Massachusetts libraries.



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