Marblehead poet, writer Elisabeth Weiss Horowitz 

On Sunday, May 4, Marblehead resident Elisabeth Weiss Horowitz will join thousands of poets and writers for the sixth annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem. Her workshop, “Writing the Sea: Water as Metaphor and Poetry of the New England Coast,” will take place in the Pickman Room of the Hawthorne Hotel from 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Poets from Lucy Larcom to Sylvia Plath have gazed from the New England shore and traveled under both real and imagined sails. This workshop will follow a coast stippled with wrecks, shipyards and salty ports. Through writing prompts we’ll explore the sea’s tidal pull on the imagination: the myths of its vast expanse, the reflection of the human psyche in its surface and the idea of exploration as a road to riches and adventure.

Horowitz is a poet who teaches writing and literature at Salem State University. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled.
Her award-winning poetry has been in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, and is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review.

She taught creative writing at Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead for many years, recently taught a writing workshop for the Lappin Foundation and has been a docent at the Jeremiah Lee Mansion for the last 15 years.

Horowitz is an enthusiastic volunteer and participant in the Mass. Poetry Festival and is a member of the Salem Writer’s Group.

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival will take place in many venues around Salem during the weekend of May 2, 3 and 4. Buttons for entry can be purchased at Spirit of ‘76 Bookstore in Marblehead as well as at the Festival. This year’s headliner poets include: Kim Addonizio, Lucie Brock-Broido, Rafael Campo, Carol Ann Duffy, Oliver de la Paz, Cornelius Eady, Rhina Espaillat, Forrest Gander, David Ferry, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Susan Rich, Marge Piercy, Vivian Shipley and C.D. Wright.

For more information, visit masspoetry.org.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how aging creates a fire in the belly. We have limited time left. Some of us furiously scribble or travel or begin to say what we really mean and begin to live the life we imagined. The fire is not blazing but one of a new, gentle burnished glow.  Many of us have buried friends, siblings, our parents. We know we can’t stop time (great book, btw) but we are  indignant at the changes time brings.

As a Boomer, I never thought I’d age, yet daily the mirror accosts me with werewolf-like hairs in odd places. As the hormones twist and shout, I find it amusing  to be entering a second stage adolescence . I have much in common with the teenager down the street who sneaks out at night to smoke dope with his friends at the beach. But I am responsible and in my bed tossing and turning trying to get some sleep so that I can work the next day while he is out, feeling like he owns the world. No fair!

Today I was reading poems about aging for a workshop I will teach in the spring and I came across this Charles Bukowski poem called “This Kind of Fire.” It made me laugh and it punched me in the gut at the same time. This is what the best poems do. I felt a sharp longing for a world I never knew, when man believed in multiple gods who controlled our fates. Now it feels like no one is out there.

I first began to write about how peaceful it was to sit still. In my garden this summer, recuperating from surgery, I watched the irises, the roses, and the hostas each take their turn to shine in maddeningly colorful bloom. And while it was true that I was sitting still reflecting, it did not grant me greater inner peace. Quite the contrary. Quiet reflection, something we are asked to do during this season, runs counter to the usual Jewish teachings of performing acts of tikkun olam, and counter to our modern lifestyles of cramming as much as we can, into a day. Quite frankly, sitting still was maddening for me.