Narrator Maria Margaronis introduces us to the writers and creatives who retreated the chaos of the time in the late 60s to Vermont to create intentional communities based on free expression and the idea of a commonwealth in a hamlet in Guilford near Brattleboro, Vermont. Maria discovered this 'little Utopia' in the 80s when she was 'a slip of a girl' and returns frequently from her home base in London. First part introduces the community founded 'around the word at a time of language assassination' with comments from poet Verandah Porche and Richard Wyzanski, one time 'pariahs' who have turned 'pillars' of today's community, 50 years later. Second Part further explores 'bard of Guilford' Verandah Porche. Verandah shares delightful verse and experiences at 'Total Loss Farm.' Part Three takes us on an evocative night walk around Packer Corners with former 'communer' Peter Gould and where we linger at a cemetery to hear Peter's ghost story about early Black villagers Abijah and Lucy Terry Prince, complete with thundering hoofs in the night.
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Podcast was written, produced and narrated by Maria Margaronis. The voices on Part 1 ‘Total Loss Farm’’ are Maria, Verandah Porche and Richard Wizansky. The voices on Part 2 ‘The Bard of Guilford’ are Maria and Verandah Porche. The voices on Segment 3 ‘Night Walk’ are Maria and Peter Gould. Executive Producer was me, Lissa Weinmann. Mastering of segments was by Guilford Sound. Final podcast editing and mastering was Alec Pombriant. Photograph is 1971 Packer Corners image by Asa Elliot. For more information about how to join this creative work, visit us at BrattleboroWords.org.
TALES OF ANOTHER TIME: PACKER CORNERS COMMUNITY
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PACKER CORNERS PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast
INTRODUCTION PRODUCER/NARRATOR MARIA MARGARONIS: In 1968, Packer Corners Farm in Guilford became home to a community of writers, activists and artists who wanted to build an alternative to the sanitized cruelties and fractured movement politics of the Vietnam War years. Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom had set up and run the movement’s Liberation News Service, which split apart that year. The dream of a commonwealth drew others, too, looking for new beginnings, a place to live differently, and freedom to express their creativity and their sexuality. More communes soon sprouted: Montague, May Day, Red Clover, and just up the road, Tree Frog Farm. Tree Frog became home to the radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who wrote for The New Republic, Ramparts, the Village Voice, The Nation, and many other publications. It's still home to his partner, the filmmaker John Scagliotti, and to Kopkind, Andy’s living memorial, which brings together young activists, journalists and filmmakers each summer for workshops and radical relaxation. You can hear about that in our previous episode. My name’s Maria Magaronis and I'm the writer and producer of these two episodes. I've been coming to this little Utopia since I was a slip of a girl back in the 1980s and it's shaped my life too. These podcasts are dedicated with love and gratitude to all our friends and neighbors above and below the green hill.
(Part One: Organizing Around the Word and New Ways of Being)
VOICE OF VERANDAH PORCHE, READING FROM ONE OF HER POEMS:
Skating home on thin ice / from the Apocalypse…(singing in the background)
VOICE OF NARRATOR MARIA MARGARONIS: It's 1968, a year of agony and turmoil, riots and assassinations. The war in Vietnam has reached its peak, and so have the protests against it. Dr. Martin Luther King is dead, killed by an assassin's bullet. (Tape of Verandah and Patty Carpenter singing: We were trying to save the world…). A motley crew of writers, activists, and artists are seeking a way out that’s also a way into a different way of living, and set up a commune at Packer Corners farm. The poet Verandah Porche is one of them.
VERANDAH: There were always writers at the farm. In fact, the farm was organized around the word. I remember writing that we existed at a time of language assassination: the specialized language of murder. The particular sanitized cruelties were very much on our minds, and also the fracturing of coalitions. Black allies and white allies just having farewells. It was a parting of the ways.
MARIA: Among the friends who created the commune at Packer Corners, known with affection and irony as Total Loss Form were the anti war journalist Marty Jeezer, the counterculture chronicler Ray Mungo, the photographer Peter Simon, and the essayist Richard Wizansky. Richard and Verandah told me the story of how they came.
RICHARD WIZANSKY: Well, I was resisting the Vietnam War, and I was disgusted to be living in a country with LBJ. There was a big convocation led by William Sloan Coffin, who was, you remember, a fabulous speaker, and could convince you to do anything. And I was sitting next to Verandah, and he was saying, ‘Come down and give your draft cards to me. We're going to burn them.’ And I just then said, ‘I have to do this.’
VERANDAH: We had been thinking about leaving the country.
RICHARD: We had actually a map on the wall, which was where we were going to go to get out of the United States, and we thought we were going to go to British Columbia, originally.
VERANDAH: Ray Mungo, when I woke him up on Easter morning, when the uprising in Washington was in full swing, and I said Raymond, ‘I want to go home,’ he famously said, ‘I know the place,’ and went back to sleep.
RICHARD: Laurie, who was my boyfriend, but you couldn't say that – the love which should go unspoken – came up with Verandah and Raymond on Memorial Day in 1968. And we got to this place and we looked up that hill, and there was a peach orchard that was incipiently budding and we said “That's what we want to do.”
VERANDAH (reading one of her poems): ‘Sudden Eden: For that pinkish haze across the orchard / 10,000 blossoms on a widow's peak / we forsook the revolution / and bought the farm. / “He bought the farm” means “kick the bucket,” / croaks Maynard, / our helpful neighbor / who did, decades later, / never owning what he woke to milk.”
VERANDAH: We arrived here, and it was this pee-yellow farmhouse, and it was locked. And so Peter Simon set up the iconic photograph of ‘American Gothic for Seven’ as if we lived here. And then I saw that pinkish haze. And so we hastened up the hill to see this, oh, there were probably 30 trees in full pink bloom. And the fragrance was just astonishing. And then we turned around and saw that vista. You could really believe that you were the only people on Earth. And I said, ‘I want to live here forever.’
MARIA: Verandah still lives at Packer Corners Farm. Richard lives down the road. They’re now the chair and vice-chair of the Guilford Selectboard–’from pariah to pillar in 50 years,’ as Verandah says. Many others who lived here have put down roots nearby, like sculptor Mark Fenwick, and writer and Shakespearean Peter Gould. The farm is no longer a commune, but it is a community.
I've been coming here for nearly 30 years, and it's changed my life and my family's too. My children, raised in London, hold it close as a touchstone. At the farm’s 50th anniversary party in 2018, I asked Richard and Verandah how they think about it now.
RICHARD: We were trying to not have anything to do with the economy. We had a huge garden where we ate our vegetables, and we chopped our wood, and we slaughtered animals. I was the chicken slaughterer, like this, in the Cuban way. I mean, it was not all utopian and dreamy. We had a lot of friction. But considering we were people living together, in a very close space, and in primitive circumstances, we really had a very beautiful life. We had a theater company; we'd been doing outdoor productions. I lived here for 25 years on the commune and I would never give up that past. I mean, it was just…it was grand.
VERANDAH: We came together, and we did this thing, and we've not turned away. And we still have this shouldering to do, of lifting up the dream of a commonwealth that's been so disrespected. And we're here standing for something else.
VERANDAH READING HER POEM: ‘Welcome to Total Loss Farm, famous formless, flakey, together. / Greet you with open arms. / Screen door smashes into the weather. / Set down your roots and roam / There's no place like home.’
(Part Two: 'Bard of Guilford' Verandah Porche)
MARIA: When I first met Verandah Porche I was in my early 20s.
VERANDAH: So this is fresh soup…
MARIA: I was a bit in awe of this green-eyed poet in muck boots, her way with words, her peppery wit, her ease in her own skin.
VERANDAH: …and we will be eating it in mere moments. I don't think I have any parm.
MARIA: Now I count on her as one of my oldest and dearest friends. Living far away. I imagine her in her kitchen making soup, or up on the windy hill.
VERANDAH: …And yesterday, when we came up, there was bittersweet. Growing up the maypole. It's very hard to get rid of, but it has a great name.
MARIA: Verandah’s poems delight in sound and puns and wordplay. They're rooted in her life on the farm, which is always also a window to the wider world.
VERANDAH: Coming here to the farm, I felt that I needed to learn a new language. I was brought up indoors. I lived on a hill when I was growing up, but I didn't know it was a hill.
MARIA: Verandah grew up in New Jersey. And yes, she had a different name then.
VERANDAH: I remember getting field guides, and learning the names of each plant. I loved the holdovers from old ways, old ways of living and old ways of expression. It was the old timers who taught us how to do things. It started out with language and it moved, I suppose, to the heart.
(Shift into Verandah reading her poem) ‘Chance Meeting’: My neighbor swears / this spring might finish him. / Beside the mailboxes, hunched and clustered like a trailer park, / we pause to speak. / Damp hay, / late corn, / low yields, / the listing barn. / His son's not into it. / How's the poetry going? / he politely asks. / About like my jalopy. Cheaper than livestock. / No feed bills, he quips / Well, you just can't count on ends to meet. / The scenic field across the road/ he’ll cut for cash. / Our sentences tail off like cow paths in juniper / once the herd’s been sold. / His low indrawn sigh / like the stroke of a scythe.
MARIA: In the 1990s Verandah hit rough road in her own life. And she went to work in a nursing home, writing with the residents.
VERANDAH: And these wily old ladies looked at me, and they crossed their arms in front of them. And they refused to pick up the pencils. And I said, ‘Okay, you talk I'll take it down.’ And suddenly, I was there with them. And this was an astonishing healing experience for me. I realized the lesson was that in my weakness, they found their power. They were my goddesses.
MARIA: Poems fall from Verandah in an amazing torrent, poems written, as she says, for maintenance of the heart, poems for friends and family, poems written with love and courage for her community.
VERANDAH: People will say ‘Oh, Verandah, such and such is happening, will you please…?’ And it pleases me to have that responsibility.
MARIA: You could say she's the Bard of Guilford. And now she knows the names of lots of plants.
VERANDAH: …So here we have love-in-a-mist, and here we have thyme. That’s nigella. And this is where there were poppies…
(Part Three: The Ghost Story)
PETER GOULD: On these night walks, there was one time I was standing here with a couple of dogs and it was a really dark night. And we heard hoofbeats and the dogs started to bark and bark and bark. There was nothing here but it was like, a horse, a ghost horse, right on this spot where we're standing now.
MARIA: Peter Gould, writer, performer, director of youth Shakespeare, co-creator of Brattleboro’s New England Youth Theatre.
It's really interesting to stand here at night, because we're at the Four Corners Packer Corners, Verandah’s house, and there's what used to be the schoolhouse. Because it's dark, you can go back in time.
PETER: Yeah. And also, you don't necessarily have to go back in time, because some of the maple trees are just about that old…
MARIA: I'm hoping for an answer to the mystery of the ghostly hooves. But Peter has an instinct for drama, and he bides his time. From his first novel ‘Burnt Toast,’ written here at the farm in the early 70s, to his newest collection, ‘Horse Drawn Yogurt,’ all his books involve night walks, like the one we're on now, by moonlight down the Packer Corners Road.
PETER: I just loved it. I just absolutely loved it. It made me feel like this is one more thing that I can do here. This is where I get my ideas. And particularly when you come upon a place like this all of a sudden, and there's the overarching canopy we're seeing here, of leaves, it's so magical. It should be said that we're walking toward the graveyard. But my night walks were all about never being afraid, just feeling so at home here. And I tried to capture that in the first page of ‘Burnt Toast’: (Peter reading from ‘Burnt Toast’):
‘Whether or not you knew that each bend and splinter of the road has a name, and that the sign at the crossroads up ahead is the only one in the world that marks the way to Adam's Ear….Whether or not you knew these things, I don't think you would have felt afraid to descend from the moonlit road, to take a closer look at what you'd seen. Come as close as you wish.
MARIA: I've never been down to this cemetery.
PETER: Really? Well, be prepared for a special treat….One of the stones says: ‘Oh, stop, dear friend / oh, take another view / the dust that molders here / was once beloved like you / no longer than on future time rely / improve the present / and prepare to die.’ (laugh)
MARIA: Peter slides down the leafy bank in the dark ahead of me. And then we're in the stillness of the cemetery leaning against tombstones.
MARIA talking to Peter: So all these people underground, who lived on this hill. How old is the oldest grave do you know?
PETER: Around probably 1740 or something like that. In that row of stones closest to that wall, I think you'd get the story that Captain Packer had several wives, you know, because the women would die in childbirth, and there was no way to get help for them. We used to just venerate all those wonderful old settlers and their hard lives.
There's the Packers, there's the Noyes family…
But it was the Noyes family and their thuggish friends who got together in the tavern and got really drunk (hoof beats sound) and decided this was going to be the night that they were going to ride down and go to the homestead of the black people and burn it down.
Abijah Prince was a freed slave and he fell in love with Lucy. And these two unbelievably ambitious and proud and wonderful people were there raising a family in freedom. There was a farm and there was a barn. There were outbuildings. There were cattle. There were chickens. Of course he defended his household but I think that some animals were killed and part of the barn was burned.
MARIA: So were those the ghostly riders Peter heard that night: guilty souls tormented by their part in a 19th century racist raid?
PETER: Maybe. But the Noyes family, they didn't know that Lucy and Abijah would dog them all the rest of their lives with legal trouble.
MARIA: Good night Packers. Good night Noyes.
We walk slowly back up the road, refreshed as if we've been swimming in the night. And it's just like Peter said, ghosts or no ghosts, a safe place, a wild place, a place of home. (night owl sounds)
END CREDITS HOST VOICE: This episode of the Brattleboro Words Podcast was written, produced and narrated by Maria Margaronis. The voices on Part 1 ‘Total Loss Farm’’ are Maria, Verandah Porche and Richard Wizansky. The voices on Part 2 ‘The Bard of Guilford’ are Maria and Verandah Porche. The voices on Segment 3 ‘Night Walk’ are Maria and Peter Gould. Executive Producer was me, Lissa Weinmann. Mastering of segments was by Guilford Sound. Final podcast editing and mastering was Alec Pombriant. Our Words Trail theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Many thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vermont Arts and Humanities councils for helping support the Brattleboro Words Project’s community storytelling about places important in the Brattleboro area’s rich history of words. For more information about how to join this creative work, visit us at BrattleboroWords.org. Please subscribe to this podcast. We look forward to seeing you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail.