Especially in these fall days, Wilmot is a beautiful town. Walking along Campground Road there last weekend, my wife and I made slow progress because barns or fenced horses or clumps of flaming swamp maples bade us pause.

We were there for the New Hampshire Writers' Project's Kearsarge poets day, so we saw some of Wilmot's infrastructure, too - the places you don't see if you drive through the town on Route 4 or Route 11 on the way to somewhere else. We had been in the town hall before, with its paneled walls and white tin ceiling, but never the modern community center or the grand lodge at the camp on Eagle Pond.

One purpose of the day was to honor one of the town's own, Donald Hall, who only days before had officially become the poet laureate of the United States. Those doing the honoring represented the literary world and the realm of Mount Kearsarge.

From the literary world there came, for example, Alice Mattison, a writer of short stories and novels. Mattison knew Hall's work before she knew Hall. And she knew the poet Jane Kenyon, Hall's late wife, better than she knew Hall. Mattison was a member of Kenyon's famous "committee" - three women, the third being the poet Joyce Peseroff, who nurtured one another's work.

When Mattison's turn to talk came, she brought a ragged sheaf of papers with her to the podium. It turned out to be the 1943 diary of a horse named Riley. Riley lived on Eagle Pond Farm, where Hall lives now, and in his diary Riley followed the story of a boy who came to visit for the summer and was

inept at pitching hay - so inept that Riley always wound up with hay in his ears.

Over time, however, and with help from Riley, the boy began to show talent in poetry. Riley's last advice to him was to try writing a poem called "Names of Horses."

From the realm of Kearsarge there came Laurie Zimmerman, a teacher at Proctor Academy. Hers was the kind of story that defines community, the ties that bind, the goodness underneath the life of a place.

When Zimmerman had cancer, Hall often drove her for treatments in Hanover. This was the nadir of her life until the neighbor from Wilmot gave her a lift, and wisdom and laughter, to help her through it.

Embracing place

As I listened to Zimmerman's story, I thought about the larger theme of the day's events: the Kearsarge poets.

I know Hall hates labels, and for good reason. They're limiting. To call someone a regional poet, say, is to diminish that poet's work. It is to suggest that the poetry lacks universal appeal, that it is small-bore, parochial.

To call Hall, Kenyon and Maxine Kumin "the Kearsarge poets" for the purposes of this event was, therefore, risky. But poets approach and use place in singular ways. As Kumin, Hall and other writers spoke during the day, the theme that emerged was not the similarities in their poetry but the distinctiveness of each poet. As with all of us, so it is with poets: It is what they make of a place that matters.

When Kumin moved to Warner decades ago, she embraced the land. She kept horses, grew vegetables, worked with her husband Victor to reshape the farm on a hill and the many acres around it. A close reading of the terrain and the flora and fauna enlivens her poems. The poet behind these poems has sweat on her brow and dirt under her fingernails.

A nicer way of saying this is that Kumin is a nature poet, as her friend and fellow poet Alicia Ostriker said. She is not merely observing nature in her poems but also living in it.

Kenyon, who died in 1995, was a gardener, too, but you would not call her a nature poet. A Midwesterner, she adapted to this new place and adopted the community around her. Once she found herself as a poet, she always seemed at home, even in poems that were set elsewhere.

My favorite story of the day told how Kenyon acquired Gus, the mixed-breed dog that often made cameos, and occasionally a star turn, in her poems and Hall's. She regularly drove by a house where a dog was chained up in the yard. One day, she couldn't take it anymore. She got out of her car and knocked on the door and said that if the owner didn't want the dog, she'd be glad to take it. (next page »)