Common Threads: Seven Poems and a Wealth of Readers

"MassPoetry offers you Common Threads and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, as well as other programs including the placement of poets in schools, taking poets into communities, summer workshops for teachers, and shortly, a new interactive poetry of place website. Common Threads seeks to connect a small amount of text – seven poems – to as large and broad a community of readers as possible. This microcollection connects seven poets who’ve written, lived, or worked in Massachusetts to thousands of people in libraries, homes, schools, senior centers, and other settings, all reading and discussing the same poems.

We ask you not only to read these poems, but to experience them. We've added some background information, which we invite you to consider as you create time and space to connect these poems to your life. We encourage you to read these aloud and listen to recordings of the poems on our website, www.masspoetry.org. We hope you find the included questions and observations helpful in stimulating group discussion. But even more importantly, we hope you come to ask your own questions about the poems and share your own answers with one another and with us."

Kevin R. Morrissette and S.D. Mullaney
University of Massachusetts Boston
March 2011