by Naveen Anwer

Poets Linda Haviland Conte and Mary Buchinger-Bodwell were featured at the Poetry reading June 13 sponsored by The Somerville News at the Toast Lounge in Union Square as part of the paper’s Friday Nights series.

“When I start to write I just want peace and quiet around me,” said Conte. A long time resident of Somerville, Conte has been writing poetry for over 20 years. She was inspired to write from a young age and admires poetry written by Mary Oliver.

Conte is the author of “Slow as a Poem”, a poetry collection published by Ibbetson Street Press. She won the 2004 “The Best Short Story” award at the Cambridge Poetry Award for her poem “Little Weed.” The award winning poem was published in “Out of the Blue Writers Unite” anthology. Another poem published in this anthology is “Mom’s Time Out.”

Conte is a regular reader at the Blue Gallery in Cambridge on Saturday nights and is a graduate of Lesley University.

Conte opened the reading with “Immersion Pill” which is a poem about the first swim of the season. Other poems she read were “Poem Moth”, “Child Home”, “Dinner”, “Sorting Things Out.”

Her final poem, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which is a poem about soldiers returning from the Iraqi war in flag-draped coffins.

“One day I was having lunch with a friend and I was telling her I didn’t have any inspiration to write about anything at the moment. And these petals fell from a flower tree. So my friend told me write about that. “Sometimes you have to wait for perfection and sometimes you have to have a friend kick you in the butt,” said Conte.

Conte has been published in the Cambridge Tab, Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville News, and City Of Poets anthology by the local Singing Bone Press.

Buchinger-Bodwell is the winner of the “Best Love Poem” at the Cambridge Poetry Award (2004) for her poem “On the Wings of a Bat”. Bodwell had a PhD in Linguistics from Boston University and she is an assistant professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.

Buchinger-Bodwell’s first poem of the night was “Why Hell is Hot” which is a poem based on events which took place in real life and were found in a Cambridge Police report.

Her poem read “Two Weeks” was about separation. “This poem is about when I went out of town for four weeks and my husband went out of town for two weeks,” she said.

They left a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter. “The poem is about what happened to the fruit while we were away,” she said.

Buchinger-Bodwell also read her poems: “Mockingbird”, “More Father for Paranoia“, “The way things fall” and “On the Wings of a Bat.”

“Listening to poetry albums inspired me to write poetry,” she said.

Poets such as William Meredith, Szymborska, Mary Oliver and Billy Collins have all inspired her, she said.

Buchinger-Bodwell said she writes poetry based on her own life experiences and the lives around her. “I write from everyday incidents. Sometimes, I’m just poised ready to write and I do it.”

“I commute to work, so I get a lot of my writing done on the train, also another time I like to write is when I’m sitting with my kids,” she said.

Buchinger-Bodwell had been published in Facets, MÖbius, Ibbetson Street Press and Penumbra. Bodwell lives in Cambridge.

The next Poetry reading in the Friday Nights at Toast series is Sept. 3, and will feature the Don Share, former poetry editor of the Partisan Review, curator of the Harvard Poetry Room, author of a collection of poetry “Union” and current editor of the Harvard Review and David Slavitt.

Slavitt is currently making waves as the Republican candidate for the 26th Middlesex state rep. seat against Democrat incumbent Timothy J. Toomey Jr.

Doug Holder, the arts page editor said Slavitt is easily one of the most important literary forces in our midst. In his career, he has been the movie critic for Newsweek, an Ivy League professor, a poet, translator, educator, and novelist.