Acclaimed poet Cornelia Veenendaal recently celebrated her one 100th birthday surrounded by family and friends at her home. Spry, active, sharp, and inquisitive, Cornelia—Connie to everyone—is blessed by good health and circumstances, and lives in her home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her daughter, Barbara. She greets each day with forward-looking purpose, her current goal being to find the right publishing house for her recent collection of poems.
Veenendaal was born on September 24, 1924, in Springfield, Mass., the eldest of six children. Her grandparents immigrated from Ireland in the latter 1800’s. Her parents, born in Massachusetts, met, married and settled in Springfield, where her father worked building homes. They lost their own house during the Depression but were able to move into another nearby “lost house,” where her parents stayed for the rest of their lives.
While poetry and teaching became her life’s work, Veenendaal didn’t have ambition to write early on. Though she wrote occasionally while in high school, it wasn’t until college, at Mass State College, Amherst (later UMass Amherst) that she first seriously considered writing. Robert Frost had given several readings at the school, which proved a formative experience for Veenendaal, since most poets she’d read were figures from the past.
After Yale graduate school, she taught literature at Mt. Holyoke, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lastly, for more than 30 years, UMass Boston. In her first few years at UMass, Veenendaal was invited into a small writing group of female Boston poets, who held their meetings in their homes on Beacon Hill. It was an occurrence that would prove to have a profound influence on all of their lives.
After a few years together, this writing workshop came up with a bold, innovative plan. Publishing was a difficult endeavor for anyone, but women poets especially found themselves shut out by the largely male-dominated presses of the time.
Thus, in 1973, in Cambridge, Mass, Alice James Books was born. A nonprofit, cooperatively run press, it was named after the talented yet troubled sister of writers William and Henry James. Alice James diaries, finally published in the 1960’s, revealed an insightful, witty, personally struggling writer, who subsequently became regarded as a feminist icon. The writing group now consisted of five women and two men—Maine poet laureate Betsy Scholl, poet Jean Pedrick, Veenendaal, Patricia Cumming, Marjorie Fletcher, Lee Rudolph and Ron Schreiber. A “built from the ground up” enterprise, funding, finding office space, editing, typesetting, printing and distribution were all done hands-on, collectively, by the small group. Veenendaal says of the time, “It was very improvised, fun and unusual. We supported each other well and I felt lucky to be part of it.” Personally, for Veenendaal, the activity created a welcome diversion from her divorce at the time.
Widely renowned for its innovation, Alice James Books came to publish numerous women authors and continues its groundbreaking tradition today. Its authors, both women and men, have garnered numerous literary awards and appeared in profiles in prestigious publications, such as The New York Times, Paris Review and others.
Veenendaal herself has published four books of poetry, The Trans-Siberian Railway, Green Shaded Lamps, What Seas What Shores, and An Argument of Roots, all of which are in print, available online.
Her poems examine nature, the urban landscape, and the juxtaposition of the two, memories of moments small and large—seeing as children the Hindenburg, floating overhead in Springfield, Mass. in 1937, meeting a former student who remembers an image she taught in class 20 years ago. Journals in verse, records of the struggles and rewards of a life, examined. One that continues.
From Veenendaal’s book, An Argument of Roots
POEM
Somewhere near the fireplace, the fire
having burnt down to a red crackle,
a cricket strikes up–among the birch logs
or in the fireirons’ dark–
calculating his tenure on this hearth,
as if he were the young emperor’s
cricket, who waited a lifetime for him
under the throne, until the palace was made
a tourist attraction, and his master
came back as one of the people.
The cricket tells me he is well;
others have drowned under tarpaulins,
or been fed to turtles. He is here still,
scraping his colors on the hours.
William Routhier writes fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and children’s stories. He has been published in the New Hampshire Magazine, Salem Gazette, Atherton Review, Choeofpleirn Press, InterText Magazine, Shampoo, Light Magazine, atelier, Happy Magazine, Living Buddhism, Substack, and others. He lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.