The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2016

Every day huge numbers of refugees cross national borders to escape war, famine, poverty, and injustice in search of the basic rights that allow humans to feel at home — to feel safe, fed, clothed, and cared for. Meanwhile people from all corners of the globe are more closely connected than ever before — and yet still people feel alienated in their own communities or even in their own skins. We intend to explore this dialectic between home and exile, place and displacement. Is home a tent, a McMansion, an apartment, a room? And conversely what external and internal forces drive people into exile from their own land, their people, their families, even from themselves? We will investigate poetry that expresses the belonging and rootedness of home against the angst and displacement of exile, illustrated with our own poems and those of others.