Susan Edwards Richmond

Susan Edwards Richmond started off the artist residency at Fruitlands with an introductory poetry reading in the Tea Room of her own work, as well as selections from Emerson, Thoreau, Alcotts, and their peers in history and spirit. Before the museum opened for the season, she worked with Laurie Butters to select poems that would resonate with each of the museum exhibits and to design thought-provoking prompts to entice visitors to explore their own creativity. These were eventually available in each of the museum buildings.

According to Susan, I was interested in writing a cycle of poems related to Fruitlands and soon became engaged by the Shaker exhibit and its extension into the Harvard Shaker community. Instituting poetry First Fridays, I spent the first Friday of every month on the museum grounds, doing my own research and writing, while also being available for occasional readings and once a school group presentation. Fruitlands hosted its first collaboration with The Concord Poetry Center that summer with a program focused on landscapes, and concluded the formal residency with a "baton passing" program in November in which I presented my own Fruitlands-inspired poetry and Joseph Wheelwright introduced his project for the following year.

Portrait of Henry

from the painting, Portrait of Henry Munro and His Twin Brother, Peter, 1844
by Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle

Oval of heads, oval of eyes,
arms encircling, oval embrace,
fingers slip out of paint and away,
ovals melt in a gilded frame.
Heads brushed with golden down.
Who is Henry, who his brother?
One face meets the viewers’ gaze;
the other, eyes cast down.
Kissable buds, the pursed lips,
sleeve slips from a shoulder bare,
elbow triangle pressed to chest;
one mouth saying, I’ll be your voice,
pick up the gauntlet, thread your eye;
the other, saying, by your side,
in art as I am in history.

by Susan Edwards Richmond

Landscape with Curator

Almost a town composing history,
hillside sprinkled with brick and clapboard
the green saturation of pine-covered
valley, a meandering of tourists
on the path. The Alcott’s red farmhouse
anchors the scene while a bumblebee
gone tipsy on a flower provides
a foreground focal point. Half way down
Pumunagwet shoots his arrow eternally
skyward in a graceful T while a chief
in bronze-feathered splendor contemplates
his territory. At the horizon’s
rim, stately campuses unfurl
on the hills. At the crest to the right,
two cranes nod opposite, lift nothing
that can be seen. Except for petunias,
pink and purple, and the bleeding heart’s
trumpet inviting a hummingbird’s narrow
straw, the rest is clover. When Clara Sears
first walked this slope, did she see it all at once—
a landscape painted on her own canvas,
this corner of New England enshrined, the one
she knew and couldn’t bear to see passed by?