Poets, Please

The Island Voices Poetry in Performance series moves to Pathways at the Chilmark Tavern on Wednesday, March 10, at 7 p.m. All Island poets are invited. Linda Black and Michael West will perform their work, with an open reading to follow. Island Voices continues on one Wednesday night monthly through the winter and will move forward in an expanded schedule through the summer and fall, to include spoken word performers, rappers and freestylers, slam poets, singer-songwriters and free-verse and traditional forms poets.

Ending a dream season, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School boys’ basketball team on Saturday lost 92-75 to Wareham in the second round of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association tournament. With the loss the Vineyarders finish the season at 16-4, one of their best records in recent memory.

By LYNNE IRONS

It’s happened again. I squandered many perfectly decent days this winter and never cut back some of the perennial beds. Now, snowdops and crocuses are pushing up through the debris. I am in the proverbial dilemma. Do I rake now and risk damaging the bulbs, or throw some mulch on the entire situation and call it a day?

The eye of the beholder, that’s where they say the beauty lies. Maybe this is why the conundrum of wind energy being wrangled within our Island newspapers and e-mail threads has no apparent clear answer.

This bud’s for you.

While it is arguably always happy hour somewhere, these buds won’t quench your thirst, bring forth the Clydesdales, or provoke the “taste great, less filling” argument.  

The America’s Cup is named after the schooner America, the first winner of the sailing regatta match around the Isle of Wight in England in 1851. The cup is the oldest active trophy in international sport, 45 years older than the modern Olympics. Both contests took place last month, and while many flocked to Vancouver for the winter games, I headed to Valencia, Spain for the sailing. It was a tough call, as I had taken pictures at the half-pipe in Salt Lake in 2002, which was thrilling, but I had to witness this special America’s Cup.

THE REAL MENEMSHA

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

From Gazette editions of March, 1935:

While telephone wires were busy with inquiries as to whether all or only part of Edgartown was being consumed, many town residents watched the spectacle — a thin line of firefighters combatting a blaze which swept across the Great Plain between Edgartown Great Pond and Katama Bay, threatening every house in its path and destroying four small buildings and grove after grove of pine and oak. The origin of the fire was still unclear, and the selectmen commissioned Chief of Police James Geddis to make an investigation.

It’s funny the memories we keep.

There are the expected ones: a first kiss, college graduation, family holiday celebrations. And the not so expected: a sunrise beach walk alone on Christmas morning, the feel of the stiff Florida grass on bare feet used to the Vineyard’s downy lawns.

Signs Matter

Character is in all the little features, those details that form the individual nature of a place. On the Vineyard, it’s in the split rail fences, shingles, dirt roads and old, working barns. And good for Edgartown for saying that it’s in signposts, too.