Daniel Hales
About a year ago, I gained temporary possession of a chair. The thing was apparently full of weighty significance, stuffed with metaphors and bursting with prosody. The Poet’s Seat poetry contest awards the chair annually to a Franklin County poet via blindly judged submissions, and each year’s winner — 24 and counting — takes home the furniture ’til the next year’s winner gives it a new home. The poets’ names are engraved on a plaque on its back.
It’s a comfortable chair, but it’s also a substantial one. On April 28, I quite literally handed the chair to the new Poet’s Seat winner, Greenfield poet and musician Daniel Hales, and he faced the problem all the winners face: how do you get such an unwieldy, if honorific, piece of wood home? Good packing sense prevailed this time around, and Hales, pictured above, stuffed the newly won Poet’s Seat into his car and trundled it off to gather a new year’s worth of patina in anticipation of its next poetic home.
