Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship
MONTPELIER — At the Vermont Statehouse on April 1, Nadine Budbill read from “Judevine: A Love Song for a Place and Its People,” a poetry collection by her father, David Budbill, published in 2025. Drawing on his time living in Wolcott, Budbill sets many of the poems in the hills of the state, capturing the spirit of rural living.
The reading took place as part of Farmers Night, a longstanding mid-week tradition where local performers take over the legislative chamber, and Montpelier’s PoemCity kickoff celebration for National Poetry Month.
“We have a community that loves to be involved and to read and write and enjoy art and humanities,” said Dan Groberg, executive director of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library, which organizes PoemCity each April.
The event, called The Poetry of a Place & Its People, was presented by Vermont Humanities. As part of the event, Budbill’s reading highlighted the state’s enduring literary identity, Groberg said.
Vermont celebrates a long tradition of poets. One thing that unites them over the centuries is the relationship to landscape they express in their writing, according to Cindy Ellen Hill, president of the Poetry Society of Vermont.
“There is a lot going on there that speaks to the human experience,” she said. “It’s not a wilderness environment, nor is it an urban environment where it’s dominated by human structures. It’s that sort of sweet spot in the middle.”
This was true in the work of beloved poets like Robert Frost and lesser-known poets like Frost’s contemporaries, Sarah N. Cleghorn and Walter John Coates. Nature also appears frequently in the work of 19th-century Vermont poets like Charles G. Eastman and Edward Martin Taber.
Contemporary poet and author Ann B. Day, born in 1929, likewise draws inspiration from nature—particularly from her long walks in the woods as a young girl, according to The Valley Reporter.
Day lived in the Mad River Valley from 1954 to 2014, according to the Poetry Society of Vermont. She wrote a long-running nature column for The Valley Reporter. In 1983, she made one of the earliest conservation agreements with the Vermont Land Trust. It ensured that her home, Knoll Farm in Fayston, be preserved for the future, according to the Poetry Society of Vermont.
Anna Capelle, Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate and University of Vermont student, finds a similar joy in the state’s natural landscape.
“The extremeness of the seasons, it almost brings out, at least for me, extreme emotions,” Capelle said. “You’re dropped in this environment, in this beautiful state, and you have to figure out how to exist, regardless of the temperature and the weather around you, and you find a way to not only exist but coexist with nature and appreciate it.”
Capelle is particularly drawn to the story of Achsa W. Sprague, a Plymouth-born Vermonter known as “The Preaching Woman.”
Sprague was a prominent American spiritualist and activist in the mid-1800s who lectured and practiced trance mediumship across the country, according to a biography published by Vermont Historical Society.
She wrote most of her poetry towards the end of her life, often during periods of illness, exploring themes such as nature, patriotism and religion. According to her biography, many Vermonters found her reflections on Salt Ash Mountain in Plymouth especially moving:
Teach me, sublime old mount,
To stand like thee, defying clouds and storms,
And wrap the snow-white mantle of a calm
And holy resignation round my soul,
When sorrow’s dreary winter-time shall come!
And when ’tis past, like thee reclothe myself
To be reclothed in Higher Worlds, in robes
That young immortals wear, to lose their light
No more forever.
Capelle draws inspiration from writers like Sprague whose appreciation of Vermont’s beauty continues to shape the state’s literary legacy.
“They almost made nature their church,” Capelle said.