Celebrating the 250th birthday of Guilford & the contributions of Verandah Porche
Sunday, October 9th @ 2PM
The Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm
Kopkind Rd., Guilford, VT 05301
Please join us on this 250th anniversary of our town, Guilford, as we celebrate an important chapter in its history, commemorating the commune movement that brought Andy Kopkind to Vermont and honoring our friend, neighbor and community conscience, poet Verandah Porche.
Not long after the town’s bicentennial, young people began coming to this area, first in a sprinkling, then in a wave: dreamers and artists and drop-outs from a mad world, people with utopian visions or just looking for something, something else. By the 1970s many were, as Andy said, “refugees from the New Left”. He himself packed a bag in 1970, left most all he owned on a street corner in DC, and drove his motorcycle to a commune in Guilford. Verandah had come here two years earlier, to Packer Corners Farm just up the road from the Organ Barn, which has been standing almost as long as Guilford but which owes its name and peculiar feature to those days. The people who came changed Vermont, and were changed by it. Andy came out as a gay man, left, and returned a few years later to spend every summer at Tree Frog Farm, the reason we are here today. Verandah made Packer Corners her permanent home, enchanted Guilford with the creations of the Monteverdi Artists Collaborative, and has been telling the stories of people’s lives in poetry here and throughout the country ever since.
We are therefore honoring Verandah and this special moment in our town’s history at our annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit. There will be a delicious Tapas Feast. Afterward: a video tribute, a reminiscence of commune life by Verandah, and a screening of The Stuff of Dreams, which documents Monteverdi’s magical production of The Tempest, on an island in Sweet Pond.
Tickets are $35, $25 for students. With your support, the Kopkind Colony will weather the storms of nature and politics, preserving its connection to the past while developing ideas for the future. 10% of the proceeds will go to the campaign to resurrect Sweet Pond, a place once as pleasant as its name, recently drained and now the locus of community action. Reserve tickets now!
For more information or directions, contact 802.254.4859, or email at stonewal@sover.net.
Kopkind Colony 