Photo: Photo by Patrick Timothy Mullikin

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

"Excuse me. Is that Verandah Porche's house?" "That all depends on who you are," says one of her neighbors as two white geese send out warning honks from a nearby pen.

"Here for an interview."

"Then that's her house."

Inside her home Porche grins when she hears about her neighbor's remark.

It's par for the course in these parts, she says. Up here, neighbors watch out for one another.

Seated at her wooden kitchen table, Porche brings out a framed photograph that shows seven hippie kids in front of an old building. It was taken in August 1968, she says, the group's first day at Total Loss Farm.

Welcome to Total Loss Farm — Famous, formless, flaky, together.
Greet you with open arms.
Screen door smashes into the weather.
Set down your roots and roam.
There's no place like home.

Porche, who penned the above, is 22 years old in that photo, fresh from Washington, D.C., and save for a few years in the mid-70s, she's lived here since.

Nowadays Porche, 61, shares her home with daughter Emily, 28, and Judy Sopenski, who raises animals on the farm.

Later tonight she is meeting with friends to plan for the farm's 40th anniversary next August.

She's expecting a gathering of 100 or so people — former communards and families — to show up, a homecoming of sorts and testimony to the enduring nature of the '60s back-to-the-land movement.

Though raised in Teaneck, N.J., and schooled at Boston University (art history and religion major), Porche says she seemed destined for an alternative lifestyle.

"I wanted my life to be a poem. I wanted to revise it. I wanted it to be alien and strange. I remember in junior high school trying to be normal — having a permanent wave and a shirt-waist dress — and I just didn't fit it."

It was Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, that was the turning point in her life, she says. Porche, then living in Washington, says she felt a real sense of hopelessness.

"I wanted to start over again. There was a kind of homesickness for something that I didn't have. I remember telling (friend and future communard) Ray Mungo that I wanted to go home. He said, 'Don't worry. I know the place.' It turned out that one of our college chums knew that this place was for sale."

Porche remembers those early years fondly.

"I spent many of my happiest years living in those windy quarters. The neighbors from Guilford, those who were not horrified by us, were very helpful," she says with a big laugh. "To sit in a farm kitchen and drink sap beer and listen to the way they made a wheel of cheese or the way they sawed out wood, I was fascinated both with the information, then increasingly by the telling — the vernacular, and the way conversation ebbed and flowed.

Note: Porche's unusual first name was inspired by writer Doris Lessing, who added an h to veranda in one of her works. Adding an 'e' to porch was Porche's idea; hey, this was the Sixties.

Though she's reflective when talking about the early years, Porche hasn't been stuck in some Sixties' time warp.

"When I moved here I had been publishing little bits of poems, and because there was so much public interest in communes, I managed to publish my first book, ('The Body's Symmetry,' Harper Colophon Books, 1975)" she said. "Publishing that book gave me access to a modest livelihood."

She then turned her sites to work as a poet in residence.

"I had to learn to make a serious — for Vermont — living, so I became a really perspicacious poet in residence and contacted every single superintendent and school principal, convincing them that they needed poetry," she says with laugh. She confesses that she wasn't the greatest instructor during the early years. "Those were, uh, looser times in the early '80s. If you were a good poet, then you had a certain amount of slack."

She says she made good money during those years, though, enough to send her husband through law school. It was around this time, too, that she was recruited as a member of the Governor's Institute of the Arts.

An important turn in her career came when she was asked to be poet-in-residence at Gill Odd Fellows Home in Ludlow.

"I had a little poetry session with mostly old ladies. I went to the nursing home once a month. Then we got a grant, and I started going once a week. I went room to room and sat with people. I have in my laptop a treasury of spoken narrative, poetry and reflection … everything from how to keep a husband happy and in place to just wild dementia narrative."

Porche calls this practice "told poetry" or shared narratives that she uses with different groups that she works with. "Everybody loves to be listened to. Some people need a writing partner because they can't do it themselves."

As for her own work these days, she is preparing the manuscript for her first book of verse since she wrote "Glancing Off" in 1989. She tried to find publisher for a book called "Old Lady Land," based, primarily, on her time at Gill Odd Fellows Home. It was to be a combination memoir and exploration of the process she used in her told poetry, and kind of how-to book. So far there have been no takers.

Lately, she says, her poems have become very site specific. "For instance, last weekend I wrote a poem for a friend of mine who is going to be a judge. I had a very fixed set of objectives, and I needed to write a poem that everybody could understand."

She says she's also been on an ode kick: ode to a moose, to tapioca, and to the novella never penned. "I have this whole series of them. I am fascinated in how the forces of life work together, how they entwine. Language is the way that I document that."


Patrick Timothy Mullikin, an editor at The Times Argus, writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.