NEWTOWN, PA —Lynda Gene Rymond does not own a television. Instead, she "might hear 25 species of birds sharing local news and gossip" as she gardens on her small farm in Applebachsville in Haycock Township, just north of Lake
Nockamixon.
The local news the birds are tweeting about now is that Rymond, after seven previous entries and three times as a runner-up, has been named the 50th Bucks County Poet
Laureate, officials at Bucks County Community College announced.
The 10 poems Rymond submitted this year rose to the top of 90 entries, said Professor Ethel Rackin, Ph.D., director of the longest-running poet laureate competition in Pennsylvania.
"This truly was an incredibly talented field of writers who entered the contest this year," said Rackin. "The caliber of entries we received is, in my view, clearly a reflection on the
distinctive poetry community we've cultivated here in Bucks County."
Rymond will be celebrated with a reading and reception at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 14, at Tyler Hall on the college's Newtown campus, joined by 2025 Bucks County Poet Laureate Madeline Marriott of Holland and preliminary contest judge Michelle Messina Reale. The event is free and open to the public.
The final judge was Jeanne Marie Beaumont, who also selected three runners-up who will join Rymond at the Nov. 14 celebration. They are first runner-up Kevin Kaiser of Warrington, second runner-up Natalie Mera Ford of Doylestown, and third runner-up Camille Norvaisas of Feasterville.
Beaumont described the winner as "a keen observer of the natural world, right down to the smallest 'glints of mica' and 'rover ants,' while also attending to the ways the human is interwoven with it. This results in poems that often evoke the earliest poetic forms of spell, litany, and chant…"
Indeed, Rymond said all her poetry and fiction comes from her "deep roots in the land itself, her seasons, her creatures, the great interweaving that is the natural world," she noted. "Even when I write of human endeavors, nature is present."
Rymond, who grew up in Feasterville, added that she has been drawn to nature as her spiritual life and sustenance ever since she was a child, as a refuge from a tumultuous home life and being badly bullied at school.
"The woods and fields were my place of peace and animals my trusted companions. That has only deepened as I age," Rymond said. "We live on a miracle planet thick with interwoven relationships we are only beginning to understand – even while it is being sliced away by greed and violence. I will keep calling attention to the wonder of it all – even to the glints of mica and herds of pill bugs in a shovelful of garden earth."
After studying art at Bucks County Community College "on and off for about six years," Rymond ventured west and received a B.F.A. from the California College of Arts and
Crafts, where she studied drawing, ceramics and book arts.
"As I started classes there, I realized how well my Bucks faculty – Marlene Miller, Charlette Schatz, Alan Goldstein, and others – had prepared me," recalled Rymond. "And even though the past couple of decades have been more about writing than visual art, the same concepts apply: perseverance, critical thinking, contrasts, composition…"
She was drawn to writing as a creative form around the year 2000 and eventually joined the masters' poetry workshops led by the late Bucks County Community College Professor Chris Bursk.
"When I joined in 2019, Chris and the other poets pulled me into deeper waters," Rymond recalled. "It was pure joy, both in the writing and the finding of 'my people.'"
Rymond authored the poetry chapbook "Spellbook" (Moonstone Arts) and the children's books "The Village of Basketeers" and "Oscar and the Mooncats" (Houghton Mifflin).
Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and her short story "Turn, Turn" won the 2020 Pennwriters Competition.
She now lives on the 2.5-acre Goblin Farm in Applebachsville with her husband, the painter Charles Browning, where they tend goats, chickens, honeybees, an overly large vegetable and fruit garden, and share two studios – and no TV set.
"Charles and I met in art school 40 years ago, and as our lives came together, we chose our creative work over a more financially secure path," said Rymond. "It doesn't make sense on paper – but in terms of sharing a rich life of the mind, it sure keeps things interesting. And as for television – who has the time when the weeds and Orion are calling?"
Event Details
What: 50th Annual Bucks County Poet Laureate Reading & Reception
When: 1 p.m., Saturday, November 14
Where: Tyler Hall, Bucks County Community College, 275 Swamp Rd., Newtown
Admission: Free and open to the public
Featured Readers
Sample Poem by Lynda Gene Rymond
Perhaps it is you who walks early, early
to a meadow in September early, early
and sees that the small arachnids have written
all night in strands linking stem and leaf,
rail and tree and gate and white-lace flowers
and those lines now illuminate with shining
drops of fog or dew or foggy dew or maybe
a drizzle early, early and now you are witness
to how everything connects to everything else
by line and light and the most ephemeral gems
of holy water and while you stand agape
early, early you see that now one small spider
has clambered to your shoelace and endeavors
with her own lyric strand to inform you
early, early of your place in the interweaving
and that it is not too late not too late after all.
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