Anne’s Tablet Significant Gathering Place for East Bluff Poetry Gaggle

The meeting of the first annual East Bluff Poetry Gaggle was a success, according to founders and East Bluff cottagers Susan Allen and Jim Lenfestey. Having planned the event only the day before, they were thrilled that a few friends and neighbors managed to show up August 26 at Anne's Tablet for poetry and talk of the life and death matters with which poetry, they said, commonly deals.

On a clear afternoon with an east wind stirring the cedars above the harbor, participants shared stories about the history of Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-94) and the creation on Mackinac of the monument to her writing life. She was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and a working, successful writer who is best remembered for her novel, “Anne,” set partially on Mackinac. The monument was built by family members, who were cottagers on the East Bluff, after Ms. Woolson died in Florence, Italy, an apparent suicide.

The gathering was treated to a surprise reading of Woolson's poem, “Lake Erie in September,” originally published in 1872 in Appleton's Journal. Other poems read or recited were by Ms. Allen, Mr. Lenfestey, Billy Collins, Han-shan, and Emily Dickinson.

Lorabeth Fitzgerald and Nicki Croghan brought poems or friends with poems.

The organizers plan to make this an annual event, open to all, at Anne's Tablet, a rare monument, they say, commemorating a literary life.