“My mind is on cows so much that I think cow, dream cow, and it seems paint cows without realizing what I am about,” wrote landscape painter and poet William Otis Bemis (1819-93).
Twenty-first-century Vermont still has more than its share of “farmer poets.” They’ll congregate on Thursday at Middlebury’s Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, which is hosting a Farmer Poets’ Reading as part of its ongoing gallery exhibit “From Dairy to Doorstep.” (That show features a Bemis painting of — what else? — cows.)
Do farmer poets find themselves writing about bovines the way Bemis found himself painting them?
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