Farmers Night Performance Series Rocks the Statehouse

One night after the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly approved a budget bill that would gut social programs for working-class Americans, Vermonters — elected lawmakers and their constituents — gathered in their Statehouse to support a different kind of social aid.

They came to hear the evening’s performer, Toussaint St. Negritude, who filled the House chamber with lyric incantations. Outfitted with two horns, a feathered hat and his debut poetry collection, the Northeast Kingdom free-verse poet and hatmaker opened with a stirring lament on bass clarinet before segueing into his poem “Cosmographies in Bloom.”

Over the course of an hour, he recited roughly a dozen poems, with interludes of improvisational jazz and poignant personal anecdotes. A preacher of jazz-infused gospel, he held the audience captive with the resonant timbre of his voice and his impromptu musicality. It felt as though the concentric, lunette-style desks ringing the well of the House floor were undulating like waves when he bellowed, “Behold! Such noble means of galactic introspection.”

St. Negritude’s performance was one in a series of Farmers Night programs —weekly arts and cultural events that take place during the legislative session. Free and open to the public, the Wednesday evening gatherings run from January through April and showcase a diversity of artistic expression and Vermont voices.

For state curator David Schutz, the popularity of the Farmers Night series is one indication of the building’s importance as not just an edifice of governance but also a contributor to Vermont’s cultural life.

Farmers Night began in the 1800s when lawmakers, most of them farmers, found themselves in the Capital City for the workweek. Starved for entertainment at night, they’d grab their songbooks from a drawer in the speaker’s rostrum, gather beneath the gaslit chandelier and start an old-fashioned sing-along.

“There is a very strong sense of community to this day among legislators,” Schutz said. “These are the events that create the kind of community that other parts of the nation are bemoaning in this moment when our democracy is threatened by many things. One of those things is simply not knowing each other well.”

Indeed, there was a sense of community before St. Negritude’s concert. Vermonters of all stripes, some in their finest chapeaus, mingled and chatted before they took the seats typically reserved for state representatives.

However, the history of entertainment at the Statehouse includes tales of darker moments — of exclusion rather than inclusion.

“White legislators would present minstrel shows in blackface decades ago, without understanding what that represented,” Schutz said. “That’s our history, and we need to embrace it, understand it and move on to somebody as compelling as Toussaint.”

Whether drawing inspiration from the mountainous landscape of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom or the Black-led Republic of Haiti, St. Negritude endows his subjects with a potent and mystical spirituality that’s evocative of the surrealist works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Coltrane.

“A big part of my inspiration — it’s always been true, but especially here in Vermont — are mountains,” St. Negritude later told Seven Days. “I appreciate that the mountains are always above the nonsense.”

Born in California but a longtime Vermonter, St. Negritude, 65, is a poet who seeks spiritual fellowship with nature, from the foothills to the cosmos. In an ode to his tiny home in the hinterlands, “How I Built My Star House,” he extols the emancipatory power of communing with mountains and stars. Grasping for inner peace through free-form poetic expression and slant rhyme, St. Negritude writes, “It started / with making poems / turning mountains / into navigational tomes.”

St. Negritude’s poetry draws inspiration from Afrocentric themes and surrealist imagery while fluctuating between unabashed emotion and healthy social provocation. During his Farmers Night recitation of the epistolary poem “Rocking You,” attendees cheered amiably after the line: “dreams of precious boyfriends fade just as ghostly as affordable housing.”

St. Negritude developed an interest in the malleability of language at a young age. He recalled an early schoolteacher who saw the seeds of a budding poet in him. “She gave me a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘I want you to write a poem. And on this blank sheet is total freedom. Grammar won’t matter. Spelling won’t matter. This is your place of freedom.'”

In October, St. Negritude released a collection of poems with the Montpelier imprint Rootstock Publishing. While he’s contributed individual poems to various journals over the course of his 40-year career, Mountain Spells is his first book. When asked what impetus, if any, he had for waiting all these years to publish a full-length volume, he doesn’t shy away from the ugly truth.

“For years, I would submit collections of my poems,” he said, “and I would get very nicely written rejection letters that would say, ‘We love your work, but we don’t publish ethnic.'”

St. Negritude’s February 26 appearance at Farmers Night was part of its celebration of Black History Month, following a Vermont Symphony Orchestra concert on February 12 with composer and ethnomusicologist Damascus Kafumbe and a February 19 performance of West African music and dance by Montpelier nonprofit Shidaa Projects.

“Being involved in the arts prior to running for office, I was missing that part of my heart,” said Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (D/P-Burlington), who leads the Farmers Night Committee. “It’s an opportunity for legislators to remember why it is we are here … but also for people in the community to see that this place belongs to all of us.”

This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2025.

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