On Thursday, August 6, the West Tisbury library celebrates the sixth annual Dionis Coffin Riggs Day of Poetry, observed on her birthday to commemorate her work and the Cleaveland House Poets, the poetry group she established 60 years ago.
Fan Ogilvie, a longtime member of the Cleaveland House Poets, recalled, “She blessed my home in West Chop several times with George Mills and Lee Maccormack and Galway Kinnell. She was elegant, and her cultivated voice unforgettable.”
Dionis Coffin Riggs was descended from Athearns, Mayhews, Butlers, Looks, and old Island families, according to the New York Times. She was born in Edgartown, but lived much of her early adult life off-Island in Brooklyn, N.Y., and in New Jersey with her husband, Sidney Riggs, a high school principal. However, Riggs always spent her summers on the Vineyard, and she and her husband retired here in 1954. After his death in 1975, she transformed her family home into Cleaveland House, a bed and breakfast inn catering to poets.
Riggs was very active in West Tisbury town life, and she shared her poetry with young and old alike, volunteering in schools and in nursing homes. As well, she regularly published poems in the Christian Science Monitor. Her first book of poems, “Sea Born Island,” appeared in 1969, followed by “The Collected Poems of Dionis Coffin Riggs,” a rare and collectable volume of 684 pages, in 1998. It is said she published well over a thousand poems during her highly prolific writing career.
Dionis Coffin Riggs’ poems were clear and evocative, plainspoken and full of familiar details. Here is a good example of her poetry, from “The Collected Poems of Dionis Coffin Riggs”:
Just once each year
I can recapture something
Of childhood’s summer-scented magic
When, on Illumination Night,
The band plays in the park.
And one by one, instead of stars,
The Chinese lanterns light the dark
Tree-sheltered sky.
The shadows of the oak trees, dwarfed
And twisted by the wind,
Loom giantlike among
The little houses made of wood,
Or gingerbread.
At last each house is hung
From porch to peak
With lanterns, and the people
Sit in rocking chairs, or walk
Around, around the circle.
Wind-stirred sea air,
Marigolds and popcorn,
The smoke of candle wicks.
How brief the flame!
Family, friends, and the community are invited to come together and read their favorite Dionis Coffin Riggs poems, or an original poem inspired by the Vineyard.
Dionis Coffin Riggs Day of Poetry is on Thursday, August 6, at the West Tisbury library. This event is free and open to the public.
