“I’ll let that image percolate in my mind. It could end up as a metaphor in a poem one day,” said the 62-year-old poet, whose writing practice melds elements of Buddhist meditation and the discipline of a journalist’s deadline.

Broderick, a fixture in the local poetry community for two decades, lets nothing stand in the way of finishing a draft of a new weekly poem on Saturday. She shares the poem-in-progress in a sacrosanct Sunday morning critique session with fellow poets and University at Albany faculty members Jil Hanifan, Sarah Giragosian, Juliette Gutmann and Jonathan Dubow. The sessions, which last 60 to 90 minutes, have been running for 11 years.

“Everyone needs an editor,” Broderick said.

Broderick and I spent Friday morning deconstructing a definition of poetry and what living a poetic life means to her.

She quotes the late, great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who called poetry “language in orbit.” She quibbled with poet and critic Elisa Gilbert’s column in the April 17 New York Times Book Review, an edition devoted to poetry. Gilbert posited that words with rhyme and meter are poetry, but that it also “leaves something out” and has an ineffable quality. “The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid,” she wrote.

Broderick doesn’t dwell on distinctions between poetry and prose. She feels poetry at its best embodies in words an almost mystical experience. “You don’t listen to a poem as much as you feel the poem listening to you,” she said.

“I try to live a poet’s life,” she said. “Poetry makes me more aware. I pay closer attention to sensory details. I express myself in a deeper way. It’s all part of my poetic evolution.”

As National Poetry Month winds down at the end of April, she offered a modest proposal. Broderick turned her personal collection of 400 poetry books, anthologies and chapbooks by Capital Region poets into a lending library. She invites anyone to contact her to borrow the titles.

“I am supporting local poets and sharing the beauty of poetry with others,” she said, a waif-like figure who chooses her words carefully and speaks in a soft whisper.

For 20 years, Broderick has purchased the work of local poets at bookstores, poetry readings, library book sales and homegrown poetry presses. They fill a bookshelf in her grown daughter’s old bedroom upstairs that she made into a writing space.

She has catalogued the volumes, most of which are limited editions, and arranged them alphabetically in a bibliography on her blog. The collection spans from Eddie Abrams’ “Mermaid in Metamorphosis” to Rachel Zitomer’s “Three Sides to the Looking Glass: A Poem for Albany.” Broderick includes several of her own works, including a 2011 self-published chapbook, “At April’s End,” printed by The Troy Book Makers, and a 2021 volume, “Crosswinds,” a self-published, hand-stitched chapbook.

There are several entries for poet Dan Wilcox, dean of the local poetry scene, whom Broderick describes as “the hub of the wheel, who works tirelessly to make poetry visible.”

“We’re the silent majority, all these folks out there writing poetry,” said Wilcox, who has hosted local open mics and a variety of poetry readings for more than 30 years. He has amassed an archive of thousands of images of local poets, what he’s dubbed “the world’s largest collection of photographs of unknown poets.”

“I love Therese’s idea of a lending library,” he said. “She’s a solid poet with longevity. She’s quiet, self-effacing and very involved in the poetry community.”

Wilcox and Broderick have long been active with Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. The two groups merged under the guild’s auspices in 2021.

Despite ebbs and flows over the decades, the current local poetry scene is thriving, Wilcox said. “The ease of publishing has caused an explosion of poetry,” Wilcox said.

Broderick is a 1977 graduate of Columbia High School, where her mother, Jane Broderick, taught English. Her father, Laird, was a commercial artist. Her freshman English teacher, Ilda Lyon, submitted Broderick’s poem, “Essence,” and it was published in a National Poetry Press anthology when she was 15.

“I always loved playing with words,” recalled Broderick. Her father recited poems, including “Casey at the Bat,” and her mother read her classic children’s literature.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Holy Cross, she completed a master’s degree in information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She spent 20 years as a reference librarian in Troy, Albany and Bethlehem public libraries.

She returned to graduate school at 45 and earned an MFA in creative writing in 2006 from Spalding University in Louisville, Ky., a low-residency program.

“I’ve been living life as a poet from that point on,” she said.

“She’s serious about her craft,” said her husband of 33 years, Frank Robinson, a retired state administrative law judge, expert numismatist, writer of “The Rational Optimist” blog and author of five nonfiction books. He writes his wife a poem on her birthday, holidays and special occasions. Their daughter, Elizabeth Robinson, 29, is completing a master’s degree in education and international development at University College London.

“She’s the best writer of all of us,” her mother said.

Broderick returns often to enduring poetry influences, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Hirshfield and Gregory Orr – whose book “A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry” she finds indispensable.

Her practice of Buddhism and poetry have converged at a kind of vanishing point. “They both have to do with mystery and impermanence, the yin and yang of life,” she said. “I guess the ultimate poem is silence.”

To borrow from Broderick’s lending library of local poets’ work, consult the bibliography at https://theresebroderick.wordpress.com/ and email her at brdrck@gmail.com. Here is one of her poems.

Mr. Canada Admonishes the Poets

again this month

one of you publishes

a new poem

of honking and V's

 

still more praise for that

most common of birds

in ink

as in skies

 

but how true are you

to me

who named them

grey Canada geese

belonging to no land

 

I too loved

their couplet

throats

and their alexandrine flights

Paul Grondahl is director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at grondahlpaul@gmail.com