Maine’s ‘persistent’ legacy of poetry continues as strong as ever

Very likely, the poet who lives next door is busy. So is the one you know down the street, in the next town over or up north in The County.

If it feels like Maine’s libraries, bookstores, coffee shops, cafes, classrooms and lecture halls are busier hosting readings, signings and talks, that’s because they are. In the land of Longfellow, poetry is as prevalent as ever, and especially so during National Poetry Month in April.

FIVE APRIL POETRY EVENTS

Richard Foerster reading

WHERE: York Public Library, 15 Long Sands Road, York

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday

HOW MUCH: Free

Megan Grumbling’s “Booker’s Point” launch party

WHERE: Space Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland

WHEN: 7 p.m. Wednesday; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

HOW MUCH: Free

Longfellow’s Shorts with Megan Grumbling, Daniel Noel and Moira Driscoll

WHERE: Portland Stage Company, 25A Forest Ave., Portland

WHEN: 7 p.m. April 11; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

HOW MUCH: $5 suggested donation

“Take Heart: More Poems from Maine” hosted by Wesley McNair

WHERE: Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Way, Portland

WHEN: 7 p.m. April 14

HOW MUCH: Free

Participants: Marcia Brown, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Megan Grumbling, Alice Persons, Betsy Sholl and Martin Steingesser

Maine Poetry Gala with the Beloit Poetry Journal

WHERE: SPACE Gallery 538 Congress St., Portland

WHEN: 7 p.m. April 22

HOW MUCH: Free

Participants: Beloit editors Melissa Crowe and Rachel Contreni Flynn with Dawn Potter, Betsy Sholl, Martin Steingesser, Jeffrey Thomson and Elizabeth Tibbetts

“There’s a great pride in Maine and the state’s poetic traditions and legacies,” said Stuart Kestenbaum, who on Tuesday was sworn in as Maine’s newest poet laureate, replacing Wesley McNair of Mercer. “It will never be giant, in terms of the sizes of audiences. But poetry in Maine is persistent.”

Befitting the casual nature of his office, Kestenbaum’s swearing-in was low-key. Between appointments with his doctor and his dentist, he stopped in at the Town Hall in Stonington, near his home in Deer Isle. A clerk licensed as a dedimus justice – a position of higher authority than a notary public – performed the brief ceremony.

Kestenbaum doesn’t have a specific plan for his five-year term, other than to read poems and promote poetry at every opportunity. As the former director at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, he’s skilled at putting programs together that involve diverse groups of people.

“I enjoyed making connections among different makers, different kinds of artists and people working in different materials,” Kestenbaum said, noting that he began a writing retreat at Haystack to add the creative energy of writers to the mix of visual artists. “I think I could do that kind of thing with poetry, and bring poetry to new audiences and partner with different groups around the state.”

Kestenbaum, who has published four volumes of poetry, believes poetry can have a bigger place in our society. He thinks people are searching for the meaningful moments that poetry fosters, among each other and between words and emotions.

“Poetry presents a different sense of time the way it slows things down,” Kestenbaum said. “It can be a small moment that has great power. People want that. There’s a yearning for it, to make sense of the world.”

He follows McNair in a role that historically has been a largely ceremonial one. That’s not the case anymore. McNair, an educator and writer, energized the position with programs designed to put poetry in the hands of the people. He started a weekly poetry newspaper column, “Take Heart,” and traveled the state bringing poets together with everyday Mainers to read poems about their lives and their communities.

McNair also published two anthologies of contemporary Maine poetry, the second of which, “Take Heart: More Poems from Maine,” will be celebrated at the Portland Public Library on April 14. Greater Portland poets will join McNair to read from the anthology, including Portland Poet Laureate Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Beloit Poetry Journal co-editor Rachel Contreni Flynn, Megan Grumbling, Marcia Brown, Alice Persons, Betsy Sholl and Martin Steingesser.

McNair remains active beyond the expiration of his term. He is working with the Maine Humanities Council to make his statewide poetry tour, the Maine Poetry Express, an ongoing library program. He’s collaborating with Fay-LeBlanc to create an educational website, “Written Word, Spoken Word and Hip-Hop,” to bring new forms of poetic expression into Maine classrooms.

He’s also creating a video anthology, “21 Maine Poets Read and Discuss Their Work,” with the University of Maine at Farmington, where he taught. For the videos, poets read two poems and talk about their inspiration, their development as writers or Maine’s influence on their work. The website will be active this month and available to teachers, students and fans of poetry, McNair said.

The ongoing initiatives will help ensure “the poems will live on and on,” McNair said.

York poet Richard Foerster is among those who has recorded poems for McNair’s “21 Poets” project. A veteran poet who has lived in Maine since 1986, Foerster believes McNair’s efforts have made a difference in making poetry more accessible to people in Maine. “We couldn’t have had a stronger poet laureate,” Foerster said of McNair. “He will have lasting impact. The videos, the anthologies – I can’t praise him too highly.”

Foerster is a founder and former editor of poetry journals and a published poet. Texas Review Press published his collection “River Road” last year. He is the winner of multiple National Endowment for the Arts and Maine Arts Commission fellowships, and he serves on the jury for the Poets’ Prize, an annual, national $3,000 award. He will read his poetry at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the York Public Library and travel to North Carolina later this month to read at a festival there.

Poetry still attracts what Foerster calls “a boutique-y audience,” but there are more opportunities to read than at any time since he began publishing poetry in the 1980s. There’s a resurgence in small press and online journals. Online publications especially have been an effective avenue for young and emerging writers to have their work seen and read, he said.

In Maine, that means more readings. “In small cafes and large auditoriums, there’s just a proliferation in local readings,” said Foerster, who lives in the village of Cape Neddick.

NO BARRIER TO PUBLISHING

There’s also been what Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Executive Director Joshua Bodwell calls a “mind-blowing” surge in people writing and publishing poetry, made possible by the Internet. Although he didn’t live through the Beat generation, Bodwell said the current wave of writers publishing their poems online reminds him of what he has read about the Beat poets, who reproduced their own poems by whatever means necessary and distributed them by hand among friends.

That has led to a proliferation of small presses and poetry journals that produce physical books or quarterlies, as well as online-only publications. Some of the those publications don’t last long, but many do, said Contreni Flynn, who spent last week in Los Angeles at a writers’ convention. She lives in North Gorham.

“The online-only poetry journals have burgeoned in the past 10 years, and the quality and reputation of a great many of those journals are stellar,” she said. “It might have been in the early years of online magazines that they were perceived as second string or shabby compared to print journals. Not anymore by a long shot – they’re nimble and fresh and publishing imaginative, electric work.”

At Beloit, she and co-editor Melissa Crowe receive 20 to 25 poetry submissions per day. Beloit, a 66-year-old national publication that has been based in Maine since 1984 and prints four times a year, publishes less than 2 percent of the poems it receives, the editors said.

They’ve edited the journal only nine months, so their perspective is limited. But they’ve both been reading poetry for years and have detected a change in the kinds of poems they’re receiving, particularly in vocabulary and image. “All of a sudden, I’ll notice everybody is using the word ‘liminal’ or writing a lot about pomegranates,” Crowe said. “And – this is not at all a complaint or criticism – there are the NPR poems. Some really fascinating story on Radio Lab will show up in a handful of poems after it airs. I love ’em – I write ’em. Keep them coming.”

Beloit continues to receive lyrically charged, socially engaged and politically uncompromising work from a diverse range of perspectives, Crowe said.

She described Maine’s poetry scene as lively and diverse. Formal college-level writing programs at the University of Maine at Farmington, the University of Southern Maine and on other campuses encourage new voices, the Telling Room in Portland supports young writers, and Maine Writers & Publishers helps established writers connect with each other and publicize books and events. It’s a strong network that supports writers in all stages of their careers, she said.

YOUNG VOICE

One of Maine’s newest and youngest poetry converts is Rose Horowitz of Harpswell. For the second time in two years, the 17-year-old senior at Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham will represent Maine in the national Poetry Out Loud finals in Washington, D.C., in May. She advanced to the national competition after winning at the state level in Waterville in March.

Until her sophomore year, she had never read a poem in public. A teacher required her class to participate in a schoolwide poetry contest that qualified students for the next round of Poetry Out Loud. Horowitz found her voice – and an unexpected love of poetry – during the competition.

A shy, quiet student who sometimes stuttered, Horowitz found self-confidence reading poetry out loud. This coming weekend, she joins the Vox Nova Chamber Choir and the DaPonte String Quartet for concerts in Brunswick that will include recitations by Horowitz of two poems, including one in Hebrew. Horowitz is Jewish.

“I thought poetry was obnoxious,” she said. “I had no interest in it. Now I can’t imagine my life without it.”