Poetry Flourishes in a Maine Library
MAINE’S POET LAUREATE Betsy Sholl facilitated the new poetry series in the Council’s free reading and discussion program, Let’s Talk About It, in Bridgton last summer. In honor of National Poetry Month, she has contributed this account of her experiences. To learn more about Let’s Talk About It, please see the article in this newsletter issue.
On five Saturday mornings in July and August, I drove along Route 302, through a still sleepy Windham, through a Naples just beginning to wake up—a few strollers on the causeway, the lake deliciously riled or quietly glowing. But I wasn’t planning a boat ride or a shopping expedition. I was on my way to talk about Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the lovely—and air-conditioned—basement room of the Bridgton Public Library.
Who would have guessed that at our first meeting, at 10:30 on a summer Saturday, there’d be standing room only—and for the next four weeks, a dedicated group of at least thirty people?
Following the excellent curriculum prepared by Maine’s former poet laureate, Baron Wormser, we read poems by all three poets on the first day. At each of the next three meetings, we looked at one poet more closely, and examined con-temporary poets aligned with his or her style. As Baron writes in his introduction to the curriculum, we looked at Whitman’s “free verse, expansive, vatic impulses,” at Dickinson’s “metaphysical, homemade, intense designs,” and at the “socialized, fluent lyric manners of Longfellow.” For the last meeting, each participant shared a favorite poem with the group, some reading their own poems, some selecting recent discoveries, and others reading old favorites. In response to a suggestion from the group that we include in our last session a look at poems responding to war, I made a handout that included poems from 8th-century China, as well as poems by Vietnam and Iraq veterans. Our weeks together reinforced our belief that poetry indeed carries vital responses to our human dilemma.
The group meetings were lively and enthusiastic, the discussions rich, the participants serious readers and engaged thinkers. We often spilled over our noon ending point, and could have gone even longer. From retired ambassadors to journalists to teachers and fellow poets, the group was an inspiration and a delight.
Considering all the ways language is used to sell and exploit, we relished our time together looking at the work of poets whose primary relationship to language involves crafting sound and sense to explore, to discover, to probe, to make a music that expresses our rich and varied humanity, or—as the poet W.S. Auden says—to make a “clear expression of mixed feelings.” We read Ginsberg’s breathless and irreverent lament for his generation, Plath’s metaphor-rich responses to motherhood, Merwin’s evocative, subtle depiction of Vietnam, and Heather McHugh’s deliciously tricky sexual puns. The group’s quick wit and insight meant nothing was lost on us.
I left the last meeting with a car full of flowers, balloons, blueberries, an enormous cucumber, a book of poems, a New Yorker interview that one member graciously tracked down and Xeroxed for me, and a DVD by fellow poet Timothy Richardson—plus a sense of deeply shared humanity.
There are many people responsible for the success of this program: everyone who attended; the Humanities Council staff, partners, and funders who made it possible; Baron who prepared the excellent curriculum; and the librarians who request it and host the meetings. In my case, that was Bridgton’s own irrepressible Diane am Rhein, whose enthusiasm and generosity were unbounded. She knew that a poetry program would be met with interest, and her good spirit was a significant draw for the lively Saturday morning crowd.
In an age when people decry the dearth and death of poetry, this program proves them wrong. Clearly, poetry still speaks and readers still listen.
