Maine Humanities Council

Take Heart is edited and introduced by Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair, and produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance

Mekeel McBride lives in Kittery and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. In her poem she shows us what we have missed in the winter trees we observe every day.

Where Inspiration Has Learned a Thing or Two

By Mekeel McBride

From the trees because they are the true intuitives.

Palm readers of sunlight and storm, calm interpreters

for any kind of wind, doing most of the detective work

on shooting stars and aurora borealis. Their easy come,

easy go romances with migrating birds scarcely bear

recording and not even the quick cinema jump cuts

from summer to snow bother them. Even if there is snow,

temperature in the minus numbers, something continues

to live, invisible, at the core. Looking at the trees, you might

see in the bare branches only the bones of Babayaga’s hand

or the possibility of kindling for your wood stove, owl haven,

or a kind of living elegy blessed on the highest branch

by one thin crow. Of course you could be wrong. What

inspiration looks like is never really what it is.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2006 by Mekeel McBride. Reprinted from Dog Star Delicatessen, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006, by permission of Mekeel McBride. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.

Margaret Chase Smith

by Jim Melcher

Margaret Chase Smith, who served Maine in Congress for 32 years, is still one of the most iconic figures in Maine political history over 15 years after her death in 1995. She remains a significant figure in American national political history as well. What can we still learn from “The Red Rose of Skowhegan”’s experience in politics almost three decades after she left the Senate in 1973? As a scholar of American politics, I tried my hand at this question at a conference titled “The Politics of Conscience: Margaret Chase Smith and Today’s Political Climate” hosted by the Maine Humanities Council at G.W.-Hinckley (formerly Good Will-Hinckley) this past September. (The podcast available here on the MHC website is from a later presentation on this topic I made in Professor Amy Fried’s class on Women and Politics at the University of Maine). I argued that not only are there ways in which we can learn from Margaret Chase Smith’s experience still holding valid today, but that there are other ways in which her experience offers a contrast to the way American politics works now.

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The war is stalemated in its 10^th year. Two powerful warlords argue over the spoils. The more charismatic of the two suddenly goes berserk after the death of his closest comrade.

Sound familiar? But it’s not today’s news from Afghanistan. It’s a tale first told some 3,000 years ago by the Greeks. On March 9-10, 2012, at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, the Maine Humanities Council returns to this ancient yet only too fresh story for its 15^th annual Winter Weekend, devoted to Homer’s The Iliad in the Robert Fagles translation.

The weekend features scholarly yet accessible lectures—led off by Mainer Caroline Alexander, author of the bestselling The War That Killed Achilles—small-group discussions, a reception, and a Mediterranean feast.

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Liam Riordan

The MHC is pleased to announce that Dr. Liam Riordan, early Americanist scholar, MHC Board Member, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine, Orono, will be doing archival research and teaching at the University of Glasgow in spring 2012 as a Fulbright Scholar. His honours level undergraduate course will focus on the early American republic, and he will be pursuing two main research projects. The first is to locate material about the Loyalist Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, who lived in Scotland with her family in the mid-1780s before moving on to Jamaica and then Nova Scotia. Second, he is starting a new research project about outmigration from Glasgow throughout the Atlantic World, and especially to Virginia, the British West Indies, and the Canadian Maritimes, from 1760 to 1820. He will be joined in Glasgow by his wife Susan Thibedeau (on leave from the English Department at Bangor High School) and their sons Cormac and Declan.

Liam has many publications to his credit, including the forthcoming collection The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era and Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic.

Celebrated Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer signs Vecka nr.II, a reflection of his poem "Galleriet," an artist book by multi-award Iraqi-Swedish Modhir Ahmed, By Tokistar (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Each year, I eagerly await the Nobel Laureate in Literature. Being an aficionado of things Swedish, including the language, I always listen to the first announcement made by Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and watch the reaction of the largely-Swedish crowd of reporters. Like most other literary types, I have my own list of who should win and who should have won, and express pleasure or bemusement or curiosity based on that. This year, however, when Englund made his announcement of Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer as the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Literature, my cheer rivaled those of the reporters.

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I have just finished reading the novel, Home by Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Orange Prize, and a retelling of the story of her previous novel, Gilead, set in a small midwestern town of that name in the late 1950s.  Both of these feature the prodigal son, Jack, in his relationship to two families, and more specifically, the father of those two families: his own and his father’s best friend, both of whom are ministers, Presbyterian and Congregationalist.  In Gilead, we learn about Jack from the point of view of Ames, the father’s best friend, neighbor, and Jack’s intended but weary and suspicious mentor; in Home, we see Jack from the point of view of his sister Glory, who has recently returned home after abandonment by a long time fiancé, to care for their dying father.

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View from Strip Road, Fort Kent: Maine's northern border is a landscape of rolling hills, fields, and lots of sky. Credit: Erik Jorgensen

by Kathryn Olmstead

What do borders mean? It is a provocative question that captured the imaginations of participants in two discussions sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council Sept. 16 and 17. Held in the border towns of Houlton and Frenchville, the discussions brought together residents of varied ages and walks of life from both Maine and Canada to examine and expand their views of a border’s significance.

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The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have evoked complicated responses from Americans and also the rest of the world. Now, ten years later, we are reflecting on how we at the Maine Humanities Council have responded. In summary, I think it is fair to say that we have tried to learn from the events of 9/11 and to promote understanding of how people in other parts of the world live, what they believe and want, and how they view the United States. 9/11 also caused us to reflect on how Americans see themselves, and we’ve created a number of programs and given grants that explore that as well.

In this post, we’ll present programs that look outward, towards the rest of the world, and in October focus on programs and activities that have encouraged us to reflect upon ourselves as Americans.

The Council’s immediate response to 9/11 was our quickly organized statewide reading and discussion program Let Freedom Ring! On October 11, 2001, nearly 1,000 Mainers came together in 63 libraries to share thoughts on W.H. Auden’s ”September 1, 1939” and Franklin Roosevelt’s speech, “The Four Freedoms”, and to reflect on the events of September 11. As one participant wrote afterwards, “There was freedom and respect in this circle – it models what we wish for in the larger world.”

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I recently read Islandport Press’ handsome 2003 edition of Mary Ellen Chase’s Silas Crockett, first published in 1935. A classic herself, Chase was born (in 1887) and raised in Blue Hill, educated there and at the University of Maine, and then, with a PhD from the University of Minnesota, spent most of her adult life teaching English at Smith College.

The granddaughter of a sea captain, Chase was probably only too familiar with the saga she traced in Silas Crockett: four generations of decline of a proud, prosperous and ambitious seafaring family against the backdrop of one hundred years of decline of a once bustling ship building and globally connected port town on the coast of Maine.  Although Chase’s family may have retained a professional status and attendant financial security, there were many other members of the community with similar family histories who were not so fortunate.

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On August 14, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Neal Gabler about how big ideas area disappearing from our society due to, among other things, the rise of social media.  Gabler makes many interesting points, but early on writes, “If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did.” This becomes a refrain to express concerns about the 140-character world of Twitter and the seemingly-unlimited unfiltered information available online.

Social media does indeed open up the world to conversations of tacos had for dinner, but it and the Internet also open up the world to so much more. No longer are only the Western Gods of Thought  sources of ideas, bestowed on high to grateful mortals. Ideas belong to everyone. The Internet is a democracy in the truest sense.

I feel this strongly. As a writer of historical fiction, I rely on the Internet and its amazing sources—from scholars to non-academic people who write about their memories—for excellent information. As a humanities person, I learn from my social media contacts. On Twitter, I follow fascinating individuals, from historians to PhD students to a London cab driver. They often share profound thoughts—through those 140-character bundles, or linked blog posts—that I not only retweet but discuss over the dinner table and muse about far into the night. A post by an independent scholar, for example, posed a fascinating historical perspective on the police’s reaction to the London riots.

And claiming that no profundity exists in 140 characters or less ignores the profundity that is present in so many other cultures, including, for instance, the entire tradition of Japanese haiku. I argue that Bashō‘s and Shiki‘s works can tell modern readers much about the human condition and a powerful way—and non-Western—way of thinking.

Maine Humanities Council programs celebrate the fact that everyone, from a young child to a low-literacy adult to a professor at a private college, has ideas worth hearing. To us, inherent in our mission, lies this powerful truth: that ideas are common currency for everyone.

—Diane Magras