Maine Humanities Council

The Thinking Heart is a performance piece in two voices, with cello, based on the journal and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and died in Auschwitz in 1943. The performance is an original arrangement of her journal and letters in the form of poems written by Martin Steingesser. The Maine Humanities Council awarded a grant for this piece to be performed at four locations, including the Rockland Public Library, the Bangor Public Library and the Belfast Free Library.

 

 The Thinking Heart: A Performance in Two Voices, with Cello [36:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (813)

Denise Pendleton, Maine Humanities Council’s Program Director of Born To Read and poet, sat down at the Belfast Free Library with two of Maine’s best-known poets, Elizabeth Garber and Dawn Potter. In addition to reading from their memoirs, the poets spoke about why they turned to prose and how their poetry background has influenced their current writing. Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of two collections of poetry and is currently writing a memoir, The Architect’s Daughter, about growing up in a modern glass house in the 1960’s. Her chapter “Stones” won the Maine Writer’s and Publishers Alliance 2009 Literary Award for unpublished Non-Fiction.  She was voted 2009 Best Writer in Waldo County in a Reader’s Poll conducted by The Village Soup/Republican Journal. Dawn Potter is the author of two collections of poetry and, most recently, a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. It recounts her project of copying out every word of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost while living an everyday life in the central Maine town of Harmony. According to writer Sam Pickering “Potter writes beautifully. . . . [Her book] made me ponder my life as well as literature, as a good book should but few books do.”

 

 Poets Writing Memoir: A Conversation with Elizabeth Garber and Dawn Potter [78:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1082)

Thin Blue Lines is a project of Portland’s Arts & Equity Initiative. The project brings local poets and photographers together with Portland police officers and detectives to create poems and photographs that increase the public’s knowledge and appreciation of police work. The first product of this collaboration was a calendar that was sold as a fundraiser for the family of Sgt. Rob Johnsey, who died of an accidental gun discharge in May of 2008.

This recording is from a reading that the participants—poets and police officer-poets—gave at the Portland Public Library. To learn more about this project, or to obtain a copy of the 2009 calendar, please visit Arts & Equity online.

 

 Thin Blue Lines [48:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (375)