Maine Poet Laureate

Baron Wormser

Hallowell

Baron Wormser is the author of six collections of poetry. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including The Paris Review, Sewanee Review, The New Republic, Harper’s and Poetry. He recently published Teaching the Art of Poetry with David Cappella. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine in 2000. He teaches at the Frost Place in New Hampshire, co-directing the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching as well as the Frost Place Seminar.

January
"Cold as the moon," he'd mutter
In the January of 5 A.M and 15 below
As he tried to tease the old Chev into greeting
one more misanthropic morning.

It was an art (though he never
Used that curious word) as he thumped
The gas pedal and turned the key
So carefully while he held his breath
And waited for the sharp jounce
And roar of an engaged engine.

"Shoulda brought in the battery last night."
"Shoulda got up around midnight
And turned it over once."

It was always early rising as he'd worked
A lifetime "in every damn sort
Of damn factory." Machines were
As natural to him as dogs and flowers.
A machine, as he put it, "was sensible."

I was so stupid about values and intakes
He thought I was some religious type.
How had I lived as long as I had
And remained so out of it?
And why had I moved of my own free will
To a place that prided itself
On the blunt misery of January?

"No way to live," he'd say as he poked
A finger into the frozen throat
Of an unwilling carburetor.
His breath hung in the air
Like a white balloon.

Later on the way to the town where
We worked while the heater
Wheezed fitfully and the windshield
Showed indifference to the defroster
He'd turn to me and say that
The two best things in this world
Were hot coffee and winter sunrises.
The icy road beckoned to no one,
Snow began to drift down sleepily,
The peace of servitude sighed and dreamed

©Copyright 2000, Baron Wormser



Robert Chute

Poland Spring

Robert Chute, native Mainer, father an Inn Keeper, mother a school teacher, educated at Fryeburg Academy and UMO. He held the Dana Chair in biology at Bates College before retirement. His poems have been in various journals, including Ascent, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB, Cafe Review, The Cape Rock, The Fiddlehead, Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, Nebo, North Dakota Review, Prism, Texas Review. He has had seven chapbooks published. He recently published Thirteen Moons, (in English, French, Passamquoddy), and Bent Offerings, a three chapbook boxed set on Native American/Colonial themes. He was awarded the Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal and the Maine State chapbook award.

On The Outskirts Of Purgatory
 
How glad I am
that like Thoreau, but perhaps
for different reasons,
I travel most in books.

I turn the page to an aerial photograph:
the high plateau and Mexico city.
A gritty text of low houses
as far as a buzzards eye
could see (it might be
Hong Kong or Paris or New York
from my altitude).

Or a photomicrograph
of the latest chip technology”
so many megabytes of people.
All ones and zeros.
It's a matter of scale.

The armies of Montezuma
and Cortes reappear
to be swept away
in a flood of zeros and one.
I turn the page with relief.

Turn to an innocent smoldering
volcano” but
I can't forget. I still smell
that gaseous brown cloud
staining the city.

Is this a circle of Hell
Dante's Virgil missed?
If this is the information age
why don't more people
get the message?

Cities and slum fields spread
like a moon's shadow
as if some irreversible eclipse
has already begun.
Perhaps the sun will shine
a little longer here.

©Copyright 2003 Robert M. Chute



Rhea Cote Robbins

Brewer

Rhea Côté Robbins grew up in a bilingual Franco-American Waterville neighborhood, attended the University of Maine on a bilingual education scholarship, taught public high school briefly, worked as editor of an international, bilingual socio-cultural journal entitled, Le FORUM, then received her MA from the UMO. She is a founder and Executive Director of the Franco-American Women's Institute and created a women’s writing group in the Maine prison system. She currently teaches creative nonfiction, literature and Franco-American women's experiences at the UMO. She was the 1997 winner of the Maine Chapbook Award for creative nonfiction with Wednesday's Child. She has published in various magazines, including Review Rivière, Reflections on Maine, Les Voix, Rafale, Stolen Island Review, Puckerbrush Review, ECHOES, Portland Magazine, Feminist Times, and edits an online magazine for Franco-American women, moé pi toe.

For Xerxes, the new grandson
Baby, sweet baby
with hands
that speak
of his personal
poetry
long fingers
supple at birth
and stories
the way
he allows us to
see
Open-palmed startle
Dr. Spock
live long and prosper
greetings
closed fists scattered
to abandon
Resting in air
swept back, laid back
of his new chosen
universe.
©Copyright 2003, Rhea Cote Robbin





Tom Fallon

Rumford Falls

Tom Fallon's poetry and fiction have appeared in the Wisconsin Review, The Café Review, Acorn, the Puckerbrush Review, La Riviere, Spectrum, The Panhandler, Wolf Moon Press Journal and others. The former Maine Times poetry editor has published experimental poetry and fiction as well as free verse collections and is included in New Maine Writing I-II, Maine Speaks and Red Dust 3 anthologies. He promotes Maine writers through websites "Maine Literature Daily" literary events calendar and "Maine Poetry" with classic and contemporary Maine poets and poetry, as well as the official author- sanctioned home page for the legendary Maine creator, Bern Porter.

Out On Moose Run Road

For Leo Connellan

The cold was fierce.

The trailer on Moose Run Road was cold.

The wind railed outside, rocking the trailer.

Old Eldon Smith wore a ragged jacket and ski cap inside the trailer.

No money now, he thought. We don’t need no money.

Old Mary Smith sat in the chair with her mouth open.

The old man covered her carefully with her favorite afghan.

She was dead. Mary was dead.

Mary had been dead for three days.

Eldon sat in the chair facing his wife.

The wind railed outside, rocking the trailer.

The old man looked at his wife, mouth open, covered with her afghan.

Mary’s beyond this, he thought. Beyond the cold. Beyond the fear.

He picked up the picture of the kids.

None of them live in Maine, he thought.

He placed the picture face down on the coffee table.

He looked at Mary, her mouth open, covered with her afghan.

Who needs money now, the old man thought.

The wind railed outside, rocking the trailer.

The old man picked up the 22 rifle and put the barrel in his mouth.

I’m comin’ Mary, he said aloud.

He pulled the trigger and blood splattered on the wall.

The wind railed outside, rocking the trailer.

Mary and Eldon Smith were dead.

Two snowshoers found the door open at the trailer on Moose Run Road.

Mary and Eldon Smith were dead.

Frozen.
©Copyright 2003, T. C. Fallon




Anonymous


Factory Children

Hear ye, who kindly pit feel,
The factory children's loud appeal!
With pallid cheek and sunken eye,
O'er wearied, still their tasks they ply,
Ah, sad! o'er childhood's opening flower,
The tempest-clouds so early lower,
And cast the blight of toil and gloom
Where joy and hope should gaily bloom.

The rosy morn, with dewy wings,
For them renewed exertion brings;
The shade of evening finds them still
Fatigued within the tedious mill,
Immortal beings, formed to rise
In thought beyond the spangled skies;
They're doomed to toil the livelong day –
Then sink in premature decay.

When, bursting from the moral clay,
Th'undying spirits pass away,
Oh! let them not depart unblest,
By with'ring ignorance depress'd;
With soulsd unclad, with minds untaught,
(How fearful is the awful thought!)
To stand before His judgement throne,
Who was to them a "God unknown."

Ye say – the church, the schools, invite,
To guide their youthful ways aright
But crushed beneath Oppression's sway,
How can they Duty's voice obey?
The weary frames require repose,
The Sabbath day alone bestows –
Oh, chided be each cold delay,
Life's precious streamlet ebbs away!

Then pity grant, that all may feel
The factory children's sad appeal;
'Tis sounded in the Senate's ear
By one whose virtues all revere;
The champion of the helpless throng,
The friend of all who suffer wrong,
What, though awhile his efforts fail.
The cause of mercy must prevail.




Susann Pelletier
Lewiston

Susann Pelletier, a Lewiston native, has been writing poems since she was ten years old. Her work gives voice to her deep connections to family and place in Franco-America, as well as her vision of social justice and dignity at home and beyond our borders. Her articles and poems have been published here and abroad in anthologies, literary journals, and political and environmental magazines. Susann works as a learning associate at the Writing Workshop at Bates College. Pelletier's poetry in the Puckerbrush Review, Franco-American Women's Anthology and other literary journals. Her poetry collection is titled Immigrant Dream and Other Poems.

For the Innocents
An afternoon ago,
I bared my legs, my arms,
I lifted my face to the March sun.
It pressed its heat onto my lids,
Pressed its yellows and its reds –
Called up from summer past
Buzz of katydid and easeful afternoon,
Marigolds and the hand's hot hold
On husband, love –
All these pungencies pressed onto me.

Then, heat reached deeper, touched
What I had shoved and heaped into a place
Of no shame, few dreams –
I forgetting how the mounded and the dead
Will startle again…
Will rise up from thawed ground,
Seek audience.  

Now this sorrow will seep up like a sheening
Of new grass.
Fires in Bagdad flare out of every blade
And the bright, sharp edges of broken day, broken night
Rain down rain down
Into the cupped hands of my daughter –
This, her inheritance –
All the children tussle with flame,
Run toward us,
Seek water at our glistening stream.
They have come from the ancient, ruined fountains…  

Daughter, how can we wrack ice
And widen this stream,
Take up the living and the dead,
Bathe all the wounds,
Slake the thirst of these innocents?  

©Copyright 2003, Susann Pelletier




Jessy Kendall
Lewiston

Jessy Kendall grew up near Shagg Pond in the Woodstock area of Maine. He is a drummer, festival organizer and works in the experimental vein with visual/concrete poetry, found items as well sending off mail art. He edits Answer Shirker, a monthly literary adventure from Lewiston.

Untitled
©Copyright 2005, Jessy Kendall



Betsy Sholl

Portland

Betsy Sholl has published six poetry collections. She is a founding member of Alice James Books. A chapbook, Coastal Bop, has been published with Oyster River Press in 2001. A new collection, Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, among them Ploughshares, Field, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review. In 1991 she won the Maine Arts Commission Chapbook Competition and the Associated Writing Programs Competition in Poetry. In 1997, her collection, Don't Explain, won the Felix Pollock Award. She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship and two Maine Artists Fellowships. She has taught in the Writing Program at M.I.T. and currently teaches at the Univ. of Southern Maine.

At the Public Market
The flesh of swordfish swirls like wood grain
around a knot, and the tuna's a dark rose,
its petals packed tight beside the bright 
fine-grooved salmon making raw seem sweet:

such a beautiful display of how we eat
and are eaten.  The crabs, oysters, mussels,
big and bigger shrimp in their gray shrink-wrap – 
imagine not being able to eat,

having to repeat the rounds of these stalls
stunned like the gluttons on Terrace Six, who look
but can't touch as hunger crawls through muscle
and mind.  Imagine the millionth time passing

bins piled with scallops like the jellied whites
of eyes collected by a mad despot. 
And bass on ice, tiered rows of snapper,
gold racing stripes lined up with such care

each bright red unblinking bull's-eye is clear –
a good kind of grief Dante manages to say,
reading on each passing face shrunk down
to skull the word Omo (man), as if life

is a hunger we shouldn't rush to quell,
as if we shouldn't even want to dull 
our appetite's relentless drive
till it arrives at what can't be consumed.
©Copyright 2003, Betsy Sholl




Martin Steingesser
Portland

Martin Steingesser, a performance poet who presents poetry and stories in a diversity of styles, often appears in Maine schools and at festivals. His book of poems is titled, Brothers of Morning.

Stilt Dancing the Pennacook Valley Parade in What Must Be Heaven
for Wesley McNair


How to tell what happened that summer morning, marching Main Street
Rumford, everywhere smelling like rotten eggs? (“Hydrogen sulfide,”
I overheard this bystander say.) How to explain the sinking
feeling, eyeing the one float from WE CARE DAY CARE with a dozen kids
in bikinis, pink umbrella and handfuls of sand, as I sat on the car roof tying
on stilts? Or else define the tagrag Paresseux Marching Band of snare drums,
tom tom and one bass; color guard of American, Canadian and Maine
flags, then Jon Richard and his daughter on the purple Harley, followed
by a player-piano-sounding calliope, pealing out Semper Fidelis. “Parades
are up there with apple pie,” Dorie, the 20-something organizer, said.
“I have this simple philosophy,” she said, “all this negative shit has to go.”
I’m not sure what she was referring to, the poor turn out or thick, clean-looking
white billowing out of Boise Cascade, twin red-trimmed stacks
poking right up into what had to be summer’s best
china blue. All this beside the rolling Androscoggin, and Denise and Sandee
Welch, Steve Gallant, Davie Frost, Debi and David Briggs beat the drums, for the
Penacook Valley Festival Parade has begun, and suddenly
I want to cheer, because something about Keith Sinclair—the way he steps
out in the color guard makes me think he would shine if the rifle
he shoulders were a broom, and what could I do but take off, whirling and
kicking for the sky, everybody marching solemn-faced together, this surprise
fanfare of the heart, the flags an Androscoggin of red, blue, green, yellow
through back streets and main; and we marched for two kids on
the hood of a car, for elders in robes waving behind screen doors, past the blue
fire hydrant, and I danced for one girl with her puppy, for a man
across a vacant lot, a blue dress blowing on a clothesline. It doesn’t matter
streets were empty, they came to windows, left TVs flickering in empty
rooms, came out of the hardware store and Kohler’s Plumbing, groups on corners
clapping, eyeglasses filling with light. It doesn’t matter in some smaller moment
I didn’t want to be part of their parade. Judy Willett hit the cymbals, eyes smiled
up at me, we met somewhere we knew each other before we knew, roadside weeds
broke out in fragrance, something threading the streets threading us, morning’s
first swagger of heat staggering back. Drums beat, Smash the TV! Drums beat,
Take back the river! the air—
Come out! Come out! the drums beat.

©Copyright 2000, Martin Steingesser




Dawn Potter

Harmony

Dawn Potter is the author of "Boy Land & Other Poems". New work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including the Connecticut Review and the Beloit Poetry Journal . A 2004 faculty member at Haystack, she received a grant from the Maine Arts Commission for study in Rome. She teaches in schools and workshops around the state.

The Bridge

 
Flood-tide below me!  I see you face to face!
                

										
										Walt Whitman 

I stand with you, watching melted snow whirl
down Higgins Brook, past three ministers' houses,
past heavy-headed horses and the woolen mill
where men linger in the weak sunshine,

past McGinleys' yard full of junk cars,
and Harveys' house, half painted and tumbledown,
then into the forest, out of knowledge.
You scowl between the concrete rails,

watching the water rumble and crash,
blue hood pulled up tight, cranky because I won't
let you drop a beer can over the edge.
We pause on the chipped sidewalk,

cold air rising, sun blinking among the clouds.
You wriggle and thrust against the rails,
and I grip the back of your hood
so you won't pitch over the edge and disappear,

as my father, braking, would reach across the passenger seat
and brace his hand against my chest -
a futile gesture, defiant of gravity, dense with the fear
I did not feel then, that you do not feel now,

shrugging off the hand that might twist
you over the edge - tilt you, blue coat ballooning,
like a gull into a stiff current of wind -
suspended above ice, water, foam, roar

for seconds as long as years, until the husk
of winter splits, and swallows you whole.
The unhappened looms.
I drive into destruction, with this hand that steadies you.

©Copyright 2004, Dawn Potter




Bruce Spang

Falmouth

Bruce Spang is the author of "The Knot" and "To the Promised Land Grocery"; and two chapbooks, "The End of Time" and "Once the First Berries Dissolve". He is Review Editor for The Cafe Review in Portland, Maine, and associate editor for Hunger Mountain. His poems have appeared in The Diner, Rattle, Puckerbrush Review, Patterson Review, Fairfield Review, Cafe Review and Off the Coast. He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at Scarborough High School.

Whatever

Whatever the youth say
When their rooms need to be cleaned
They should have been home by ten
They should have used a condom

Whatever the students say
When an assignment is weeks late
the team loses the homecoming game
a faggot is beaten in the back corridor

Whatever employees say
When the air conditioner gags and dies
When fifty more layoffs are announced
health coverage is dropped entirely

Whatever homemakers say
when they are snowed in
the bean seeds don’t germinate
the goldfish bellies up in the tank

Whatever your lover says
When you find a love note to someone else
you ask them to make love
you find your physician is very attractive

Whatever your partner says
When you say you’ll be right back
When you threaten to quit your job
When you don’t come back



Whatever the president says
When the White House chef burns the ribs
When Fox-news posts photos of Abu-grab
When a roadside bomb shatters a Hummer

Whatever the clergyman says
When the wine turns to vinegar
When the oil burns out
When God is dead


©Copyright 2008, Bruce Spang



The books of Maine poets may be purchased
at independent Maine bookstores.

http://www.mainepoetry.comeditor@mainepoetry.com©Copyright 2005, T. Fallon/Maine Poetry Workshop