Writing in community takes many shapes in Maine. “Whitman on the Walls” was a recent event in Portland in which seven different films featuring people reading Walt Whitman poems were shown along with original poems written by a variety of local poets.That project is moving on to other cities with new poets writing in response.There will be another gathering of poets and artists responding to climate change and the amazing pink sculptures by artist Pamela Moulton.Those are just two examples of the ways writers and other artists are relating to community in Maine. Most importantly, there is Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA), which sponsors workshops, retreats, and other ways of creating support and community among writers. The MWPA weekly newsletter, The Peavey, is full of information on gatherings and events.
But the four poems published together here come from a different kind of community. On Thursday nights, a group of poets gather and give each other prompts and then write together. It is a curious experience—an art form that seems to require solitude and long quiet hours suddenly becomes communal, off-the-cuff, trusting the levity and levitation of the group to surprise new work, to jiggle language loose. There’s an easy acceptance that all are drafts and even when they seem murky and mired, gems may appear, a little flint may keep burning. Among several others in the group these four responded to my request for work (thank you, thank you!) and each sent in three or four wonderful poems that have been started in one of those gatherings. I loved them all, but picked these particular ones for the kind of shared theme flickering through them. They may well have been written on different occasions, though I suspect two might have come from the same prompt. They all think about language in one way or another. Zanne Langlois and Maureen Thorson both write about those words that got away—not in some ethereal fog but let out of our mouths a little recklessly and with regret. Dawn Potter writes about that experience of thinking in retrospect of what we might have said—something more profound and imaginative than most of us can manage in the moment. Marita O’Neill writes of living in a different country that requires constant translation, and how that experience becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of translating experience into understanding.
—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor
Slip of the Tongue
My mouth is a tragic flaw—
it is full of small apologies.
My tongue runs back and forth
along the back of my teeth,
a dog looking for an opening
in a fence so it can escape
and bolt into traffic. Outside
the kitchen window is a wall
of fog so dense it could hold
a school of fish aloft. I want
to slip out the door and into
its folds, my unwise sentences
smothered in wet velvet,
swallowed by a damp abyss,
extinguished like a match
dropped in a puddle. I want
to spool my sentences back
into the unsaid, wind the reel
and tug them from the ears
they’ve landed in, but alas
they are barbed and sunk fast
in all the wrong memories.
—Suzanne Langlois
Thomas Birtwistle, Untitled, Peaks Island 2021, inkjet print, 20 x 20 in.
A Late Pardon
All the words you’ve ever said are connected.
They unspool from your throat, thick
as a hawser, fine as spider silk, dear
as a gold chain, cheap as kitchen twine,
all linked in an unending, single line
that is always growing.
Somewhere miles from you now
is your first “ma-ma” or “da-da.”
Everything you said in love,
everything you cried in pain,
every cliché and every phrase
as sharp as the tin star
that tops a Christmas tree
is formed into that ribbon.
Now imagine you could crank
the handle backwards, ravel
your words up behind the plush
of your thick-piled tongue
until you reached what
should have never left you,
repack the belly whose bile
first unleashed those words
like a carpet with a corpse in it,
like a parchment unrolled
to show the signature
that seals the warrant—
a sentence that cannot be commuted
because, like a body,
it’s already been carried out.
—Maureen Thorson (first published in Bennington Review 7, 2021)
Thomas Birtwistle, Untitled, Peaks Island 2022, inkjet print, 20 x 24 in.
What I Should Have Said to the Person Who Asked Me Why the Fields Are Littered with Old Cars
Rotten apple in the tire treads & the bees sucking their homesick sweetness from bruise & bang, O autumn, season of mellow breathlessness, when the firewood isn’t split yet & the shed roof won’t stand another winter’s weight of snow & I am rushing from orchard to kitchen, dishpans heaped with fruit too soft to bite, though why am I always so desperate to save every single one, as if it would be a crime to let rot have her way, a crime to bless the hornets & the blowflies, to let the wheelbarrow rest in the way it’s always dreamed of, future of slow rust in the dooryard, contemplations of wind, of raccoons, of the woman who wanders out into the unmown grass, cigarette pinched between slender fingers, nightgown stained with coffee, for she too will be honored to rust in this yard, where the mice scurry under the collapsing shed, where evening shivers & hugs a new moon to its sagging breast
—Dawn Potter
Thomas Birtwistle, Untitled, Peaks Island 2022, inkjet print, 20 x 24 in.
Half-life
When we moved to Istanbul,
green parrots prattled
in fig trees; steep hills plunged
into the roil and twine
of Bosporus currents
where towns called Kuruçeşme,
Ortaköy, and Bebek teetered.
Emerald tails, yellow beaks,
they spoke of half-lives lived
in ancient lands more foreign
than this in a language
I couldn’t translate
and flashed through skies
like falling stars: green, green
gleaming against wide blue.
I didn’t know then
we were burning
down to our marriage’s
half-life, didn’t know
how quickly
our own flash and dive
was fading
into a gloaming
turned night.
While Ramadan moons
curled like ear-lobes
listening in the blue black sky,
each morning
a drummer beat and called
at 4 am the faithful to wake,
yelling as if the world were ending:
rise, eat, be full before the fast,
before long days of want.
We fell into sleep
while the parrots fussed
and prattled their
untranslatable dreams
and the drum beat
and thrummed
and the man called
and called,
Wake! Wake!
—Marita O’Neill
Suzanne Langlois’s collection Bright Glint Gone won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award.
Maureen Thorson’s most recent book is Share the Wealth, Veliz Books, 2022.
Dawn Potter’s most recent book is Accidental Hymn, Deerbrook Editions, 2022.
Marita O’Neill’s chapbook Dragon Love was a finalist in the 2022 Poets Corner Chapbook Competition.
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The four photographs are part of a larger series Thomas Birtwistle is doing on Peaks Island and the old battery that is located there: “Part of what interests me there is the way that meanings and associations are mutable over time. The battery that once housed massive armaments is now a haven for graffiti artists and the sea that once concealed German submarines can now be a benign foreground for a sunrise. Other signs, written and otherwise, seem ambiguous even in the current moment. It is this sense of the flux of meaning that I thought might well accompany the four poems.”
Image at top: Thomas Birtwistle, Untitled, Peaks Island 2021, inkjet print, 20 x 20 in.