Portland's Poet Laureate

Martin Steingesser

inaugurated June 12, 2007

Martin Steingesser grew up and lived on New York City's Lower East Side, moving to Maine in 1981. Also a performance poet, he works actively both presenting and teaching in the Maine Arts Commission's Touring Artist and Artist-in-Residence programs. His poems have garnered national recognition, and he has been a Fellow of Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and recipient of the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Writers' Conference Pierre Menard Poetry Scholarship.

He says writing is a way he touches and makes present a sense of grace he wants in his life: ÒThere are moments in poems I have madeÑwhen they are given, when windows, doors, walls are blown off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening."

http://www.martinsteingesser.com

Martin reading at the Maine Festival.

L.R. Berger, author of The Unexpected Aviary, won the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her book has been reviewed in Field and Pleiades.

http://www.oberlin.edu/ocpress/FIELD/70.htm

 

L. R. Berger's work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook. Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love."

In Praise of The unexpected Aviary

The quality of persistent attention in Berger's work constitutes, I think, the heart of the poetic act. It is hard enough to find the inner space and self-command for that attention in our time; it is a matter of verbal gift and discipline to be able to make such attention audible to others. It matters that her attention is paid to such endangered objects as human love and the extra-human natural world; to the intricate connection between our conduct of love and that imperiled world.

—Mary Baine Campbell Author of The World, The Flesh, and The Angels

In language that is hauntingly singular in its music and its psychological tenor, Berger has wrested from a difficult, and tenuous, even precarious life, a stubborn, intelligent, and affirming poetry. Her lines, like the birds she writes about, dart out of the shadows with such swiftness and grace we feel startled into perception. The reader feels catapulted into a world where truth is apprehended through the complex intelligence and receptivity of the non-linear mind; in fact, the poems persuade us into abandoning our preconceptions and habits of mind.

—Teresa Cader Author of The Paper Wasp

 

 

LR Berger was interviewed by New Hampshire Public Radio after her book, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. To listen to her interview, http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2003/10/22/term/15000 which was aired October 22, 2003.

 

L.R. Berger is the New England Associate of Pace e Bene

http://www.paceebene.org/pace/user/lr-berger

Dawn Potter is the author of two collections of poetry. A finalist for both the White Pine Poetry Prize and the Robert Frost Poetry Prize, she has published poems and prose in the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. She teaches poetry in schools and conferences throughout New England and has recently joined the Beloit Poetry Journal's editorial board. She lives in Harmony, Maine.

IN PRAISE OF BOY LAND & OTHER POEMS

Dawn Potter looks hard at the world and describes it so acutely that we become aware of something hidden underneath it—and that something is often a sense of quiet menace. Her poetry, like one of the characters she describes, "subdues a sense of internal chaos by /keeping her hands quiet at all times." But the chaos is there, and we feel it all the more intensely for its being submerged under the taut surfaces of these remarkable poems. "The un-happened looms," she says in The Bridge. It is that unsettling immanence that charges these poems with mysterious power.

—Jeffrey Harrison

Can poets be characterized by their longings? Dawn Potter writes of wanting "to believe . . . that there is a way to compose these pieces into patterns of great beauty and precision," and indeed, it is a formal compositional elegance precisely balanced with a natural lyric expressiveness that defines the crafty grace that leads the way through Boy Land & Other Poems. Although itÕs a land where "The un-happened looms" and the bee waits to sting, it is also a place where the poet makes the choices her art requires to create poems that move through disquiet with the greatest of ease.

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont

One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the "I," to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with consummate ease, in her poems, no matter where she is, the consciousness is always fresh, the perceptions always immediate and the human connections always moving, moving us, as we are by the moments of life coming into focus, newly seen and absolutely clear.

—Howard Levy

 

A list of Activities

February 2007

Judge, Martin Dibner Poetry Prize, administered by the Maine Community Foundation

Judge, Poetry Out Loud, Maine finals, administered by the Maine Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts

September 2007

Featured reader, Maine Poetry Society, fall meeting, Wilton

Faculty, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance fall retreat, Deer Isle

July 2008

Faculty, Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching, Franconia, NH

Carl Little, author of Ocean Drinker, New & Selected Poems, director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation, and author of numorous art books, has recently written a book on painting in Maine. Carl is an alumnus of Dartmouth.