Deep Water: ‘Social Distancing,’ by Gretchen Berg
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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All of us can relate to something in this week’s poem, Gretchen Berg’s “Social Distancing.” I love this poem’s specificity and details, its candor, and its humor. It may well inspire all of us to make our own lists of things we never thought we’d miss.
Berg is a performance artist/educator and writer. She is the lead teaching artist for Portland arts education partnership Side X Side, works in rural Maine schools through the Local Stories Project and often teaches performance courses at Bates College. She was lucky enough to spend time at Monson Arts this summer writing poetry.
Deep Water: ‘Welcome Home,’ by Gary Lawless
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
By Megan Grumbling
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This week’s Deep Water poem, “Welcome Home,” by Gary Lawless, is about America – not its politics or borders, but the expansive land and waters where we make our home. In “Welcome Home,” which recently appeared in Cove Street Gallery’s “I Am An American” exhibit in Portland, Lawless shares an essential vision of America the beautiful: diverse, dynamic and wide open.
Lawless is co-owner of Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, and a widely published poet, with 20 published collections in the U.S. and five in Italy. Originally from Belfast, he lives in Nobleboro.
Deep Water: ‘Willow Street,’ by Jonathan Aldrich
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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This week we feature a poem by the accomplished and much beloved Cape Elizabeth poet Jonathan Aldrich, who passed away last week. In “Willow Street,” from Aldrich’s first book, the speaker describes a place “not far from here” that also seems to be something more than a place. As the poem weaves gracefully between the tangible and the abstract, the space and state it conjures feel both mysterious and deeply, timelessly familiar.
Aldrich wrote over a dozen books in his 40-year career as a poet. At Harvard College, he won the William Lloyd Garrison Prize for poetry and the Academy of American Poets Award, and he was a Frost Scholar at The Bread Loaf School of English. His translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” illustrated by Allison Hildreth and hand-printed by David Wolfe Productions, won a Baxter Society Award. Aldrich also taught English at
So you think you’re a Mainer. Have you read these books?
With time on your hands, now is a good time to catch up on some of the must-read books by Maine authors.
Courtesy of the Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival
One thing the pandemic has done is eliminate your excuse for not reading more.
Maine authors have created some of the classic books of all time, along with best-sellers and Pulitzer Prize-winners. Their stories about Maine and their Maine viewpoints are rich and varied. Reading as many as you can only enriches your awareness of the state, your sense of being a Mainer.
Deep Water: ‘Cold Harvest,’ by Jenny Doughty
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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This week’s poem, by Jenny Doughty, brings us into the season of ice, and into a past when ice was precious through the warmer months. I love this poem for its vivid details of the ice harvesters’ work, for the delight it shows ice bringing to warm mouths, and for its sudden turn to the present – and our new understanding of just how precious ice is.
Doughty is British but has lived in Maine since 2002 and is an American citizen. In the U.K., she edited a Penguin anthology of pre-20th-century poetry, “Key Poets,” and wrote children’s non-fiction, short stories and magazine articles under the name Jenny Green. Her book “Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber” was published by Moon Pie Press. She is president of the Maine Poets Society.