For the last days of National Poetry Month, Bookmarked teamed up with the Academy of American Poets to highlight three of their 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows. The fellowships recognize laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.
For the next three days, we will feature a fellow responding to questions from Academy Content Editor Nadra Mabrouk. Today’s post features Julia Bouwsma, poet laureate of Maine.
What inspired you most about bringing poetry to your community as a poet laureate fellow?
Years ago, I was challenged by another poet to identify a single-word driving force behind my poems. My answer was “connection.” As a poet who engages in many interlinking types of work—writing, editing, teaching, serving as a public librarian, working the land as a homesteader/farmer—connection is essential to my practice, both on and off the page. To my mind, the work of poetry is the work of living and, as such, it is community work. Serving as Maine’s poet laureate and living in one of Maine’s rural counties, I have also been extremely aware of the ways in which economic, political, cultural and racial divisions, as well as geographic and social isolation, have led to increasing friction and disconnection in my state. Because of this, I wanted to create a project that used poetry to actively build connections across Maine’s disparate communities, foster listening and collaboration among strangers and perhaps even help frame and nurture difficult social conversations. And because in my travels across the state I often speak with people who admit to feeling a little intimidated by poetry, I also wanted to provide an opportunity to engage in a generative poetry writing practice in a manner that would feel accessible for participants of any experience level.
How do you think your work changed the way your community engages with poetry, both now and in the future?
The Write ME Epistolary Poetry Project provided participants (both poets and the poetry-curious) the opportunity to directly engage with poetry, to listen and communicate something meaningful to a person they didn’t already know and to engage in the physically and emotionally connective rituals of letter writing. The first step was to introduce and build comfort and enthusiasm for the epistolary poem—a poem that is also a letter—through a series of free public workshops, each taught by a different Maine poet, which included both virtual options and in-person opportunities across the state. After that, over two hundred participants signed up to receive a randomly assigned poetry pen pal for a winter-long poetry exchange.
While an official hybrid celebration event will be taking place at the end of May for participants to meet one another and share their poems and experiences, I recently had an opportunity to hear a few of the poems produced in the Write ME exchange during a National Poetry Month celebration at my state’s capitol. The poems I have heard and read so far have moved me deeply with their commitment to listening, their vulnerability, their playfulness, their innovation and the unexpected surprises of collaboration. Participants have been telling me about new friendships that have developed, the joy of receiving postal mail, the excitement of learning a new form, how the project has pushed them to take new risks, about the creativity generated through structured practice, about the freedom they have felt to express themselves, of the much-needed light the exchange has brought during hard times.
It has also been very exciting to see this project grow in unanticipated directions. For example: a Franco-American poet, inspired by Maine’s large population of Franco-Americans and French speakers, created a French language epistolary poetry exchange that has led to thoughtful and poignant discussions about the intersection of language, history, identity, culture and what it means to have or lose a language. And a poet and teacher crafted a wonderful series of four linking lessons on epistolary poetry that we have been able to share with teachers across Maine. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see people in my community continuing to interact with epistolary poetry in different ways as a result of this project, making poetry a part of their daily lives and, perhaps most importantly, embracing and empowering both their own voices and each other’s.
What partnerships were you most excited about when embarking on this project?
This was a project designed to engage the full spectrum of creative partnership, from the organizational to the individual and everything in between. I feel so honored and grateful to have been able to work with the Academy of American Poets, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Maine Arts Commission and The Telling Room on this project. The workshops, which included at least one in-person workshop in each of Maine’s sixteen counties, relied on the generosity and enthusiasm of the many local arts organizations and public libraries which hosted them. And, of course, the project would not have succeeded without the wide range of incredible Maine poets who facilitated workshops for the project, each offering their unique knowledge, voice and perspective to help participants come to know the epistolary form more closely.
But the partnerships that have truly excited me the most in this project are the ones I couldn’t really predict: the poetic explorations, and oftentimes new friendships, that have evolved between poetry pen pals, most of whom were previously strangers to one another. Many of these I’m still learning about, but I can speak to my own delight at being paired to exchange poems with a brilliant illustrator who lives on an island several hours from my home in the mountains. Our letters, which were art objects as much as poems, brought a sense of play to my writing that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Each envelope she sent was a magnificent treat, both visually and linguistically. And though I felt daunted by trying to respond to them in kind, I also felt deeply inspired to take risks with visual art that I would have otherwise shied from. The best part of this partnership, I think, was the way in which our pieces built on one another, taking elements from what we had received and then pushing it in a slightly different direction. She sent me a lunar calendar to which she had contributed, and I replied with a hanging sculpture made of birch bark, which featured a golden shovel poem based on the calendar’s description of the birch moon. I sent her an epistolary prose poem I rolled into a scroll and tied with a strip of my late grandmother’s red dress, and she responded with a beautifully illustrated erasure poem that echoed the pattern of the dress and a hand-sewed card that contained a little piece of the original fabric. In this way, we played while pushing both ourselves and one another. I often tell people that I think poetry compresses language to the point of possibility, but it had been a long time since I’d had a chance to so palpably experience that for myself.
How has being a poet laureate changed your own writing and how you approach poetry?
Being a poet laureate has pushed me out of my comfort zone in all the best possible ways. I came to poetry first as a child, and I came to poetry first—like many people—as a private endeavor, a way to channel strong emotions. My earliest poems were all written in journals, behind folded-over pages marked “do not read.” And as an adult, many of my poems have remained highly personal. And often I’ve pushed myself to be my bravest self on the page by pretending no one will ever read the poems I’m writing. Serving as a poet laureate has meant I’ve had to think much more about audience, to learn to widen the scope of my poems at times, to write poems that speak as a “we” rather than as an “I.” And I think that has helped make me a stronger poet because it has broadened my toolbox.
I am an introverted poet who lives off-the-grid in the woods on a hilltop where my nearest neighbors are half a mile away, so the poet laureate position has also taken me quite literally out of my comfort zone. As it happened, I ended up publishing my first and second books and becoming poet laureate all within a span of four years. And that meant that I went quite rapidly from having a very private persona as a poet in Maine to a very public one. It’s a journey that’s been filled with amazing opportunities, such as the poet laureate fellowship. But it almost meant that I came to the role with, perhaps, a smaller pre-existing network than some poets laureate and instead had to build many of those partnerships while on the job. While this has felt a little daunting at times, it has also been one of the greatest joys of my time as poet laureate. I have encountered so many poets and poems I otherwise would not have and have made so many new friends through poetry. And that in turn has expanded my understanding of poetry as a community practice.
Is there a laureate whose work influenced you and your project? How so?
There are two guide points that I have tried to hold in my mind throughout my term as Maine’s poet laureate and that have informed my project. The first is a quote by Joy Harjo (U.S. Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022) from a PBS interview with Jim Lehrer: “When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.” The second is the powerful and timeless essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde (New York State Poet from 1991 to 1992) in which she wrote:
[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
The first quote reminds me that poetry is the language that connects us to one another and that the work of poetry, both on and off the page, is achieved through the ability to listen. The second reminds me that language is only the beginning, that we are not just writing but writing toward—toward survival, toward change, toward something tangible. I have tried, in my way, to create a project that engages and embraces both ideas. Something that, ideally, will help my community practice what it means for us to listen to each other. And something that will both encourage us to dream and give us something to hold.