Fourteen poets, ten visual artists, four performing artists, and more will participate in the 6th Annual Belfast Poetry Festival October 17 and 18, 2010 in downtown Belfast, Maine.
One of the only community-based, non-academic poetry festivals in the country, the event features established, professionally recognized poets and artists from throughout Maine along with emerging poets to create a lively mix.
A unique feature of the Festival all five years has been the Gallery Walk, in which the audience moves among seven downtown galleries to view the collaborative exhibits by artist/poet teams and hear the accompanying poetry.
Kaber wins BPF’s first poetry contest
Judy Kaber’s poem Industrial remains has won the 2009 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest sponsored by the Belfast Poetry Festival. Joel Lipman of the University of Toledo was the final judge.
Lipman describes Kaber’s poem as “... a language-conscious, historically attentive, dynamic poem focused upon the confluence of land and sea, fresh and salt waters, industrial past and historical present. As a bardic poem, it probes the marls and "counterpane of mud" of the Passagassawkeag and sings "the backward tale" of "the bones of ten thousand chickens." The poem is organic and complexly conscious of the striations of death and existence, and is ultimately positive.”
Judy Kabner read at the Festival and calligrapher Jan Owen perented her with a calligraphy version of the poem. Over 160 Maine residents submitted entries by the July 4 deadline. » Read more [pdf].
Also, “Old Home Night” for Waldo County poets of all stripes and persuasions to came out of the woods and off their boats to read from their work.
What Participants & Attendees are Saying…
“What a great festival; good friends, good poetry, tremendous creative vibe!”
“Thank YOU for the opportunity to be in and also experience a totally fulfilling day. The blending of art forms made it so rich.”
“What crowds! What art! What poetry!”
“I was pleased to see that so many artists were separately but like-mindedly inspired to make affordable or free items for purchase, so that a lot of folks went home with cheap, cool art in their pockets.”
“I loved seeing all of the collaborations cross the boundaries of discipline, and quit behaving. The music and sound were wonderful…and all that poetry…”
“I was surprised over and over again. Delighted and made curious and surprised.”
“Belfast seemed positively humming and magical, on that crisp October day. The afternoon left us energized.”
“The collaborations were so amazing, I spent every spare minute studying and soaking them up. The performances were tender and tremendous (including the open mike!) The venues were warm, welcoming and enticing to the senses.”
“Looking forward to its next incarnation with gratitude for the amazing word and visual art I saw and heard this year.”
The Belfast Poetry Festival began in 2004 under the auspices of Festivo, a small steering committee that later disbanded. It has been run by the current Belfast Poet Laureate (appointed by the Belfast City Council) and a Waldo County steering committee of volunteers each October since then, and is one of the few community-based, non-academic literary festivals in the country. Most events are free or low cost to the public.
Activities have included poetry readings, workshops, art exhibits, evening performances, poetry contests, a public supper, and book displays by Maine bookstores, publishers, and authors. A highlight of the festival is a curated show of collaborative projects between poets and visual and/or performing artists in Belfast galleries and other venues. These 10 to 12 artist/poet teams are chosen by the Poet Laureate and Steering Committee and consists of professionally recognized Maine artists and poets. The teams’ projects are displayed for the month of October in local galleries and coordinated with Belfast’s First Friday Art Walks. During the Festival weekend, audience members move from gallery to gallery to see the artwork and hear the poetry read live. Projects have included sculpture, musical performance, dance, painting, printmaking and broadsides, book arts, and installations.
’09 Maine Postmark Contest Judge: Joel Lipman of the University of Toledo.
’09 Steering Committee:
Linda Buckmaster, Belfast Poet Laureate
Nancy Mimeles Carey
Jacob Fricke
Elizabeth Garber
Arielle Greenberg
Brenda Harrington
Details
Most events except the dinner are free with donations encouraged.
Donations can be made out to the City of Belfast and mailed to:
Linda Buckmaster
Poet Laureate
12 Huntress Ave.
Belfast ME 04915
For more information, keep checking this site for regular updates, or contact us.
The 2009 festival presented an impressive group of poets from around the state of Maine, many of whom have never read in Belfast, and some interesting collaborations. For more info contact us.
Adrian Blevins The Brass Girl Brouhaha won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. A new book, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Blevins teaches at Colby College.
Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century and Given, as well as several chapbooks, and the co–editor of several poetry anthologies, including, with Rachel Zucker, the forthcoming Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days. and Women Poets on Mentorship: Effort and Affections. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and is currently living in Belfast, working on an oral history of the current back–to–the–land movement in Waldo County.
Carl Little is the author of 3,000 Dreams Explained and Ocean Drinker: New and Selected Poems. His poems have appeared in many publications, including The Hudson Review, Paris Review, Off the Coast, Puckerbrush Review and Narramissic Notebook, and in The Maine Poets, edited by Wesley McNair. His poem “Ten Tourists Visit Baker’s Island, ca. 1900” won the 2002 Friends of Acadia poetry competition. Author of several art books, including Paintings of Maine, he lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.
Dave Morrison is like a carpenter missing fingers — do you worry about his ability or applaud his devotion? A high school graduate and above-average guitar player, Dave has published two novels and three books of poetry, and his poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies.
Lauren Murray was advised by her grandmother to make sure she had an interesting life if she wanted to be a poet. She moved to Maine in 1983 and works as an occupational therapist. She is a collaborator with Ova Dreams.
David Sloan helped found, and is the lead teacher at Maine's only Waldorf high school – Merriconeag Waldorf High School in New Gloucester. He graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program in poetry, and is the author of two books on Waldorf education—Stages of Imagination: Working Dramatically with Adolescents, and Life Lessons: Reaching Teenagers through Literature. He has also had numerous articles published in Renewal, and poetry in Western Poetry Quarterly and Infinity Limited.
Helen Tirone has lived in Maine since the age of two, when her parents moved their family from Philadelphia to Mt. Desert Island. She always told her father it was the greatest decision he ever made. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a dual B.A. in Creative Writing and Geography. Upon returning to Maine she pursued a career in Garden Design/Landscaping. She and her family live on a farm in Freedom.
Ellen Goldsmith is the author of two chapbooks – Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect, which won the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center 1997 chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including Bangor Metro, California Quarterly, the Kerf, Off the Coast and Wolf Moon Press Journal. She is the recipient of Creative Incentive Awards from the City University of New York. A resident of Cushing, she is a professor emerita of The City University of New York.
Joel Lipman is Professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo, and Poet Laureate of Lucas County (Ohio). His poetry, which has been published since the 1960’s with independent press books, include Machete Chemistry/Panades Physics (Cubola New Arts, with Yasser Musa), and the Luna Bisante Prods chapbook The Real Ideal and Ransom Notes. Among his bookworks, mail art and visual poems are the lengthy sequences, Jesse Helms’ Body, and Origins of Poetry, a selection of which was published in Poetry and republished in Harper’s.
Mark Melnicove is the author of The Uncensored Guide to Maine, Africa is not a Country, Advanced Memories, Poets on Photography, and Mainiac Express. He worked for over twenty years in publishing, as editor/publisher of The Dog Ear Press and Tilbury House, and as executive director of the The Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Currently, Mark teaches creative writing, at Falmouth High School. In the 1980s and 90s he toured as a performance poet with Belfast's inimitable Bern Porter, and is now Porter's literary executor. Melnicove's papers and correspondence are housed at Bowdoin College's Special Collections Library. He lives in Dresden with his wife and son.
Stephen Petroff is a painter and writer from the Bowdoinham area and currently resides in Topsham. His paintings were included in the Center for Maine Contemporary Art's 50th Anniversary invitational exhibit. His poem Extinct Songbirds of Maine (Blackberry Books 1998) was anthologized by MIT Press in its book Writing on Air, edited by David Rothenberg and Wandi J. Prior in 2003. His book 101 Ways to Kill Each Other Without Nuclear Weapons was included in the forty-year survey of artist-made books at the Museum of Modern Art in 2001. Stephen studied writing with Tuli Kupferberg and painted with Carlo Pittore.
Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot and Political Cactus Poems. Skinner edits the journal Ecopoetics and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College in Central Maine.
Karin Spitfire’s full fledge debut as a poet came in 2005 with the publishing of her first book, Standing with Trees. Her poetry includes rants, prayers, polemics and free verse influenced by her years as a dancer, healer and activist. She has enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with visual artist Susan White, Kenny Cole and performing artist David Dobson in previous Festivals and the Women’s Work Dance Collective Summer 2009 “Landscapes Show.”
Exhibits will open at the First Friday Art Walk in October and be on display at seven Belfast galleries during the month.
For more info contact us.
Dyan Berk holds an art/ art education degree from the University of Miami. Her mixed media paintings and soft sculptures have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout New England. For the past 8 years she has been working on a series of collages and 3D work. She presently lives and works on Monhegan Island and Lincolnville. This summer she will be installing her first Percent for Art installation entitled "A Story Inside" at the Mt. View Elementary School in Thorndike.
Richard Mann made his way back home to Maine after studying intaglio,lithography and papermaking at the University of Hawaii. He lives in Belfast and is a partner at Aarhus Gallery.
Paul Oberst earned a BA in Studio Arts from Centre College, Danville, Kentucky. He worked for 4 years at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (now Cleveland MOCA) and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The subject of his work is the architectural "temple" (imagined sacred space) in sculptural form or in graphic studies, dance costume/set designs and museum site-specific installations. His pieces are in private, foundation, corporate and museum collections and have been shown in gallery, university and museum exhibitions.
Willy Reddick grew up in an encouraging family of professional artists. She studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and has been working professionally as a painter and white-line woodblock printmaker for over 20 years. Currently she has been combining miniature paintings with semi-precious metals as brooches and other two-dimensional or sculptural pieces. She also designs and manufactures her own line of Willy Wires jewelry, is a freelance designer and a founding partner of Åarhus Gallery in Belfast.
Abbie Shahn thinks of herself as the last of the "artists with a summer place in Maine" and the first of the “back to the landers;” or maybe she’s neither. She paints. She gardens. She agitates. She reads. She thinks. Shahn was a co–host on a radio show of world music for over 20 years. That music had a great influence on her art. 
David Estey is an award-winning painter/printmaker in Belfast. He has a BFA degree from Rhode Island School of Design and a MSA degree from George Washington University, with extensive study in Rome, Italy, at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. His work is primarily abstract oil paintings and charcoal figure drawings. He has exhibited widely in Maine, Mid-Atlantic Region, and North Carolina.
Jan Owen is a Belfast calligrapher and book artist who often collaborates with Maine poets. She shows her work nationally and is a Finalist for the Minnesota Center for International Book Arts Award.
Abbie Read moved to Maine in 1998, after (what felt like) a lifetime trying to find a way to live here. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan School of Art, majoring in Mixed Media. While making art has been a lifetime pursuit and passion so has gardening, and in 1995 she received a degree from Michigan State in Landscape Design; as a result she has owned and operated ARTgarden, a landscape design and maintenance business.
Brian Reeves Certified Master of Fine Arts, is cofounder of the thriving multinational retail giant Slop Art Dot Com and inventor of the Painting Simulator and other compact innovations in Premium Expression distribution, including engineering quality Slopware for the iPhone. Through elevating contemporary "Fine Art" to the level of consumer culture, Slop Brand has provided shelter from the advancing norm since 1995, promoting the production of less forgettable work.
Also, in the mix, a diverse group of performers. Come and enjoy the sights and sounds of poetry, art, music and dance. The Grand Opening at 11 a.m. on Saturday will be a jazz and poetry writing and reading jam with Agharta Quartet at Waterfall Arts. The event is open to anyone who would like to write in response to live jazz, maybe read their new work with the band, or just listen.
Tom Luther (pianist and composer) lives in Union, Maine, where he composes solo works as well as for his group Agharta. He is also as a performer. Recent projects include recordings of keyboard music of Johann Sebastien Bach, an ambient soundscape video project, and his own large scale solo piano collection “Watersongs.”
Leslie Stein (keyboardist) has been a musician since her early days, playing piano and guitar in a wide range of bands and singing in vocal groups of all sorts. She has also enjoyed acting with local theater groups over the past ten years and is a collaborator with Ova Dreams.
Joan Proudman (dance) studied with the Classical Ballet Academy of Connecticut and later performed with the Boston Ballet at the Music Hall and with the Lyric Opera Company of Chicago. She moved to Portland in 1980, joined the Ram Island Dance Company and the Portland Ballet, and later moved to the Belfast area where she continues to dance with Women's Works and Ova Dreams.
Downtown Belfast Maine (google maps)
1 | Waterfall Arts Center256 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.2222
website
2 | Belfast Dance Studio
109 High Street,, Belfast, Maine
207.338.5380
website
3 | Belfast Free Library
106 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.3884
website
4 | Baywrap (aka The “Hub”)
102 Main Street, Belfast, ME
207.338.9757
website
5 | Darby's Restaurant
155 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.2339
website
6 | Åarhus Gallery
50 Main Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.0001
website
7 | Roots & Tendrils
2 Cross Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.5225
website
8 | Unitarian Universalist Church of Belfast
37 Miller Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.4482
website
City of Belfast
The Emily and William Muir Community Fund II of the Maine Community Foundation
Special thanks to:
Joel Lipman
Jan Owen
Åarhus
Bay Wrap
Belfast dance Studio
Belfast Free Library
Darby’s Restaurant
Roots and Tendrils
Unitarian Universalist Church of Belfast
Waterfall Arts Center
Love poetry, art & music? Want to be a part of the 2010 weekend activities? Why not volunteer? It's a great way to contribute to a unique occasion and meet people.
Contact us on how you would like to help.