Ten poets, eight visual artists, one dancer, and an a cappella ensemble participate in the 6th Annual Belfast Poetry Festival October 15 and 16, 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 six years has been the Gallery Walk, in which the audience moves among four downtown galleries to view the collaborative exhibits by artist/poet teams and hear the accompanying poetry.
The 2nd Annual Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, will be once again held in conjunction with the 6th annual Belfast Poetry Festival, October 15 & 16. Maine residents are invited to submit entries of up to two pages and no more than two poems, accompanied by a cover letter with contact information and a check for $5 (reading fee). Proceeds will be used to support the contest and festival. Maine residents may submit more than one entry, but each additional entry is an additional $5.
Submissions are welcome from now until July 1, 2010; only submissions received with a Maine postmark dated July 1 or earlier will be accepted and read. Poems should be sent without the poet’s name on the poem and accompanied by a cover letter listing the poet’s name, contact information (address, email and phone) and the title of the poem(s) submitted so that poems can be read anonymously. Cover letters need not include biographical information. Poems sent without a cover letter will be disqualified. All poems must be original and previously unpublished. Poems will not be returned, so please do not send originals or an SASE.
Download full details »
Make checks out to: City of Belfast
Send to: Linda Buckmaster, Belfast Poet Laureate
Attn: Maine Postmark Poetry Contest
12 Huntress Ave, Belfast, ME 04915
Friday, Oct 1
First Friday Opening of Exhibits
Downtown Belfast, 5–8pm.
Friday, Oct 15
7pm: “Old Home Night”
Maine Poets Open Reading at the Belfast Free Library.
Saturday, Oct 16: Art & Poetry Gallery Walk
1pm: Festival Opening; Belfast Dance Studio
“Poetry in Music: The Bard and Other Muses” with Ave Stella Maris, a cappella vocal ensemble.
Poet Carol Bachofner with dancer Lisa Newcomb.
2pm: Belfast Free Library
Poet Dawn Potter with photographer Thomas Birtwhistle
Poet Bruce Pratt with painter Alison Rector
Poet Jacob Fricke with found objects artist Daniel Anselmi
3:45pm: Roots & Tendrils Gallery
Poet Henry Braun with artist Robert Shetterly
Poet Kristen Lindquist with sculptor Beth Henderson
Poet Visual artist and poet Mihku Paul
5pm: Waterfall Arts
Poet Linda Buckmaster with painter Harold Garde
Poet Leonore Hildebrandt with glass artist David Jacobson
Poet Jeffrey Thomson with metal artist Isabelle Pelissier
6:30pm: Closing Reception
Waterfall Arts
7pm: “Round Robin” Open Mic
Waterfall Arts
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. All events are free or low cost to the public.
Activities have included poetry readings, workshops, art exhibits, evening performances, poetry contests, 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 9 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.
2010 Maine Postmark Contest Judge: Poet Arielle Greenberg.
2010 Steering Committee:
Linda Buckmaster, Belfast Poet Laureate
Nancy Mimeles Carey
Jacob Fricke
Elizabeth Garber
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 2010 festival will present an impressive group of poets from around the state of Maine. The poets are paired with artists and will create new collaborative work for the Festival.
Carol W. Bachofner is a poet and writing coach who edits the online literary journal, Pulse. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cream City Review, The Comstock Review, The Mochila Review, Crab Orchard, Review, and many others. Her chapbook, Daughter of the Ardennes Forest, was a 2006 finalist in the Main Street Rag chapbook contest and was published in 2007. Her latest book is Breakfast at the Brass Compass (Front Porch Editions, 2009). Bachofner, who received her MFA from Vermont College, lives and writes in Rockland, Maine. Bachofner recently chaired Poetry Month Rockland.
Henry Braun spent most of his career as a teacher of literature and creative writing at Temple University. He has served as coordinator and host of the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in Philadelphia. The Vergil Woods (Atheneum, 1968) was Braun's first book of poems. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and in several anthologies. His latest book, Loyalty, New and Selected Poems, was the first offering of Off the Grid Press. He lives with his wife, the artist and family therapist Joan Braun, “off the grid” in Weld, Maine.
Linda Buckmaster has lived within a block of U.S. Route 1 most of her life, growing up in Space Coast Florida in the 1960s and living in Waldo County for over 30 years. Her poetry, fiction, and journalism have appeared in state-wide and national publications. She has published three chapbooks of poetry and is currently at work on a collection of essays/prose poems /transgenre somethings. She works for Women, Work and Community and teaches communication in the University of Maine System. She is currently Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine.
Jacob Fricke Bio and photo coming soon. Please check back.
Leonore Hildebrandt grew up in Germany lives “off the grid” in Washington County. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flatbay Collective. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Cider Press Review, and Quercus Review, among others. A letterpress chapbook of her poetry is forthcoming by the University of Maine in Machias.
Kristen Lindquist works as development director for Coastal Mountains Land Trust in her hometown of Camden. She has two published chapbooks: Invocation to the Birds (2001) and Bald and Ragged Mountains: Poetry of Place (2008). She writes a monthly natural history column for the Herald Gazette. Her writing has also been published in Down East Magazine, Bangor Metro, the Maine Times, Bangor Daily News, the Republican Journal, and various literary magazines and poetry anthologies, including Maine in Four Seasons (2010). She has participated in several other poetry/art shows.
Mihku Paul is a poet/visual artist, and a Malaseet Indian born and raised along the Penobscot River in Maine. She is a member of Kingsclear First Nation, N.B., Canada. Mihku received a traditional education from her grandfather, a Maliseet elder, and also attended schools, including college, throughout Maine. She has an MFA in creative writing, and also holds a B.A. in Communication with a focus in Human Development. Her mixed-media exhibit “Look Twice: The Waponahki in Image & Verse” will hang at the USM Glickman Library from September through December, 2010, courtesy of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor. She currently resides in Portland, Maine.
Dawn Potter is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010). She has also written a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), which won both the 2010 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction and an Emerging Writer's Fellowship from the Writers’ Center in Bethesda, Maryland. New poems and essays appear in the Threepenny Review, the Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals in the US and UK. Dawn is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, held each summer at Robert Frost's home in Franconia, NH. She lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.
Bruce Pratt’s novel The Serpents of Blissfull is forthcoming from Mountain State Press in October 2010. He was nominated in 2008 for a Pushcart Award in fiction, and his poetry collection Boreal is available from Antrim House Books. His fiction, poetry, essays, and plays have appeared in more than forty literary magazines and journals in the US, Canada, Ireland, and Wales, and have won several awards. In addition to working with American Fiction, Pratt serves on the editorial board of Hawk and Handsaw. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at The University of Southern Maine, where he teaches undergraduate writing. Pratt lives with his wife, Janet, in Eddington Maine.
Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime (Carnegie Mellon, 2009), winner of the 2010 Maine Book Award, and Renovation (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). He has also published an anthology of emerging poets: From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, co–edited with Camille Dungy and Matt O’Donnell (Persea Books, 2009). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Arts Commission, and, most recently, was named the 2008 Individual Arts Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Maine Arts Commission. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington. Visit Thompson’s website.
Exhibits will open at the First Friday Art Walk in October and be on display at seven Belfast galleries during the month.
Daniel Anselmi was born in New York and raised in California. Daniel has also lived in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and now Maine. His work explores the use of found materials to create art that often combines imagery and abstraction. He utilizes canvas, paint, cardboard, found paper, and objects to convey his love of line, shape, and color. The artist offers viewers an opportunity to reflect upon each work’s individual qualities and appreciate how a simple discovery of castaway materials leads to ever-expanding artistic creation and contemplation.
Thomas Birtwistle was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1965. He attended Haverford College and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1992 he moved to Harmony, Maine, where he currently lives with his wife and their two sons. His work has been shown at galleries and museums throughout the state.
Harold Garde “Whimsical Chairs” (page top) was chosen by the BPF Steering Committee to represent this year’s Festival. Garde has been painting and exhibiting in New York and nationally for many decades and has been featured in numerous videos and publications. Trained as an abstract expressionist, he notes that: “I now want the simplest, the most direct, the most basic. I choose to work in acrylics because of the easy application when painting on paper or canvas. For more recent print-making I have developed and taught my dry image transfer ‘strappo’ technique.” Please view Garde’s online gallery.
Beth Henderson indulged in her desire to carve stone, upon retirement. Maine limestone was available at little or no cost and became Beth’s first loved carving stone, moving on to marble and alabaster. After returning home to Maine, she continued to sculpt, and became involved in several Maine and New England galleries. Recently encaustic and mixed media have captured her imagination and creative endeavors in no time. Because Beth has such a keen appreciation for the 3-D world, mixed media, as an equal part with encaustic, has become a natural addition to the 2-D surface of encaustic. Additionally, it allows Beth to work year round, while stone carving was limited to spring, summer and until the snow fell in the fall.
David Jacobson, born and raised in New York, graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he first studied glassblowing. As a glass artist, David has studied with Lino Tagliapietra, Elio Quarisa, and Jiri Harcuba. Jacobson moved from New York to mid–coast Maine in 2003, where he creates his fused and slumped work at his home studio, and uses a Portland studio for his hand–blown glass work. His glass has been shown in galleries around the country. Locally, his work can be seen at Aarhus Gallery, in Belfast, and at Craft, in Rockland. You can also view his work online and at his etsy store.
Isabelle Pelissier is a painter educated in Paris, France. When she arrived in Brooklyn in 1997, the scrap metal pieces she found under the Williamsburg Bridge rekindled her former interest in sculpture and her fascination for metal in general. The following year she became an apprentice metal worker in Santa Fe, NM, and in 2000 opened her first studio in Buffalo, NY. Since then, Isabelle divides her time between sculpting, painting, and her daily practice of collaging words and images in big notebooks. Now in Maine, she works and teaches a multimedial approach to art at her studio in Brunswick. Isabelle has participated in a number of public art projects and her work figures in art collections in Europe, and in the US.
Alison Rector is a painter who works in her studio at Waterfall Arts in Belfast. Originally from the Washington DC suburbs, Alison graduated from Brown University. She and her husband Eric moved to Maine from Boston in 1990. Alison's work is currently represented by Greenhut Galleries in Portland. Visit Alison's site for more information.
Robert Shetterly is a self–taught artist. A collection of his drawings and etchings, Speaking Fire at Stones, was published in 1993 with poems by William Carpenter. He is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings in response to William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation. For the past eight years he has been painting the series of portraits (numbering now over 145 ) called “Americans Who Tell the Truth.” The show has been traveling around the country for over seven years. In 2005 Dutton published a book of the portraits by the same name. In 2006 the book won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non-fiction. Since 1990, Shetterly has been the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), and producer of the UMVA’s Maine Masters Project, an on-going series of video documentaries about Maine artists.
At the Grand Opening on Saturday October 16th, 1pm, the Poetry and Art Gallery walk will open with early music singers Ave Maris Stella at the Belfast Dance Studio. The audience will then move among the galleries to see the art, hear the poetry read, and learn about the collaborative process. The event will close with a reception at Waterfall Arts. The event is open to all.
Ave Maris Stella, the highly regarded a cappella vocal ensemble based in midcoast Maine, performs varied programs of mostly early music. Repertoire covers a wide
range of time periods (from Medieval through Twentieth Century) and styles (from chant to polyphony and far beyond).For the Belfast Poetry Festival, the group will perform from “Poetry in Music: The Bard and Other Muses.” The performance features poetry set to music with poets such as Shakespeare, Neruda, and Teasdale. They will open the Festival on Saturday, October 16 at 1pm at the Belfast Dance Studio. Seating will be available.
The group performs in many languages and types of song, from English to Italian to Latin to Spanish, and from sacred to secular to humorous. While the group mainly performs a cappella, appropriate instrumentation (recorders, percussion, strings) is occasionally added.
Founded early in the Twenty–First Century, Ave Maris Stella (the name translates to “Hail, Star of the Sea”) is a collectively run, all–volunteer organization. Membership is by audition; singers share the responsibility of bringing music selections to the group. They also take turns teaching and leading. Visit the AMS website or more info
Dancer Joan Proudman 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 | Belfast Dance Studio
109 High Street,, Belfast, Maine
207.338.5380
website
2 | Belfast Free Library
106 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.3884
website
3 | Roots & Tendrils
2 Cross Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.5225
website
256 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.2222
website
» Printable map with addresses
Belfast Maine is a wonderfully easy town to walk around in. Based on the map above, the Festival waking distances are less than a mile and there is plenty of free parking. There are many restaurants and shops all within striking distance of the Festival venues. So we encourage you to come and join us this Autum weekend.
Special thanks to:
Belfast Dance Studio
Belfast Free Library
Roots and Tendrils
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.For questions, suggestions, or general info please feel free to contact us.
If were expecting a form it has been removed due to spam.
We are attempting to resolve the issue. Until then please use the email addresses below to contact the appropriate person. In your email leave the info in which you prefered to be contacted along with a detailed message.
- For general festival info: festival2010 [a] belfastpoetry.com
- For participant questions: linda [a] belfastpoetry.com
- To contact the Webmaster: info [a] catlinbarnes.com
NOTE: [a] represents @ symbol. You must enter the @ symbol without spaces in order to send an email.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.