UMaine

Student Art Exhibit

National Poetry Month

Farnsworth Art Museum Provides Poetry Readings

With National Poetry Month just around the corner the Farnsworth Art Museum will host a number of poetry readings as well as a poetry workshop in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Stu Kestenbaum

On Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at 2 p.m., Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum will deliver a poetry reading in the Farnsworth Library. Kestenbaum is the author of four collections of poems: Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions), and Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), as well as a collection of essays, The View From Here(Brynmorgen Press). A former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, The Sun, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. He was appointed poet laureate of Maine in 2016. The fee for this program is $10, and includes gallery admission to the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Award-winning poet Kathleen Ellis will lead a poetry workshop on “Inventing New Poetic Forms” on Saturday, April 13, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Farnsworth’s Gamble Education Center, 12 Grace Street in Rockland. Participants will expand their range of poetry writing styles and forms by intermeshing poetry and photography, memory, culture, and current events. Using selections from Teju Cole’s Blind Spot and works by Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Cole Swensen, Wislawa Szymborska, and others as conceptual starting points, participants will jump-start four new “lyrical-essay poems.” The fee for this half-day workshop is $56 ($48 for museum members), and all abilities are welcomed.

Kristen Lindquist

At the Farnsworth Library on Friday, April 19, at 2 p.m., poet Kristen Lindquist will present “Digging for Gold: Responding to Art through Poetry.” seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Golden Age that produced such masters as Rembrandt and Vermeer. Lindquist will discuss the creative activity of written reflection on a work of visual art, known as ekphrastic writing, and share her poem series Goldenalongside images of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings that inspired them. The fee for this program is $10, and includes gallery admission to the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Ellen Goldsmith

Another program focused on ekphrastic writing, “The Art/Poetry Connection,” will be held on Tuesday, April 23, at 2 p.m. in the Farnsworth Library. Poet, teacher, and author Ellen Goldsmith will lead a participatory presentation that places eight poems beside the images that gave rise to them—Yusef Komunyakaa and Maya Lin; E.D. Hirsch and Edward Hopper; Lisel Mueller and Claude Monet; and more. The workshop will end in the museum galleries to see which works of art stimulate thinking and feeling and might lead to writing. The fee for this program is $10, and includes gallery admission to the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Elizabeth Tibbetts

Elizabeth Tibbetts’ poems reflect her attachment to Maine and her family’s history here, her love and fears for the natural world, and her experiences as a local nurse. Tibbetts will read from her books, including In the Well, which won the Bluestem Poetry Award, and her just-published book, Say What You Can, as well as poetry from others, including Kate Barnes, Maine’s first poet laureate, on Tuesday, April 30, at 2 p.m. in the Farnsworth Library. The fee for this program is $10, and includes gallery admission to the Farnsworth Art Museum.

For more information or to register for these programs, please visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org