Alumni Gazette

The ‘Maine’ Poet

An alumna is named Maine’s new poet laureate.

Betsy Sholl ’69 (MA) remembers the day in a Rochester classroom when the then graduate student talked about her plans to be a poet.

“Everyone laughed uproariously,” says the now well-established poet, who in April was named the poet laureate of Maine.

At the Public Market

Abandon all hope, reads the hand-scrawled sign
propped beside the lobster tank—some joker
brooding on its murky doom, which looks

more like the world unformed and void,
stirred by a mind feeling that sluggish urge
to make itself known, a mind struggling

into form, water to gel, to claw and tail,
oozing its way out of slime, stumbling
among bottom feeders, grovelers, creeps

all bunched up, feelers adither
over their future’s watery inferno.
How innocent Dante seems at first—

trembling and clutching at Virgil his guide,
as if he hadn’t constructed that bucket
of dry ice himself, and personally

tossed each specimen in. Such a din
of marketing all around, it’s easy
to be wilted by guilt, or to rage at

whoever made this place. But to watch
how lobsters madly scramble, you have to
bend close, look through your own shadow

into the tank’s dim algae light,
where a few black beads fiercely eye back—
grabbers and pinchers clawing their way

to the top of some little heap.
And for what? I suddenly have to ask,
trembling, here, in the middle of my life.

The poem originally appeared in Late Psalms by Betsy Sholl (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Sholl laughs herself as she tells the story, but the anecdote is more than just a tale of “look how far she’s come.”

It’s also a small example of the ways that attitudes toward poetry have changed over the past 35 years, both within academia and outside it, she says.

Then, you either planned to be a scholar—preferably one with a faculty position at a university or college—or you were devoted wholeheartedly to your art and remained something of an outsider.

“Now people feel that they can do it all,” Sholl says.

Sholl, who has been on the poetry faculty at the University of Southern Maine for more than 20 years and who teaches in the master of fine arts program at Vermont College, has successfully dovetailed her careers as a creative artist and as a teacher.

The award-winning author of six collections of poetry, she is a founding member of Alice James Books, a poetry-publishing house located at the University of Maine at Farmington. Last fall, Puddinghouse Press published a chapbook of her work titled Besty Sholl: Greatest Hits.

As poet laureate, Sholl will be, as her predecessor Baron Wormser called the position, “the public face of poetry” in the state. Laureates are appointed for five-year terms.

This spring, she was still outlining her plans for that role but says she’s hopeful about the interest in poetry, especially among young people.

As people try to decipher the barrage of messages they receive in a culture inundated with commercial messages, spin control, and political propaganda, poetry offers language that’s both visceral and reflective, she says.

“People look to the verbal arts as a way of using language without ulterior motives,” Sholl says.

—Scott Hauser