Transcription of Stuart Kestenbaum for the show Poetry & Public Art #286
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle, and recorded at the studios of Maine magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It’s like when the power goes out. Shh…. Then all of a sudden it’s quiet and you think, “Oh, what’s that other sound? That’s the blood in my body. That’s me, I’m alive.” I think that’s what a place like Haystack does because you’re there and you’re able to just stop.
Donna McNeil: I just got bored with myself. I decided to kind of toss it all in the air and I sold… I had a farmhouse of 14 acres and I sold that. I sold my business, and I just moved to Maine with no prospect really of what I would do.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #286, Maine Live: Poetry and Public Art, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 12, 2017. Twice a year, we at Love Maine Radio are fortunate to take part in a day-long gathering of creative Mainers of every description called Maine Live. Today, we speak with two of our upcoming Maine Live speakers. Maine’s current poet laureate, Stuart Kestenbaum, is the interim president of the Maine College of Art. Donna McNeil is the former director of the Maine Arts Commission. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: It’s always fun for me to be able to interview people who do things that I really love, including writing poetry, and this person not only is a poet but also has made a life out of teaching and advocating for poetry, I guess you can say. This is Stuart Kestenbaum, who is currently serving as the interim president of the Maine College of Art here in Portland. He is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Only Now. He was appointed Maine’s poet laureate last March, and he was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle for the last 27 years. That’s very impressive.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Thanks for coming in.
Stuart Kestenbaum: You’re welcome.
Lisa Belisle: I think that we need to start, being that you are a poet, we need to start with one of your poems.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Okay. Well, this is a poem that, I think we may not have winters like this anymore, but the kind of winter where the ice sticks around for a long time, but there’s still, I was walking here down Congress Street and I could see by 1 City Center where they plowed it up, there’s still that’s going to last a long time. This is called “A Cold Rain the Day Before Spring”.
From heaven it falls on the gray pitted ice that has been here since December.
In the gutter rivulets erode piles of dirt and road salt into small countries and the morning is so dark, in school teachers turn on fluorescent lights and everyone comes in smelling of damp wool.
From heaven it falls, just the opposite of prayer, which I send up at the traffic light: please let me begin over again.
One more time over again, wipe the slate clean, the same way after school, janitors, keys jangling from belt loops, will use a wet rag and wipe the school day off, so there is only the residue, faint white on the smooth surface.
It’s the same way the infield looks before the game begins, or the ice on a rink between periods, all new again for the moment and glistening.
Imagine each day you get to start again and again. How many days does the janitor enter the room of your soul, wipe it clean, go out into the hallway and push his broom down the long corridor, full of doors to so many rooms.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me about that poem. Where did that come from?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Where does it come from? Well, it probably started in elementary school when I first began to notice janitors, and maybe going to a baseball game when I was young, when you could afford to go to baseball games and watch how they would do the infield or watching a Zamboni at the… now it’s Cross Arena, I guess, the former Cumberland County Civic Center. Those images of starting over and the actual genesis of it, I was in… just it was that time of year in March, kind of a wet, dark day. That’s what started me on the images that it evoked, came up because of my experience. I’d say that it was weather-driven to start.
Lisa Belisle: Starting over again is something that we do every day, every month, every year, and sometimes, several big times a lifetime.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Belisle: You’ve actually had a little bit of a starting over yourself recently.
Stuart Kestenbaum: I have. I left Haystack. I was the director for 27 years. In May of 2015, I left, and it was a pretty big shift. It was like…. What did it feel like? Like the last notes that I wrote were like a parent leaving instructions before they leave their kids for the night and go off or… It’s like bigger than that actually. More like… the sense of just tying things up and knowing I was going to step away, and I guess the biggest thing is being able to let that go, so that you’re not…. Like starting again, or starting a new thing, it’s also being willing to let go of the old thing and let that be what it needs to be. So yeah, it was a pretty big step.
Lisa Belisle: Why?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Why did I do it?
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, why did you do it?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Well, I felt like I’ve done a lot of things when I was there, and we had developed programs in our local schools. I developed programs in writing, we had a new residency program which hadn’t existed before which we were fortunate to have fully endowed and a relationship with MIT where we had a digital fabrication lab, so I felt like we had a lot of things, I felt like, “That’s great. Now somebody else can take that and run with it.”
It wasn’t that I couldn’t have done it, but for me, I wanted to have… I was always driven by the creative impulse and I always wanted to have that, and I felt like I used my creative impulse on those, and now I felt like I wanted to have more time to devote to writing, to working on other projects, so….
Lisa Belisle: So the way that you described the creative impulse isn’t just about an artist who creates something visual, something written, but it’s an artist who creates a school or a program or a community or is involved in creating, I guess.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. To me, a place like Haystack is given over… It’s total purpose is about creativity. I think that the right administrative response is not to look at … You want to look at numbers, you want to make sure that you can do the programs you’re gonna do, but I think you want to have first and foremost that the reason you’re there is to do creative things and the same at Maine College of Art. You have stop and say, “Well, are we here to be here or are we here to do something?” If you answer to do something, then that’s a creative impulse.
Once that happens, you can go into … The part that’s creative I think is that you say, “Well, what if we did this?” not, “Oh, well we can’t do that because of these reasons.” Or, “What if we were to imagine this?” Once you begin to imagine, then it’s a creative act. I guess bookkeeping, you don’t want to be creative in that way, but most everything else, I think, you…. Even looking at numbers, you can say, “Well, the numbers say this but there are many ways to look at numbers.” You can look at what you spend in a year, but if you’re not saving to do things that you want to do in your life or institutionally then… I mean, that’s another way to look at numbers. I think even that, I think it’s a matter with creativity of looking at possibility and having the tools where you can attempt to make that happen.
Lisa Belisle: Haystack is very much at the end of the world.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Or the beginning of the world.
Lisa Belisle: Or the beginning of the world. Maybe….
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right at the edge. That’s where it stops and starts. The line’s right there.
Lisa Belisle: That’s probably a good way to put it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Maybe the end of the world that many of us know in the Southern Maine area. How’s that?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Then you flip-flopped. Now you’re right in the middle. The Maine College of Art is squarely in the middle of Portland geographically, and there’s so many big differences between the two.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah, and I used to… Before I was at Haystack I lived in Portland, so it was great to be able to come back and be in this environment. Many more restaurants than there used to be. Much more expensive in terms of what you pay for in rent and those things, but the thing to me that joins them together is there’s a spirit of creativity and a sense of place, and I think that Portland’s bigger than Deer Isle, but I think that sense of place, of what a community means to the members of that community, and the kind of energy that people have at Maine College of Art to make things happen is very similar to Deer Isle and Haystack. The roads in Deer Isle are worse, but there’s no traffic.
Lisa Belisle: Also in my limited experience, it’s very beautiful up there, and it was nice and quiet because I had very little cellphone reception, at least for my cellphone….
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right.
Lisa Belisle: In that area. I had a lot of time to sort of wander around in my own mind and really enjoy nature and enjoy the people that I was with. It’s a very different sense than being right in the middle of Portland where the energy just feels….
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. I think a big part of a retreat setting like Haystack, which is remote on Deer Isle, is that you’re able to disconnect. When the school was started in the 1950s, what seemed like a pretty regular thing, you’d go somewhere for three weeks and work on something without interruption. Now it’s like a radical act in the world that you can actually go someplace and pay attention to one thing. There’s the art part of that, the creative part of it, and then there’s the sense of how we deal with time, so you get to this place where… it’s the beginning of the world or the end of the world, or you’re at an edge where you can stop and think about what you’re doing differently. It’s like when the power goes out. Shh…. Then all of a sudden it’s quiet and you think, “Oh, what’s that other sound? That’s the blood in my body. That’s me, I’m alive.” I think that’s what a place like Haystack does because you’re there and you’re able to just stop.
I mean you could do that I guess if you…. With the Sabbath, that’s the same impulse I think is to stop time. Slow it down so you can…. Then I think people begin to say, “Well, what matters to me?” Once you get quiet, and you go, “You know, that doesn’t matter and that doesn’t matter, but this is what really matters.” I think that happens in a studio experience too, but definitely in a place where it’s different from what you know and you can reflect.
Lisa Belisle: The Maine College of Art has really evolved over the last probably couple of decades I guess.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I remember it when I was growing up as the Portland School of Art, and it’s expanded, and it’s drawing students from really all over the world. It has a broad range of programs. I know that the music program has really taken off in addition to all the visual arts and all the writing that is going on there. What’s that like for you to be in such a very differently dynamic place?
Stuart Kestenbaum: It’s a very similar impulse. I think that to me, being in one building, or primarily one building at the old Porteous, Mitchell & Braun department store, which I remember going in to buy a blender when I first got married.
Lisa Belisle: I think I bought a bathing suit there.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It was a big store.
Lisa Belisle: It really was.
Stuart Kestenbaum: This year, MECA received an economic achievement award from the Portland Development Council in recognition of its impact, which really goes back to when Roger Gilmore was president in the early 90s and the school made a big leap to say, “Let’s go into this five-story vacant department store.” I didn’t do anything to merit the award, but because I’m the president now, I got to accept the award. It’s great. Just to be able to do that. It made me reflect on, if you take the creative energy of Maine College of Art out of Congress Street, it’s a whole different street, and that that really is a driver, that creativity is really why those restaurants are around there. If you take MECA out of that, that doesn’t exist, so it’s like it really is….
That creativity made so much happen, so there’s a kind of energy with that, and I think the new programs only expand that. We’re going to be launching the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, or relaunching it, because it was a freestanding program before, and that gives us the opportunity to interact with other Maine communities through storytelling, so to really put the Maine in Maine College of Art into the rest of Maine and the ways that the college can interact with the community, the Institute for Contemporary Art, all those, I think, are really opening the college up in lots of ways, so it’s really a center for creativity and to see the mostly young people who are students there who then wind up…. They might come to Maine from elsewhere and decide to stay. That’s the kind of in-migration that everybody is looking for, to have creative people want to stick around, and that’s happening. It’s pretty exciting.
Lisa Belisle: You are Maine’s poet laureate.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Which is a big deal.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Well, it’s a deal.
Lisa Belisle: It’s a deal. I think it’s a big deal. I mean, the fact that Maine even has a poet laureate and that you now get to be that.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right.
Lisa Belisle: As an ambassador of the poem, how does this feel to you because that’s such a beautiful small secret thing to have that poetry?
Stuart Kestenbaum: What I like about it, I’m honored to have been chosen. The people who were laureates before me like Betsy Sholl and Wes McNair and Kate Barnes and Baron Wormser are really exceptional writers, and so it’s a little bit daunting to be named after them. It’s also kind of a responsibility, to be an advocate for poetry, to say what kind of place poetry can have in a world such as ours, to speak well, not make grammatical errors if you can help it, and I think, so it gives…. Once you say, “Well, this is the title you have.” And Oh, “You, you’re that.” Then you can say something. It gives you a way to… I think it’s a platform. I was asked to read before the legislature because every session, they begin with a benediction or a prayer and so Walter Kumiega, who is the representative for Deer Isle, arranged for me to do it when I was named laureate. I said, “I’m not a minister.” I was a comparative religion major in college, but they said I should do it and they said I got a note from the Clerk of the House saying it should be brief, ecumenical, and uplifting. Those are the three characteristics of what you should say.
When I got there, everybody was great and I was with the full House at the beginning of the session, and all the legislators stood up, which is what they do before a benediction. I said, “You know, this is not a prayer. It’s a poem I’m going to read,” but that I felt that a prayer and poem both had something in common because they made you slow down and pay attention to things. That was interesting to be able to speak to legislators from all over and to have the power of the words of a poem speak to them in some way. I said amen at the end of the poem because they were still standing, so they sat down.
Lisa Belisle: What is it about us as humans that causes us to crave that pause, that…. We all have our stories about how religion has caused us perhaps strife in our lives, but there’s something about humans that is still deeply spiritual, I believe, and there’s something about poetry that creates that connection.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah. Mark Strand, who was the U.S. poet laureate, I read an essay he wrote many years ago where he was talking about that when people are troubled, they don’t turn to a novel, they turn to poetry. If there’s grief, they may send a Hallmark card that is of verse, because there’s some impulse to want to say something in a special way at those times or to have language act in some way that makes sense, and so like these are really dark times, so it’s kind of a growth time for poetry. Everybody knows where to turn. I think that somehow, you’re not…. What Mark Strand says is, you’re not turning the page to get to the next thing the way you would with a novel, you’re actually staying with the one thing, and I think it just opens up a moment in a way that lets you, instead of rushing along with time, it’s saying, “Nope, listen right now.” I think that’s why people want to turn to it. I do think there’s a spiritual impulse and it’s only when…. Mostly you can run past it now, but something will happen that will stop you, and you’ll realize it’s time to pay attention.
Lisa Belisle: Why did you decide that poetry spoke to you the most of all written type art? I mean, you could have been perhaps a novelist or a journalist or maybe couldn’t have done that, I don’t know.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It may be the way I see images or conceive of them. I don’t feel like writing a long story that I would see the beginning and end of or know where it was going, or even not know where it was going, but just take that much time in terms of the rhythms of my own writing. I think I’m much more compact. I might see something, imagine that thing and follow it to where it concludes. It would be kind of my impulse. I like writing. I actually like writing grants. I was working on one yesterday, and it was the same, I was thinking of how is this going to end? I wanted to have a little lift in it the way I would want a poem to. It doesn’t always feel dissimilar. I want that language to be as engaging as the language in a poem, like sometimes people get stiffer if they want to say…. Rather than use natural language to describe why you want the money to do a project, you dress it up in some way that makes it so abstract nobody really knows what you want.
If you tell somebody a story and say, “You know, the reason we want to do this project is it means that these kids will be able to come and do this thing,” and they go, “Wow, that’s great,” You’re not going to say, “We’re going to service this many so and so’s.” That is not compelling to anybody. I think the story is. Maybe I’m contradicting myself, but that’s the same thing I find in a poem or in writing. To me, it’s really that writing can engage people and tell some kind of story. For me, the story winds up being a shorter one of a poem because I think in that length.
Lisa Belisle: As you’re talking about grant writing, I’m thinking about other areas where people end up getting very prosaic and difficult to follow sometimes. I think about medicine where look at all the stories we have in medicine and William Carlos Williams. He absolutely knew that there were stories in medicine and wrote about them. Yet if you read a medical chart, it doesn’t really always reflect that. It reflects sort of the cells and the x-rays and the testing. The language is….
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right, and it kind of allows you to distance yourself from the actual thing. I was just reading in The New Yorker, it’s a piece Atul Gawande wrote about incremental medicine versus heroic medicine, meaning instead of like the heart surgeon which is great, you know, there’s actually listening to somebody and that this idea that… So there’s stories that like you could tell like William Carlos Williams could but there’s stories…. Listening to somebody’s story tells you more than my elbow hurts. You know, if you say, “Well tell me about what you’ve been doing,” and you hear a story, then it’s a more natural way and you probably go deeper and I think that’s the same in impulse with writing because I think if you’re willing to not say, “Well, I’m supposed to go here,” you’d never get to anywhere that’s going to make you think any differently about something, but if you say, “I’m starting here and I’m going to something related to this, but I don’t know exactly where it is,” then you realize it wasn’t about the elbow, it’s really about your relationship with your son, or I don’t know what it would be. That’s not a great medical example but I think that you have to be willing to go into something and come out different, and that’s what happens in art making and I think anything where you….
If you say, “I’m here, I’m going to go here, I know exactly where I’m going to go,” everybody’s bored by it, but if you say, “I’m going here and on the way I discover these things and now I’m here in a different place,” then it’s exciting. I think that’s part of a lot of different disciplines, not just writing.
Lisa Belisle: It is hard to have that permission. It’s to give oneself that permission and I think sometimes we seek it from other people to not have a destination, to not know where you’re going to end up. This is such a linear space that we live in these days that it always feels like you have to… it’s like a Google map. Your life is a Google map. If you just put in where you want to go, then you follow all the steps to get there. That’s not really the way life works, but we all kind of feel like it should be that way.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah, and I think the willingness to…. You can’t come up with a new concept if you know what the concept is. You can’t make a discovery in a poem, or you can’t probably diagnose a patient. I might be killing somebody by talking this way, so…. There’s still a moment where you can’t know, your instincts can tell you. Instincts are important, knowledge is important, but you still have to be willing to think in a way that’s not “I know exactly where this is going to go,” because then you do and it may not need to go there. It may need to be something else, like if you think… like Maine College of Art, where you think, “Well, that’s a department store. That’s what’s supposed to be in there. We should get some retailers to go in there.” Somebody says….
This is not a profound, transcendent example, but somebody goes, “Why don’t we put an art school in there?” Just like thinking in a way if you knew exactly what you were supposed to do, you wouldn’t have done it. If you’re right on the edge maybe and so a little crazy but not too crazy, that seems like a good place to be. In fact, when I saw Hidden Figures, the movie about the African-American women who did so much for the space program, and you realize a month before John Glenn’s supposed to go into orbit, they’re still figuring something out. I thought, “Our world’s so different now.” We’d say, “What? You didn’t know when you started out on this? I think I’ll sue you.” You know, that we would say, “Well, we believe enough in our ingenuity in that we want to make this thing happen and it’s profound enough for us that we’re going to make this leap.” I think maybe we’re not leaping….
People are leaping, but it’s a good thing to do. It’s a good thing to not know exactly where you’re going to end up. Not in a way that’s foolhardy or dangerous to the world, but in a way that just allows you to push yourself beyond where you think you could go.
Lisa Belisle: I’d like you to read for us another one of your poems, and this one is called “Prayer for Joy” which sounds like you and I are kind of in the same mindset, that joy is not a bad thing to have, especially in this day and age.
Stuart Kestenbaum: “Prayer for Joy”
What was it we wanted
to say anyhow, like today
when there were all the letters
in my alphabet soup and suddenly
the ‘j’ rises to the surface.
The ‘j’, a letter that might be
great for Scrabble, but not really
used for much else, unless
we need to jump for joy,
and then all of a sudden
it’s there and ready to
help us soar and to open up
our hearts at the same time,
this simple line with a curved bottom,
an upside down cane that helps
us walk in a new way into this
forest of language, where all the letters
are beginning to speak,
finding each other in just
the right combination
to be understood.
Lisa Belisle: You are speaking for us at Maine Live, which is going up at the end of the March.
Stuart Kestenbaum: I am. Yes.
Lisa Belisle: People who are interested can go to our show notes page and find out more about Maine Live and can also find out more about the Maine College of Art. I’m assuming they can find out more about you and your poetry online as well.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yes, I think so.
Lisa Belisle: And your four books.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You’re doing impressive work. It really is very… it makes me feel happy to know that we still have poets in the world. I know this intellectually, but to talk to someone who says, “This is my thing. I’m putting my stake in the ground and I am a poet.” That’s a good thing.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to come watch Stuart Kestenbaum, who is the interim president of Maine College of Art, author of four collections of poems and also a former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle. Stuart will be with me at Maine Live at the end of the March, and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you Lisa. Thanks.