new Portsmouth poet laureate John-Michael Albert prepares to win you over with the power of words

“Well chosen words can stick with people and influence the way they feel the rest of their lives,” says poet John-Michael Albert.

That’s the basic sentiment behind Albert’s recent poem, “Teaching Poetry to Third Graders.” In it, he recalls memorizing and reciting poems in an elementary school classroom.

Mrs. Stickler wrote the poems on the right side

of the green board. Beautiful cursive. Every month,

a new poem. And the class would recite, together,

“The Twenty-Third Psalm,” Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.”

And as we memorized it, she would roll the map

of North America down a little more each day.

After one week, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,

that floats on high, o’er vale and hill,” was

miraculously transformed into the southern tips

of Florida and Texas. Then, the entire South

would materialize, concealing “beneath the trees,

fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” When at last,

Wordsworth was on his couch, we had made it

to Canada and—well, you know the rest. Poem

after poem morphed improbably into our entire

continent. When we started Fourth Grade

with Mrs. Thompson, we had a comprehensive

understanding of rhetoric and simile: Alabama,

the yellow of “a host of golden daffodils,” Wisconsin

Green as the shepard king’s lakeside pastures.

The lines are still vivid in his memory.  

“Here I am, 60 years old this year, and that happened to me when I was 10, and I still know those poems,” Albert said. “It’s because they had lines in them that have been significant to me my entire life.”

A long-time local poet and regular participant in area poetry events, Albert will serve as the eighth poet laureate of Portsmouth. The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program selected him from a list of six nominees that also included Diana Durham, Kimberly Cloutier-Green, Nancy Jean Hill, Tony Marino, and John Simon. 

Albert takes over as laureate at a time when the Seacoast’s poetry scene appears to be remarkably vibrant. Laureate programs in Portsmouth and Rochester have made poetry consistently visible across the region, while N.H. Poet Laureate Walter Butts has led similar efforts around the state. Even as budget cuts threaten to dramatically reduce state funding for the arts, local poets plan to continue engaging the public to help build a stronger cultural community.  

Albert is a former board member of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Jazzmouth Festival. He has published two collections of poetry, “Two-Ply and Extra Sensitive” in 2006 and “Vivaldi for Breakfast” in 2009. He has also edited two volumes of “The Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire” in 2008 and 2010. 

Also a composer who works in the music department at the University of New Hampshire, Albert has hosted numerous poetry readings, including the monthly hoot at Cafe Espresso in Portsmouth and the Beat Night open mike at The Press Room in Portsmouth. He has also led several poetry workshops and has delivered invited readings of his poetry at more than 50 locations across the state.

He replaces outgoing laureate Mark DeCarteret, who served a two-year term in the position, which includes a small annual stipend. The laureate’s mission is to build community through poetry and promote events that feature area poets and authors of all ages.

According to DeCarteret, Portsmouth may have been the first city in the nation to establish a poet laureate program. Launched in 1997, the program is now in its 15th year. Several other major cities have since founded their own laureate programs, including Boston and Cambridge. Representatives from the city of Portsmouth, England, recently contacted the local board as they prepared to elect their first laureate. 

“We were at the forefront of this thing,” DeCarteret said.

Rochester also has added a poet laureate program, making it the only other community in New Hampshire with its own laureate. The program is overseen by Rochester Public Library and receives support from local organization Art Esprit. Rochester’s current laureate is Andrew Periale, who said the program has helped revitalize the art and poetry community in the Lilac City.

“Between the Art Esprit projects and the poet laureate stuff, which really overlap, and the occasional readings I’ve done through the library, I think poetry definitely has gotten more visibility,” Periale said.

Art Esprit has led two public art exhibitions in downtown Rochester, “The Shoes of Rochester” in 2009 and “If these Rocks could Talk” in 2010. With help from the laureate program, local poets collaborated in both events. 

Periale, who became laureate in 2008, is currently working on a project that involves interviewing former shoe factory workers in Rochester and writing poems about their stories, which will later inform a theater production. The project is intended to help illustrate Rochester’s working history.

 The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program is run by a volunteer board and is funded entirely by donations. The first laureate was Esther Buffler, who died in 2002 at the age of 93. She was followed by Robert Dunn, who passed away in 2009. Other local laureates have included Maren Tirabassi, John Perrault, Mimi White, and Elizabeth Knies.

Each laureate spearheads a project to promote the creation of poetry and increase the public’s access to it. White’s project was called “What Is Home?” 

“It involved exploring that question in the broadest range possible with several dozen—and it turned out to be hundreds—of people around the city of Portsmouth,” she said. 

White, who served as laureate from 2005 to 2007, led several poetry workshops and collaborated with other arts organizations to bring the poems to life. Three composers created music to accompany the poems, and local women’s chorus Voices from the Heart performed some of the songs at a spring concert. Pontine Theatre also adapted some of the poems into theater productions.

White said interest in the project was overwhelming, and she had to turn away some of those who applied to participate in the workshops. She said the project, with all its facets, demonstrated how poetry can resonate through a community.

“It’s one of the few art forms that, in a way, doesn’t have a price tag on it, and yet it has this ripple effect throughout the community,” White said. “It’s very egalitarian. Everybody’s welcome to participate.”

For his project, DeCarteret invited poets to write poems on postcards and send them to artists, who then added artwork based on the poem’s content. About 70 poets participated, along with more than 150 artists. The postcards were displayed in an exhibit last spring at the Discover Portsmouth Center and were later sold at auction, raising around $3,000 to help cover the program’s expenses.

DeCarteret said he was thrilled with the project’s results. “For me, the most satisfying thing about it is looking at what people produced,” he said. “I was astounded by the effort that people put in... The variety of the work was just amazing.” 

Over the years, DeCarteret said, the Seacoast has nurtured a lively poetry scene with several regular readings that draw healthy crowds. Although he sees many of the same faces at every reading, simply maintaining the current level of enthusiasm around poetry is a worthy challenge for any poet laureate. 

“It’s always been incredibly healthy, and, in some ways, just maintaining that is more than acceptable,” he said. “Poetry’s always going to be a tougher sell than most things. It takes a little bit more attention and investment on the part of the listener.” 

With a limitless supply of digital entertainment at people’s fingertips, our attention spans are on the decline. The challenge, therefore, is making sure new generations of young poets continue to carry the torch. “Hopefully we can continue to get new blood and new breath into these (projects),” DeCarteret said. 

Albert moved to the Seacoast in 1999, the same year the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program launched its monthly Poetry Hoot, now held at Cafe Esspresso on the first Wednesday of every month. Over the last 12 years, he has watched young poets grow up and find their voices at the hoots.

“It was tremendously inspiring from the very beginning because of the community it creates, because of the positive energy,” Albert said. “There were teenagers there and older people, of course, and published poets and rank novices reading right next to each other. It’s really a thrilling, supportive community.”

Albert has yet to finalize plans for his poetry project as laureate, but he is brainstorming something along the lines of the national Poetry in Motion program, which places poetry in public transit systems. Albert, an “inveterate public transportation person” who does not own a car, would like to put poetry in local buses. 

“It’s the thing of taking people who are just going through the dull and boring part of their everyday life and just sort of ambushing them with poetry,” he said. Being ambushed with verse, he added, is vastly preferable to being bombarded with advertisements. “To look up and realize that you’re reading something that doesn’t want anything from you is a big release.”

But Albert realizes that only a small percentage of the Seacoast population rides the bus every day, so his guerrilla poetry project may reach beyond public transportation. “There have to be other ways to kind of ambush people, without being threatening, in public when they’re going through their day,” he said.

Exposing more people to poetry is also the mission of state Poet Laureate Walter Butts, who received his title in 2009. New Hampshire’s poet laureate program stretches back to the late 1960s and has included three former U.S. Poet Laureates: Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, and Richard Eberhart (two other New Hampshire poets have served as U.S. Poet Laureate: Charles Simic and Robert Frost). 

“I see my position as being something of an ambassador and advocate for poets in the state, so I think as I get out and do public readings it serves to make poetry more visible in a larger context,” Butts said. “Everything I’ve done, the communities I’ve visited have had full access to it.”

A former Portsmouth resident who now lives in Manchester, Butts has participated in 30 to 40 public poetry readings per year as laureate. He’s led several programs and workshops at schools and colleges, often partnering with the NH Writers’ Project. He’s also served as a judge for Poetry Out Loud, a competition for high school students, and has read in classrooms and independent bookstores.

“To whatever extent I can help, I’m very interested in basically making communities aware of the resources within their reach, whether it be independent bookstores, small presses, or the poets who live in those communities,” he said. 

The state budget proposal recently approved by the N.H. House of Representative eliminates all funding for the N.H. State Council on the Arts, which oversees the state poet laureate program. The Senate is now at work on the budget bill. Butts said he has no idea what will happen to his position if the Arts Council is dismantled. But, it is not a paid position, and he will continue promoting poetry no matter what. 

“I think it’s essential,” said Butts, who has a collection of new poems called “Radio Time” due out in July. “I think poetry, in some ways more than any other literary form that we have, is closest to expressing feelings relative to the human condition. Poetry is really connected to our thoughts and our feelings and our experiences, both on a day-to-day basis and a larger context.”

Mimi White agrees. The Rye resident, who now serves as chair of the Rye Energy Committee, said she is “devastated” by the proposed budget cuts. The arts generate revenue, she said, and she has been involved in poetry projects that have helped children, senior citizens, and prison inmates.

“The power of poetry is not to be underestimated,” White said.  

April is National Poetry Month, and Albert looks forward to getting to work as Portsmouth Poet Laureate. He writes new poems on a near daily basis, finding inspiration from everyday occurrences around the city. The key to writing good poems, he said, is writing poetry all the time, even if a few clunkers come out in the process. Albert has long since moved beyond thinking that every poem must be a timeless and immortal treasure. Instead, he writes about what he sees every day.  

“I just got to the point where I thought, that’s a crock,” he said. “Every poem becomes durable by accurately reflecting what the poet sees in his own life and in his own time.”

For more information on the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, visit www.pplp.org. For more on the Rochester Poet Laureate Program, visit www.artesprit.org. For more on the state program, visit www.nh.gov/nharts.