This year, Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair celebrates annual Poetry Day in the Hall of Flags at the State House in Augusta. The event has traditionally been an invitation-only affair hosted at the Blaine House. This year’s celebration, sponsored by the Maine Arts Commission with assistance from the Maine Humanities Council, is free and open to the public on April 7 at 2:30 p.m. 

“By making this Poetry Day more open and inclusive,” McNair says, “I want to stress the main theme of my laureateship: that poetry belongs to the people.”

McNair's final Poetry Day will be a crowd-pleaser and feature a shared reading of Maine poems by a wide range of Mainers, from legislators and prominent Maine citizens, to television personalities. The participants will recite one poem they have selected for the event and explain what the poem means to them in their personal experience. A Swan’s Island lobsterman will read the work of nationally acclaimed Down East poet Phillip Booth, and a central Maine native revered for reciting poems by heart in Grange Halls will present an anonymous poem about an encounter with a bear. 

“This will be poetry as you've never known it,” McNair says. “It will make you proud of what poetry can be, and proud of the state we live in, too.”

During his nearly five-year term as poet laureate, McNair has launched five statewide initiatives in partnership with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “All of them have the same motive,” he says, “which is to make poetry part of the cultural life we all share.”

The initiatives include “Take Heart,” a weekly poetry column for 30 Maine newspapers; “The Maine Poetry Express,” a tour of 19 Maine towns where local residents join area poets to read favorite Maine poems; “Poets in Public,” the videotaping of Maine poets for YouTube and a website for general access by the public in Maine and elsewhere; and “Written Word, Spoken Word, and Hip-Hop,” a tour of Maine high schools by a team of poets leading a “how-to” website for teachers and students; and a four-year series of coaching sessions for the annual Poetry Out Loud competition sponsored by the Maine Arts Commission for high-school students.