Reflections from the 2025 Margaret Chase Smith Maine Town Meeting

On October 28, 2025, the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan hosted its Annual Maine Town Meeting, a long-standing tradition that has brought together scholars, public servants, artists, and citizens for more than two decades to discuss ideas that matter to Maine people.

This year’s gathering took a slightly different approach from years past. Instead of formal lectures, the program invited an open conversation between the audience and featured speakers, fostering dialogue around creativity, community, and civic life in Maine.

The 2025 featured speakers were Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma and award-winning poet and author Kristen Case, both of whom shared thought-provoking reflections on art, connection, and the role of poetry in civic discourse. The event was generously supported by the LaFond Family Foundation.

Julia Bouwsma, who lives off the grid in the mountains of western Maine, serves as Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021 to 2026). A poet, teacher, and librarian, Bouwsma’s work often explores the intersections of land, history, and human resilience. Her most recent collection, Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, 2025), continues her powerful engagement with the natural and emotional landscapes of Maine life.

Her remarks at the Town Meeting were both deeply personal and profoundly relevant, offering insight into how creativity and empathy can strengthen our communities, our democracy, and our shared sense of purpose.

Below, we are pleased to share Julia Bouwsma’s full remarks, presented at the Margaret Chase Smith Library’s 2025 Maine Town Meeting.

Executive Director Chris O’Brien, Poet and Author Kristen Case, Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma, Maine Arts Commission Executive Director Amy Hausmann

Maine Town Meeting: Arts and the Humanities in a Time of Trouble

I want to begin my remarks today be reading a poem I wrote in early 2020. I wrote this poem after watching a YouTube video, released by a British hospital, of professional violinist Dagmar Turner, playing her violin while undergoing a surgery a craniotomy to remove a brain tumor. I wrote the poem in the quick rush of emotion that followed watching such an intense moment, and it turned in ways I didn’t expect—ultimately becoming a poem about the role of art in times of crisis and extremity.

What Will You Do at the End of the World?

When I watch the video where the violinist plays
as surgeons cut the cancer from her brain,
my first impulse is to descend into metaphor—
to imagine the plaintive cry of her violin as a singular
silvery thread that leads the surgeons—sublimely,
tremulously—through the Minotaur’s maze,
so they can extract the tumor abutting the lobe
that controls her left hand, so they can navigate
the fleshy labyrinthine folds and electric shocks
that make a human mind. When I watch her bow
graze the ventilator tube again and again,
I recollect the old story of Nero playing
as Rome burned, which is supposed to be a story
about callous cruelty and ineffectual leadership,
but which fails to hold up under historic scrutiny
for many reasons, including that the violin
was not invented until the 11th century.
Still, the fable lends him more humanity than not—
the notion that there was music inside him,
even if it took six days of burning to fan it out,
a music so powerful it forced itself to escape
his tyrant’s mouth. If art is only pleasure,
Nero’s act is selfish, loathsome, but if art is survival—
a violin’s siren might morph to beacon
against the smoky air. I keep asking my poems
what the world needs from me in these days
of quickening dread, of burgeoning conflagration,
what they want me to do. In the comments section
below the hospital video, no one can agree
on what they’re seeing: Creepy, incredible,
horrifying, beautiful. Afterward, the violinist recalls,
I kept thinking, Get out of my way. I need to play louder.

Centered at the heart of this poem is a question that has gnawed at me my entire creative life and now feels more pressing than ever: What is the purpose of art? What do we want from it? What do we need from it? Challenge or pleasure? “Can’t you paint bowls of fruit?” my mother once asked my artist sister. “People like bowls of fruit.” And to me more recently when she found my poems overly bleak, “But it’s the poet’s job to provide hope.”

And yet life—like the poem—cannot not and will not unthread beauty from the brutalities that surround it. Creepy, incredible, horrifying, beautiful. Indeed, the inherent compression of poetry actively resists such compartmentalization. Poetry is at essence a connective and collaborative process. We compress language until our words carry the possibility of multiple meanings, a density of logic we otherwise experience only in dreams. We set our joys side by side to rub against our sorrows, and they create sparks that electrify the space between reader and writer. That light the darkness so we might find one another. In this way poetry can transcend time and distance. We can move from the current moment to ancient history and back in a matter of seconds. By pressing our hardest selves up against our tenderest selves, poetry resists the false safety of archetypes and binaries. Just as the poet might seek out a received form so the container might break, distort, adapt, transform under the weight of their words. Something new emerges. Possibility is born. As Audre Lorde reminds us, “it is our dreams that point the way toward freedom.”

My answer to my mother then is that even when the poem itself is not hopeful, the work of poetry is. Because the work of poetry—of writing, of art—is one of learning to listen to uncertainty, of following possibility even when it leads us into and through despair. We follow language like a trail of quickly disappearing footprints in the winter woods. Often it leads us in figure eights, our footsteps drawing us back across ruts our feet have worn, across ruts worn by the many generations of feet that preceded our own. We become so immersed in the process we are startled when we accidentally find what we need; when it finds us, a bright stain on the snow.

As I was preparing my words for today, contemplating the relationship between crisis and art, I found myself thinking of Carolyn Forché and her formative 1993 anthology Against Forgetting, which coined the term “poetry of witness” and collected works by 144 poets who “endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century.” Rereading Forché’s introduction, I found the final poem written by the Hungarian poet Doctor Miklós Radnóti, whose sodden, soiled notebook of poems was found on his person when his body was exhumed from a mass grave in Abda after the war. The poem, dated October 31, 1944, describes the death of Radnóti’s fellow prisoner, Miklós Lorsi, a violinist.

It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence, wrote the French writer, philosopher, and theorist Maurice Blanchot.

The Palestinian American poet, George Abraham, recently created a new poetic form inspired by the Markov Chain, which refers to a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. In describing his Markov Sonnet, “a sonnet where every set of 3 lines is to be read in isolation (abc / bcd / cde /…) as a cause/action/effect triplet,” Abraham observes that “the poem both aggressively forgets itself & repeats, much like history.”

My new collection of poems, Death Fluorescence focuses, in large part, on research related to epigenetic memory, the idea that trauma alters our DNA and that these changes are heritable. The C. elegans nematode produces a fluorescent protein when transferred to warmer climates; fourteen generations after the worm is returned to cold, this green glow remains. The offspring of mice exposed simultaneously to electric shocks and a cherry blossom scent display a fear reaction to the smell, the effects of which last up to three generations.

What does it mean to call something a crisis? Can disaster be marked as a single moment, and if so have we arrived at it? Is the disaster already inside us? Perhaps the disaster has been with us all along, carried through our physical bodies. Carried even through our forgetting and silence. And perhaps that itself can be a source not just of trauma but of hope. If my grandmother has seen this before then maybe so have I. Maybe we already carry a knowledge that will help us navigate the times in which we find ourselves. This is what poetry gives me: the possibility that the language for responding to crisis is already in me. That we can meet fear’s gaze head on and respond to its constriction not by looking away but with a defiant expansion.

Learn more about Julia Bouwsma's work and the Poet Laureate program HERE>