For some reason Portland is possessed of a number of hypertrophied creative communities relative to our population: architecture, culinary arts, literature, music and particularly advertising. I asked Dave Goldberg of Kemp Goldberg how big the agency scene is here. “Between ad agencies, PR firms and digital/interactive marketing firms in greater Portland, there are WAY more companies in this business than an area this size should or deserves to have,” says Dave. “I have 27 bookmarked, but there are more.” I asked him what he thought accounted for the disproportionate numbers and he answered with an anecdote, “I was down in West Hartford recently at my 30th high school reunion. I was talking to a woman I knew from school who does PR. From our discussion my guess is that in greater Hartford, an area larger than greater Portland, they have half as many agencies. Hartford does not have a “creative economy.” It doesn’t attract the creative talent, leadership, investment, etc. We in Portland are different.”

To celebrate that difference, the VIA agency is hosting this year’s Broderson Awards, The Ad Club of Maine‘s “Celebration of Commercial Artists from the State of Maine.” In a recent post on Forbes.com, I talked about Dunbar’s number and the size of cohesive social communities. In the hunter gatherer terms I was considering, our advertising community is one of our few creative enclaves larger than a clan and approaching a tribe. A clan, however, would fit the theme of this year’s competition which (mis)quotes the great (and greatly inebriated) Irish poet Dylan Thomas with the title ”In Our Craft or Sullen Art.” Why a sullen art? For Thomas, the poet’s craft was practiced while others slept so as to earn “the common wages /Of their most secret heart.” Sounds a lot like advertising!

In the words of VIA creative director, Teddy Stoecklein, ”To outsiders Maine, let alone Portland or Bangor, is usually just vacationland. Our Fine Art community is often overshadowed by bigger cities like Boston, New York, Providence, even Montreal. The same is true of our Commercial Art community, yet we have some of the most talented people in the nation, right here. The Broderson Awards is hosted by the Maine Ad Club to reward the very best in Maine. But it’s more than just a pat on the back or a trophy. It’s also an acknowledgment that our craft is indeed a Fine Art. It’s both a showcase and a moment of inspiration.” To make that acknowledgement stick, they have lined up some first rate judges: Nina DiSesa, Former Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of McCann Erickson, New York; Rupal Parekh, Agency Editor of Advertising Age; and Peter Friedman Former Executive Producer at Wieden + Kennedy and McCann Erickson, New York.

The deadline for all entries is next Friday, July 1, 2011 at 5 p.m. Late entries will not be accepted. See the Broderson site to find out more.

Like this month’s Abstract conference that created an intersection between the design communities of New York and Portland, the Broderson’s in October will do the same for advertising. But whereas the designers convened in the very nice but clan sized Hannaford Hall at USM, the ad tribe will take over the 2,500 seat State Theatre. In honor of Dylan Thomas, sullenness will not be banished, drinks will be served!

The title choices of new literary magazines—like Guernica or Drunken Boat—have this artful potential to hint at the publication’s editorial leanings. Newer journals typically depart from the tradition of slapping the word “Review” to a University or place (Paris Review,  Harvard Review, etc.). In another place and time, I could write a civilized article maintaining why these prestigious titles are unfair to writers and impede the democratization of literature. But back in Maine, the newest magazine is not the Kennebunkport Review, it’s The New Guard , a name that editor and publisher Shanna McNair says gave her “hope and courage and adrenaline” for a publishing world that needs more open-minded paradigms.

McNair aims to represent the spectrum of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction written today. Within each of these genres, her magazine welcomes so-called experimental, literary, and narrative categories under one roof and intends to spark conversation as to the meaning of “new.” Maybe nodding to the death of an old guard, The New Guard kicks off with a series of 13 fan letters written by 13 living writers addressed to deceased literary superstars. What would you say to the ghost of Wallace Stevens? Or Agatha Christie? Each forthcoming issue will begin with a similar letter series that orbits many voices around one concept. In a sense, fan letters to dead writers reflect what McNair has in mind for the magazine’s ideal poetry and fiction submissions: “Find your own tradition, what you think is traditional, and then insert your own experiment…  grounded but really new.”

The annual journal was born alongside two annual $1,000 prize contests. Payne Ratner won the Machigonne Fiction Contest for “Fish Story,” judged this year by celebrated Maine fiction writer Debra Spark. With humor so dark you might mistake it for chocolate, Payne’s piece follows an office worker who one day finds a fish plopped into his lap, as if dropped from the drop tile ceiling, and then risks his own crumbling world in a struggle to save the creature’s life. William Derge won the $1,000 Knightville Poetry contest, judged this year by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. Derge’s poem, “The Red Chair,” peers into the lives and thoughts of characters in de Hooch’s painting Interior. McNair, who is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program said sending those checks to the winners was “one of my happiest days ever.” “At the end of the day,” she continued, “we’re here for writers… It’s not about me or my concept. It’s about giving people what they deserve as writers.”

The New Guard joins a cadre of Maine lit mags that includes the nationally renowned Beloit Poetry Journal and famed Portland-based Café Review. The New Guard is currently open to submissions from writers everywhere for the 2011 Machigonne Fiction Contest and Knightville Poetry Contest. Deadline: September 1. If you’d like a cheeky submission solicitation for these contests, check out The New Guard‘s YouTube video.

Photo of McNair by Nathan Eldridge

Today, poetry’s relationship with the public feels complicated. Its roots in English and American cultural history are massive and continue to sprout new offshoots, but poetry’s presence in our public literary consciousness over the past thirtyish years has sunk below the waves of prose. I find this state of affairs less depressing than exciting and fascinating. The imperative to revive poetry in the public eye gives us a chance to harness creativity and social technology in ways that will change poems for good. Both the city of Portland and the state of Maine are about to take a major step in this direction.

Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA) is a Portland-based nonprofit that works to “enrich the cultural life of Maine by supporting writers and the literary arts.” This past month, MWPA teamed up with Maine’s new poet laureate, Wesley McNair, to introduce “Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry.” The initiative will give Mainers frequent opportunities to read poems written by the people who live here: a series of poems to be published weekly in newspapers across the state. You’ll find the first poem, “April,” by Stuart Kestenbaum, the first week of May in over twenty-four papers that range from The Portland Sunday Telegram to the Aroostook Republican, which extends the project’s radius almost 300 miles toward the northeast Canadian border. As a poet who often hears people sigh, “I just don’t get poetry,” I felt deeply encouraged when I heard about Take Heart. If you’re not writing your own poems or earning a college degree in literature, chances are you have limited contact with poetry written today. Sneaking poems under the noses of average readers will begin to break an amplified silence that has made poetry feel so alien to our daily rhythms.

MWPA’s crucial support for McNair’s project represents a unique collaboration in the history of Maine’s laureateship, which was legislated in 1995. Until now, laureates received no financial support or capacity to launch new poetry initiatives. Oddly enough, Augusta just didn’t write those details into law. Joshua Bodwell, Executive Director of MWPA, said he “wanted to fill that void.” Portland is the MWPA’s headquarters, but the nonprofit is a statewide literary organization and so decided to offer an unofficial home-base for McNair during his five-year term. Bodwell has allotted him the space, funding, and grant-writing capacities of nonprofits and has established the post of “Special Assistant to the Poet Laureate,” a young poet’s dream job, now enjoyed by David Turner. McNair and Turner are building a library of poetry written by the poets of Maine, located in Portland, from which the Take Heart series will be curated. In its readiness to make McNair’s vision a reality, MWPA represents an understanding that our creative community will blossom further when Portland-based organizations recognize and connect with the broader region that influences the city.

With MWPA as the project’s support system, McNair will choose poems of the highest quality crafted by Maine citizens. Quality, in this instance, means remaining accessible to a broad readership without sacrificing the complexities of life that poetry must illuminate. What I find most exciting about Take Heart’s selection is the sheer range from free verse to metered, rhymed, and received forms; from Maine’s classic poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to remarkable contemporary poets who you’ve never heard of; and from visions of our very own Casco Bay to mindstreams that escape the borders of geography. McNair wants the “diversity and regions of the state to be reflected” in the project, yet he also realizes that limiting the entire subject matter of the series to Maine content “would limit the true richness of our poems.” Instead of poems that beat lobsters and blueberries and Baxter St. Park to death, we’re going to find works loosely arranged around a diverse yet Maine-centered psyche. “If a poem about a region is good,” says McNair, “it’s not only about that place… it’s about all places.” Most of all, the poems will lead us to honor our “emotional and intuitive self,” which McNair beautifully argues is “the deepest self that we have.”

Thanks to MWPA, you can read McNair’s galvanizing and eloquent speech about Take Heart from the April 20, 2011 poetry celebration at the Blaine House in Augusta. It’s available for download here.

Photos by Irvin Serrano and Dan Habib.
Pictured above (left to right): Joshua Bodwell, Wesley McNair, and David Turner.