ROCKPORT, Maine — Poet Gary Lawless loves to climb the path that wends up Beech Hill in Rockport, with the blue, island-dotted expanse of Penobscot Bay spreading out to the horizon far below.
He loves Beech Nut, the stone cottage that crowns the hill; but although he has made the trek to the hilltop many times, the cottage has always been locked and he had never been inside. That changed this summer, because Lawless, a Belfast native who runs Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, has been named an artist-in-residence on Beech Hill. The artist-in-residence program is new, as of last year, and is run by the Coastal Mountains Land Trust, the nonprofit organization that manages the Beech Hill Preserve.
“Now I have a key for six weeks,” he said gleefully in June before sharing details of his vision for his residency. “We all experience places differently. I want to see how other people experience a place I really like. We’ve got a whole bunch of ideas, and we’ll see what happens.”
Lawless said he did an artist-in-residence program at Isle Royale National Park on Lake Superior a number of years ago. When he learned the Maine land trust was starting its own program, he wanted to be part of it.
“I thought it shouldn’t just be for visual artists. I thought I would like to do something with poetry,” he said.
His ideas so far include doing weekly walks at the preserve, having visitors add to an ongoing poem that will be kept in a journal at the top of Beech Hill, making a word map of the preserve, translating bird calls into poems and creating an online blog with people’s poems about Beech Hill. There already are about a dozen poems on the blog, with lots of space for more, Lawless said.
One of his own poems about the preserve is short, sweet and redolent of summer in Maine.
“Beech Hill: August: Blueberries”
blue below our
feet blue field
field full of berries
blue bay below
clouds, crows,
wood lily under
blue sky,
on our way
to blue.
Kristen Lindquist, the land trust’s development director and a poet herself, said that last year George Mason, a textile artist from Damariscotta Mills, did big textile panels that filled the walls of Beech Nut with light and color. The artist-in-residence program was off to a good start, and officials decided they wanted it to continue.
“We said we need to get artists in here more often,” she said.
After Lawless’ tenure ends on July 28, Dudley Zopp will be the second featured artist-in-residence. She plans to create an installation in Beech Nut that relates to Maine geology during her residency, which will run through mid-September.
“It should be fun,” Lindquist said. “It’ll get arty people up there to check it out. And once they’re up there, presumably they will recognize what a beautiful place it is and enjoy that, too. Or people who go up there to enjoy a hike will suddenly be confronted with poetry and art.”
Lawless said he can’t wait to see what happens, word-wise, over the next few weeks on Beech Hill.
“It’s a way of exploring a particular space that’s already pretty well loved by a lot of people,” Lawless said. “I really want to learn from other people.”
For more information about Lawless’s Beech Hill artist in residency events or to check out poems about the preserve, visit the website at beechhillpilgrimage.blogspot.com.