Poetic politician: Maine Gov. Janet Mills' skills include verse
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Many Mainers know Democratic Gov. Janet Mills as a level-headed leader, a pragmatic politician, or even a former tough-minded prosecutor. But there’s another side to the governor — she’s a poet.
“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live,” Mills said, quoting John F. Kennedy at her inauguration last month.
Her inner poet emerged after she dropped out of Colby College and headed to San Francisco for the Summer of Love before returning to college and later attending the University of Maine School of Law.
Mills, who is addressing a joint session of the Legislature on Tuesday to discuss her goals for her second term, said it was in San Francisco in 1967 that she began composing poetry in her head to counter the daylong drudgery of typing forms at an insurance company to pay the bills.
Decades later, sitting behind her desk in the State House, Mills said she remains convinced that poetry and the arts are essential to being well-rounded and understanding the world.
“I think it behooves us as public policymakers and public officeholders to extend our intellects as broadly as we can,” Mills said. “Poetry and reading are a way of learning the world and opening our eyes and ears to what other people are experiencing.”
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Two of her early poems were published in 1975 in “Balancing Act: A Book of Poems by Ten Maine Women,” compiled by Agnes Bushell, of Portland, who was frustrated that male publishers were giving short shrift to the poetry of women.
The words of Mills, then a law student, stood out from the other poets, Bushell said. One of her poems was entitled, “He Looks in the Metal Waters,” about a man’s gloomy breakfast routine, and the other was about introspection and irony, “This Fussy Fatality.”
“Culture isn’t dead. We have a governor who’s a poet. How great is that?” said Bushell, who has since published “Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of Poems by Fifty Maine Women.”
Mills, whose father gave her a journal at age 5 and whose mother was an English teacher, enjoys transforming journal notes into verse on subjects ranging from the birth of her granddaughter to a painting of a snowy owl by Jamie Wyeth.
When her husband of three decades, Stanley Kuklinski, died, Mills recorded her memories of him in a poem, recalling loons and tall trees, and writing of “following the river / to another trail.”
As governor, Mills served on a committee that selected the state’s current poet laureate, Julia Bouwsma. and she restored poetry to inaugurations. Last month, her second inauguration featured not one, but two poets — Bouwsma and Richard Blanco, former President Barack Obama’s inaugural poet.
Blanco read a poem that he penned, but not before lauding Mills as “an amazing poet in her own right.”
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Wesley McNair, University of Maine at Farmington professor emeritus, recalled Mills attending poetry readings in her hometown, and said prose makes her a better leader.
“Its beauty comes from the truths it tells,” he said of poetry. “You can’t be a poet without understanding the world and the people in it, and having a compassion toward them.”
Mills, 75, said she doesn’t write political poetry, but the poem for her granddaughter’s birth started with a stanza about male politicians who “Yell on the TV.”
The poem, written in the hospital waiting room while the TV blared, quickly shifted to hopefulness and optimism surrounding her newborn granddaughter.
“Eyes and ears / Ready to know / Everything that is new, / Everything that is,” she wrote. “A brain ready / To learn, / A heart ready / To love. / That is your god / Warming your own heart, / That is your god / holding your hand / So tight / Never letting you / Go.”
A few poems Maine Gov. Janet Mills wrote over the years
“For Stan” (2015)
There are things I have seen I cannot explain –
The way a child cries and laughs
At things only it knows.
The way autumn always brings
the smell of fries and donuts, musty hay,
the baying of old animals, the carnies and barkers,
the crowd in the grandstand shouting with a single voice,
the chill of a new wind.
The way spring brings everything back we’ve
Sheltered all the long dark days—
Grass in the field,
water in the stream,
hope in the heart.
And the way a dying person sometimes
has one last good day.
Our friend Harry had one last good day.
In deep coma, it was the end, they said,
as they pulled the tubes,
and he awoke with a smile.
And when you and I went to say goodbye,
He was having the best party,
Telling such stories with his
Firefighter friends, his wife, his neighbors,
Before he died.
There are other things,
Like red lights in the sky
That twice appeared when I was on
An old road on a dark night.
Like the music we heard at the lake
That came from swift bats, tall trees,
naked loons at dusk.
Like the man lost three days in deep woods,
given up for dead, who
Walked out, following the river
To the trail.
Like the time I found you, love,
and two lives changed.
Like you, when we came to say goodbye.
Laughing like lightning,
You knew us, you saw us, you held us,
And thanked us, every one,
knowing it was the end.
And like me now
holding in my hands
your old smile,
missing that music,
looking,
following the river
to another trail.
—-
“This Fussy Fatality” (from “Balancing Act: A Book of Poems by Ten Maine Women,” 1975)
This fussy fatality I have found must
belong to some god-like dog-day dreamer
who, falling under the frequency of
the full moon, forgets us,
blinded by forgeries of the past,
his eyes two telescopes of time turned inward.
Pink and scarlet of dusk’s purgatorial
keeps us in-and-out, flame-bent for
purposes priceless and unfathomed.
We return from forms of perfect mind
to under zero, acknowledging the
conditions of the day,
harboring in undergarments our wares
preserved with secret sacrifice.
Logic makes checker squares on all that’s touched
feigning bravado from every face I see;
yet from the crevice of all eyes
come these spiralling scarlet circles,
mad-apple crimson.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Poetic politician: Maine Governor Janet Mills' skills include verse
