Bucksport’s poet laureate has resigned after dedicating 11 years to using poetry to document life in the town and its response to the closure of its paper mill.
At 85, Patricia Smith Ranzoni is less able to carry on traditions and come up with new ideas, she said in her resignation letter. She gave up the lifetime appointment to offer the opportunity to someone else, as well as to pursue a desire to focus her writing on current events outside of town.
“This brings me both sadness and great satisfaction,” she said.
Poet laureates are accomplished writers who create new work specific to the place they’re appointed and promote poetry locally. Ranzoni was the first to hold the honorary role in Bucksport, preserving and sharing daily life there through a decade that redefined it.
The town doesn’t know who could follow in her footsteps, according to Town Manager Susan Lessard.
Bucksport is one of the only Maine municipalities to have its own poet laureate, along with Belfast and Portland. From the outside, the town may look like less of an artistic destination than those larger cities.
But Ranzoni sees poetry as part of daily life and folk art in rural Maine through the songs, recitations and stories shared among families, churches, schools, clubs and libraries.
“As we know, this place’s historical records, including oral tradition, show that from first Wabanaki Peoples to the present, lovers of musical language have always lived along the Penobscot and that that community continues to grow,” she wrote.
Her tenure produced annual window displays of poems on Main Street and a “poem in your pocket” day to share writings. She also led programs at local institutions, public dedications, community readings and events that brought different cultural groups together. All of it was organized with outside funding and didn’t use taxpayer dollars, according to Ranzoni.
“A native daughter of Bucksport, she has worked to keep ‘Bucksportians’ connected to each other and to their history, and she has done so both through her poetry and writings and her deep love and commitment to Bucksport,” Lessard said.
Born in Lincoln and raised on a homestead in Bucksport, Ranzoni worked in education and described her writing as “unschooled documentary poetry.” Her poems feature mill workers, working-class and poor families, daily life in rural Maine, local history and nature.
Ranzoni’s first book, “Claiming,” published by Puckerbrush Press in 1995, was followed by numerous other books and smaller pamphlets, called chapbooks.
She was appointed poet laureate in 2014, just months before the Verso Paper mill closed. Ranzoni sprang into action to document its legacy when the closure was announced. That project became “Still Mill: Stories and Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine,” an anthology of firsthand stories, poems and memories. A reviewer called it a people’s history that was a “swan song” for Maine’s papermaking industry.
Royalties from the anthology launched and still support the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum, which held a soft opening in the mill’s former gatehouse last fall. It aims to teach the history of the mill and honor the people who worked there, according to its website.
“It’s the recognition that somebody values what they have done, that it will be remembered,” she said in an interview with Yankee Magazine about her work’s value to those whose lives were shaped by the mill. “Many probably thought they’d have their private memories but they would be lost [to the world] forever.”
Poems from Ranzoni’s tenure — those she’s written and ones others wrote in programs she organized — will be archived, according to her resignation letter. Her work will be acquired by the Maine State Library and papers can be found at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library Special Collections and archives of Maine women writers.
The Town Council will formally recognize her at its June 12 meeting. It doesn’t have plans to find a successor yet, and Ranzoni set a standard that will be hard to replicate, Lessard said.
“Thank you to all who respected and supported this position and my efforts to document and celebrate life here through poetry among old-timers and newcomers alike,” Ranzoni said. “Just as I never knew how my appointment came about, I shall never forget that it did.”
