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SITE OF THE WEEK

Portsmouth poets are back. The city once known for Celia Thaxter, Thomas Bailey aldrich and James T. Fields has recreated the poet scene. They hoot, they publish, they write -- and they ahve a web site.

VISIT the featured web site

Ever so slowly the community is beginning to realize that the Seacoast is more than the sum of its beaches and restaurants. People live here and visit here because something touches their spirit – and that something is art. You can see it in the architecture and painting, hear it in the live music and feel it in the salty air.

Last year the Greater Piscataqua Community Foundation (GPCF) decided to encourage visual artists by creating a $30,000 annual grant. Gary Haven Smith, a sculptor of stones from Northwood was the first recipient. The second is being chosen now. The Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce under artsy director Peter Hamelin has been reaching out to include artists in its business membership. This year the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program (PPLP) selected singer and writer John Perrault as its fourth honored poetry spokesperson. In order to spread the word that poetry is alive and well on the Seacoast, the PPLP has just launched a new web site.

This is a good web site, as concise and full of white space as a good poem. Since I also moonlight as the poetry editor of the biweekly New Hampshire Gazette, the arrival of PPLP.org was a "site" for sore eyes. Moreover it is an important site because, finally, the poet laureate program has a home.

Everybody who cares about poetry around here knows how important the laureate program is. By regularly appointing an ambassador of local verse, the program keeps poetry in the news. The monthly poetry "hoots" at Café Expresso in Portsmouth are filled to the rafters. Each laureate must leave behind something memorable. The late unflappable Esther Buffler, then in her 80s, recorded a compact disk entitled "High on Poetry" with a group of local writers. Laureate Robert Dunn conducted a guerilla campaign of street poetry, mugging unsuspecting tourists with witty and wonderful words. Maren Tirabassi orchestrated a new anthology called "Portsmouth Unabridged: New Poems for an Old City".

But until the arrival of the web site, this activity was a little too random for me. Now it all sits under one roof. Visitors can read the mission of the organization, read local poems, meet the new laureate, check the date and details of the upcoming hoot, purchase the book and CD or even – God forbid – make a contribution to the cause. There are some dandy poetry web links too and, for the first time in the group’s five year history, we know how to email the PPLP – and get an email back.

When Andrew Howe took over as webmaster of the PPLP site it was a single online page. Harbor Light Productions, one of the most generous web site developers in the region, had gotten the ball rolling by creating a superb new logo. It shows a figure reading a poem in a flowing style that reminds me of an unrolling scroll. But the page was meant only as a place-holder until a volunteer could build and maintain something vital and informative.

Howe, who is a webmaster at Liberty Mutual and a PPAF board member, met with the co-chairmen of the organization Nancy Hill and Paula Rais to discuss building a truly functional site.

"Nancy and Paula are two of the greatest shakers and movers this city has ever seen," Howe told me this week. "Sit with them for just half an hour and you’ll want to run for mayor."

Using Microsoft Front Page, Howe constructed a site that is a breeze to sail through. All the former laureates are there and John Perrault, a master balladeer and teacher, has begun a monthly column that appears online. Already adept at reaching a large mailing list by email, pumping out press releases, and covering the town with handbills, the PPLP now has a new tool and a new Internet address. That kind of multi- media marketing, the experts say, is exactly what gets results.

The web site will have to pull its weight in fundraising too. So far the organization has depended on grants from GPCF, the NH State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. But ultimately these organizations need generous individuals to survive. Howe says the group plans to double its existing endowment using the network it has been developing for the last five years.

I suggest many more poems online. The web site needs a means for poets to submit via the Web, although paper and rote memory still rule in the poetry world. The most difficult part will be keeping the serious and professional poets connected with programs that court the unwashed masses. Shakespeare handled that well, but strange social rifts can form among artists when the public suddenly pays attention. Meanwhile, we need to see more photos too – pictures of poets and hoots and readings. Howe has just added the photos taken by Richard Haynes to illustrate the group’s recent anthologym and syas more are to follow.

Let us not forget audio. There’s a place I love on the British Broadcasting Corporation web site (BBC.com) where all the famous English-language poets read their own work aloud. Eventually all the poems on Esther’s compact disk should find their way online. And what ahout those hoots. Can we listen in there via the Web too?

Illustrator Bill Paarlberg once suggested a comic book about Portsmouth. In it, all the exploited underpaid artists leave town en masse. As they leave the color drains out of the comic book until the city appears only in black and white. In the story, the townspeople come to realize that their colorless lives are not worth living and they invite the artists back with a promise to respect and compensate them for their creative enterprise.

That story always reminds me of the ancient Greek drama Lysistrata. In that play, in order to end the Peloponnesian War, the women of Sparta and Thebes refuse to have sex with their husbands until the end of the war. I’m not implying that artistic creativity and procreation are exactly the same thing, although you can see where the metaphor has merit.

In Lysistrata the men give up their warlike ways and learn to appreciate their creative partners. Seacoast artists, despite the obvious color they add to the region, should probably not attempt a boycott of their talents – not just yet anyway. The public still has a lot to discover and appreciate about them. We’ve already discovered that arts events are both artistically and economically viable. Our annual blues and jazz and folk festivals draw huge crowds to the city. The recent Seacoast Irish Festival in Dover was a big crowd-pleaser during its first year. The Newmarket Heritage Festival, one of the funkiest cultural weekends of the fall, now takes over the whole downtown in September. Theater troupes thrive along the Seacoast. More galleries and art studios are springing up.

It is through the work of groups like the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program that people learn the importance of the arts in their own lives. The more poetry we bump into the better. We need more poems in the schools and in local newspapers, on street signs and on the radio.

This is nothing new. Guys like Homer were door-to-door salesmen. The early bards carried the great ballads to every town, trading their recitations for room and board. Our European ancestors were immersed in poetry and every big Portsmouth event in the 19^th century began with a noble poetry reading. It was only in the 20^th century that it began its decline. We became too sophisticated, too scientific, too hip to express ourselves in verse. We lost a little of our soul in the process, and now the very technology that stole it away is bringing it back. Quite poetic, don’t you think?