Hosts: Dr. Betty Duff and Joan Clemons
Topic: Love Song to Maine: Tradition, love poems, Maine poems, WERU
Guest: Pat Ranzoni (pranzoni@aol.com)
Mixed blood Yankee, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, was born in the Katahdin region to a Canadian-American woodcutter and farm girl from Orland and Castine, both descended from European settlers to Indian territory in what became Massachusetts then Maine, their roots mixing in relation with Native Americans and First Canadians. She grew up in Bucksport where she now writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth.
Her unschooled documentary poems have been published across the country and abroad, and she is a frequent reader and reciter around Maine. In 2002 she became the first poet from the northern reach of the Appalachian Chain to be invited to read at the University of Ohio, Zanesville, Women of Appalachia Conference. Her work has been used in Colby College’s “Many Maines” course and by University of Maine departments of history and English, and is being acquired by Fogler Library’s Special Collections and other archives of Maine history, class, and women’s studies.
Books: CLAIMING (1995), SETTLING (2000), ONLY HUMAN ~ Poems from the Atlantic Flyway (Sheltering Pines Press, 2005).
Questions this program may have answered for listeners:
What are some Maine traditions? How do Maine cultures connect with other cultures?
How are winters today like winters past for long-time natives keeping the old ways?