Please join MWPA, Compagnia de' Colombari, Friends of Congress Square Park, Portland Stage Company, and The Telling Room, for Whitman on Walls! (WoW!), a new hybrid event bringing living poets and film together at Congress Square Park.
WoW! is composed of seven short films taken from Compagnia de' Colombari's live performance More or Less I Am (played gratis all around New York from 2008-2019), which draws its inspiration from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. A drive-in movie meets poetry slam, Wow! fuses the theatrical and literary and brings Whitman’s iconic poem into the present moment.
The seven films were recorded over three weeks during lockdown, with over fifty performers from around the world, each piece embodying Whitman's words. Each screening will be followed by a local poet who will have the opportunity to talk back to Whitman in their own words, challenging or quarreling with him, thus weaving together film and live recitation. The local poets participating in this event include Sharif Elmusa, Gary Lawless, Moon Nguany, Mihku Paul, Betsy Sholl, and Maya Williams as well as young writers from The Telling Room and Peter, Kate, and Sadie Weed.
The one-hour event will play at dark, just after sunset.
Sharif Elmusa is a poet and scholar. Apart from academic publications on the environment, he co-edited Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, and authored the poetry collection Flawed Landscape. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT, and is Professor Emeritus at the American University in Cairo.
Gary Lawless is a poet, bookstore owner, book editor, and publisher, born in Belfast and living now in Nobleboro. He has published 18 collections of poetry in the United States and five in Italy. He is the co-owner of Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, and the author, most recently, of How the Stones Came to Venice, published by Littoral Books in 2021.
Moon Nguany is a spoken word poet. In 2019, she was the recipient of both the rising Advocate Award from the Bazelon Center in Washington DC and the Diaspora Award from the Luol Deng foundation for her advocacy work around South Sudan.
Mihku Paul is a Malecite writer and visual artist born and raised traditionally on the Penobscot River in Maine. She holds a B.A. in communication and human development and received her MFA in 2010 from Stonecoast. Mihku has taught poetry and fiction writing to diverse groups including Waponaki Writers Project, Rise Up! and at the Maine Women Writers Collection. She is also a Maine Lit Fest Fellow and a member of the Community Advisory Board at MWPA.
Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry, As If a Song Could Save You, will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall of 2022. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. In 2020, MWPA awarded Sholl the Distinguished Achievement Award, and just this spring USM awarded her an honorary doctorate. She also served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland.
Portland Poet Laureate Maya Williams is a Black multiracial suicide survivor and writer currently residing in Portland. They have contributed poems to venues such as the Portland Press Herald, Black Table Arts, Frost Meadow Review, Occulum, Homology Lit, and more. They recently graduated from Randolph College's low-residency Creative Writing MFA, focusing on Poetry.
