Living on Millay Hill: An Interview with Julia Bouwsma
by Mark Raymond
Kate Barnes was Maine’s first Poet Laureate, and now, three decades on from the post’s inauguration under then-governor Angus King, we’re onto our sixth, Julia Bouwsma, who works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and librarian in the mountains of western Maine, living on a hill called Millay Hill, on road named Millay Hill Road. In small-town New Portland, Maine, Bouwsma lives off the grid (not our first Poet Laureate to do so), but poetry lives and works on another kind of grid, older and hauntingly empowered by other networks of interconnectedness. Like dowsing and ley lines, it follows an alternative current of psychogeography, which isn’t as goofy as it sounds, since poetry is work (and not just networking at an MWPA event), but work like foraging or canning, except in fields and pantries that yield and maintain a harder-won and a more long-lived and deeply held sustenance. The communities of writers that come before her, the past laureates and prizewinners, the canonized, the newcomer, and the fan, all engage a living poetic tradition, with its verse forms like the sonnet, its genres and its tropes, that puts us in an intergenerational conversation with cultural memory, the way foodways in our lives sustain a depth of knowledge, although not every poet gets to pick fiddleheads steps away from a beloved poet’s great-grandmother’s grave.
Millay House Rockland had a chance to ask Julia a few questions about her life and work and her own psychogeographic connectedness to the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
Can you pinpoint the start of your interest in Edna St. Vincent Millay, and did it involve a pumpkin?
Ha! Yes, it did indeed involve a pumpkin. The story is that my seventh-grade English teacher gave us all mini pumpkins one Halloween with the assignment to decorate them in a literary fashion. And the night before it was due, I still hadn’t come up with an idea for mine. So my father pointed me toward Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” and suggested I simply insert a candle into each end of the pumpkin:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
The pumpkin itself was not a success, since sticking a candle in both ends meant it didn’t really stand up very well and I had to build a weird frame for it out of wire. And obviously I couldn’t light the candles in school either, so I fashioned rather awkward-looking flames out of tissue paper. But the poem spoke to me powerfully and immediately and still does.
You’ll be doing an event for the MHR in the coming months, Conversations with Dead Poets. Tell me about this “strange epistolary poetry” project you’ve been working on, engaging with Millay.
The project begins with the fact that I live on Millay Hill in New Portland (Somerset County). On the property there is a small cemetery which includes, among other members of the Millay family, the grave of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s paternal great-grandmother, Sarah Dinslow Millay (1785-1861). I have also heard rumors that Edna St. Vincent Millay used to visit her cousins in the area, though I don’t know if it’s true. So I started imagining her—a poet whom I have long loved and admired—walking this hill and these woods, which have become an essential part of who I am as both poet and person. And I started thinking of this land I love and work as a shared space between us. And because I have come in my practice to think of the page as a natural extension of both land and body, that thought process gradually turned into a series of epistolary poems addressed to Edna St. Vincent Millay, which I have been slowly working on for the last five years or so.
Millay graves on Julia’s land: Esta Pratt-Kielley (Maine Public)
The project is exciting because it feels like uncharted territory, at least for me. There is certainly a documentary aspect to it—I’ve spent time with Millay archives, have visited other places associated with her, have read her poems and letters and diary entries, etc.—but it also includes some of the most intensely personal writing I’ve ever done. These epistolary poems to Millay have been a place where I can write about topics I have not yet found a way to write about before, topics that have always felt dangerous and out of reach to me. I’ve long felt drawn to a certain confessional impulse in my poetry, but I’ve also been touchy about it, since it’s a term that’s been used to shame women writers and conflate the personal with the narcissistic. In this project, I think I’m trying to thread the needle a bit—to lean into the creative risk of personal vulnerability but to do so in a way that is connective rather than self-indulgent. I am trying to re-see Millay because I think she was often treated unfairly by the literary world. And I am trying to re-see myself as well, imagining myself through Millay’s eyes, as a way of trying to view myself with greater grace. And in doing so I’m hoping to engage a greater dialogue across time between two poets—one that confronts gender and queerness and feminism and antifascism and history and sense of place and the public vs. the private gaze and so many other messy, necessary, intertwined conversations.
Tell me about Death Fluorescence. I think I’ve heard you read a poem that will appear in it, something about a worm.
Death Fluorescence, my new poetry collection, takes its name from the blue light that is emitted by the C. elegans nematode when it dies. The poems consider the question of how to navigate an increasingly unstable future while drawing on themes that include personal and social grief, historic trauma and epigenetics research, secular Jewish identity, and my relationship to place as a homesteader in the mountains of rural western Maine.
Would you like to share any thoughts on your writing process? For instance, thinking about Millay’s poetry or her life and letters, how does your creative process take into account another writer’s work—directly? Indirectly? An allusion? A quote? A summoned presence? A touchstone? An antagonist? A vibe?
This is an interesting question. I would say my writing process involves creating apertures wherever and however I can. So I think all of the above really, in different ways and at different times. I’ve read biographies, as well as her own poems, journals, and letters. I have surrounded my workspace with photographs. I have put my finger to the cigarette burn holes at the bottom of her nightgown (housed in the archive at the Maine Women Writers Collection). I have perused the internet for all manner of details. I have listened to music inspired by her poems. I have used oracle and tarot cards and once even an online Ouija board. I have embedded quotes into poems or used them as epigraphs, sounding boards. An artist I know created erasure poems out of a book of Millay sonnets and then sent it to me, so I wrote a series of golden shovel sonnets using her erasures—broken shovels, I call them. It’s about sifting through wreckage really, through ruins. I dream and then write down my dreams. Have spent hours staring at the ocean. Or talking to myself in the middle of the woods in a snowstorm. Putting my hands in earth I imagine she too has touched or walking paths I imagine she too has walked. Gathering small stones and pottery shards and lining them up on the windowsill. Just letting myself be as weird as I need to and seeing what comes, if anything comes. But writing letters has been one of the most effective strategies for me—the intimacy and urgency of letters—the space of the page, which even in its stark white loneliness is a shared space we both know how to navigate.
One thing about dead poets, they don’t listen, they can’t respond. How do you feel about that? Of course, when we read their work, we’re letting them speak, we’re listening to them intently, but then, after the poem’s over or whenever we decide to stop reading, we get the chance to respond, we can talk back to and talk over them. Who gets the last word?
I tend to think of poems as coming to life in the space between the reader and the writer. When we read a poem, although we are of course reading the poet’s words and letting them speak, we are also bringing our own memories and associations to the text and inherently changing it by our reading, making it into something new and collaborative. In that way, I wonder if it’s not actually the reader who gets the last word? But of course poetry is a never-ending conversation. Every time I return to the page, either as reader or as writer, I’m a different person. I will have different reactions and responses each time, even if only slightly. So the conversation will keep gradually evolving, can keep evolving forever if we let it. Aracelis Girmay once told me that it was the poet’s job to try to have a conversation with silence, and I think about this often. How loud silence is. How many words, how many conversations there are inside it. I like to think I’m not speaking over, just catching what words I can out of the silence and using those words to guide me as I try to listen further.
What are your thoughts on the sonnet? As a writer? As a reader? Do you love the sonnet form, revel in it, respect it, hate it, or is it complicated? What are the risks and rewards of the sonnet for poets today? What about Millay’s sonnets? Is there one in particular that you return to?
I must admit to an intense, nerdy excitement about the way I’ve come around in my thinking regarding sonnets. For most of my life, I respected the sonnet as a reader yet dreaded it as a writer. Perhaps because I’ve never felt terribly comfortable with metrics (I first learned to scan in Latin and Greek, and scansion in English has always felt frustratingly slippery to me in comparison, too dependent on pronunciation). Or perhaps simply because a well-achieved sonnet seemed like such an unobtainable glory. And my own attempts—always for school assignments, it was never a form I attempted on my own for fun—felt tedious and awkward, trapped inside the form rather than of it.
This finally changed for me as I began encountering contemporary sonnets that challenge the traditional structures—sonnets I now like to think of as “transgressive sonnets” and teach alongside traditional ones. The first was Phillip B. Williams’s “Sonnet with a Cut Wrist and Flies.” It blew my mind. I remember reading it and then saying, out loud, “I didn’t know you could do that.” Then at the advice of Cynthia Dewi Oka, who has a stunning sonnet sequence in her book Salvage, I began re-writing a poem that started as a four-page elegiac rant for my grandmother into a heroic sonnet crown, “I’m Okay but the Country Is Not,” the final version of which is included in Death Fluorescence. I wrote the first eight poems as Petrarchan sonnets but stalled after that. I let the project sit for a year or so, until I purchased Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin while on a trip to Paris in 2019. Again, there was this permission to break the traditional rules, to make of the form what I needed it to be. Immediately I was able to finish the crown, and this time the remaining poems came out as unrhymed sonnets. So the crown’s volta also became the point where form breaks down, where the speaker’s grief overpowers the sequence’s original constraints.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that now I love the sonnet. Because it was the form that really taught me that poetic form is just a container, and that the poem is often at its most exciting for me when the emotion of the poem is simply too much for the container, when it spills over and breaks by necessity. Since the sonnet is such a restrictive form, it’s easy to break. And that inherent fragility has led to so many incredibly innovative and transgressive sonnets in recent years. Poets of color disrupting the traditional strictures of the sonnet as a means of critiquing whiteness. Or Diane Seuss’s sonnets in frank, where grief unravels the form until the lines are so long, they need to be printed on a foldout page. We’re at an exciting moment for the sonnet right now, I think, for both readers and writers.
The Millay sonnets I return to most often are her “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,” a sequence which was transgressive in its own way for its time. The whole thing is terrific in every way, but I think my personal favorite might be the third sonnet, simply because it’s the best, most relatable description of getting an armload of firewood I’ve ever read: “She filled her arms with wood, and set her chin / Forward to hold the highest stick in place, / No less afraid than she had always been, / Of spiders up her arms and on her face…”
Millay nightgown with cigarette burns: Maine Women Writers Collection, “Dorothy Healy with Millay nightgown” (2019). Maine Women Writers Collection 60th Anniversary.
I’ve heard that Emily Dickinson, a prizewinning baker, once drafted a poem on the back of a recipe for coconut cake. My sense of Vincent is that, once ensconced at Steepletop, she wasn’t busying herself with the pantry or the stove. How close is your own writing to the kitchen?
Well, I am definitely not a prize-winning baker by any means! But I do quite a lot of my writing at my kitchen table. It’s near the woodstove, so I can feed it easily in the winter. And it’s large enough for me to spread out, unlike my desk which is always cluttered with piles of paper. And I do love food, especially the seasonal rituals that are so much a part of homesteading, so that’s how it tends to show up in my poems most often—boiling and canning maple syrup, foraging for fiddleheads or ramps, fishing for smelts in early May, canning dilly beans, processing chickens. All of this, the physicality of it, feeds my poems.
You moved to Maine. Millay moved from Maine. A lot of young Mainers feel they need to leave the state to find their way. If you were writing a letter to a young Maine poet today, a version of yourself or a Vincent Gen Z, what insights would you share about the places we write from and the place of Maine in the poetry world?
Home is such a complicated thing. I often tell people that I’m one of those people who has had to leave home to find home. I’ve lived in Maine for twenty years now, and although I started writing poems as a child, it’s very much the truth that I matured as a poet, became the poet I am today, in and because of Maine. There is something about Maine’s hard-earned beauty—the way its pleasures are so closely tied to its challenges, the sheer physicality of this place—that breeds poetry. And I absolutely believe that Maine has pushed me to be a better poet than I might otherwise have become. But while I don’t regret it, it’s also true that living in rural Maine has created disadvantages for me in terms of national exposure, that Maine poets and other rural poets are too often and too easily regionalized. I seriously doubt that Millay would have ever achieved the recognition she did without leaving Maine. And though much has changed from Millay’s time to now, I’m not sure that fact has shifted much. But also, so many of Millay’s poems—“Inland” or “Ragged Island,” for example—carry this really intense and deeply palpable longing for Maine, for home. I think that leaving Maine was probably one of the great heartaches of her life. So I guess what I would say to a young Maine poet is that we can carry many different homes inside ourselves. Don’t be afraid to open yourself up to possibility. Remember that it is the life you lead that will shape your poems. If you are lucky enough to live in a place, wherever it is, that honors you for who you are and helps to make you a better poet, that itself is a tremendous gift.
Poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, librarian, and current Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma is the author of three poetry collections, Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and, most recently, Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, 2025).
