Bucksport’s New Poet Laureate Focuses on Maine’s Lost Mills

 

In Bucksport, collecting stories about the local paper mill was and still is a project for which Pat Ranzoni, the town’s recently inducted poet laureate, is unusually well-suited. The storyteller, whose specialty is "documentary poetry," was born and raised in Bucksport. 

When Ranzoni was still young, her parents left the cradle of the state’s forest products industry for Bucksport. Her father, a sailor who served in World War II, correctly reasoned he’d be able to land a job at the paper mill when his service ended.

"It really was like a death," says poet Ranzoni of the closing of the Verso mill. Ranzoni, who eventually became a teacher and poet, also had uncles, friends, neighbors, and students who worked there at one time or another.

For a while, her husband, Ed Ranzoni, and their sons made extra money by chopping wood, hauling it into town using a John Deere tractor, and selling it off to the mill operators. Some neighbors made a living off such transactions.

So when Verso Paper Corp. announced it was closing the mill late last year, Ranzoni said during a recent interview in her home on Bucksmills Road, "It really was like a death. That mill has been a real presence, and it’s been all of us working to build it to do what it does."

With the mill’s new owner, Canadian scrap metal recycler AIM Development, all but certain to begin demolition this spring, a chorus of locals are now wondering how Bucksport can reinvent itself. And this is for the most recent string of closings in the U.S. that have affected primary the northeastern states. For quite some years into this new century, the industry had remained viable in Bucksport and the Verso mill continued to provide for the local economy successfully. But finally times, as well as some unfortunate circumstances, took their toll. Energy costs to the northeast were rising. The cost of raw materials for making pulp and paper was also on the rise. 

 

 

Ranzoni counts herself among the reinvention crowd, but she’s also kickstarted a project to ensure Bucksport’s 84 years as a mill town aren’t forgotten. She’s asking: how can that vibrant period remain an asset as the town and region move forward?

For the last couple of months, Ranzoni has been collecting submissions for an anthology with the working title "Still Mill: Poems, Stories and Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine, 1930-2014, a documentary from around the world."

Submissions are welcome from anyone with a connection to the mill, whether it was working there or simply driving past it regularly. To contribute, email Ranzoni at pranzoni@aol.com; call her at 469-2225; or mail them to her at 289 Bucksmills Road, Bucksport, ME 04416. Enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply. Include a description of your relationship to the mill.

The project, Ranzoni explained, came from her initial reactions to the closure announcement. " (But) the people who made it are still living, breathing, storytelling. It was a very real culture."

Ranzoni, who’s working without compensation, said any extra proceeds — beyond what’s needed to cover production costs — will be donated to the Bucksport Historical Society to protect and exhibit material documenting the mill’s history.

Among the submissions Ranzoni has already received are poems, stories, artwork, and musical compositions by old and young Bucksport area residents or natives.

Musical submissions include the composition "Papermakers Lament" by Ranzoni’s brother, bagpiper Ernie Smith, and the lyrics to the song "Small Town America," which a local guitarist and lobster fisherman, Chris Soper, wrote last fall as a tribute to laid-off paper mill workers.

Several poems will make it into the anthology, including one by Ranzoni in which she describes the old paper machine "felt" (dryer fabric) that her father brought home to use as insulation during winter. Another by Pat Claus of Orrington, titled "The Two Forts," juxtaposes the mill and Fort Knox, for so long the twin pillars at the mouth of the Penobscot River.

Other submissions have included written and oral recollections of the mill, its operations, and the people who ran it. Some come from interviews conducted by Ranzoni, others from old documents.

Ranzoni acknowledges the importance of the next phase for industry in the region.

But "Still Mill" is her attempt to let no one lose sight of the last one either, an era when pulp and paper dominated:

By Pat Ranzoni 

If we didn’t cover the panes ice did

in sash rotting inches. Tar paper years

then papermachine felt

(what didn’t get used on our beds)

over the front door funnel from The North

Ragged sheep-colored windings hoarded

from the mill still roaring Saturday Evening...

and Life... wrapping our houses

in scraggly scarfs pounded ritualistically in place

through roughsawn laths each fall. Bits of wool

still surface screaming in cellar-edge soil. Next,

cloudy plastic coverings closed us in. How I wished

to see out our windows all those years dreading

the annual bracing and blanketing that took the light:

the long out there light. Now we worship at broad

glass breakthroughs east and south. Even the north,

with lowered case, dares look upon snowheaped nests.

Curtains don’t get closed until dark. If then.

By Pat Claus, Orrington

 

My two stoic grandfathers, back when the mills began,

Not complaining about the noise, the danger

Not complaining when they lost fingers to the machines

Proud to work and to provide

Stark smokestacks pierced the sky — ugly but

Reassuring too — assuring the future of a town and

The future of families.

The self-respect of work.

No more stopping for workers crossing the street

After a long, hard shift at the mill.

A small courtesy which bound us together

As a community.

The view, like twin forts

Across the cold mirror of the winter river

Across the shimmering mirror of the summer river.

 

Can we imagine our town otherwise?

What can we make now?

Not just memories for summer people.