First class mail: Corresponding in poetry
Two men tell each other about their lives through poetry delivered by US Postal Service
April 14, 2026
By John Boit
How do two poets speak to each other? In poetry, of course.
That’s the case for Stuart Kestenbaum of Deer Isle, who was Maine’s poet laureate from 2016 to 2021, and his friend Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, a Portland resident who is the executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
Since 2024, the two men have been corresponding with each other through poems, which they send to each other via the US postal service.
Their letter writing was inspired by an epistolary (meaning letter writing) poetry project developed by Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouswma. The project paired Mainers with partners from different parts of the state to exchange poetry letters. The poems could take any form and address any subject matter.
While the initial project was scheduled to last for four months, Kestenbaum and Fay-LeBlanc are continuing to correspond, addressing topics ranging from family life to the changing seasons to the turbulent state of the world. They’ve been surprised and moved by their investigations, and look forward to seeing how things look every few weeks from Portland and Deer Isle, respectively.
Below are examples from each.
Letter to Stu with the World’s Third Largest Stalactite
Last week near Doolin I walked eight stories
of stairs down into the earth,
stooped through a tunnel cut into rock—
so I did not have to army crawl
five hundred meters through
the barely body-sized burrow—
to eventually open into a massive cave,
a chamber, all of it made by water
moving through limestone, all of it
sculpted as if to show off the showpiece,
the giant, jagged, mineral chandelier
growing one drip at a time for tens
of thousands of years, making even
the thousand-year-old stone castles
and churches above it seem like a blip.
I don’t have the audacity or arrogance
to assume any of my words, including these,
might last a hundred years, or fifty.
Poems won’t save us. I remember the harumph
my professor gave in the mid-‘90s
when I told her my thesis might look at
literature and social change. What I meant
was that the weft and whimple of certain lines—
Back out of all this now too much for us
and Somebody waters the plant
or oils it, maybe—were at that moment
blasting a new road through a mountain
of granite between my head and my heart.
I had not yet called my mother
to say med school was not for me.
I still need words to charge me,
to lead me by the ear. Today
it’s some lines by a friend: awe
is not lost on me, but I catch it. Poems
keep showing me more rooms, rooms
upon rooms—not infinite, but always
another there if you need it, as I need
to crawl, dig, and eventually find one
inside my ragged, foul, still-beating heart.
—Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
In response, Kestenbaum wrote:
Letter to Gibson One Drip at a Time
I’m imagining you entering the cavern, moving
through darkness to the inner light of the stalactites,
which have formed and are forming one drip at a time
over thousands and thousands of our lifetimes.
In that cool damp air you get a sense
of geologic time, the time that disregards us,
the time so slow that it’s hard for us to fathom.
After my first year of college, a high school friend
and I drove across the country. We arrived
at the Grand Canyon at night. He had
climbed down to the Colorado River there the year
before so knew what to expect. He took me to the edge
in the dark. Even without seeing the space,
I could feel it, its ancient rock and ancient wind.
I had to step away. It was that combination of awe
and fear, words we use to indicate sensing a world
that’s beyond the reach of our imaginations.
Today that same wind is blowing out of the northwest,
over the water of the harbor and hitting our house.
There are whitecaps, the tree branches tremble,
and I can hear it pushing up against our windows
working its way into our home. You could say
that the wind is relentless. Lately I’ve been feeling
that same way about the news, how each day
in our country something is wearing away--
because the autocracy we’re living in is its
own form of erosion. Scientists and farmers
know how to control erosion. You plant. You put
seeds in the dark soil so that their spreading
roots eventually will hold the earth in place.
One hole. One seed. Repeat.
—Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, including most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press). He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is the author of two collections of poems, including Death of a Ventriloquist, which won the Vassar Miller Prize, and Deke Dangle Dive (CavanKerry Press, 2021). His poems have appeared recently in magazines including Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and a poem was awarded the 2025 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize by December Magazine and Maggie Smith. He has served as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance since 2019 and has previously helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE, and Hewnoaks.
The Rising Tide welcomes artistic endeavors from our community, and showcases them here in our “Create” section. If you have something you’d like to submit—a poem, a picture of a painting, a photograph, a music recording—send it to info@risingtide.media. We’d love to publish it and give you an audience for your creativity.
