Before he became prominent as a poet, novelist, editor, filmmaker and lecturer, Sherman Alexie had to be noticed.

One of the first publications to give a boost to the Native American poet from Seattle more than a decade ago, was a Maine-based quarterly which marked a half-century of publication last fall with “A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal.”

The hundreds of poems in the anthology represent works by May Sarton, Philip Booth and William Carlos Williams in the ’50s; Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov and Joyce Carol Oates in the ’60s; Richard Eberhart and John Wheatcroft in the ’70s; Dorianne Laux and Susan Hand Shetterly from the ’80s; and in the ’90s, Betsy Sholl, William Carpenter and, again, Philip Booth.

“We’re especially proud of poets we discovered – that we were the first or second to publish them,” said Marion Stocking, the Lamoine woman who has edited the Beloit Poetry Journal for 46 of its 50 years.

The publication was an early part of careers of writers such as Kinnell, Booth and Alexie.

“We just take the best poems we have,” Stocking explained.

Sherman Alexie, 34, is of Spokane and Coeur d’Alene ancestry. He learned to read at age 3 and went on to earn poetry fellowships from the Washington State Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

One of the strongest poems in the anthology, Stocking said, may well be Alexie’s “Inside Dachau,” written after the poet visited the site of the former Holocaust concentration camp.

Inside Dachau, you might believe winter will never end. You may lose faith in the change of seasons because some of the men who built the camps still live in Argentina, in Washington, in Munich.

They live simple lives. They share bread with sons and daughters who have come to understand the master plan.

The journal that has given visibility to Alexie and so many other poets is published in Maine, but it didn’t start out that way.

It is named for its original affiliation with the Wisconsin college where Robin Glauber and Chad Walsh transformed a small magazine into the Beloit Poetry Journal in 1950.

Stocking, who taught at the University of Maine after World War II and later in Europe, arrived in Beloit in 1954. She joined the journal’s board, whose members included her future husband, David Stocking. The couple taught literature at Beloit.

“He did the Americans, I did the British – Byron and Shelley,” she said.

Working on the anthology brought back memories of the journal’s early years for Stocking.

“One of the big surprises as we put together the history is that we think of the ’50s as dull and sort of lobotomized, but the poetry was exploding. It was not the ’60s, but the ’50s that were so experimental and powerful. So many poets were really protesting against complacency and the military industrial complex,” she said.

The ’70s, however, were “far enough away to get World War II poems. It surprised me how long it took,” she said.

One of those poems was John Wheatcroft’s “Night Howl,” about experiences aboard the World War II aircraft carrier, USS Intrepid.

Off Cochin China, swimming armadillos

prowl for merchantmen, fishing boats, junks.

The howl is typhoon wind.

You hear water, gargle of sea and rain,

within the air rush, feel spray,

almost a wave, sting what’s exposed

of your face, cowled in oilskin.

In the ’90s, war poems would move up to Vietnam in pieces such as Henry Hart’s “The Prisoner of Camau.” War was just one of the countless topics that poets covered over the years.

“Looking back, decade by decade,” Stocking commented, “what impresses me most is the diversity of the poems.”

The anthology has a good cross-section of work by Maine poets, strictly on merit, Stocking emphasized. Twenty-eight poems in the book represent 23 authors with Maine connections.

“There’s Baron and Kate,” Stocking said, referring to Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser and his predecessor Kate Barnes. And May Sarton edited an early edition of the journal.

Others include Marianne Boruch, Robert Chute, Robert Creeley, Ted Enslin, Robert Finch, Richard Foerster, Daniel Hoffman, Jane Mead, Nancy Nielsen and Elizabeth Tibbetts.

“We’ve published 85 Maine-connected poets in 50 years,” Stocking said.

Dorianne Laux, who was born in Augusta, offers “Two Pictures of My Sister.”

The pose is stolen from Monroe, struck

in the sun’s floodlight, eyes lowered,

a long stemmed plastic rose between her teeth.

My cast off bathing suit hangs in folds

over her ribs, straps cinched, pinned

at the back of her neck. Barefoot

on the hot cement, knock-kneed, comical

if it weren’t for the graceful

angles of her arms, her flesh soft

against the chipped stucco.

Wormser presents “Cow Symphony,” Barnes “Elizabeth and Sally,” and Shetterly “The Lobsterman’s Death.”

Poems are chosen for the journal four times a year, in a gathering Stocking refers to as a party.

“Every three months we just eat and drink and read poems out loud until we have an issue,” Stocking said. That’s putting it simply.

The process begins when submissions arrive at Stocking’s home.

“I do a cover slip and comment” on each submission, she said, “then I send them to Brian Hubbell in Cherryfield, and he comments, and then to David Sanderson in Lamoine.”

Eventually the board members gather at Stocking’s home – Lee Sharkey from Farmington, where she is the director of women’s studies at the University of Maine campus there; other board members from throughout Maine and other parts of the country.

“We’re all coming from different perspectives, too,” Stocking said. “We argue a lot about the poems. If a poem makes it through those diverse points of view, there’s a pretty good chance of it being a strong, sturdy poem.”

Stocking said the real test of a poem is not how it reads to the eye, but with the voice.

“It’s amazing what reading aloud can do,” she said. “Anybody who has difficulty with contemporary poetry, the first thing you do is read it aloud.”

The gatherings to winnow the pile of poems can be exhausting, said Hubbell, who is himself a poet and novelist, and also works in various facets of construction.

Hubbell has two poems in the anthology, but his work no longer is considered because he is now on the board.

“I was flattered they asked me to join the board. I’ve always admired the magazine,” he said. Choosing poems for publication, he notes, takes a different frame of mind than writing them.

“It will be interesting to see how the poems we like will look in another 20 to 30 years,” he said.

Hubbell said that Stocking, who has edited the journal for most of its half-century, “is really the heart of the whole thing. She sets the whole tone.

“She reads everything that comes in. That’s very unusual for the editor,” he said.

The journal moved to Maine in 1984 when the Stockings retired. David Stocking died shortly thereafter.

The board has since set up a foundation for the journal, which saw its financial health enhanced when the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation made a $50,000 grant.

Stocking hardly sounds retired. She’s also a faculty associate at the College of the Atlantic at Bar Harbor, supervising certain independent study programs.

She also has an article in the March-April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, “Experience Through Language: How An Editor Chooses a Poem.”

The reading and editing of work by hopeful poets remain a part of her regular activities.

“It gets to be like breathing. It’s what you do every day,” she said. And six days a week, there’s that all-important trip to the mailbox.

Always, she thinks of the manuscripts she’ll find there, “Maybe this is the one that will change my life, that will change the way I see the world.”

Subscriptions to the Beloit Poetry Journal – this year including “A Fine Excess” and the next two regular issues, are $18, sent to Beloit Poetry Journal, 24 Berry Cove Road, Lamoine 04605. Extra charge for Canadian and foreign subscriptions. Individual copies of the anthology also may be ordered for $15 plus $2 postage. Subscriptions also may be ordered through the Web site, www.bpj.org.