A few months back, a colleague of mine at the Maine Community Foundation passed along a clipping from the May 5 issue of Newsweek. It was a “My Turn” column with the vexing title, “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” The subhead added insult to injury: “If you’re like me,” Bruce Wexler, the guest columnist from Chicago, wrote, “untangling symbol and allusion seems as irrelevant now as it did in high school.”

Knowing my passion for poetry, my friend at the foundation wrote at the top of the article, “I think you should respond.” Here’s my response: Josie Sigler, aka The Poetry Goddess, and her Weekly Selection.

Back in 1999, Sigler, then a senior at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, went out for coffee with a scientist friend after presenting her final project, a reading of her poetry. The friend confessed, “I don’t like poetry, I don’t get poetry, but I get your poetry.” Sigler asked her why that was. “Because you are writing about my life,” the friend replied, “not like the poems we read in high school.”

Reflecting on this conversation, Sigler realized she knew a lot of poems that were at once accessible and meaningful. She decided to start e-mailing her friend a poem a day; she soon switched to once a week so as to not overwhelm her audience. Eventually, she invited others to sign up for the service. Her e-mail name at the time fit her newfound role: Poetry Goddess.

In the beginning, Sigler sent out the poems with little commentary. Her introduction to a Robert Bly translation of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, distributed in 1999, was typical: “It’s a good one.” Soon, however, she began writing fuller intros, explaining what made the poem grab her and sometimes relating it to her life. As a result, her Internet poetry circle grew. After about five months, she started receiving e-mails from other people asking to be placed on the list. She added them.

Sigler chose pieces that were difficult and diverse, yet accessible. She jumped from a poem from 14th century Italy to Pablo Neruda to contemporary American poets such as Marge Piercy and Larry Levis. She believes “pretty strongly” that it’s the poet’s job to make the poem understandable. She favors experiments in poetry when you can comprehend them.

The Weekly Selection became more interactive as people responded to pieces they liked or didn’t like. “I became more adept,” the Poetry Goddess recalls, “at choosing poems that meant something to the individuals reading them.” These days, she feels that she is carrying a “full key ring” when it comes to opening doors to poetry.

The list grew geographically, by word of mouth or by other means. While purchasing something on eBay, Sigler began chatting with a woman who wanted to join because of the quotations that appeared at the end of the poet’s e-mail, and which round out each Weekly Selection. Lines from Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Margaret Mead and a host of others (including friends, such as 6-year-old Will Greene) are a special bonus for Sigler’s followers.

“Followers” is no exaggeration: Rosemary Seton, who directs Allied Whale, the marine mammal research center at College of the Atlantic, has held onto every single Weekly Selection since its inception. The list now represents most of the United States and a few foreign countries, with the majority of readers from the New England area.

Today, there are 206 people receiving their weekly fix of wisdom and poetry. Sigler’s introductions have lengthened over time. Many readers told her they wouldn’t request the poems without the preambles. “It goes against the advice we’ve been given as ‘students’ of poetry,” Sigler notes: “You’re never supposed to explain the poem, right? Everyone has to figure it out for themselves.” She is proud to report that there are people “out there” who now use the term “line break” who never did before.

Moving from everyday language and events into a poem as Sigler does turns out to be a great way to broach an understanding with someone who might not otherwise pay attention to something in the lines that can be easily missed. “We like knowing, I think, why something is important to someone else before we’ll make it important to ourselves,” Sigler says.

A recent selection featured W.H. Auden’s classic “Le Musee des Beaux-Arts,” a poem inspired by Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. In her intro, Sigler reminded readers of the Icarus story, but also took several signature tangents, including an account of a confrontation with her father. When she was 7, she related, she challenged him to prove God’s existence. “I was a miniature scientist, pounding my fist against a book on stars, which did not mention God,” she recounted. “He was ready to send me to my room until cobwebs grew over me and God both.”

It is such writing that makes the Weekly Selection so engaging – more engaging in its personal touch than Garrison Keillor’s daily “Writer’s Almanac.” By the way, the Almanac is now available by daily e-mail. It represents another excellent example of people connecting to poetry (take note, columnist from Chicago!).

Sigler came to Bar Harbor from Michigan in 1994 to attend College of the Atlantic. She knew from an early age that she was going to live on a Maine island. “I’m that way,” Sigler explains. “I’m very driven.”

A similar drive marks her writing. Sigler has been a poet since she was 5 years old (brought up Catholic, early on she thought she was writing prayers). At age 12 or so, she started to take time out of her day to write. For the past 10 years, she has devoted at least 16 hours per week to poetry. “I would call myself a writer because I have become highly disciplined about it,” she says.

Sigler has had some wonderful teachers along the way, starting with her grandmother, who had a calligraphy set and encouraged her grandchild to sit and write even before she knew how to. When she became tense or upset about something, her grandmother would suggest, “Why don’t you go write a thing or two down now?” She still uses this suggestion as a personal prompt to start writing.

At COA, Sigler studied with William Carpenter and Karen Waldron, faculty members in literature and writing. Together, they offered guidance both technical and substantive. Going back and forth between them, Sigler inevitably ended up with two different opinions about a particular piece. “I would know everything that the poem was about,” she recalls, “but I would be forced to choose the final form on my own.”

The study and discipline have paid off. In 2000, Sow’s Ear Press nominated Sigler for a Pushcart Prize. The same year, she was a finalist for a Dana Award in poetry. She has given a number of readings on Mount Desert Island. A couple of months ago at a gathering in the Gates Center at COA, she read a special poem for her friend Craig Greene, a professor of botany at the college, who is fighting pancreatic cancer.

Sigler has also been spreading the poetry gospel as a teacher. “My favorite thing is the football player who thinks he hates English,” she notes. “If you make him fall in love with a poem – any poem – it’s such a big achievement.” She has taught English 101 at the University of Maine at Orono and a number of writing seminars and independent studies at COA.

Sigler recently started the six-year Ph.D. program in writing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She plans to branch out a bit in her writing through a fiction class in the fall. She is keeping a phone number and address in Maine – “I’m going to become a summer person,” she says with a laugh.

“Sometimes I feel that poetry is under attack,” Sigler says, when told about the aforementioned Newsweek column. “Poetry has always been the underdog,” she says, and quotes Welch Everman, professor of English at UMO: “Reading is an idiosyncrasy these days, and poetry is the most idiosyncratic.”

“Poets are different because they have to be interested in everything,” Sigler adds. “A poet has to pay attention to a doctor; a doctor doesn’t have to pay attention to a poet, so you sort of have to be squawky loud because otherwise something that is really beautiful could die.” Sigler considers poetry powerful medicine. “I get so many e-mails from people that say, ‘You have no idea how much this selection was exactly what I needed to hear this week. Thank you.'”

Dana Gioia, recently appointed director of the National Endowment for the Arts, might have been thinking of Sigler when he wrote the essay “Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture,” which appears in the 55th anniversary issue of The Hudson Review. “A serious art,” he writes of poetry, “does not need a large audience to prosper, only a lively, diverse, and engaged one.”

My response to that uninformed columnist is pretty straightforward: poetry is alive because Josie Sigler really cares.

Josie Sigler welcomes new readers. She can be reached at wildsojourn@yahoo.com.