Q&A Stuart Kestenbaum ‘poems are like little journeys. a prayer is a jourjney, too.’

Stuart Kestenbaum, director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, has been known to open public addresses with a poem. Typically, the poems are by someone else. But his own poems increasingly have found their way into the hands of poetry readers in the form of “House of Thanksgiving,” a collection published in 2002, and now “Prayers & Run-on Sentences,” which comes out this month. Kestenbaum, a New Jersey native, majored in comparative religions at Hamilton College. He has lived on Deer Isle with his family since 1989, and added a visiting writer series to the craft lineup at Haystack in the 1990s. BDN reporter Alicia Anstead caught up with Kestenbaum, 56, at a fish shack in Blue Hill after he had been to the Memorial Day parade in Stonington. He ordered a bowl of soft-serve vanilla ice cream while discussing religion, prayer, his family, craftsmanship and T.S. Eliot. “This is the first time I’ve ever eaten ice cream and talked about poetry,” he said.

When do you write?

In the winter. In the mornings. Not summer.

The theme of your book is prayer. Are you a religious person?

I’ve always wanted to feel tied to something. Exploring the sacred of the world seems important to me.

How do you define prayer?

It’s not like: God let me hit a home run. It’s about being open. The poems are like little journeys. A prayer is a journey, too. Toward the sacred. But it’s not separate from the world. It’s part of it.

When I read your poems, I didn’t feel they were particularly religious.

Right. I’m used to some liturgy from synagogue or psalms, so there may be a language or cadence. But there’s no religious structure.

Was your family religious?

We were religious enough to know the practices and rituals. But when I go to synagogue, I feel the same way I feel when I go to the Memorial Day parade, that there is something tremendously poignant underneath it.

You write more about your family in this book, and about your brother who died in the World Trade Center. Did you know you would write about him?

I tried to write a poem about playing catch together. I worked it through but it felt like too much.

You didn’t put it in the book.

No, it’s gone. An image might come back again another time.

Does memory chug you along with your poems?

It contributes, fuels the poems.

What part does the natural world of Maine play in your writing?

It’s the underpinning, the underneath, the ground. Also, since I have been at Haystack, I have been seeing people who work with materials. I began to think of world as materials. You don’t have to give up on writing if it’s not going the right way. If you’re a carpenter, you can shim a piece you’re working on. If you’re a writer, you can go back in and build a part.

Do you think you would be writing poetry if you lived in, say, Kansas?

I guess I would. But I like to think there’s a certain team, a Maine team of writers in history, and that feels like part of the soil, which I like. But I’m also a Jersey boy. I like that, too.

Well, Jersey gave us some good poets, too – William Carlos Williams, for one.

That’s right. Walt Whitman lived there. And of course, there’s Bruce Springsteen.