Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words — Robert Frost

By Wayne E. Rivet

Staff Writer

Katherine Hagopian Berry first experienced writing poetry when she helped her mother create rhyming cards for her father’s birthday and other holidays.

Her passion to write exploded in college.

“College was transformative for me. I was accepted into a women’s poetry seminar and things cracked open for me stylistically,” the Bridgton writer said. “I began to encounter and create the kind of poems I’m still proud of.”

The pride level reached a new high recently when Berry published her first collection of poems, Mast Year.

As part of The News’ continuing “Worth a Browse” series profiling local writers, Katherine Hagopian Berry talks about her love of writing poetry and how that passion resulted in Mast Year, published by Littoral Books of Portland. Her work has previously appeared in The Café Review and other literary magazines, and in two anthologies, Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women and A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis. Kate was a finalist and showcase performer at the Belfast Poetry Festival.

In Mast Year, Berry takes readers on a journey through a year of creative abundance. Her poems revel in lush language, offering a feast of stories, images, insights and revelations great and small. Award-winning poet Jeri Theriault says of Mast Year, “It is a wise, finely attuned observer who speaks these poems, enticing the reader to enter her compassionate, clear-eyed vision of the natural world of which she (and all of us) are a part.”

Mast Year is the second volume in Littoral Books’ Contemporary Maine Poetry Series. It is illustrated with art work by Judith Allen-Efstathiou and includes an interview with the author conducted by Bowdoin College’s Special Collections Librarian, Marieke Van Der Steenhoven.

BN. How has your writing evolved?

Kate HB. I believe poetry is inextricably tied to place, so when I moved to Maine from North Carolina almost 10 years ago, there was a shock and an absence. It was like I had to learn a new language. I was a young mother struggling to find community and for a long time, I worried that this integral part of my life had vanished. I shouldn’t have doubted. Something was happening, an alchemy was occurring, and my poetry, rooted in something magical and specific to Maine, grew. I started writing again, and when we moved to Bridgton, it was like a spring thaw — poems just started running onto the page in ways that surprised and delighted me.

BN. What was the “inspiration” behind this book?

Kate HB. Fall of 2018 was a magical year for me. After an amazing experience reading at the Belfast Poetry Festival, I gathered my courage and submitted poems to the Balancing Act II Anthology of Maine Women Writers published by Littoral Books. They saw me. By December 2018, I was holding the most beautiful book I had ever seen in my hands. I met the most amazing community of poets. Agnes and Jim Bushell believed in my work and solicited my full manuscript for their Maine Contemporary Poets Series in January of 2019. And if I thought I was writing before, it was nothing to what happened next — I couldn’t stop writing. Poems were hanging off trees and tapping me on the shoulder and coming to me as I drove my kids to school. I basically spent all of 2018-2019 writing and when I gathered all of those poems, I realized that the manuscript I had been molding and refining for the past 20 years had changed shape into something very special. 

BN. Give a brief account of what the book is about.

Kate HB. A “mast year” happens when all the oak trees in a region simultaneously overproduce acorns, which leads to a boom in the squirrel and rodent population, which leads to an explosion of predators. 2018 was a mast year for Maine — you may have remembered there were squirrels everywhere on the roads — and a mast year for me, personally. Mast Year is about that mysterious invitation to abundance; all the poems in the book are ones I either wrote, performed or extensively revised during that year. In a post-pandemic world, I feel the collection has changed shape again, the poems capture that last pause before our current period of rapid change.

BN. What do you think readers will enjoy most reading this book?

Kate HB. Well, there is a lot of Bridgton and Maine in general in Mast Year. One of the first poems is shaped by my experience in a local knitting circle, poems in the collection speak to worshiping at First Church, school field trips with the Boxberry School, Cub Scout Pack 149, walking the Stevens Brook Factory Trail and my own beloved Hio Ridge Road. One of the gifts of poetry is that you don’t need to be in the specific place to have the experience of the poem, but there is a special thrill, I think, in being where a poem describes. We just climbed Mount Battie as a family last week — and while I must have read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence” a million times, something changes when you actually see those “three mountains and a bay.”

BN. What did you enjoy most in writing material for this book?

Kate HB. For me, poetry is always about trying to capture what Virginia Woolf would call “a moment of being” — to express something transformative in language. The joy for me comes in feeling like I captured and held some of that ephemeral wonder and terror that so moves the world.

BN. What were the biggest challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?

Kate HB. As a mother to the most wonderful 11 and seven-year-old on the planet, time is clearly the biggest challenge. Just because I am inspired, doesn’t mean I have the three or four hours to produce a first draft. Revision time is always easier to come by because I can do that in stops and starts. For me, success lies in producing something every week — even if it’s just a draft or a faltering few lines — so carving out those three uninterrupted hours — especially now with homeschooling and social distancing. That said, it’s a vital thing. Showing up for a poem means I have a place to begin.

BN. How have you grown as a writer?

Kate HB. In every way, but most of all, in trust. I don’t want to pretend that writing isn’t mostly hard work. But I am learning every day to trust that sixth sense that tells me there is something worth my attention, worth the time it takes to find the poem in it. I’m lucky enough to have a few brilliant moments when the poem pretty much presents itself, but most of the time it’s a long hard struggle to find the form, shape and language. The more I read and write, the more forms and shapes and ideas I gather, allows me to shape the best container I can for that original spark.

BN. What is next?

Kate HB. I’m delighted to be the featured poet in the Winter issue of Frost Meadow Review. I have a poem I am very proud of in the forthcoming Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest — 26 Maine poets, inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests and issues of social and economic justice; photographs by Nicholas Gervin; edited by Claire Millikin and Agnes Bushell, which will be released on Sept. 25. I am also privileged to be able to interview Lori Harley, the graphic designer for Littoral Books on the Littorally Alive Zoom reading series, Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 7 p.m. I found lockdown and the powerful political and social movements of this year to be deeply inspirational and have almost finished drafting a new manuscript.