Please consider supporting our mission to celebrate local poetry and to put on our annual festival in a time when there are very few operating annual poetry festivals. Nantucket is not just a venue for the arts to visit from the mainland, Nantucket is a community of the arts - and, we daresay, a community of poetry. All Nantucketers are artists - whalers, bakers, fishermen, weavers, historians, writers, sailors, tour guides, construction workers. It is impossible to walk down the streets of this island without understanding the generations of artists that created this community we enjoy today.

 

Without art, we are not Nantucket. 

But how could we understand that without poetry?

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Poetry tells us there is beauty in the mundane. Poetry shows us that we are all making poetry, even if we aren't writing anything. Poetry tells us there is so much more than what is in front of us. The everyday is art. The nail gun is a paintbrush, is a keyboard, is a pencil - just like the fishing rod, the loom, the harpoon. Poetry remembers the whaling ships, the dark oil or blood slick on the deck, the documentary of it all. The feeling of the paper, the rope, the pen, the dough. Poetry says I have always been here. Poetry says don't forget about me. Poetry says but you can only see me if you look.