PHOTO BY BOB ROCHE
Stephen Iannaccone will receive a plaque recognizing him for his service as Swampscott’s poet laureate for the past year.
SWAMPSCOTT — The Board of Selectmen will honor Stephen Iannaccone, the town’s poet laureate, a week from tonight — with the search for his successor underway.
Iannaccone, a Swampscott resident, who began his year-long gig last May, will receive a plaque recognizing him for his service at the Jan. 20 meeting.
Iannaccone won the right to call himself poet laureate at last May’s Town Meeting, where he read a poem he submitted for the competition called “I Saw a Holy Ghost.”
Although the competition for poet laureate has only been going on two years, the process for selecting one is in place. According to Sami Lawler, a fourth grade teacher at the Stanley Elementary School and the organizer of the competition, original poems are submitted to the town from January to mid-March, and a winner is picked by the end of April and announced at the May meeting. This year’s deadline to submit poems to the main desk of the Swampscott Public Library is March 14.
Iannaccone said he was excited when he found out he had been selected and that the announcement was unexpected.
“I wasn’t obviously thinking that I was going to win the recognition,” Iannaccone said. “I was excited and certainly upbeat when I heard about it.”
Lawlor said the competition has only been going on for two years. The first year saw two winners with an adult, Nancy Hewitt, and a child, Abby Rhoads, chosen. She said there were no submissions from children last year, which she was “shocked by,” so only an adult was chosen. Two poets laureate will be selected this year — one will be a young student poet from kindergarten to Grade 4 and the other will be an adult poet 18 years or older, but no longer a high school student.
Lawler said she got the idea for the competition because she spends a lot of time on Martha’s Vineyard and saw that the island had poets laureate.
“As a teacher, I’m really excited about writing,” Lawler said. “I just want to get the kids excited about it.”
Lawler said she proposed the idea to John Callahan, a member of the Board of Selectmen, who brought it before the board where it was approved. She said for the past two years, the moderator has allowed the poets laureate to read their poems in front of Town Meeting in May. She said reading the poems in front of the town is “such an honor.”
The poems are ranked by judges, with different ones for the adult and child entries.
“The point is to encourage people to be happy with submitting their writing,” Lawler said. “We just want to give people a venue for self-expression.”
Iannaccone said he had already written his poem when the notice came out for the new poet laureate. He said he had been finishing three poems at the time and the one he chose to submit was shorter and fit the length criteria of the competition.
Iannaccone said the “holy ghost” can be a religious reference, but he wanted to take the connotation beyond that and express it as the spirit of creativity and imagination.
“The idea is to show that the spirit is greater than a particular religion or philosophy,” Iannaccone said. “It inhabits the world and you find it in various places.”
Iannaccone said the idea for the poem was sparked because he was interested in trying to explain what creativity and art was about. He said a person can pass by a flower everyday and one day suddenly become conscious of its texture or the way it reflects light in a certain way and creates a shadow.
Iannaccone said his style of poetry is more freeform, rather than structured like a sonnet, and he doesn’t use rhymes. He said he hasn’t had any work published yet, as writing wasn’t his career. He spent 24 years working with people with developmental disabilities and was writing during that period, but said it wasn’t his focus. He did study English and Philosophy at St. John’s Seminary College, a school he said is no longer around.
Now that he is semi-retired, Iannaccone said he’ll be going back to his roots and focusing more on his writing.
“Now that I have more time, I’ve been trying to provide some opportunities to see if I can get published or share my poetry with other people and hopefully get a good response,” Iannaccone said.
Lawler said her vision for the competition is to eventually have a current or future poet laureate eventually take over and run the program. She said she doesn’t foresee always running it.
“I’d be willing to become more involved in developing a more formal concept of the laureate and work with Sami and whoever else would be involved in developing the selection process,” Iannaccone said.
Gayla Cawley can be reached at [email protected].
