The reading takes place Saturday, Oct. 17, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Porter Meeting Room at Skidompha Library, 184 Main St. in Damariscotta. Admission is free, everyone is welcome, and light refreshments will be served.

 

The featured guest is Tom Daley, the American poet and playwright, not the British Olympic diver, although we make no promises that there won't be a few spectacular verbal dives.

 

Daley has taken a wonderfully crooked road to poetry. He has worked as a waiter, prep cook, dishwasher, free-school teacher, and, for more than two decades, as a machinist repairing and retrofitting molds in a factory, where he also practiced what he cheerfully describes as his very bad Spanish with patient Central and Latin American co-workers.

 

Today he leads poetry and creative-prose workshops in the Boston area and online. He is the recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry and the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, and many other publications and anthologies.

 

But a list of literary credentials tells only part of the story. Daley is also a performer with a mischievous theatrical streak. He is the author of the one-man shows "Every Broom and Bridget: Emily Dickinson and Her Irish Servants" and "In His Ecstasy: The Passion of Gerard Manley Hopkins." During one performance of his Dickinson show, he realized an entire row of audience members had stopped watching and were busily checking off poems and letter excerpts in their programs. He resisted informing them that this was not Emily Dickinson Bingo, an impressive feat of self-restraint for someone who says his family put the “pro” in “inappropriate.”

 

As poet-in-residence at the Boston Center for Adult Education, Daley also created poetry-performance galas, including The Poetry Vaudeville Show, proving that poetry need not sit quietly in a chair with its hands folded. Neither, for that matter, do we.

 

Following Daley’s featured reading, the afternoon opens up to local poets and an open mic, with voices including Eleanor Cade Busby, Len Germinara, Daphne Stern, Dr. Sarah Oktay, and others from Maine’s lively poetry community. Audience members are invited to bring a poem of their own to share. And a small warning seems appropriate: Midcoast poets are about as predictable as Maine weather and considerably harder to forecast. A reading may contain tenderness, wicked humor, politics, ravens, grief, joy, sea fog, questionable decisions, or something nobody saw coming.

 

What we can promise is that it will never be boring. Come for Tom Daley. Stay for the open mic. Bring a poem, bring a friend, or simply bring yourself and listen.