Forty Years on the Poetry Beat
Northern Voices: Forty Years on the Poetry Beat, tells the story of journalist, Mike Pride’s relationships with several poets who lived and worked in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont from the 1970s through the present. Mike transformed the New Hampshire newspaper The Concord Monitor into a prizewinning paragon of regional journalism, mentoring generations of reporters and editors, defying the trope about the dying small-town newspaper and exerting an outsize impact on his profession. He carved out for himself, “The Poetry Beat,” befriending poets including Charles Simic, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Maxine Cumin, Hayden Carruth, Wes McNair, and Sharon Olds. among many others, whom he wrote about with regularity. Sadly Mike died before his “poetry memoir” Northern Voices was published. But in true Mike-style, he completed the manuscript and readied it for press.