Richard Craig Sipe can’t remember being bored a day in his life. It’s no wonder the poet loves year-round living on Orr’s Island.
“Long, bleak winters here are good for writing, especially for me,” Sipe said in a recent interview.
Since retiring in 2016 after more than three decades in the shipbuilding industry, Sipe has devoted more time to writing. His second poetry collection, “Here It Comes … and It’s Gone,” was released last month by Atmosphere Press. It follows a collection he completed in 2020, “Lovely Dregs.”
2016 was also the year that Sipe and his wife, Kristin Fletcher, who grew up in Harpswell, renovated and moved into a family home on Orr’s Island.
“It’s a great place for writing and I have a great room for writing,” he says. That room has a view of the water and, across it, the shore of Harpswell Neck.
It’s also a good place to write about change. Sipe says the title poem of “Here It Comes” was more than 12 years old when he pulled it out of a file and chose it for the book. He found that it still rang true.
Both Sipe’s father and his great-grandfather left their families. As the story goes, his great-grandfather disappeared over a hill one day in the 1890s, never returning to his wife and children.
Sipe remembers the day a distant relative told him his absent father was a well-respected doctor in North Carolina and had a family, one that Sipe did not share.
“I know what happened to him,” he remembers her saying. “Would you like to know?”
There’s a photo of his great-grandfather’s tombstone in “Here It Comes,” next to Sipe’s poem “American Trilogy.” He calls it the “centerpiece of the book.”
“Sometimes you need / the other side of a hill in your life,” the poem concludes.
“It makes you want to appreciate things while they’re there,” says Sipe of both the verse and his family’s experience.
That’s something Sipe thinks writing does in general. It’s “something I’ve done since I was a kid,” he says of the craft. “On and off, it’s something I’ve kept up doing.”
When he isn’t writing, Sipe volunteers as the head chef at the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program and serves as poetry editor for the Café Review, a quarterly literary magazine based in Portland.
Although he describes “the temporary nature of all things” as the guiding theme of “Here It Comes … and It’s Gone,” much of its contents are playfully concerned with the everyday. “There’s a lot of quirkiness in the book,” he says.
Take “Cow Game,” for example. Sipe based the poem off a diversion he and his sister made use of on long road trips. Each time they passed a pasture with cows in it (a frequent sight in western Pennsylvania, where Sipe grew up), they would add them to a growing tally. There was one rule the siblings agreed upon: if you pass a cemetery, Sipe says, “you lose all your cows and start again.”
“That kind of brings the lighter side of ‘Here It Comes … and It’s Gone,'” he says.
