Portsmouth Halloween Parade 2024: Grand marshal wants swarm of bees to lead procession

Ian Lenahan

Portsmouth Herald

PORTSMOUTH — A swarm of bees will take center stage among the throng of creatures marching through downtown Halloween night, an anticipated blur of black and yellow at the request of the 2024 Portsmouth Halloween Parade grand marshal. 

Mike Nelson, a staple of the city’s poetry scene, will lead the Portsmouth Halloween Parade as this year’s grand marshal, a local honor dating back to the 2003 march through city streets. The parade itself first stepped off in 1995 and has become a regional phenomenon in the years since, drawing thousands of participants and viewers from the sidelines.

A hotel maintenance engineer working in Portsmouth, Nelson is a previous poet laureate and chairperson of the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program and longtime host of “Beat Night,” a monthly poetry open mic event at the Press Room.

Nelson’s first time marching in the Portsmouth Halloween Parade was circa 2005. He hasn’t missed one since. 

“Being asked to be the grand marshal is an incredible honor,” he said. “You get to be at the front. I’ve never gotten to be at the front before. Representing the city of Portsmouth and this community that I love is an awesome feeling. That’s the best part.”

In parades past, Nelson has dressed as a scary clown, but this year, he’s sporting a costume resembling a longtime fascination of his — a bumblebee.

At Nelson’s request, anyone else dressed like a bumblebee during the parade can come march at the front of the line with him, offering a unique perspective among the crowds of costumes.

Bring pots and pans to bang together during the parade, he suggested.

“Bees are significant to me personally. I paint bees. I’ve been fascinated with them for years and years and years. I just love them. I think they’re super cool, and they’re very important,” Nelson added.

“Rain or moonshine,” the grassroots parade will take place Halloween night, according to longtime organizer Monte Bohanan. This year’s edition is the 29th Portsmouth Halloween Parade, though technically occurring in what would have been the event’s 30th anniversary year. However, as the coronavirus pandemic raged on throughout 2020, the parade was canceled that fall, the first and only time it’s been called off in its history.

The annual event is unaffiliated with the city and has been volunteer-run since its inception. The parade is organized each year by a “coven,” a board-adjacent group that pulls all the strings and pulls volunteers into the mix.

Bohanan and Liz Scharf are two members of the board, both of whom are counting down the days until Halloween.

“That spirit of creativity and stick-it-together-with-hot-glue-and-duct-tape sort of spirit of the parade really shines through. That’s one of the things that I love about it,” Bohanan said. “The wonderful thing about it is that anybody can march. That’s (another) one of the things that I love about this parade. You can jump in. You don’t have to pre-register. It’s really about that inclusive spirit. We encourage anybody who wants to march to march.”

“I think the great thing about Halloween is that it’s the one day of the year where you can be whatever you want to be and nobody’s going to judge you for it,” Scharf stated. “In fact, people celebrate it. I think Portsmouth just really gets behind that and comes together as a community to celebrate everyone just expressing themselves in creativity.”

Upwards of 1,000 to 1,500 people tend to march in the parade, according to Bohanan. This year, though weather-dependent, he projects the timing of the parade could result in perhaps 10,000 people watching along the route.

Nelson was named the grand marshal at the 19th annual “(I Gotta) Rock Show” at The Press Room held in early October, a yearly custom as part of the Portsmouth Halloween Parade lore. The evening before the parade, on Oct. 30, Nelson will host “Undead Beat Night” at The Press Room, often the highest-attended Beat Night of the year.

Come one, come all to Undead Beat Night, where participants dress in costume and Halloween attire and read uncensored poetry on-stage with a band keeping the rhythm behind. 

“With Undead Beat Night, it’s such a natural fit, because Beat Night can be kind of wild anyways, so when that parade crew comes and everybody gets their costumes on, it’s just a natural fit. It all ties together very easily,” Nelson said.

The open mic session is one of many fundraisers and benefits held prior to the parade. So far, a karaoke night, an art market and a tattoo flash sale at Grim North Tattoo and Piercing have all been held already to support the parade, with a city farmer’s market pumpkin smash, a Peirce Island “spooky paddle” event and Undead Beat Night coming up next.

This year, for the first time, Portsmouth Halloween Parade merchandise will be available for sale the evening of the event. Off Piste, a Congress Street business, will stay open until 7 p.m. on Halloween with a pop-up shop full of Portsmouth Halloween Parade-themed merchandise, including T-shirts for adults and children, hooded sweatshirts and pint glasses.

The design for this year’s Portsmouth Halloween Parade shirt was created by local artist Leigh Anita.

“I’ve just always loved everything about it,” Scharf said of the parade. “The creativity, the community getting together. I was very excited when they decided to ask me to join them. Walking into downtown, the square, and just seeing everybody screaming and cheering for everyone is fun.”

link to original article

It was a fun two year term on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire! I got to see the inner working of an all-volunteer board that has been meeting since 1964. The board of PSNH puts on a number of events in-person and online, but their biggest contributions to poetry in the state are the vetting of the state poet laureate every five years and the publishing of Touchstone, compilations of community poetry. I had the pleasure of being the editor-in-chief of Issues 65.1 and the Tribute to Charles Simic.

Alexandria Peary is the author of nine books including her new one Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak.

She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa writers workshop at the University of Iowa, a second MFA in poetry from the University of Mass Amherst and a PhD in English composition from the University of New Hampshire.  

Her work has received many awards including a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, Best of NH, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and several Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. 

She specializes in mindful writing and gives frequent talks on the topic including a TED talk on how mindfulness can transform the way you write. 

Her activities as poet laureate include the 2020 North Country Young Writers’ Festival, helping NH writers get published, and facilitating mindful writing workshops for people affected by the opioid crisis. 

She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Under the Madness, a new literary magazine edited by NH teens. 

She is a professor in the English Department at Salem State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing and mindful writing. 

She was born in Dover and lives in my home town of Londonderry New Hampshire

I was honored to work with her on her Submit-A-thon projects and to be published in her Covid Spring anthology of granite state pandemic poems with so many awesome new Hampshire poets.  

To learn more about Alexandria visit her website or her page at NH Sate Council on the arts.

Gina Puorro says on her website, she is a student of magic, love, grief, intimacy, myth and story, ritual arts, and the wild and vast terrain that we call nature and that her writing is inspired by the exploration of good questions, by relating with her human and non-human kin, and by her pursuit of beauty and awe. 

Former NH state laureate Maxine Kumin called Mary Oliver “a guide to the nature world.” I think Gina Puorro is a new and important guide and voice for the natural world and our place in it. in her book The Wild Will Call You Back, she implores us to be, not passively, but profoundly and actively with ourselves and each other and the world in this moment.