Blog- CavanKerry Press

CavanKerry Press on Roe v Wade

July 12, 2022 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

To all in the CavanKerry family,

We at the Press are still reeling from the Supreme Court’s disastrous, regressive, and alarming decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24th. Not only does this decision rob women of a basic human right to bodily autonomy, it sets a dangerous precedent for the Court to take future action against civil liberties and social equity. Further, the criminalization of abortion will have catastrophic health effects on women seeking safe medical procedures involving any facet of their reproductive health, as they will be forced to turn to unsanctioned and unregulated providers for care rather than the safety of professional and personally determined care.

We join in the anguish and grief of women and families across the country in the wake of this ruling. We encourage you to review and share the following resources and opportunities to support women’s health and rights:

In addition, several of our authors are providing grief-processing sessions in the next few weeks, and you can find more information on two of them here:

In this dark time, we at CavanKerry will continue to advocate and fight for equal human rights and a brighter future.

With love,
Joan, Gabe, Dimitri, Dana, Tamara

Reflections on Mental Health Awareness Month, 2022

May 27, 2022 By Gabriel Cleveland Leave a Comment

It’s National Mental Health Awareness Month again. It has been quite some time since 2019, when I wrote my blog entry, “Poetry and Personal Wellness” for the CavanKerry website. With everything that has happened since then, it was truly another lifetime ago.

Now, over two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are living in a prolonged season of loss. This month, we passed the 1 million death threshold, the toll of which will continue to resonate in startling, unforeseeable ways for ages to come. Combine that with a decade of ever-increasingly polarized social and political discourse, and it’s plain that we are experiencing a collective trauma on our psyches, the scope of which hasn’t been experienced for generations. Amidst the ongoing efforts to attend to afflictions of the body and immune system, a woefully insufficient amount of attention and resources is being directed toward Mental Health resources and support. More than ever, a season of kindness and compassion is critically important.

Grief and trauma manifest in a myriad of ways and the experience varies from person to person. Some will turn to anger and try to pass on their pain to anyone who views the world differently from them. Others will struggle to make sense of the whole ordeal and lose their bearings on themselves, their loved ones, and their place in the world. Some will deny the reality of a situation even as it continues to engulf and destroy those around them.

Some will take all that anger, pain, and confusion inward.

It is a heavy, heavy weight that burrows deep to the core. Many of us have sunk deeper and deeper into panic, distress, and/or depression in the past few years, and far too many have not lived to see the other side of it. I’ve personally lost multiple people to suicide and known and cared for others who were brought to the brink. I know there are countless people out there who can say the same.

In a society which continues to stigmatize and underacknowledge mental health issues, it is crucial to know that none of us are alone – not in our terror, not in our pain. Everyone deserves to be able to speak as openly about these inner, invisible worlds and wounds as they would a cut or a broken arm, and those who dare to share their experiences with depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges should be commended, not condemned. Here are a few resources for you or anyone you know who is in pain and might need them:

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
National Alliance on Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264
Mental Health America

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”

Those words from Rainer Maria Rilke, in his collection, Letters to a Young Poet, have stuck with and guided me for the last 15 years since I first read them. Understand that too many of us suffer in silence. Then, make the choice to dedicate some of your time to show those you love that you care for them, that you will listen to them genuinely and without judgment, and that you are willing to sit with them in their pain. The alternative has too great a cost.

Be kind and be well,

~Gabriel Cleveland, Managing Editor

Read Gabriel Cleveland’s Post from 2019

Paola Corso Interviews Tina Kelley

November 13, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Paola Corso, author of The Laundress Catches Her Breath, takes time out of her busy schedule to interview pressmate, Tina Kelley, author of our Fall 2020 release, Rise Wildly.

Corso: Your latest poetry collection with CavanKerry Press, Rise Wildly, is published in a time of sacrifice and loss in our country from Covid-19 and the need for soul-searching, for coping with challenges in our physical world and everyday lives. For preserving community. For healing. Tina, your title is a bold imperative—not just a call to your readers to lift ourselves up, but to lift ourselves up fervidly. Tell us about the origin of Rise Wildly and the impassioned way it speaks to your readers.

Kelley: Thanks so much for your questions! The poem with the title came from a playful misreading of a New York Times headline, “Trains Running after Storms.” I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if trains started chasing storms from west to east? I went a little crazy with it and had fun – I like reading the poem to people because it feels a bit like a carnival.

Corso: There are so many poems in this collection where the speaker elevates daily life through consciousness and reflection. And with such conviction! “Planting, Nearest the Prayer” does just that as it ponders the wonders of nature. Let’s post it here and then have your comments.

Planting, Nearest the Prayer

You, new garden, have all the charms of a seven-month-old-baby.
You sit up and smile, stay where I put you for a few short weeks.
You haven’t confounded me yet. I haven’t fallen behind, failed,
or felt regret. See “verve,” “new ambition.” See “various hopes.”

What tricks will you do? Attract bees, give me edible blue flowers
to freeze in ice cubes, produce blooms for each room and for hanging
from attic rafters, herbs for a summer of dishes, seed heads for finches
in the fall. I’m curious, what will thrive and reseed and naturalize,

which will the squirrels eat, the drought singe, the trees overshade?
With compost from three years of dinners, night crawlers from the bin,
not-yet-severed soaker hose dug in to bathe roots, you may turn marvelous.

I want to sit with you, parse the evening birdsong, feel the spring rinsing,
the possibility of jewels, ever unmined, miles deep under the ocean floor.
My wine, you erase the thump in the gut, turn me capable, full, and desired.

Kelley: I love gardening, especially in that first day or two when everything still looks good. I like making fun of my mediocre gardening talents— – my ability to hoe through a soaker hose the first week, etc. Early spring is such a fertile, beautiful time here in New Jersey, and it’s not hard to be optimistic after the first seedlings go in. I like that feeling of incipience; it brings out my inner Whitman.

Corso: The poem, “Vitamin Awe,” suggests how we might lower our stress levels by spotting “the bad eagle over Route 10,” or being shown “the songwriter playing her guitar’s dreams.” Once-ever moments as you call them. How do you sustain the sense of astonishment and gratitude in your writing that allows the speaker in these poems to rise above her struggles? Is it your Episcopal faith?

Kelley: I saw on the internet— – so it must be true ha ha— – that if you write down five things you’re grateful for every day, you become happier. I keep a journal, so I figured: why not try? I don’t know if it works, but it just seems like good manners to thank the host of this whole party (I mean God) for all the intriguing bits about life on earth, both the good and bad. I used to sustain awe by traveling to new places. Lately I’ve been trying to spend as much time in nature as possible, even if that means listening to leaf blowers and watching the eight-point bucks in my backyard 11 miles from New York City. I also get infusions of awe from music and reading. And gardening. And hearing from, and mishearing, friends and family members. Any source of inspiration in a storm!

Corso: While Rise Wildly is buoyed with rising stars and shiny objects and traveling light, there’s a dark side to the collection. Morbidity is the word I’ve heard you say. For example, “The Fetal Fawn inside the Roadkilled Deer.” Let’s post the poem and then have your comments.

The Fetal Fawn inside the Roadkilled Deer

In the dark alive,
I hear water against land.
I hear undersides of rain.

The giant jolt, the twisted spine.
How long will cold keep sharpening?
I am, but the darkness knows me not.

Grope without hands. Push without goal.
Leaden walls stiffen. Dust settles on sea,
past the barbed-wire finish line.

Her absence is blank presence,
plain, tall mausoleum, benthic.
Our spirits haunt each other—boat

with brown sail, sailor’s stale eye.
Wind sounds like turning in sleep.
I am blown blind, a firework dud.

The tough, fried cornmeal husk on my heart
would melt if I could just stumble and run,
these hours between death and a burial.

The blood color of eyelids facing sun, fading.
Fluid congeals. I declare
myself gone, cold.

Kelley: Well that’s a cheery little number, isn’t it? I wrote it during a spell of writing dark, sad poems, around the time my mother’s health started to decline. The images came from daily life— – I remember going running, and feeling better by the time I got up the hill, and the idea of the melting of the deep-fried outer coating of my heart just popped up. Probably too weird to use, I thought at the time. But I filed it away, and it definitely fit in with the dead baby deer! I don’t know where he or she came from. The line about “her absence” was basically one that got cut from my non-fiction book about homeless young people.

Corso: I’m also thinking of poems that moved me to tears such as “The Brother My Parents Almost Adopted” or “All the Birds Now Silent in the Yard” and the last time your mother sat outside before she died. Tina, how has experiencing loss in your own life informed these poems?

Kelley: I never know what to say when someone says something I wrote made them cry. It makes me happy, on one level, that my writing connected strongly, but it’s also frowned upon to make people cry, on purpose, in polite society! So thanks-and-sorry! Many of these poems were inspired by my mother, who passed away in 2016, and I am also deeply moved by the failing health of our planet, which weighs heavily on me. I find so much solace and inspiration being outdoors. It’s hard for me to stay inside if I have any other option. That obsession, to honor something or someone in decline, drives me and my writing.

Corso: As I read Rise Wildly, I’m reminded where there’s darkness, there’s light. It’s impossible to experience one without the other. I think of a line from the English Romantic poet John Keats: “Glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.”

Kelley: Yes, and that was my main theme in Abloom & Awry, how both the horrible and delightful are awe-inspiring in this life, in that you can’t make this stuff up. I’m always awestruck by the beauty and dastardliness we see in the same scene. A thin layer separates sadness and happiness. During any crying fit I’ll almost always be flitting back and forth between the two.

Corso: Let me shift to another duality:, your writing as both a poet and a journalist. During a recent CKP reading you gave, there was a question about the intersection between the two. You had mentioned how many people you interviewed as a Metro reporter for the New York Times, the odd situations and hobbies you heard about, and how some of what was said became lines in your poems. Can you give an example or two and what struck you about them?

Kelley: Oh I steal shamelessly (and respectfully) from the people I interview and even, occasionally, from posts I see on social media. Being a daily general assignment reporter gave me the chance to talk to so many people I wouldn’t usually have met, and to hear their perspectives and words. Metro assignments led directly to “World Premier, Nocturnal Bird Migration Concert” and “Would You Learn Your Lesson If I Made You Take Your Clothes Off?” Then, “Notes from a Survey of Home Health Aides” came from a book project that alas turned into a magazine article. “Looking at Saint Francis in the Desert, Two Days before War” came right out of disaster/terrorism training we had to take at The New York Times. I know I wrote more accessible poems, with better “ledes” and kickers, thanks to journalism.

Corso: You also said just as your journalism informed your poetry so was your poetry instrumental in you getting a couple of journalism assignments. I’m very eager to hear about those!

Kelley: I think one or two hiring people liked that I was a poet, that I had a quirky voice. I was even the Metro poet in there for a bit. I know they appreciated tight writing, a skill that comes with practicing poetry.

Corso: So this is a book of facts and feeling?

Kelley: Yep. I was amazed by the intense fact-checking that went into the production of the book. CavanKerry Press worked so hard, through the editing, copy editing, and production to treat these poems like gems.

Corso: You are a journalist and a poet. Now I want to bring in another pair—love for your family and community activism. Tell us a little about each and how you balance your personal and social lives. And also with your writing.

Kelley: Family comes first, full stop. But I have a family that is very supportive of my poetry (my husband spent many hours on the kids so I could visit the muse) and also of my mask-making venture, which has kept me sane, or saner than usual, during the pandemic.

Corso: I’m eager to hear about the Sewing Volunteers project. Are you writing new poems about this? Or what now?

Kelley: I help wrangle volunteer mask-makers in South Orange and Maplewood. There are 500 members, and they have collected and cut fabric and elastic, sewn, and figured out optimal recipients for…nearly 40,000 masks we’ve donated to hospitals, food banks, homeless shelters, and other social service agencies. I’ve written about it here. No mask poems yet…though like everyone I have a few pandemic poems.

Corso: Let’s end the interview with the last poem in Rise Wildly, “To Live-The Imperative,” which I want you to know, Tina, is my go-to poem that I read and reread for solace. It takes us back to the title of your collection, what you ask of your readers, and of yourself, I’m sure. What can and must we do together?

To Live: The Imperative

For all we know, though, ours may be the only planet in the universe hosting mind and consciousness. If so, then our decisions and our conduct will determine whether the universe has a long future as a conscious entity or will soon lapse back into unconsciousness.
—Steve Stewart-Smith, Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life

There is a German verb, to separate souls from bodies.

How terrifying, the world without
the two bright lights
in our live, kind eyes.

Instead, a radiant glacier melts to black stone.

Maybe the universe reads all our email,
understands our jokes and work,
and loves our steel drums.

99% of all the species that ever lived are now extinct.

We counter with side curtain airbags,
programs to maintain brain health,
surefire weight loss diets.

A language dies every 14 days.

We bash ourselves upstream,
scraping flesh to find a mate.
Could you live in a world without fish?

What if fireflies stop blinking?

What does the sperm feel when
it wins? I praise the headlong
from love to egg and life.

40% of all humans ever died in their first year.

Each age loses sleep over air raids,
1984, Russia, Cuba, nuclear winter,
climate change, 2012, North Korea.

A quarter of our daughters are depressed or anxious.

The person I loved most in the world
went to solitude. He lives outside
my tenses. By now, you have felt this, too.

This is what hearing a hovering helicopter does to me.

There are stars so far away, their first light
has not yet reached us. We must remain,
the only ones to know and praise them.

Kelley: What we need to do together? Pay attention, praise, take care of each other, but mostly, love.

Tina Kelley's other CavanKerry Press Book

Paola Corso is the author of seven poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Southern Italian immigrant family worked in the steel mills. Her books include newly released Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told The Air Was Not For Breathing, winner of the Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award, and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories, a Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection.

Tina Kelley’s earlier books include Abloom & Awry (CavanKerry Press, 2017); Ardor, which won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition; Precise (Word Poetry, 2013); and The Gospel of Galore (Word Poetry, 2002), winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She coauthored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and reported for The New York Times for a decade, sharing in a staff Pulitzer for 9/11 coverage. Her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Our Fall Collection Is Here!

November 5, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

In Stores Now: Our Last Two Books of the Season!

Get fully swept into the deep contemplation of a speaker’s relationship with her husband in the months leading up his death with Frannie Lindsay’s, The Snow’s Wife while finding humor, passion, love, and empathy in Tina Kelley’s, Rise Wildly.

As with all of our 100+ books, these collections explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life in clear, relatable language.

((((VISIT our SHOP)))

The Snow's Wife

About The Snow's Wife

The Snow’s Wife presents an unflinching examination of the final months of a marriage, ending with a spouse’s death. It explores the daily minutiae of caregiving, the tender and the distasteful, that lend startling poignancy and unbearable hardship— how these challenge even the most steadfast bonds between self and God, dismantling that spiritual partnership and re-creating a new one that seems at first a temporary refuge, but is later revealed to be sturdy and permanent. Lindsay’s poems investigate intimacy on trial in the face of loss.

About Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay’s previous volumes are If Mercy (The Word Works, 2016), Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press, 2014), Mayweed (The Word Works, 2010), Lamb (Perugia, 2006), and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Field, Plume, Salamander, and The Best American Poetry 2014. She was awarded the 2008 Missouri Review Prize. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches poetry workshops specializing in grief and trauma. She is also a classical pianist.

About Rise Wildly

In Rise Wildly, poet and journalist Tina Kelley writes with precision, heart, and humor, with an unabashed love of big words and small children. She has heard and told hundreds of stories, and, like all reporters, aims for the facts and the psychological heft behind them on matters ranging from marriage and child-rearing to caregiving for her mother and her earth. Her mind catches on shiny facts and phrases that she gathers in combinations that can surprise, delight, and inform. Both reverent and irreverent, but always aiming for accuracy and empathy, she explores the darkest corners, then lifts her eyes high.

About Tina Kelley

Tina Kelley’s earlier books include Abloom & Awry (CavanKerry Press, 2017); Ardor, which won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition; Precise (Word Poetry, 2013); and The Gospel of Galore (Word Poetry, 2002), winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She coauthored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and reported for The New York Times for a decade, sharing in a staff Pulitzer for 9/11 coverage. Her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Purchase The Snow’s Wife

Purchase Rise Wildly

Dispatches from 2020: Our Authors Responded

October 23, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, CavanKerry Press created the Dispatches from 2020 online folio. With assistance from our staff and authors, we created an online record of our times in 2020– dealing with an ongoing pandemic, the continuing struggles and protests for social change, and our recollection of our past and present as we imagine new futures.

The following pieces simply highlight the scope of this project and we encourage you to read the entire issue at your leisure.

You Had to Be There

You had to be there to believe it,
the men and women marching,
Black, White, Brown.
“We’ve had enough,” they cry,
pain so deep,
suffering so great.
They shout, “I can’t breathe.”

Police like the army,
each day a glass full of evil,
like the rallies in Irvington
when I was a girl.
Brown shirted men raised
their hands in a Nazi salute
and shouted “Kill the Jews.”

Cops paid off, Newark’s gangsters
turned out and beat up the anti-Semites.
My father led the charge,
his fists like clubs.
My father is gone like the God
who is nowhere.

But why blame Him
for inventing the hatred of love?
After so many words,
will we be swallowed up
in our own darkness?
I hold hope in one eye,
despair in the other.

Selections from: Shelter-in-Place: Forty-Eight Fragments, Episodes, Anecdotes, Fodders, and Vignettes
(First featured in World Literature Today)

(1) On the longest day of the longest year, I did not sleep. I stood as witness with the maximum tilt of the Arctic Circle toward the sun.

(2) I live with my husband in Queens, the storied borough of New York City frequently cited as the most diverse place in one of the most diverse metropolises in the world. But when peeled away, diversity is exposed as disparity. At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, in April 2020, Queens, specifically its western triangle of Corona, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights, was the epicenter of the epicenter.

(read more…)

Grocery Gavotte 5:30 a.m.
At the Senior Citizen hour, Market Basket 3/25/2020

Our carts roll aisle-by-aisle
in stately 4/4 time, no Top 40
Muzak, no youth with their
hip-hop, pop-and-lock.

Just head music as back-up
for creaky morning joints, still
sleepy ears. My cart fresh,
cleaned at the front door,

I foxtrot from dairy
to cereal, from canned soup
to produce, frozen food,
and ice cream; quick-step

past empty shelves for paper
goods and disinfectants.
We all maintain always
the 6-foot dance space

except when that old guy
stops mid aisle, not defiant,
just oblivious—the dancer
without a dance.

The cashier smiles and I realize
I haven’t looked into a face
outside myself in days. She asks
“how are you?” as I do-si-do

with the checker behind me.
I answer “doing well…and
that has a whole new meaning.”
The bagger grins as I waltz

to the car. I travel morning
streets, so empty now. At home
I cue up music—two more
weeks of tango with my shadow.

In the Time of the Virus (excerpt)

In the time of the virus we argued over words like ANXIOUS, which had the mental health professionals experiencing anxiety or anxiety-adjacent. I myself felt something akin to DISTRESSED and DEPRESSED and FEARFUL. I was distressed that I let my anti-anxiety prescription lapse. In the time of the virus we had home haircuts and home manicures and home massages and those of us who had previously outsourced these services now found ourselves with extra income to outsource other things, such as take out, which was left in brown paper on our front stoop after you clicked “contactless” delivery option on the app on the phone.

Those of us who had privilege in the world before the virus seemed to have more so now. Everything became an ethical conundrum, which just exposed how much life before had also been an ethical conundrum only some of us hadn’t paid enough attention. In the time of the virus, I wasn’t doing anything that seemed unique, nor was my experience universal. The “we” I evoked was, as it had always been, an illusion. In this time I broke my tooth and debated for two weeks whether this constituted an emergency; the dentist’s office told me that I could only be seen for an emergency appointment and they could not tell me if it was an emergency without looking at my tooth. This experience of the time of the virus was mine alone.

(read more…)

The Small Door

is the door back into the pandemic

and the room where I am trying to tell the story

of my husband, our house, street, young boarder,

his wife pregnant back in India. How he puts on his mask

and rubber gloves and shops for our food. How he brings

mangos home, and ice cream. He lectures us about

leaving the house and we mostly comply.

Wearing earbuds, he talks with his wife for hours

and hours. We have no children to fret over us,

he frets and we are grateful. His name is Narendra

which means “lord of men”. 53 days in quarantine and

counting. We have planted lettuce, tomatoes, and useful herbs.

The wind has blown our plastic recycling across the yard,

the youngest girl from next door is picking it up,

placing each piece back in the bin; her name is Hope.

CavanKerry is a community-minded press first and foremost, and our hearts are perpetually out to those who are struggling. We believe, fervently, in the power of words to help people through the toughest parts of their lives, and are privileged to have a community of writers who care deeply for the well-being of our fellow citizens. Several of our authors have written “Dispatches” on the state of the nation and the world and it is our hope that their writing will help navigate and offer some companionship to you during these difficult times.

click here or the picture below to read the entire folio

Teresa Carson on Poetry: “Poem-Lunking”

October 15, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

This week’s poem & video:

“When a Roadside Altar Speaks,” poem by Dimitri Reyes

“When a Roadside Altar Speaks,” video poem by Yuval Nitzan & Dimitri Reyes

Are you up for a deep poem exploration? If yes then put on your hardhat with the headlamp on it and get ready to go “poem-lunking” (yep, my newly coined word for close reading).

Today I want to talk about a poem featured in the Dispatches From 2020 folio from CavanKerry’s own Marketing & Communications Director, Dimitri Reyes. Particularly, how his poem, “When a Roadside Altar Speaks” uses indirectness as a rhetorical strategy in which it, as Emily Dickinson once famously wrote, “Tell[s] all the truth but tell[s] it slant.” This can be a very powerful strategy; if used well, it compels a reader to travel into the poem’s deep, possibly dark, spaces. In this case, indirectness allows for a direct and passionate political statement to be made in a way that invites both listening and responding. Remember, good poems want to engage the reader in a two-sided conversation.

This week’s note will be quite free-form because I want to suggest a few ways in which you might approach a poem. It will also be incomplete (i.e. I’ll concentrate on the opening and closing lines) because it would take a much longer note to do a comprehensive analysis of “When a Roadside Altar Speaks” … which means you’ll still have a lot of poem to explore on your own!

Let’s begin with first impressions:

The title, which is the real beginning to any poem, sets up an anthropomorphic situation: an object (or collection of objects in this case) will be speaking as if it were human. Right away, that catches my eye. What is gained by having an object speak? What is lost? I, having lived in NJ for most of my life, know what a “roadside altar” is … but maybe you don’t … which would add another level of mystery to an already mysterious title.
Short lines. While you would think short lines make a poem move faster, the opposite is true because of the little pause that happens between lines. If you honor the lineation of the poem then those pauses must be taken into account.
The lines in the second half are less regularly placed on the page than in the first half. I wonder if the change in form signals an emotional change? Maybe some kind of disintegration happens in the second half?
Lots of space. Space between stanzas also slows down the pace of the poem. In this poem, space between stanzas might also indicate a moment when the speaker is pausing to gather their thoughts.

Here’s the link to the award-winning video poem.
Dimitri does a great job of honoring his own line & stanza breaks.

Now let’s go a bit deeper:

Dimitri, understanding that some images were regionally/ experientially specific, included a handful of notes with his submission to this project, which he allowed us to post here. After you’ve watched the video, reread the poem while taking his notes into consideration.

On my first reading I “got” the overall sense of the poem but that wasn’t enough. The poem called me back; it said, “No, pay closer attention to what I’m saying.” When I did, here’s some of what I heard:

I love how the poem begins with a sound that comes out of the blue. But what is the source of the sound? Given the context of a “roadside altar,” I hear the “pop … pop … pop” as gunshots. But I can’t be certain, can I?
What does the “ – – -“ mean? Not silence but wordless—I first wrote “soundless,” but it does have a sound albeit a non-human one. Seems to be a transition of some kind.
The dots started to connect in my mind: if I go with the idea of “gunshots” then maybe I can take the leap that “- – -“ indicates a person’s heart flatlining, a person in the split-second transition between life and death? Which makes sense because the roadside altar, the substitute (in a sense) for the person takes over speaking in the next stanza.
I love how the altar announces it will speak “fluently” and “in a few words.” A fluent roadside altar. A little tongue-in-cheek? But, maybe, on a more serious note, the altar can speak more “fluently” than the victim? Or more fluently about the overall situation because of its point of view …
Which leads me to the lines about the sneakers. Again because of my NJ background I immediately thought of sneakers thrown over utility wires. Except, remember my earlier question about what is gained by having an altar as speaker? Well, one huge gain is a different point of view. The altar, which sits on the ground, only sees sneakers on the ground. Because children and young adults often wear sneakers, “many feet” = “many young people.” I don’t know why, but these sneakers seem to be running, right?
Oh … and … wait … maybe the gunshot victim is also a young person and, considering other references of place and cultural community sprinkled through the poem, a person of color.

Whew. Exploring the opening eight lines took time but now the full horror of the narrative has been excavated: this roadside altar commemorates the homicide of a young person. The altar seems to be telling a reverse-narrative. Maybe telling us its origin story?

Which leads me to the end of the poem where something quite marvelous happens.

It begins with the line “That it’s okay to sell my Civic.” Huh? Roadside altars don’t own cars. What’s going on here? Remember I said earlier that the “- – -“ was a transitional moment in which the altar took over as the voice for the unknown person in the first two lines? Well, with this line, the altar returns the voice to the victim. Again, thinking in terms of how to get us to listen, it’s a brilliant move. The altar as narrator added a slight distancing which pulled me into the poem … at this moment the altar steps aside and the victim speaks. And oh, though the victim was old enough to own a car, at the moment of death, he sounds so so young.

The final seven lines are devastatingly raw and vulnerable. Honestly, I can’t even transcribe them because they hurt my heart. If I were reading this poem to an audience, then, at this point, my voice would be buried in tears. Not only does this poem get me to listen to another’s experience, it gets me to feel another’s experience. Listening. Empathizing. Couldn’t we use more of them nowadays?

Our poem-lunking expedition is finished for the week but I hope you spend more time with this powerful poem.

As of now, I have no idea what poem-cave we’ll be exploring next time.
Without a doubt some poem or another will grab my arm and say, “Listen to me.”

like what you just read? read the rest of Dispatches from 2020

Supporting CavanKerry Press

October 2, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Recently, our Publisher recorded a video highlighting everything we’ve done thus far in 2020 despite the challenges of COVID-19. She also discusses our responses to other issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement and alludes to what we will be doing going forward.

Like all organizations operating in 2020, we have had moments of struggle and triumph with regard to our programming and publishing schedule, all while figuring out how to continue with limited resources. Public support is vital for our survival. As a 501(c)3, we rely on contributions from people like you to continue producing quality literature while offering thoughtful and necessary community outreach. Please make a donation today; every dollar goes right back into the work we do!

Secure online donations through PayPal. Or send a check to:
CavanKerry Press, 5 Horizon Road, #2403 Fort Lee, NJ 07024

(Click to Share and/or Donate Through Facebook)

Read more of our highlights by visiting the full Publisher’s Note page.

The Birth of a Press Part 7: Snags, Roadblocks, & Near Catastrophies

September 25, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Snags, Roadblocks, & Near Catastrophies

Admittedly, the temptation is there to leave off the Birth of a Press with a summation of our mission and description of our programs. It might seem then that our growth and development proceeded without a hitch, which is far from the truth. Though we have emerged satisfied and quite successful, we certainly have had our snags and roadblocks—even a few mild catastrophes (mild only in the sense that we would not be beaten by them).

Distributors

Probably the most disastrous catastrophe occurred in 2002, when our distributor filed Chapter 11 and took our money and our inventory with them, but let’s back up for a minute. At CavanKerry’s inception, we had been of interest to both Consortium and University Press of New England. But after several meetings, both of them bowed out for fear that we would not be able to pull off what we proposed. I was never anything but completely honest about my lack of publishing experience, and since I had to find a distributor before I actually produced books and could build a track record, they were reluctant to take the chance. At this point, we were close to print with Howard Levy’s book, and we were very concerned about not having a way to get the books out there.

I spoke with a marketing expert who recommended that I contact a publishing consultant she knew who had worked for one of the large publishing houses as the company liaison with their distributors. He had subsequently left the corporate world to start his own consulting business and was available to search out a distributor for us; he found us LPC. They appeared to be an excellent choice because they were known for their interest in poetry, and in fact had represented it at many small press conferences. Soon after we signed on with them, our books were everywhere; sometime later we had a call from the Barnes and Noble corporate offices offering to do a special promotion of Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place in over 600 of their stores during the Christmas season.

But that never panned out; the honeymoon was short-lived. We could not reach the LPC sales representatives by phone, catalogs were not printed, and there were long gaps between payment checks. I was very wary and spoke repeatedly to our expensive consultant/liaison who tried to reassure me that LPC remained strong and healthy. I finally decided to bypass him and wrote to the LPC CEO stating that, as soon as our contract was up (which was a matter of weeks), I wanted to end our relationship. I requested the return of our inventory. I heard nothing. Within a month, we received a letter from the bankruptcy court announcing their dissolution. The next several months were filled with costly communications with lawyers and pleas to the court to release our inventory. During this time, not only did we lose tens of thousands of dollars owed to us in sales, but we had no books to sell, so we couldn’t even find another distributor to represent us. When we finally got our inventory back many months later, we signed on with Small Press Distribution and remained with them for several years.

I learned a great deal from that experience—firstly, that no one, specifically no distributor, would hold all of our inventory ever again; while it had been very seductive to have them house our books, relieving us of the responsibility and expense of storing them ourselves, it cost us dearly. Secondly, I committed to listening more to my own feelings and concerns early on. I had long been uncomfortable with the service we were getting from LPC (almost from the outset), and though I verbalized it to our staff and to our consultant, they cautioned me to be more patient and not jump the gun as I was often known to do. Though they were trying to protect the press and my name as an extension of CavanKerry, in retrospect, I wish I had jumped the gun and gotten out of the gate before our inventory was commandeered. I wonder if there is any such thing as jumping the gun when the business is yours and the buck stops with you? I think not.

A she lion, as are all creators of businesses, I knew intuitively when my baby was threatened, but I held back out of my concern that I not be too precipitous or rash. Rash?! What would have been so terrible?! I had a clause in my contract with LPC that I could also sell our books through SPD and SPD had accepted us. But we didn’t follow through; we didn’t think we needed two distributors. We were all hoping for the millions of sales we would make through our commercial distributor, so we were lulled into believing that things would improve. Alas, this was not the end of our distribution problems.

Though our relationship with Small Press Distribution was a very good one and their staff and service excellent, our book sales did not grow as we had hoped. After two years, it became abundantly clear that the only way to increase sales was with a sales force. SPD did not have one. A book wholesaler rather than a distributor, it relied on print catalogs and internet promotion. CKP already had a very liberal and generous advertising program in place whereby our books were well represented in the literary journals, Poets & Writers, and other trade magazines, but that was not enough. We needed sales people meeting in person with booksellers to draw attention to our books. Once again, our staff thought I should be patient. This time I was not.

In what felt like my endless search for a national distributor, I revisited Consortium but was turned down for the second time—this time because, though we proved we could do a great job of publishing poetry, all of their other presses were publishing poetry as well, and the market was glutted with it. Sales were very poor and they did not welcome another kid on the block. There weren’t enough sales to go around as it was.

In addition to several other national distributors, we also approached University Press of New England once again. They were going through their own growing pains and struggling with reduced sales of their own books and initially did not want to take on another press’ potential troubles. Relentless, I all but hounded them. Several good friends of CavanKerry— among them Syd Lea, Cleopatra Mathis, and Don Sheehan— approached them. We sent them our sales figures, our projections, our catalogs, our ads, our pleas. They finally agreed. From the outset, our sales increased over 150%.

After many successful years with UPNE, we noticed a drop off in 2018 in their marketing efforts and sales results. By summer, they announced that they would shutter operations at the end of the year. By November, they were gone and, yet again, we were set adrift. This time, at least, we had our books – our precious books. Nonetheless, this kicked off several months of hunting and consulting with other presses experiencing the same limbo, before we came to rest with the University of Chicago Press. We are grateful that, with their Chicago Distribution Center offering fulfilment and marketing support, we can return our full attention to the art of bookmaking.

Sean Thomas Dougherty Interviews Kevin Carey

September 4, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Poet Sean Thomas Dougherty took some time out of his busy life to ask Kevin Carey a few questions about his new book of poems, Set in Stone. They met a few years ago at the Mass Poetry Festival where they shared stories about their east coast roots and their love of basketball.

Dougherty: In your new book, as in your previous books, place seems so important; it becomes almost like a character that weaves the other speakers together. I think too, of “The City I Left” and the difference between then and now, of the iconography of Revere. Can you talk a bit about place, about Revere, and all the specific places you mention, making it a kind of travelogue of youth and loss and life, about Boston and the north shore and what it means to you as a poet, and how you find its role, that specificity or need for it in this new book of poems?

Carey: I don’t think it was until years later that I realized how much Revere was in my blood. My history: the characters I met, the jobs I had, the mistakes I made, much of what I learned seemed to trace its way back there. The place, a city for sure, with all that goes with that, but a beachfront community as well, a stone’s throw from Boston, made this place a strange intersection of personalities. I was unaware at the time (growing up there) how many stories I would carry with me. My family was involved in politics and business in Revere for many years, so there was that perspective as well. “The City I Left” is a poem about me leaving, but it’s also about others who left for various reasons, and the changing nature of a lot of urban environments.

From The City I Left

…The city I left

was my mother’s home

until three years ago,

Lancaster Ave at the foot

of the General Edwards Bridge,

the constant rush of traffic

over the green iron grate,

houses packed in between

single car driveways, dogs

barking, seagulls squawking,

sirens around the corner

day and night.

In the city I left, five stops

on the blue line to Boston,

I saw the last of the carnival

pack up its wagons and leave

the three-mile urban beachfront behind.

I saw the crowded barrooms thin

and die along Broadway,

I saw the gangsters

move to the suburbs

to hide out in their ranch houses

and barbecue steaks

and wash their cars

and plant grass over buried bags of cash.

Dougherty: In all your books you return to basketball. You use it for memory sometimes, nostalgia, but also, as in the last line of Set in Stone, the hoop hangs as a sort of emblem of familiarity that makes a stranger’s devastating act of violence not so foreign. This empty hoop the same that hangs in anyone’s drive.

From Another Ending

It’s a scene I can’t get

out of my mind:

a cul-de-sac

a white clapboard house

black top driveway

basketball hoop

some smoke

from a brick chimney

a young father holding

his dying child…

Dougherty: Can you talk a little bit about the relationship, if any, between basketball and poetry? Between teaching creative writing and coaching (7th grade hoops for decades). Did you ever have any of your ex-players in your creative writing classes?

Carey: I remember looking out to the rows of students one time on the first day of class. A freshman girl was sitting mid-row, and I recognized her right away. She was my daughter’s teammate on a YMCA team I coached. I whispered to myself, “couldn’t hit a jump shot, no left hand.” Nineteen years of coaching middle school basketball and a few YMCA teams, you develop an internal Rolodex of players. I learned so much from playing basketball, but the joy of it was the greatest gift. I could still kill three hours in a gym shooting free throws. Coaching at the level I coached at, it was really about getting kids to love and appreciate the game. I think it’s the same with teaching writing, exposing students to the joy of it, giving them some tools to improve, so they have the confidence to tell their own stories.

Dougherty: If you could play any basketball player one on one, or spend an afternoon shooting around with them, who would you choose? If they let you, what poems of yours or anyone’s would you read to them? Why?

Carey: If I could hang with any b-ball player, it would have to be a Celtic, probably Paul Pierce or Kevin Garnett. I always wanted to be a fly on the wall when that 2008 team practiced. I think I would read a poem about Bill Russell which I wrote in my second book, “Jesus Was a Homeboy.” Garnett is a fan of Russell.

Dougherty: The poem “Tobin Bridge.” I find it one of the strongest poems about loss and friendship I have read in a long time. I think of course too of the poem “Icarus” by Jack Gilbert, with its meditation on falling. Can you say more about how you approached writing about such a devastating loss? How long did it take you to write the poem? How did you even begin?

Carey: Of course, it was a shock to all of us when it happened, like any suicide for the people left behind. We were saddened by the loss, but what I couldn’t get out of mind was the act of it. The physical act of her doing what she did. So, the bridge became the starting point for me, the idea of bridges being so frightening to people and in this case to me and my wife because of what it now represented. The bridge was like a gate into this poem (story) and I guess in some ways, it allowed me to move into the tragedy a little removed at first. Eventually the poem gets personal but beginning it with the bridge gave me some distance from something that was still pretty raw when I wrote it.

Dougherty: Can you talk a bit more about the title poem of the book Set in Stone: the implications of death (a gravestone: a metaphor of permanence that pushes against a book so much about losses and leavings.) But the poem is more about the opposite of death? Some knowledge of our children leaving but knowing they will return? Are the poems, “the worthwhile pieces” we attempt to save from the life? Or are the poems something to leave for those we love? Or strangers who might need them?

Carey: That’s a great question. The stones to me are the things we hang onto, yes perhaps the poems, or the memories, or the little pieces of things that get us through. I feel like children take little pieces of us with them as they grow and go away, almost like they’ve chipped away what they need to move on, and we (the parents) are often left feeling like there’s a little less of ourselves present after they go, even if it’s temporary. It’s a little bit of a trap, no? The nostalgia always waiting to creep up on you.

From Set in Stone

I’m trapped between the memory

and the moment,

the deal we make

if we make it this long,

the markers of a life,

the small worthwhile pieces

that rattle around in my pockets

waiting to be set somewhere in stone

Dougherty: So much of your work engages memory (perhaps memories set in stone, then reset?). The older I get, I wonder how much of poetry itself is mostly about memory, or trying to get at something that memory can’t, kind of– emotional memory? How do you reflect (itself perhaps an act of memory) on the role of memory? Or is it the act of remembering in your work?

Carey: For me it usually starts with something I remember, or something I forgot I knew. I start writing about a place or an event and often, I surprise myself with what I remember. Of course, memory is very selective and I’m sure there are folks out there who might question my memory of a certain moment or time. I remember hearing that Bukowski once said to someone who questioned him, “go write your own f***ing book.” I might not go that far if challenged about something, but I do believe we all have a right to our own recollections. This is how I remember it, so this is how it is, in the poem at least.

Memory

It’s like being locked out of the theater

when your favorite movie is playing.

You know the film

you know it’s on the big screen in there

you know the scenes

some of the lines by heart

but you can’t hear the projector purring

you can’t feel the strangers around you

munching popcorn

so you stare into the lobby

past the girl with the glasses in the ticket window

past the sold out sign

past the old man sweeping the floor

and you think I know that guy

and the marquee over your head goes dark

and a slight rain makes you shiver

and you shuffle your feet on the damp sidewalk

and you hope you see someone leaving

after the show so you can ask was it good?

Dougherty: You write across genres and write and produce plays and make documentary films. Do those kinds of writing come from a different place than the poems? Why write the poems? Why not instead just work in novels or on the stage?

Carey: It’s really about storytelling for me, which is why my poems are so narrative. I think sometimes the story wants to be in prose, or in dialogue for the stage, or in the shape of a film. I remember once I tried writing this poem about my father digging his way up from the grave and coming to Christmas dinner. I couldn’t get it to work. Then I wrote it as a short story and it won a couple of awards. Sometimes it’s about experimenting with the idea to see where it fits, how it’s packaged. I like to write in different genres. I have a crime novel Murder in the Marsh coming out soon (how’s that for a plug!) and I’m working on a play and another collection of poetry. Working in different forms allows me to always have something in process. Something to edit. It keeps me busy as a writer.

Dougherty: You came to publishing later in life, Kevin. Can you talk a little about that, and how that affects or influences your sense of being an artist?

Kevin Carey: Yeah, I was a late bloomer. I had to get some things out of my system before I could take writing seriously. I feel lucky to have had some success. Writing (and teaching) can be a lot of work, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’m too old for hoops anymore. I’m most grateful for the people I’ve met through writing, people who have helped me along the way. Folks like yourself, who have inspired me. You got me to write that Julius Irving poem right? Thanks for that.

House Call

For Julius Erving

Smoother than the Orange Julius,

flying over the rim

like a 747 over downtown Philly,

like a crop duster

like a piper cub through the mountains—

was that the Doctor?

The ABA the NBA

short shorts and long socks

an afro swaying in the altitude

maybe a finger roll to save you face

(before it was a thing)

maybe not,

maybe a big swooping dunk

from the mean fast break machine.

You and Bird trying to choke out a win

beating my Celtics with your up and unders

with your foul line J’s

with your smooth rising silk,

and before that

a college kid at a basketball camp,

standing flat-footed under the basket,

rising and dunking two balls at once.

I was sitting under that hoop watching you,

you stayed in the air for a week

before touching down

before answering your house call.

On my bedside radio, Johnny Most called you Julius

but we all knew you were the Doctor,

a shimmy here, a shimmy there

lifting, soaring, extending,

a solo flight in the empty sky.

Other CavanKerry Books By Kevin Carey

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 18 books including Not All Saints, winner of the 2019 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize; Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books 2019) and All You Ask for is Longing: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions 2014). His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. Other awards include the Twin Cities College Association Poet in Residence; and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, sponsored by the US State Department. He now works as a care giver and Med Tech for various disabled populations and lives with the poet Lisa M. Dougherty and their two daughters in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found at seanthomasdoughertypoet.com

Kevin Carey is the Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. He has published four books – a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People (Red Bird Chapbooks) and three books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, which was selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize, and the recently released Set in Stone (2020). Kevin is also a fiction writer, filmmaker and playwright. His new crime novel Murder in the Marsh will be published in the fall by Darkstroke Books. Kevincareywriter.com

ADA Awareness Month Highlights

August 28, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

July 26, 2020 marked 30 years of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination against individuals with disabilities navigating all spaces of life including jobs, transportation, schools, and all other places opened to the general public. As a proud supporter of the Americans with Disabilities Act, CavanKerry Press decided to amplify those voices who live with a disability and/or speak on the subject of disability by highlighting those particular writers in our Words to Keep You Company posts this month.

Please enjoy these excerpts from our authors.

You can learn more about the ADA at https://adata.org/learn-about-ada

"Slow Dance With Broken Shoulder" by Judith Sornberger (From Practicing the World)

Cast and all, we dance our kitchen floor
though my broken wing holds us apart—
like some olden-time bundling board—
folded, as it is, over my heart.
This spring our woods turn young as we turn old,
though new birdsong still catches us off guard
as much as when feet lose their earthly hold.
Still, who’d believe I’d take a fall so hard?
But, love, let’s be voracious as the creatures
after dozing away winter in their lairs
who guzzle all the good from our birdfeeders—
those pesky chipmunks, squirrels and black bears.
Let’s dance with every hungry foe age sends us
until one finally dips us, drops us, ends us.

"The Perfect Knot" by Christopher Bursk (From A Car Stops and a Door Opens)

Last night I uncovered poems
hid so well it took me fifteen years to find them,
a ribbon tied around a packet of blue linen
as if whoever bound those sonnets
wanted whoever unwrapped them
to appreciate that some words ought to deserve more
than ordinary paper. It’s my father’s handwriting. His
rhymes grasp each other so earnestly
it’s hard for me to keep reading.
I long . . . I yearn . . . I crave . . . I burn . . .
You sizzle . . . you spark.
Everything you touch turns bright.
Every day I am away from you is night.
You are my only light. My only dark.
Every noun is a tear, every verb a goodbye,
With each adjective I am preparing to die.
At first I can’t tell if these are suicide notes
or love poems. To whom is my father speaking?
My mother? A mistress?
Someone so beautiful even the adverbs had to be beautiful
too, adjectives chosen
so every letter glides into the next,
every vowel nestles in a consonant’s arms.
Why can’t those we love be only
what we want them to be and perhaps only
what they wished to be?
There are secrets you whisper to your son
when you are dying, but there are other secrets
you wrap in dark purple ribbon
and hide—words too revealing to be published,
too important to throw away,
the kinds of poems old men write.
They know no one’s going to read them
while they are alive
but they write them anyway. And save them.
See, I am writing one now.

"Venon, France" by Joan Seliger Sidney (From Body of Diminishing Motion)

I have come back
to the mountains above Grenoble
where once I jogged along muddy trails,
Jean-Paul’s finger at my back,
prodding me. Where once I walked
from house to house, tasting
Madame Bernard’s vin de noix, Maria’s clafouti.

I have come back
to study yoga with Françoise
and transform my body into light.
To sit in a circle of neighbors, as the sun
sinks into the crevice between two peaks.
To let them carry me
in my chair wherever
stairs block my wheels. Not to walk,
but like Lazarus to rise.

I have come back
to explore Le chemin de guérison intérieure
at l’Arche, in the Abbé de St. Antoine.
To hear Jeannette ask God to heal me
in a chapel sunlight through stained glass, stone
by stone released from five hundred
years of earth. Five times each day, the medieval
clang reminds me to stop
and listen to magpies outshout
one another, to the donkey alone
in tall grass braying.

"At Home" by Joan Cusack Handler (From The Red Canoe: Love in its Making)

I am a fool wrapped in a blue blanket looking for something to say.

Shadows and their awful doubts whisper at the window. My feet—cold. My head—filled with cotton. Alan plays scales on the piano; David plucks Bach; the cat dozes on the couch.

I’m more of an invalid than a wife or mother.

It’s time to return to work, the doctor says. No, Doctor. I know this house: its turns
and conveniences, its willingness to wait. I am safe within its walls, joints and bones.
It offers itself undaunted, as safe map and glove. Like a flexible cast or loving par-
ent, it assumes all care: keeps danger out, asks little of the back, no steps to climb,
no unexpected turns, no cars or brutal collisions, no hideous laughter or pity. Ex-
tending its arms, it invites me to even give up my crutches and walk the hall from
my room to the kitchen or my son’s room alone. Alan brings a chair to the stove
and together we fix meat sauce for supper. Nothing can happen to me here. No,
Doctor. I won’t go outside again until this back can carry me: bearing her share of
my ordinary life: driving David to music or baseball or myself to the office or shop-
ping for groceries or Christmas. But you need not be concerned; I’m not closed in
here. I have windows: eight foot floor to ceiling windows invite other lives. News-
papers and TV tell me all I need to know.

"The Catatonic Speaks" by Phoebe Sparrow Wagner (From We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders)

At first it seemed a good idea not to
move a muscle, to resist without
resistance. I stood still and stiller. Soon
I was the stillest object in that room.
I neither moved nor ate nor spoke.
But I was in there all the time,
I heard every word said,
saw what was done and not done.
Indifferent to making the first move,
I let them arrange my limbs, infuse
IVs, even toilet me like a doll.
Oh, their concern was so touching!
And so unnecessary. As if I needed anything
but the viscosity of air that held me up.
I was sorry when they cured
me, when I had to depart that warm box,
the thick closed-in place of not-caring,
and return to the world. I would
never go back, not now. But
the Butterfly Effect says sometimes
the smallest step leads nowhere,
sometimes to global disaster. I tell you
it is enough to scare a person stiff.

"Watching John's Heart" by Teresa Carson (From Elegy for the Floater)

Park roof level, race back to ER

where John’s hooked up to machines that track

the jagged-but-stable peaks of his heart.

His arm cuff auto-inflates;

red numbers flicker like crazy slots

until 70 & 120 win.

He, ever the scientist, explains:

systolic contracted, diastolic relaxed.

Sublingual vasodilator kicks in

EKG fine, pressure fine, take a deep breath for me . . .

Oncall GP shows chart to specialist:

"Walking Home Late after Practice" by Jack Ridl (From Losing Season)

Walking home late after practice,
Scrub kicks the snow, imagines

each flake a phony word, a lie,
a promise he believed, floating
up off into the air, mixing
in the wind, melting. Scrub

keeps walking, passes
under the streetlight across
from his house, sees the light on
in the kitchen, pauses, looks

back, suddenly starts to dance,
dance under the long deflected pass
of the moon’s light. His feet
slide softly over the layers

of snow, piled and trampled hard
by schoolkids, teachers, people
heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,
the dancer, whirling himself

into the soft night, into the wild
applause of the falling snow.

"Invisible Fence" by Margo Taft Stever (From Cracked Piano)

So many people have moved in.
I don’t know them anymore.
I don’t know their names.
Not even my dreams make sense.

The birds have flown up from the privet.
They don’t know that the door
jams aren’t square, that something
is very wrong in this house.

All my friends have left for the country,
and I alone stand on the sidewalk,
staring into closed suburban windows,
fixating on muffled arguments.

Even my own dog won’t stay. The invisible
fence advisers leave cryptic messages
on my answering machine about restraining him.
They are baffled by his

arrogance, his willingness
to approach the electric wire,
as if nothing at all could shock him.
Someone I have never met

climbs secretly up a ladder
onto the porch of our new addition.
He is purple, a statue
in the most conceptual museum.

Cold water drips from the sink.
Drip rhythm: Two drips.
Two drips. Two drips.
Only the cold water drips.

Voices bubble up in the neighborhood,
human sounds mixed with the bark of dogs,
gas flames of cookouts.
Sometimes I think about nothing

except a few birds and the rain—how they
continue to sing even when it’s raining,
even when the cold raining rain
refuses to stop.

"A Valentine for Miss Van Duyn" by Andrea Carter Brown (From The Disheveled Bed)

Dear Mona Van Duyn (Mrs. Jarvis Thurston),

You probably don’t remember me, but I

have never forgotten the time you confessed

The pain subsides, but the want never goes away

entirely. We were sitting across from each other,

rocking on a white porch under tall sweet gums.

Back then, I had just begun, but you had lived

the whole arc: desire, disappointment, despair.

Your words saved me, I know now, helped me

through grief to the beginnings of acceptance,

humor, cheer. Seated in another garden years

later, for the first time I have the guts to read

those Valentines to the Wide World in which

you chronicle the loss that laid you low and how

writing brought you back. Surrounded by lilacs

almost too old to flower, a single bird circles.

I don’t need binoculars to see it is the rare cross

between Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers:

my first Brewster’s. I don’t know yet what life

will bring, but I believe, because you wrote it

so, our life will be full, if not with children, then

with other riches. For “Late Loving,” especially,

for “A Reading of Rex Stout,” and for “Goya’s

‘Two Old People Eating Soup’,” for “Letters

from a Father,” “The Block,” and for “Caring

for Surfaces,” I thank you from the very bottom

of my mending heart. Yours most sincerely,

Andrea Carter Brown (Mrs. Thomas Drescher)

"Entering the Light" by Elizabeth Hall Hutner (From Life With Sam)

Nobody in New York ever has light.

In every apartment I looked at,

I always asked, “Is there enough sun

to grow anything?” I chose our last place

in Brooklyn because of all the windows,

three in the living room alone,

but we were surrounded by buildings.

The plants I bought at the hardware store

did not all survive.

The first time we went to the hospital,

I bought a basket of African violets.

My mother had had one when I was born.

The last, I found a Swedish ivy plant.

We started your last three months in a room

full of light. As the doctors tried the final

experimental treatments, I put toys

away at night, tucking them on the shelf

in front of the windows just as, at home,

I picked up toys after you went to bed.

I watered the ivy from a paper cup

I brought with your dinner from the Chinese

restaurant down the street.

Our old doctor went to Boston

and the new doctor sent us home

too soon. When we came back the next day,

we had to take a different room

with fewer windows, and they were blocked

by buildings, so the room was dark.

I had left the plant at home, of course.

The doctors tried more treatments while I looked

for a brighter room, and your stepfather

put together a small wooden helicopter

with a solar panel.

By the time I found a sunnier room,

you no longer ate the meals I brought you.

We moved across the hall anyway,

and the blades on the helicopter

spun all day long as you sat in the big, blue chair

or lay in your bed, eyes closed, resting.

While you slept, I read a book about children

who have almost died and have seen the light.

They said it was beautiful, and they said

they did not want to come back.

After you died, I moved to New Jersey

to the house we had planned to live in together.

It had eight windows in the living room

and was so full of the November light!

I hung our plants or set them on the bookshelf.

I put our couch by the windows too,

so I could lie there under your comforter

with its soft cover of clouds and stars,

and watch the blades of the helicopter
spin day after day in the sun.

"Zona Viva" by Peggy Penn (From So Close)

Mexico City Market

Something about the day of the night-before-leaving

teases the yellow smog into a dream light;

I walk in a gaslit dusk, breathless,

through the Zona Viva, to find a souvenir.

Now, almost disappeared beneath the shops

that sell their artifacts, sit soft mounds

of Indian women, working in their office

of children and rags. Whirling children,

tied by invisible strings, are learning

the subtracted gravity of the Zona Viva:

the strings cannot rappel them over the fell

of poverty’s edge. They are hostage tops,

caught in the hands of their holders, blurring

in an exudation of women and myrrh.

Within the flags of paper lace, cut-out fish,

birds and braided dolls, a woman weaves in a strand

from her own shawl, not distinguishing

person from place. Watching me,

she opens her flower hand stirring

the sleeping baby in her skirt: begging,

her dropped petal fingers curl toward me,

arrowhead eyes fly toward me as I reach down

with a coin for her hand. In the gaping yellow night,

I feel my own child’s hand pull me down.

“Am I going to die?” she asks, nearly grown,

I count to twenty.

Paris. An ovarian cyst after midnight

twists her to the floor; she is yours,

and mortal, avoid the hospital.

We lock in two curves, her back against my front,

between my knees, rocking, counting,

our breaths timed with her pain . . .

twenty seconds, and we rest in between . . .

helplessly, I am chanting, “in – be – tween,

. . . there is a small space between the pains

where we rest . . .” wet as seals, our
holds slip,

counting, the small space comes.

we rest in long breaths.

“Ma, am I going to die?“

“Not while we breathe, no one dies . . .

count, it is time to count!“

We count again twenty . . . and the hours slip,

even, now subsiding, you fall to my side.

I pull the sheet down to cover you,

my long lovely daughter, sleep in this bough

of arms and legs, while we wait

for some act of reinstatement,

until the fever breaks,

or the ancients return to the Zona Viva.

The Indian woman’s eyes never leave my face

as I kneel down to her baby.

I buy a painted tin votive,

thanking God for a miracle. Permissibly,

we gaze at each other’s hammock bodies,

listening to the script of origins,

seeing volcanoes overturn or spare the pyramids,

begin the tops or stop their orbital spin.

Inhale, suppose there is spirea in the air,

where the women sit, twilit, watching the day close,

a book held fast in the hand of a sleeper,

where it is written: in this place of accidents,
we are innocent. Inhale.

"Letter to My Nieces on Their Birthdays" by Jack Wiler (From Fun Being Me)

Good day to my favorite nieces.

All joy and luck to two wonderful young women.

This is a note from your uncle.

Your silly and foolish uncle.

You probably have never had anyone write you a poem.

May you have many more.

From young men who love you

and write passionately of your charms.

That will come.

But for now you’ll have to take this as your gift.

I want to tell you about where you came from,

where you are, and where you can go.

You’ve spent your young lives in South Jersey

like your parents, and their parents and like me for a while.

You’re two white girls in a world that is changing.

I’m an old man from a very different world.

When my father was young, he had negro maids

and cooks and a man brought milk each morning

in bright, glass containers.

Milk and cream and chocolate milk,

all fresh and pure and right from the farm.

He had a gardener come and trim the bushes.

He had a cook make everything they ate.

Roasts and turkeys and casseroles,

rich in cheese and meat and milk

When I was young, we ate Thanksgiving Dinner

in the kitchen with the colored folk.

When I grew up, colored people could only

be janitors or porters on the railroad.

Now no one rides a railroad except as a treat.

I remember when I was ten, seeing young negro men

dancing to wild music and wishing I could dance like that.

They were up on a stage, legs all pumping, arms strong and wild

and I wanted to jump up and join them.

But I didn’t

It was South Jersey and you didn’t do that in 1964.

The world spins, girls,

and changes all the time.

You have to be ready to spin and change with it.

You have to jump on the stage with the colored men

and dance with them.

You have to watch how the world spins and grab it

when you can.

It’s easy to do just what the world expects.

When I was young, the world expected

you to hate negroes.

The world expected a black woman would clean your house.

That she would do it for next to nothing.

The world expected that you would grow up and get married

and have a couple of kids and love your children

and you would never have to work.

The world never expected women to work

or negros to have real jobs

or white folks to dance to negro music.

But that music has always been America’s music

and it makes us dance.

The world is a wild dance

and you have to jump in.

The world isn’t South Jersey.

The world isn’t the USA.

The world is a wild mix

of horror and joy.

One day you’ll fall in love.

Your heart will be an untamed beast

and you should never,

never,

tame that beast.

The beast made you.

The beast held you to its heart and said, I love you.

The beast mows your lawn

and cooks your dinner.

The beast watches you ride your bike and is terrified you’ll die.

The beast is your parents and the beast is you.

Don’t be scared.

Get up and dance.

Don’t be afraid of what your friends say.

Don’t worry about your grades.

Don’t be stupid and listen to the voice that says,

what will my friends say?

The moon rises up tonight, wild and huge and it’s asking you to dance.

Reach out and take its hand, my beautiful girls.

Dance across the lawn and feel your feet wet with dew.

And while you’re dancing, think about me,
asleep and dreaming of girls dancing in the dew.

Teresa Carson on Poetry: Attention to Summer

August 21, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

This week’s poems and music:

“August,” by Naila Moreira

“Summertime” sung by Janis Joplin

“Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer,” by Jack Wiler (American, 1951-2009)

“Summer in the City” performed by the Lovin’ Spoonful

“Temporale Estivo/Summer Lightning Storm,” by Federigo Tozzi

Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto No. 2 ‘Summer’ in G Minor

I hope you and your loved ones are safe, healthy, and in good spirits.

This week I’m taking a break from the Iliad in order to pay some attention to summer. Honestly, my internal clock seems to be stuck in mid-March, which is right when the pandemic shifted life into a different temporal dimension. I hardly remember to turn the pages on our usually-filled-with-appointments-and-reminders desk calendar because it has been full of blank days for the past five months.

What made me realize that the season is nearly over? Well, I received Naila Moreira’s, “scraps and oddments,” her recent newsletter in which she shared some poems, including one of her own, and lyrics about summer.

Because I’ll be talking about place-specific soundscapes in these poems, I’ve paired them with music that creates, to my ear, a similar one. Again, I suggest that you read the poems out loud to experience the full force of their sonic effects. (And maybe dance around the room to experience the full force of the music.)

After reading Naila’s poem, “August,” I started thinking about how the soundscapes of summer differ greatly from place to place. For example, in this poem a hush blankets the night world. Listen to how she builds a languid sonic environment with verbs: creep, exhale, rustle, sleep, and drowns. Listen to how the last two lines are a part of the hush and yet apart from it in that they move into a just-as-languid thought. Oddly enough, I feel that the hush, and therefore the poem, continues, maybe “spreads” a better word, into the white space after its final period. Because of the poem’s unhurried pace, I paired it with Joplin’s rendition of “Summertime.” Doesn’t the opening create a similar landscape?

By the way, I highly recommend that you check out her website at http://www.nailamoreira.com, and/or subscribe to her email newsletter, https://tinyletter.com/naila. Her writings are always thought-filled, inspiring, wide-ranging and lyrical.

But in my decades of Hudson County life, summer nights were noisy: car radios blasting out of open windows, loud laughter on stoops, sirens near and far, basketballs thumping on backboards, barking dogs, raised voices spilling from bars. There would be short bursts of silence (not the same as a hush) but pretty much it was noisy until long after midnight. Thus, I’m very familiar with the “loud” soundscape in Jack Wiler’s “Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer.” Jack recreates the ebb and flow of a city street soundscape. Of course, being Jack, he doesn’t stop there: look at the intricate weaving of noise and quiet, of inside and outside, that follows how the speaker’s thoughts shift back and forth between the absence and the presence of his lover. I’ve read this poem dozens of times yet the last line always surprises me, always takes my breath away: “Everything in the world is asking about you.”

...

Whew! Had to take a minute to recover from that line. Anyway, I paired Jack’s poem with the original version of “Summer in the City,” performed by the Lovin’ Spoonful. I can’t think of another song that better recreates the soundscape of a city, especially NYC, in the summer.

I was hard pressed to come up with a poem that fit my current summer soundscape … until I found “Temporale Estivo/Summer Lightning Storm.” You see, here in Sarasota, most July/August afternoons feature thunderstorms. I happen to love the “thuds” and “rumbles” of thunder and the “pelting” rain on our roof and windows. This poem does a great job of building to the moment when “the thunder bursts.” Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto No. 2 ‘Summer’ in G Minor felt like the perfect match for this poem.

The Birth of a Press Part 6: CavanKerry’s Commitment to Community

August 14, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Commitment to Community

Like the soft place in my heart reserved for First Books and LaurelBooks, I have another for our community outreach programs that bring poetry to new audiences. In fact, very early on, when someone asked me for a phrase, (a possible tagline) that would describe CKP, I immediately answered, “a not-for-profit press that serves both art and community.” And that we do. In fact, our community programs are our lifeblood. As I mentioned earlier, I was raised in a community that took care of each other—be it building extensions on one another’s houses, minding the children, or organizing a beach patrol to fix up the beach so the kids could swim in safe, clean water. In addition to my concern for including the general reader in the poetry banquet, it’s natural for me to want to create that same spirit of connectedness and generosity in CKP.

One such program is GiftBooks, which brings fine literature to underserved populations. The idea came from a story I read sometime ago of a man who stood on a corner giving out free poetry books to passersby. This seemed like such a simple way to share poetry with people who might otherwise not be privy to it. Though we don’t quite stand on street corners, we do give liberally; in our 20 years of service we’ve donated nearly 35,000 books to underserved communities in such places as geriatric centers, shelters, hospitals, correctional facilities, schools, and underfunded libraries. Operation “Support Our Troops” and the Widows and Children’s Fund of Police and Firefighters Lost on 9/11, as well as schools and libraries damaged by Katrina are three of our early recipient groups among countless others. Most recently, we’ve donated over 700 books to 15 hospitals to support our frontline healthcare workers during COVID-19. Requests from interested agencies are welcomed.

Another of our outreach programs is Presenting Poetry & Prose, which focuses on bringing literary art to people where they live—into their own homes and meeting places. The original “Presenting Poetry & Prose” was a program I founded and curated at the John Harms Center for the Arts in Englewood, New Jersey. Though the program was desired and highly successful to the writers who participated and the audience we were able to attract, it was unable to sustain itself because we could not maintain an audience. It occurred to me at that time that to ask people to come out of their homes to a theatre to listen to poetry on a weeknight, as nice as it was, would be somewhat unrealistic. People are inundated with time commitments to family, work and rest and have little time (and inclination, I believe) to break away to come to hear poetry being read. In addition, since most poetry and prose readings take place in libraries and bookstores, they tend to be attended only by those who visit these places, which excludes a large percentage of the reading population. As we pointed out earlier in this discussion, it was clear that we needed to bring the poetry to the audience rather than ask them to come to us.

Thus, CavanKerry brings poetry into people’s neighborhoods and community centers through free readings at hospitals, community centers, churches, schools, synagogues, prisons etc. We do this in two ways. First, we accept requests for free readings from the general reading public/specific groups and work with the individual/social director/librarian to arrange these readings in which CK writers read their own work and the work of others, without any cost to the person or organization requesting it. Usually 2-3 CK writers participate in each reading/discussion. In addition, “Presenting Poetry & Prose” is an outgrowth of the GiftBooks program in that populations that receive free books are also offered free readings and workshops. These too are sponsored and organized by CK and conducted by CK poets.

In lieu of in-person appearances during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made our two editions of The Waiting Room Reader free for download on our website and provided weekly excerpts from our books in our “Words to Keep You Company” series, as well as curating and collecting new writing from several of our authors in response to the state of the nation in our “Dispatches from 2020” series. Further, former Associate Publisher Teresa Carson, other guest writers, and I have made consistent new contributions to our blog. Each of these efforts serves to offer a window for our writers to connect with our readers during this time of isolation and desperation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as part of their contractual agreement with CavanKerry, our writers are committed to three free outreach efforts each year while their book is in print; these are over and above any marketing or literary readings/workshops they do. Thus, our writers go out into their own communities and bring their poems and stories to listeners: offering workshops/readings, mentoring younger writers, visiting infirm writers et al. CavanKerry writers then become the spine of our community outreach: they participate in other CK activities as part of a communal or cooperative body. In addition to being excellent writers, each is an excellent teacher and reader. Writers who have published their first book have learned a great deal about the heroic making of poems: they thereby have a great deal to offer students of poetry. Writers are welcome visitors to ailing individuals and members of the writing community in need; they make themselves available to go out to read & conduct workshops to underserved communities in their geographical area.

A Community of Writers

The twin to our community of readers is CKP’s commitment to creating a community of writers as a partial antidote to the isolation and loneliness that we writers often feel. Our goal was to create a community where writers could share their art and the process of making art. Towards that end, we instituted the CKP Writer’s Summit which once occurred annually at my home. The summit included 5 hours of poems, conversation, and good food and touched on topics of interest and concern to the writers and the press. Additionally, CKP or the writers themselves arrange for readings and events in which they can read together and introduce each other’s work; these are joyful occasions when the poets share their work to each other and a broader audience.

CavanKerry writers also participate with CK where we need them—in reading new manuscripts, in recommending others, writing articles for the CKP newsletter, offering workshops, helping with fundraising, and organizing events. Throughout the ongoing quarantine, we have launched virtual programming and readings featuring 12 of our authors in collaboration with multiple institutions, including Caldwell University and the Poetry Society of NY to further connect with our authors during this period where in-person events are not possible. More and more, we resemble that community we set out to create.

Why Publish with CavanKerry Press?

August 7, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 2 Comments

Throughout our 20 years in publishing, CavanKerry Press has always stood true to our dual mission by producing quality books of fine art and servicing the community. Our books are always crafted with a general audience in mind where we are committed to expanding the reach of poetry by publishing works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.

This statement is more important than ever as we are looking to diversify our pool of authors and will be looking for stories like yours more than ever! In CavanKerry’s future we will continue to help foster emerging and established writers alike, with the aim of including more narratives from Trans, Queer, Black, Indigenous, and other Person of Color communities.

So Why Else Should You Publish with CavanKerry Press?

We’ve Published Over 75+ Authors & 100+ Books

Publishing isn’t new to us! We handle your collection from manuscript to book with the utmost care. Once selected, it goes through revisions and editing where appropriate, book design, typesetting, and printing.

We Offer Major Distribution

Aside from our website, our books are also sold through the Chicago Distribution Center which has countless connections with bookstores, libraries, and colleges across the globe. This means your book will be widely distributed and easily available.

We Perpetuate Stewardship & Community

When you sign a book contract with CavanKerry Press, you are also committing to do 3 community outreach events every year for the first 3 years of your book’s release. This can be a free reading, workshop, school visit, and more. This means that within 3 years, all 12 authors we publish per cycle participate in at least 36 public outreach events. This is our way of making sure we give back to the community while expanding our reach.

We Select Books for a Range of Different Reasons

Here are the 5 categories we look to highlight each publishing cycle:

Emerging Voices, works from early or mid-career poets
Notable Voices, works of established poets of merit and distinction
Memoir, memoirs of writers keeping with the theme Lives Brought to Life
LaurelBooks, collections of poetry and prose that explore the many poignant issues associated with confronting serious physical and/or psychological illness
Florenz Eisman Memorial Collection, work from a New Jersey writer in honor of CavanKerry’s first Managing Editor

Our Books Have Garnered Various Distinctions

Here are just some of the awards our authors have received with their CavanKerry books:

AWP Small Press Publisher Award
LA Times Book Award Nomination
Florida Book Award
Tillie Olsen Award
ForeWord Book of the Year Award Finalist
Jackson Poetry Prize
Ruth Stone Poetry Prize Finalist
Oklahoma Book Award Finalist
Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award
Whirling Prize
Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist
Eric Hoffer Legacy Award Finalist

Small-But-Mighty

We operate the entire press with only 5 people and we all work in collaboration with one another. Therefore, upon accepting your manuscript, you can count on getting to know each one of us, from the Founder/ Publisher, Joan Cusack Handler, to Elena Neoh, our Marketing Assistant. You can view our entire team here.

Teresa Carson on Poetry: Direct Responses to COVID 19 (Part 2)

July 31, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

This week’s poems & art:

“Concord Street Hymn,” by Dawn Potter

“Concord Hymn,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (American, 1803-1882)

“Out My Window,” a painting by Leslie Butterfield

“Untitled,” a painting by Jeff Haste

Last week I presented three artists whose current work directly addresses COVID-19 and its many physical, emotional and spiritual effects on our lives and our world. This week I’ll present works that address those issues in a more indirect way, yet are, make no bones about it, as much saturated with COVID-19 as the ones from my COVID-19 Part One post. Over the past three months I’ve had many a conversation with Dawn, Leslie and Jeff about what’s going on so I know how much their hearts and minds are filled with the current state of the world.

Leslie Butterfield and Jeff Haste are not only my friends but also work with me on the ART IN COMMON PLACES program. While “Out My Window” and “Untitled” are both powerful images, I revel in their differences: the bright colors, flowing lines and dreamy quality of “Out My Window” versus the darker palette, straight lines and edginess of “Untitled.” “Out My Window” soothes me, almost rocks me to sleep, while “Untitled” makes me think and want to take action. Isn’t it exciting how two artists have responded to the same moment in time in two very different ways yet both ways are necessary, both are full of truth and humanity?

Leslie, a visual artist, lives in Sarasota. During these dark times, she has found much solace in Nature, especially when she kayaks and sees such wonders of the universe as manatees. Her paintings remind the viewer: Nature continues. When asked how the attached painting connects to COVID-19, she wrote:

“Out My Window” is from my manatee series that has helped keep my spirits up

even when I can’t travel to see my new granddaughter or my children.

Jeff, a painter and book designer, lives in Maine. He’s very plugged into what’s happening politically and culturally so it’s no surprise that his paintings, despite their abstractness, have a “social commentary” feel to them. He wrote about his creative process:

In indirect ways I often think my pieces speak to what’s going on around us without intent or representation. My process is unlike those who have an idea, “I want to look at this or that and incorporate it into my work,” or make pieces about subjects such as endangered species, or whatever. Which is fine. Work may fit into a ‘revisionist’ genre, though I can paint in different ways, the current layering outcomes relate to printmaking.

Usually I take a premise, a recent piece I like for something discovered in its texture and composition, and start to draw anew, wishing I could have something of that technique carry over. It might be stream of consciousness after that, the marks and colors, the layers might go elsewhere, and a series of revisions follows. I have to keep an eye on composition, not wanting to have many forms that might look representational in the layers, it can be a blessing, or a hindrance. The piece speaks to me about what it will become.

This series on how artists are “seeing in a dark time” actually grew out of conversations with poet Dawn Potter. Since March she and I have been having a bi-weekly “poetry call,” during which we discuss the works of a poet. At the time of the conversations we were reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus; we’ve since moved on the Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (I have always been baffled by these much-praised poems but, lucky for me, Dawn has a life-long connection to them!). Anyway, during the early weeks of “shelter at home,” we often turned and re-turned to the question, “What does it mean to be a poet in the midst of this turmoil?”

As Dawn roundly puts it:

So what’s it like to be a poet during this pandemic? Honestly, it feels useless. What do poems matter, compared to baking bread or hanging sheets on the line or standing alone in the sunshine? I’m not being coy here. I’m shocked at how indifferent I’ve become to the public life of an art that I’m devoted to. Of course I’m still writing. But creation feels like enough. I haven’t felt the urge to seek out a platform for this work, and I’ve been wondering if other artists and makers feel a similar shift.

Yet, she continues:

My poet life bears a certain resemblance to my breathing life—which is to say, for me words are like air molecules. I pull them in, I sigh them out, constantly, constantly. When I stop reading and writing, I’ll likely be dead.

First, take a look at how the last line of stanzas 2-4 seems to fall into the next stanza. Take a minute and just read those moves from stanza to stanza. Did your stomach feel a bit queasy? Mine did. And yet, after falling through the air, the end of the line does land on the beginning of the next stanza.

Second, look at the words choices and phrases: unanswerable, meekly, “only information available,” “a needle on the front sidewalk,” scarred, tremble (repeated), maligns, “makes me feel like dirt.” The pattern of somewhat-strong-for-the-situation words/phrases signals the presence of a text beneath the text. Don’t strain to hear the sub-text … let it appear/disappear, as it will. Let the various emotional notes, summoned by the words, appear/disappear, as they will. This is a poem full of nuances.

Third, the repetition of “daffodils.” When I lived in NJ there were years when winter dragged on and on and on … and my winter-worn spirits sank lower and lower … the appearance of daffodils, often breaking through snow, reanimated me. Now that I think about it, daffodils are fragile and resilient; they “tremble,” but “breast the wind.”

Fourth, the inclusion of images of Hope such as: the breeze kicking from the ocean; the daffodils; the thawing earth.

As I sit quietly with the poem, more connections to our COVID-19 reveal themselves: how we seem to be falling through space; our individual/communal vulnerability AND resilience; the strength-giving power of Hope.

Now take a look at “Concord Hymn.”

Why did I include this poem from 183 years ago? Because there is an “intertextual” conversation going on between “Concord Street Hymn” and “Concord Hymn.” Reading the poems together adds another layer of depth to both of them. Did Dawn consciously open this conversation between the two poems? I suspect she did, but don’t know for certain. But I, the reader, bring my history of reading, which happens to include “Concord Hymn,” to the table; therefore I may be initiating the conversation. (You may be initiating other conversations.)

Some things to consider while reading “Concord Street Hymn” in light of “Concord Hymn” (and vice versa):

–Why would the poet open a conversation with “Concord Hymn”? Does this innocent poem about daffodils contain more of a commentary on the times than it appears to?

–The Concord in “Concord Hymn” is a town. In “Concord Street Hymn” Concord has been reduced to a street. What might that difference symbolize in terms of the America of 1837 and the America of now? Are there similarities between then and now?

— What are the differences/similarities between the look of the poems on the page and the sound of them when recited? What are the differences/similarities in your responses to them?

–Look at how Dawn slyly plants pieces of Emerson’s poem in hers—e.g. his “green bank” turns into “half-green bank”; his unfurled flag turns into an unfurling person.

–In a sense these are both “memory” pieces. “Concord Hymn” records the cleaned up version of a cultural memory, the version written long afterwards by someone who didn’t participate in the experience. On the other hand, “Concord Street Hymn” is the “right here, right now” messy account of a communal experience. As such, I think it calls into question the surety of Emerson’s poem.

Open Submissions August 1st- August 31

July 24, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

OUR SUBMISSIONS OPEN AUGUST 1, 2020

YOUR LAST DAY TO SUBMIT IS AUGUST 31, 2020

We will accept submissions for poetry collections, nonfiction essay collections, and memoir. Selected titles will be published by CavanKerry Press and receive national distribution.

Who May Submit?

CavanKerry Press publishes works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.
We are particularly interested in receiving more work from queer, trans, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices.
With our LaurelBooks imprint, CavanKerry is also especially engaged with work from people living with physical and/or mental illness and disability.
Writers who reside in the United States and primarily write in English.

The Reading Fee?

To better meet the financial needs of our fellow writers, we have revised our submission fee to offer a “Pay what you can” structure, with $10, $18, and $25 options.
The sliding scale will in no way impact consideration of your manuscript.
If you need additional financial assistance, please email Gabriel Cleveland, Managing Editor, as we are able to accommodate a limited number of free submissions for writers-in-need on a first-come, first-served basis.

Manuscript Guidelines?

All manuscripts must be a minimum of 50 pages.
Submit your previously unpublished manuscript with a table of contents.
Manuscript should be formatted on a Word document using a standard font (such as Times New Roman or Calibri) and standard margins. Prose entries should be formatted with 1 and 1/2 or double spacing,
All manuscripts will be read anonymously. Please do not include your name on any pages of the manuscript.
Include a cover letter with the following information:
1. title of the manuscript
2. author name
3. address
4. telephone number
5. email address
6. social media handles and website address if applicable

*Submissions without cover letter information will not be read.

Individual poems or essays in a manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, journals, or anthologies. You may include an acknowledgment page at the end, though this will not affect consideration of your manuscript.

Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted. Please notify Gabriel Cleveland, Managing Editor, promptly if a manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

How to Submit?

All submissions should be made through Submittable. The submission fee of $25 also includes a choice of one of CavanKerry’s books from the image below. Book mailings will begin in September.

Other Suggestions?

Before submitting your work to CavanKerry, please explore our website and the work of the authors we have published.
Our full submission guidelines can be found here.

HAPPY WRITING!

Kari O’Driscoll Writes a Love Letter to Gen Z

July 17, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 2 Comments

Dear Gen Z,

This is a letter of acknowledgment and apology. I am in awe of you; your grace and intelligence and perseverance. You have swum in the waters of collective trauma in one way or another nearly every day of your lives and now your country is quite literally on fire. Throughout, you’ve managed to survive, and in many cases, thrive. You were born into a post-Columbine world where near-constant school shootings meant learning to hide under a desk, still your bodies and voices, and barricade classroom doors alongside learning “new math.” You were babies during 9/11, and US troops have been fighting in Afghanistan your entire lives. Most of you have never experienced a month without a school shooting until now, never flown without removing your shoes and jackets, never inhabited a world without political polarization and the hate that it engenders.

Your lives have been shot through with massive changes – the legalization of same-sex marriage, the first Black president of the United States, Brexit, the #MeToo movement – but also with systems that perpetuate inequities and cause harm. You have been expected to learn the vocabulary of social justice, adapt to new technology at the speed of light, and bear witness to burgeoning movements borne of pain and inequity, all while keeping one foot in the world of your parents and their parents because we are the ones who wrote the rules.

My generation wasn’t asked to do service hours to graduate from high school. We played sports seasonally instead of specializing by the time we were 12. We played for fun, not to add a line to our college applications. We spent a few thousand dollars on college instead of the tens of thousands you will spend for a degree, and our K-12 years weren’t peppered with standardized, high-stakes testing. We had our challenges, to be sure, but nothing like what you face at this time in history.

You were young during the financial crash of 2008, and you likely watched your parents freak out, begin to lose faith in the economy, and then continue to tell you to do all the same things so you could have a secure future. We had no right to make the promises we did, if only because we were focused on the wrong things. We were worried about screen time and whether or not we were “helicopter parents,” instead of making the fundamental changes in our social fabric that would help you thrive as young adults. We should have been paying attention to the skyrocketing cost of college and our addiction to fossil fuels and the systemic inequities that made it harder for your peers to finish school, find enough to eat, and continue to live in the neighborhoods their families had inhabited for generations. Instead, we stubbornly adhered to the systems we created or inherited even as we increasingly understood that they were broken, that they didn’t serve everyone.

We gave you streaming, and then called you lazy when you watched hours and hours of your favorite shows in one go. We invented e-cigarettes, let the companies market them to you against the backdrop of what we knew about cigarette marketing in our lifetime and watched in horror as many of you became addicted and some of you died.

You took social media and used it to collaborate, organize, and come together. We applauded you when you spoke out; after the discovery of lead in the water in Flint, after the Parkland shooting, when Trump was elected. We cheered for you, shared your tweets and petitions, and still didn’t vote out the people who chose guns over children, money over clean water and air, corporations over universal healthcare. Many of you aren’t old enough to serve in the military or vote, and you’ve inherited a country in disarray, full of broken promises, and you’re still putting one foot in front of the other and finding ways to support each other. You are showing up at peaceful protests, teaching your parents about anti-racism, finding ways to connect with each other while you’re sequestered at home and barred from your favorite public places.

We told you that if you checked all the boxes – went to school, studied hard, volunteered your time, excelled at a sport or mock trial, got accepted to college – it would be fine. We said that a bachelor’s degree would mean something, and we hoped that it would mean more than tens of thousands of dollars of debt and an entry level job that doesn’t pay a living wage. We told you that the world was your oyster in the face of increasing income inequality and catastrophic climate change. We kept consuming, ordering things from Amazon, buying trucks and SUVs, and turning the other cheek at fracking in our own communities.

I am sorry that we shook our heads sadly as the pressure of standardized tests and year-round club sports weighed on you. We read articles about the alarming increase of anxiety and depression, substance use, and inequities in our school systems and still told you that checking all the boxes would pan out, get you where you needed to go, give you a happy ending. I am sorry that we continued to elect politicians who are not leaders, who don’t represent you and the world you want, and hoped it would all be fine.

And now you are not only experiencing more collective trauma, but you’re doing it without the ability to come together and celebrate your victories. Some of you were set to graduate this year, from college or high school, but you get no culmination, no celebration, no collective acknowledgment of this rite of passage. That summer internship you worked so hard to get may not happen. Prom, and that final soccer game of high school on the team you’ve spent years bonding with exist only in dreams. Instead, you are emerging from stay-home orders to march in the streets, be tear-gassed by police officers, and fight the systems we propped up, systems that are cracking and crumbling and literally killing people.

And yet, all I have to do is open TikTok or YouTube or Instagram to see something amazing you’ve created. You are funny and talented and still moving forward, albeit in a much smaller space. Some of you are organizing “socially distant” soccer games, continuing to run every day, taking classes online and completing assignments. Others are heavily involved in MutualAid efforts, getting food to community members who need it or creating apps to connect people to resources. Many of you are marching in solidarity with Black community members and sharing online resources, and some of you are barely hanging on. I see you, and I honor the losses you must be grieving right now. The resilience you have developed over a lifetime of collective trauma is nothing short of phenomenal and from here forward, I pledge to both listen to you and amplify your voices, letting you lead, and supporting the movements you create in ways that are meaningful and purposeful.

I hope that you find the solidarity and support you need to create a world that allows you to soar. I hope that you all get do-over celebrations and more praise than you can imagine for thriving in the pressure-cooker you grew up in. I hope that you take a moment and recognize that the fact that you’re still here at all is a testament to your passion and strength and ability. You deserve better. You deserve to be celebrated for days on end, and I hope this is just the beginning of the accolades you receive, not for doing any one particular thing, but simply for being, for coming of age in a world, in a culture, that doesn’t always recognize you as fully human, and that piled unimaginable stress atop your shoulders and expected you to do it all. I see you. I’m amazed by you. May you be able to rest one day soon, and be held up by your elders. May you meet with miraculous success, whatever that means to each one of you.

Sincerely,

A Gen X Mom

Read more of O’Driscoll’s writing here.

Paola Corso Interviews Fred Shaw

July 10, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

This interview was conducted on 6/18/20 @ 2:37pm

PAOLA CORSO

Your debut poetry collection about restaurant service workers, Scraping Away, couldn’t be more timely in the midst of COVID-19 lockdown and now the country opening up. How do you think dining out again will impact customers dining out and restaurant workers?

FRED SHAW

I’m heading back to my restaurant gig this weekend with a hopeful yet guarded outlook on the situation. Like many others, I yearn to find a sense of normalcy that dining out seems to convey, as well as being able to make some money. But at the same time, I worry about exposure and further spreading. It also feels like customers may not be ready just yet for all the rules that go along with this new paradigm—wearing masks, social distancing, etc. I like to imagine that the guests that do come to dine will be generous and understanding of this new dynamic that restaurants are adapting to. I just hope it’s all worth it, in the end.

PAOLA CORSO

So many poems in this collection convey in vivid detail the toll working in the food industry takes on one’s physical and mental health. Your opening poem, “Argot” does just that. Let’s post it here.

Argot

In the sweaty restaurant kitchen,

where I’ll learn to cuss in Mexican,

tattooed line cooks talk shit in voices

nicked as the bone-white

monkey bowls we stack and fill.

They call the boss and picky customers

chupacabra, “goat sucker,”

being the inside joke

for every pain in the ass.

Years ago, in a place once a mustard factory,

I was a boy touring Mom’s latest food-prep gig,

a windowless world where the clam chowder

paddled around in vats

deep enough for me to stand,

and I wore a paper hat,

same as the mustached men in bloody aprons

who cut up and kidded while they hacksawed

T-bones from beef sides.

Now, I’m digging twelve-hour grooves

of full trays in spaghetti joints

with family names. I’m keeping ice bins full

and counters clean, wondering, at times,

if the routine has replaced the oxygen

of my dreams with a working life

that takes what it wants, stealing my pen

and handing me

bad math on credit slips.

On her days off,

Mom wants to play Scrabble,

but instead, we talk about our fingers,

how they’ve split into open-flowered nerves,

stinging our bodies to the bulk

of a weary self at the end of the day,

each of us searching

for the phrase that captures what it is

to feel at once,

both capable and small.

PAOLA CORSO

Tell us about your restaurant jobs, the effect they’ve had on your own physical and mental health and how you moved on from this line of work.

FRED SHAW

Restaurant work is a whirlwind, a runaway train on busy nights where all you can do is hold on. The pace can be brutal for hours at a time, and with so many moving parts and other people needing to do their jobs well, there can be moments of error, which turns into further stress and angst. I recall a recent Mother’s Day where I was ashamed of the food we were putting out, on top of long check times and mistakes being made, so much so that I jokingly offered my table to wash their cars, as it felt like there was little else I could do. It was awful and soul-killing. All of this stress adds up and many in the service industry struggle with addiction, medicating with whatever’s available.

There’s also a certain machismo about it all—partying hard and waking up to do it all over again feels like a deserved sense of escapism but it can also be a vicious cycle. I’ve certainly had my moments, but I think having creative outlets and an eye toward the future were saving graces, in my case. But I’ve known my share of folks who’ve gone off the deep end, some no longer with us. Physically, I’ve held up pretty well, trying to eat healthy and exercise, but I’ve suffered my share of cuts, burns, and bruises. Sore legs and back come with the territory, but the life has toughened me up and given me focus in ways I didn’t foresee 30+ years ago when I started.

PAOLA CORSO

That’s amazing you can say that. Good to hear the positive. Can you talk a little about how this collection evolved? Certainly as a service worker yourself, it’s easy to see why you chose the subject matter, but perhaps you could address some of your considerations for setting the tone, point of view, voice, form, and other choices you made in shaping the book.

FRED SHAW

I studied with the poet Jan Beatty at the University of Pittsburgh and I always admired her restaurant poems, the attitude of her speaker and the voice that was knowing and authentic. I had a 5-year break before finishing my undergrad studies and when I returned, I struggled to find a focus for my writing, although I was starting to put the pieces together. In grad school, studying for my MFA at Carlow University, I again struggled mightily to find my footing as I wanted to write narratively but so much came out abstracted and making sense only to me. Studying with the poet Robert Gibb made me a proponent of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, “no ideas, but in things,” which grounded me in the real world and had me focusing on the tangible.

Restaurants should be nothing but a treat for the senses for guests. Being immersed in that world for so long, I took it for granted, but needing to write poems, I found the subject matter an easy reach. After a while, it felt like I had carved out a niche for myself and obsessions can be useful if channeled. It’s difficult to write about food, but setting can play an important part in tone. I also didn’t want the poems to be a list of anecdotes about customer interactions and found my speaker to be knowing but even-handed at his best. I like using first-person, the collective “we,” but also try to remain as objective as possible through imagery, if that makes sense. I’m out to create a scene for my readers that feels authentic, while offering an inside look at a job that millions of people know well, as the service industry has been an economic force for a long time.

PAOLA CORSO

And you’ve done a remarkable job too! If you could pinpoint what meaning you came to discover in exploring food service work through poetry vs. living it– a poetic versus a working-class eye? Doing both at once? Please speak to the phrase in your poem, “Argot,” “a working life/that takes what it wants, stealing my pen/and handing me/bad math on credit slips.”

FRED SHAW

I once told my wife, “Work is an interruption of life,” which I suppose meant that it was merely a means to an end. But as someone who grew up in a working-class environment, I came to realize that our jobs get tied up into our identity and that hard work may be a sucker’s game for some, but in my thinking, it embodies a personality trait that connects you with others who feel similarly. Restaurant work is an exercise in teamwork, and the only servers I’ve ever had a real beef with are those who always looked for shortcuts or would try to “skate” out of doing their share. Those ideas fell into my poetic worldview as I want to celebrate those I’ve toiled with, and to show readers the humanity of those who do the nameless, faceless work of keeping us fed. Chuck Pahlahniuk does this nicely in moments of his novel, Fight Club, especially when his narrator speaks truth to power. Imagine the chaos recently if those who work at the grocery store had decided to behave differently?

As far as that line from “Argot,” it’s a personification of the double-shifts I worked for years that were brutal, leaving me without weekends, that in hindsight may not have been worth it, but when the rent was due, and to work many hours was the only honest way to get it. The line is also a bit of an inside joke as guests will often do the math wrong when signing for a bill and it has led to much consternation among servers and management on how much gratuity was intended.

PAOLA CORSO

Your collection includes poems about your father such as “Iron City Sage” and “What Dad Brought Home.” I’d love to hear more about your family’s working-class background, growing up in Pittsburgh, and getting your college education there. How did this provide a larger context for your personal experience working in the food industry? Connections? Disconnects?

FRED SHAW

My father was a tool and die maker, and very proud of that fact. He grew up in Pittsburgh, and his father was a pipefitter in the mills. I looked up to both of them as exemplars as a child but looking back, they were both aloof and we had trouble connecting. The poems about my Dad were therapeutic after his death at 63, much too young. I think it was my Mom that was a better role model, as she worked all sorts of food type jobs, working in a coffee shop, a chocolate store, cooking solo at a retirement home. She still had balance in her life that wasn’t tied up in just work; she had church and relationships to tend to as well as maintaining a household. Going to school at Pitt was what I always wanted but had to attend Thiel College for a year as I didn’t get accepted. Being in the sticks at a small school gave me confidence and grades that I could succeed at a university and transferred after a year.

I didn’t realize how much the city meant to me until I was visiting a friend in Seattle. We had gone to a ballgame and had many beers and were waiting to get into a place after when a man approached, asking if I was from Pittsburgh as he noticed my Pirates ballcap. I said I was, yet he then referred to it “Shittsburgh” after having studied at CMU, thinking all the locals were dipshits. It’s the closest I’ve come to blows in many years and it surprised the hell out of me. The working-class connection is always there for me as I recall the sadness of being a child during the steel industry’s downturn, still wanting to spit any time I see an image of Ronald Reagan. I also saw myself as part of the bigger picture, realizing that service work was the industry of the future, for better or worse.

PAOLA CORSO

You’re hitting a personal chord with me. As a native Pittsburgher, I’ve lived through the steel industry decline too and will always feel solidarity with our city and its working-class roots. That’s why I’ve taken a real shine to your book, Fred. Can’t thank you enough for being a fellow poet of witness.

I’m always interested in knowing how poets choose a title for their collection. How did you decide on Scraping Away? Let’s post your title poem here.

Scraping Away

Once, when we were new, a plate of seafood

crashed to the kitchen tiles and became the first scallops

some of us had ever tried, scraping away

the broken to save the unscathed,

we chewed briny mouthfuls

of gritty sweet meat swimming

in a sniff of garlic and white wine, thinking

nothing ever tasted so good,

as that moment passed into sounds of clinking silverware

and carrying-on, while Perry Como sang overhead,

imploring us to learn the mambo’s to and fro,

a lesson we’ll soon take to humming

in a heaping world that needs us to believe

we can be oceans, pushing waves

toward a shoreline we can’t see,

the worn down, far-off places of ourselves.

PAOLA CORSO

What metaphorical significance does scraping away food off a plate have beyond the literal action itself?

FRED SHAW

That poem was selected to be a part of the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017 so it felt like it was one of the strongest I had in my manuscript. Also, the act of eating food that’s fallen to the floor strikes me as desperate now but not so much at 16 and hungry. The impetus to write that came from my MFA defense when I mentioned the incident and Jan Beatty remarked that it sounded like a poem needing to be written. The phrase also feels a bit archaeological in the sense of unearthing, bit by bit, the motivations and cost of doing this job, which until March, paid me better than teaching 30 college credits a year. What is the cost we pay for our labor? Marge Piercy touches on it in a more politicized way in her poem “Market Economy.” The PA Center for the Book turned that poem into 1,000 posters and I gave away every one of them, so it’s gotten some mileage. It’s also one of the first things I see in the morning as it’s hanging on my wall.

PAOLA CORSO

Have your friends and former co-workers in the food industry seen and read your book? What are some reactions?

FRED SHAW

Reactions have been positive although some poems hit close to home for some—it’s tricky to include others in your work, especially if they disagree with their portrayal. As Joan Didion says, “writers work with what’s at hand.” For some, my work is the sum total of what they read, so I’m glad it remains accessible to a wide range of readers, which is my intention. Maybe it will get some others interested in other poetry but I’m just happy that folks can see themselves in the work and feel it’s honestly written.

PAOLA CORSO

Tell us about your current writing projects. Are you shifting from a working-class world to academia since you now teach writing and literature to college students?

FRED SHAW

I’ve been more interested in the personal essay and other creative nonfiction writing, which I think relates to my narrative style. Unfortunately, due to economic factors my critical writing of local writers has been mostly put on hold. There’s only 2 of us who write about local poetry in Pittsburgh these days, which is a shame. I don’t see my focus of writing about the service industry, family and music going away any time soon as I still have much to explore. Restaurant work is all about the relationships needed to make things run smoothly, and to attend to the humanity behind each person I work with, some more than others. I like having people in my poems and restaurants are nothing without people.

I don’t have many relationships, let alone close ones, with my colleagues at the two schools where I teach. Being an adjunct means never having a real place on campus to call home, and unintentionally I suspect, makes me feel a bit like a second-class citizen. Aside from the classroom, which I love, teaching feels solitary, even though there’s plenty of support offered. It’s the students who I like to make connections with, but usually those fall by the wayside once a new semester begins. The classroom has been a place to test out my ideas on writing and the students who dive in with both feet do some writing I’m very impressed with and keeps me coming back for more. I like the role of teaching in my life but it doesn’t feed me creatively.

PAOLA CORSO

How has your restaurant work informed your approach to teaching college students?

FRED SHAW

Everything I’ve learned about the act of teaching comes back to the training I received as a server at TGI Fridays or how I’ve handled tricky situations with tables or management. As new servers, we trained for weeks with a focus on guest satisfaction and paying attention to details. I try to make sure each of my students leaves the classroom as happy as I can make them. Teaching online for the last part of the Spring semester left me with a feeling of malaise. My role as a teacher is to be a manager of experiences, and I’ve found that sharing some of myself allows me to be vulnerable, breaking down the metaphorical wall between us and allows us to connect better. I get lots of good evaluations and some great pieces of writing so something must be working.

PAOLA CORSO

I should say so! Thanks for sharing your wisdom and insights, Fred. Your poetry shines a light on the human condition and you do so with compassion and dignity. Let’s close the interview with the last poem in your collection, “The Communicants.”

The Communicants

Here, Tuesday stumbling

toward midnight, we’re stuck

with that lone couple lingering

over a last swallow of Pinot,

their plates cleared, water glasses

emptied, check unsettled.

They don’t care

that the closing cook has swept

and mopped his now-dark kitchen

where the dish machine cools

among bottles of bleach,

or that last call was given long ago.

Instead, they lean in and whisper

while we sip water

and try not to stare, soaking up

the flicker of a muted TV,

feeling forgotten

like those doggie bags we pack

that get left behind. And if work

can be worship, it finds us

supplicant and waiting

for the chirp of chairs pushing

back from their table, followed

by heels clicking on hardwood,

a recessional marking

the end of service, the front door

closing like a prayer,

quiet on its hinges.

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Teresa Carson on Poetry: Direct Responses to COVID 19 (Part 1)

July 2, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

This week’s poems:

“Hope” and “Slumber” by Danny Shot

Art by Zerbe Sodervick

Art by Brian Riley

I hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe.

A major part of any artist’s “ordinary life” is spent making art. While the social/political/cultural environment of any given moment in time certainly has an effect on everyone’s art, some artists respond directly to those forces and some don’t. What do I mean by that statement? Well, various artists and friends are responding to COVID-19, giving me the perfect opportunity over my next two posts to illustrate the difference. What’s more exciting is that two of the artists will tell us what sparked their works.

It takes me a long time (often years) to process experiences in a way that allows for them to transform into poems. So, I’m a little in awe of artists who can incorporate big societal experiences—e.g. 9/11; COVID-19—into their work right away and make powerful pieces. Danny Shot, Zerbe Sodervick and Brian Riley have all done that in their art that responds to the ongoing pandemic.

Poet Danny Shot’s Responses to COVID-19

Poet and community activist Danny Shot lives in Hoboken, which is across the river from Manhattan. Like all of NY, NJ and CT, Hoboken was under a strictly enforced lockdown for many weeks. During those lockdown weeks Shot, who is always (at least it seems so to usually-at-home me) out and about, wrote two powerful poems. “Hope,” which addresses communal experiences of the pandemic, and “Slumber,” a poem addressing those experiences on a personal level.

“Hope” is a Whitmanesque look at the COVID-19 world. Pay attention to how Shot juxtaposes various types of details from a lament for the loss of a certain New York to “…Larry Kelly fighting, fighting, fighting/for breath…” to “the sirens passing by the front of our house” to a woman“shouting at passersby/ ‘wear a mask, don’t be an asshole’” to the plight of his friends who are teachers, Shot covers much ground in his writing. He also throws in a bit of sly humor: “I’ve caught up on/reading back issues of the New Yorker and know/as much about Bolivian politics and Fiona Apple’s/mental state as I’ll ever need to know.” Each detail carries a unique emotional tone; together they create an emotional symphony out of our experiences as a community. And isn’t the poem, above all else, a cri de coeur about the importance of community to our survival?

Visual Artist Brian Riley’s Response to COVID-19

When I asked my friend Brian Riley, a visual artist based in NJ, to send a painting directly related to COVID-19, he sent the attached image with a cryptic message about it being “COVID deep energy work.” When pressed for an explanation of that phrase he wrote:

“When COVID hit and closed my healing practice and wellness center over one week, it was a huge blow. I think I was in shock. I made nothing for two weeks then I found myself in the studio. I started making paintings of familiar shapes, things I had been making for years. I showed a painting to a friend who said, ‘Looks like a trumpet.’ Then I saw an Instagram post of a man playing taps on a trumpet. The idea of trumpets playing sad songs got stuck in my head. I repeated it over and over. Then I started drawing and the trumpet morphed into a flower shape. I had some old paint in very hospital gown colors and I started painting flowers for all the people who were dying. The COVID flower series was started.”

Visual Artist Zerbe Sodervick’s Response to COVID-19

Zerbe Sodervick, a visual artist based in Sarasota, made a work of art out of the front door of her apartment for a building-wide contest. While it was not selected, Zerbe mentioned,

“I was glad to just use my door as a platform regarding creative time/art-making in this between-space in our lives. Liminal Time — when we experience space in our lives … these betwixt and between days … no longer where we were and where we journey. What a significant gift (pause) to creative work, art-makers and innovative thinkers.

Sheryl Fullerton, from the Center for Action and Contemplation, commented in a daily meditation: ‘What if we can choose to experience this Liminal space and time, this uncomfortable now, as a place of creativity, as a place of construction and deconstruction, choice and transformation?’

A door makes a mega-sized invitation for people to stop in, see my new series and to share conversation.”

At the end of the month, we’ll be taking a look at some artists, including me, whose current work responds to COVID-19 in more indirect ways.

The Birth of a Press Part 5: CavanKerry’s Commitment to the Art of Fine Literature

June 24, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Literary Art

Not surprisingly, the publishing of First Books/ New Voices has always been at the forefront of CavanKerry’s concerns. New, talented writers are abundant, yet the doors remain mostly shut to them! We decided to focus on this very worthy group with the hope that more publishers would join us in the cause; perhaps, others would start presses as well! This concern included a commitment to an embargo on competitions and reading fees. In their emphasis on winners and losers, competitions seem to subliminally pit writers against one another and exacerbate the envy and insecurity that often already exists. While fiction writers and poets of considerable reputation are often free from the burden of contest entries and reading fees, unpublished poets as well as those with short publishing histories face prohibitive and costly expenses just for the chance to get noticed. This breeds resentment and can be fatal to prospects of brilliant-yet- unpublished works of fine literature. We reasoned that these works deserved the same rights to be seen and read by all.

As a result, we made a commitment to publish 2-3 First Books/New Voices every year; manuscripts would come from open submissions and recommendations as well as from the considerable array of worthy poets I already knew. Due to the fact that publishing (like so many other industries/arts) seems to venerate the young, particular notice is given to older poets. That said, no generation has been neglected—our writers range in age from late twenties to early eighties.

Of the 100+ books we have published, we can proudly say that many of our writers have gone onto flourishing careers. Beginning in September of 2000 with our own first book, A Day this Lit by Howard Levy, we have since published reputable names, such as Karen Chase, Peggy Penn, Sherry Fairchok, Sondra Gash, Liz Hutner, Christopher Matthews, Eloise Bruce, Celia Bland, Catherine Doty, Giorgianna Orsini, Joan Seliger Sidney, Laurie Lamon, Chris Barter, Andrea Carter Brown, Robert Seder, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Ross Gay, Joseph Legaspi, Christine Korfhage and Teresa Carson just to name a few.

On the other side of the publishing spectrum, out-of-print books also concerned us. The plethora of exquisite work allowed to go out-of-print due to slow/limited sales is staggering. We added these to our list and committed ourselves to publishing reprints of fine books that we believe deserve permanence while doing all we could to not allow any of our own books from going out of print. Martin Mooney’s Grub was our first reprint. I was drawn to him first as a gifted writer and that interest deepened once I heard that his publisher had ‘pulped’ the 600 copies of Grub that remained in storage without informing Martin. Nor did they invite him to purchase or simply remove them. Worst of all, he discovered the fate of his books when he contacted his publisher and was unable to purchase books for a reading. Grub along with Moyra Donaldson’s Snakeskin Stilettos were our first reprints.

CavanKerry’s interest in writers who are “under-recognized” or “rejected by the literary mainstream” came to include a scope broader than merely poets who were previously unpublished. Many seasoned, mid-career poets are forced to solicit a new publisher for each new book. CavanKerry has provided a home for many of these Notable Voices, including Robert Cording, Mary Ruefle, Kenneth Rosen, Jack Wiler, Karen Chase, Baron Wormser, Sam Cornish and more.

Another interest of ours are intelligent, insightful works that focus on the creative process and the making of art; these are CK Critical Collections. Our Carolyn Kizer (introduction by Maxine Kumin) and John Haines (introduction by Dana Gioia) books collect the essays and poems of reputable poets and essayists across the country who have studied the works of these two brilliant writers and write in depth about it.

Our initial aesthetic commitment goes hand-in hand with our community focus which revolves around our interest in special projects. CavanKerry has published two collections to benefit another arts organization. The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, Volumes 1 and 2 were published to honor the great work of The Robert Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, New Hampshire under the protective mantle of former executive director, Donald Sheehan, where many notable and fledgling artists, including myself, have made and shared poems.

LaurelBooks

But we were not finished. Like any excited home or business builder we kept finding new rooms to add to our structure. During our second season, we found yet another category of book that we wanted to support: specifically, those that dealt openly and honestly with the profound psychological, emotional, and physical issues connected to illness. This came to us in the form of Life with Sam by Elizabeth Hutner, a book sent to us by Molly Peacock which recounted the deeply moving story in poems and photos of a woman who lost her 5 year old son to leukemia.

Having spent most of my adult life with serious (though not life threatening) orthopedic problems (two spinal fusions and one ankle fusion, among several other surgeries), I struggled as a writer with a need to confront the effects of these in my writing and a need to escape them. When I suffered a very serious fall that resulted in a trimalleolar fracture of my left ankle, I avoided the pain in my writing until Molly insisted I confront it. I balked. I didn’t want to appear self-pitying, nor did I want to write about what I was convinced no one wanted to hear. Yet, as a psychologist, I knew how important it was that I do so.

So much work about illness, including my own, seemed to tackle the problems either glibly or stoically; all seemed to avoid the emotional pain that, by necessity, accompanies serious illness. This is important and powerful work and very necessary for writers and readers alike. Readers need poems to help them live with and through their illnesses. Poems name things for us. Sometimes they name what we feel—what we cannot express on our own. They tell us that we are not alone. The incredibly courageous story of Sam brought to mind the whole array of important works that are a necessity to read for the families, caregivers, physicians, and those living with their illnesses. I wanted CavanKerry to claim this work as a major part of our mission. We approached the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for the Advancement of Humanism in Medicine requesting that they partner with us in CavanKerry’s imprint, LaurelBooks, The Literature of Illness and Disability. The name stems from my mad love affair with trees and a line from one of my poems:

Have you noticed

how the laurel dips down

crawls along the ground

to find the sun

like any life or body

that’s known love?

The Gold Foundation agreed and with them we have brought Life with Sam, in the form of both books and readings/discussions, to medical communities across the country.

Our second LaurelBook, Body of Diminishing Motion, by Joan Seliger Sidney, tells the story in poems and a memoir of a woman who has battled with Multiple Sclerosis for over 40 years. Body of Diminishing Motion was also distributed and read to the medical community as well as to a general readership. The third, fourth, and fifth LaurelBooks also deserve notice: Robert Seders’ To the Marrow is a memoir written by a man who underwent a bone marrow transplant for lymphoma; Mark Nepo’s Surviving Has Made Me Crazy is yet another powerful story in poems and memoir of a man who survived lymphoma; and Teresa Caron’s, Elegy for the Floater recounts in poems the life of an extremely dysfunctional family that focuses on the youngest sibling who committed suicide. Our 2009 LaurelBook, We Mad Climb Steep Ladders by Pam Wagner, tells the story in poems of a woman’s inevitable plunge into the madness of schizophrenia and her eventual but very slow return to a tempered sanity.

Since then, as of January 2020, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing LaurelBooks like Little Boy Blue (Grey Jacobik— a mother and her emotionally challenged son), Letters from a Distant Shore (Marie Lawson Fiala— a mother whose son suffers a cerebral hemorrhage), Motherhood Exaggerated (Judith Hannan— a mother’s story of a daughter’s Ewing’s Sarcoma), My Crooked House (Teresa Carson— experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder), Sweet World (Maureen Seaton— a woman’s recreation of life as a survivor of Breast Cancer), Cracked Piano (Margo Taft Stever— recalling a life through letters of a relative who was a victim of psychiatric incarceration in the 19th century), and The Body at a Loss (Cati Porter— a woman’s articulation of the complexities regarding diagnosis, treatment, and recovery of Cancer). LaurelBook readings have taken place at Columbia University’s Medical Schools, UMDNJ, cancer support groups, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and many others. I’ll go into greater detail in the next section of the Community blog in this series.

I am very proud of this work and the positive impact it has had both within the writing community and among a more general audience. CavanKerry’s tagline is “lives brought to life,” with a simple but powerful mission to explore what it means to be human. Each of the 100+ books we have published in the last two decades has furthered that mission and worked to bring fine literature to an ever-growing audience.

Teresa Carson on Poetry: Holly Smith & NJ Poetry Out Loud

June 12, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

New Jersey Poetry Out Loud is the New Jersey chapter of a national poetry recitation program public, charter, parochial, and home school students from grades 9-12 across America. Every year, CavanKerry Press is proud to be involved with the enrichment of poetry education through the NJPOL. Each year, several of our authors assist with the competition as judges, we donate 500 books to over 100 participating schools in New Jersey and to the state finalists, and we grant scholarships to further the education of poetry instruction for the NJPOL teacher from the winning school.

CavanKerry author Teresa Carson, who will be supplying us with thoughts on poetry every month based off her weekly la poesia della settimana emails, was once our Associate Editor and was responsible for establishing the collaboration between us and NJPOL. We’re forever grateful for what that has grown into.

I hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe.

This week my series on “seeing in a dark time” is interrupted by a great delight: Holly Smith, poet and teacher extraordinaire, “thinking out loud about poetry recitation.” Seven or so years ago, I met Holly through Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition for high school students. Year after year, her students own the New Jersey state competition. Holly’s deep connection to poetry and her rare level of commitment to her students are the foundation of their POL success. I always jump at the chance to visit her classroom not only because I enjoy working with her students, but also because I like watching her in her “natural habitat.” Don’t tell her, but I’m more than a little intimidated by her powerful intelligence, which is on full display in this note.

Yes, today’s note is a bit longer than usual. Trust me: it’s worth reading every word, because Ms. Smith (as her students call her) is THE teacher we all wish we had had at any level of our education. The attachment contains the poems mentioned in her note. Now I’ll step out of the way and let Holly speak.

Dear Poetry Explorers:

In late February I had the opportunity to spend some time with Teresa in Sarasota. She told me about the genesis of this weekly email discussion on poetry, and then lovingly “voluntold” me to be a guest contributor.

I am 18 years into my career as a high school literature teacher in Jersey City, NJ at a public college-prep magnet school, Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School.

This week I will be thinking aloud about poetic recitation (was that a pun?).

McNair (my school) got active with Poetry Out Loud in 2011, and we started getting good in 2013. Very good. Every year since 2013, we have either taken 2nd place in NJ, or won NJ and went to Nationals in D.C. to compete against students from the 54 states and territories. My students were NJ State champs the last 3 out of 4 competition years. (This year’s NJ and National competition was cancelled due to COVID). So through coaching these students I have had to focus on issues in recitation.

For the average person, recitation isn’t about delivering a memorized piece. It is reading a poem aloud from a page, either approaching it cold having never read it prior, or using the page as a sort of script. In those cases, you need to rely quite heavily on the guidance the poet has (hopefully) so helpfully left for you. Punctuation. Line breaks. Stanzas. Forms. (We know how to read a limerick when we see one. If it is a sonnet, we are looking for turns, or perhaps shift into a punchline of a couplet.) Perhaps transitional words are traffic signals (for, and, not, but, or, yet, so…, or conditionals such as “if”), or other choices at the word level demand our tongue perform specific acrobatics (rhyme, sibilance, echoed sounds, etc.).

The voice becomes a font. The ear becomes an eye.

I think what we are doing when we transfer the poem into the air is looking for the weight in the poem. Sometimes our brain unconsciously “edits” the poem as we read, changing articles, adding plurals, or stumbling over words or sounds that feel awkward because they don’t usually appear so consciously in regular speech. For me, the moments of stumbling and error in the reading aloud is where it gets interesting. Where the poem asks us to slow down and be careful to read the words as they have been composed, not how our brains (so used to scanning and rushing) want to gloss them.

If it isn’t your practice of voicing a poem, even to yourself alone as you read, give it a try. At the very least it will slow you down. And hopefully it will also act as an oral highlighter, allowing you to notice some of the patterns and choices in the piece.

I am sure my Advanced Placement Literature students (forced by cruel me to memorize a poem over the summer), and the students who willingly enter the school contest for Poetry Out Loud each December would love to have the paper in front of them to recite. But they must memorize. I also memorize a piece each year to keep myself rooted in beginner’s mind. (This year I will be memorizing “Mi Historia” by David Dominguez.)

For the National Poetry Out Loud competition, students select three poems from a (rather excellent) database of published recognized poets (www.poetryoutloud.org). One poem must be 25 lines or fewer (short), one must be pre-20thCentury (old) and the other is of their choosing. They can choose the order of poems, usually their signature or strongest piece first, as the early rounds are elimination rounds. The philosophy of the competition is to celebrate the ancient art of poetic recitation, where the student is the vessel of the poem. They are the text and must deliver and interpret the piece for an audience who may or may not have a strong grounding in poetry. The judges see the poems ahead of time and can prep as they wish.

I tell my students: the audience is giving you the gift of their attention, honor that. Be conscious of the experience you

can credibly produce through the natural timbre of your voice
want to share with them.

This might be warmth and charm, a sharing of cultural knowledge, anger, a moment to let the audience be in their own thoughts and memories, a bit of verbal cinema via imagery, humor and playfulness, a spiritual meditation, etc.

The students sit with the piece for months (and with a signature poem, often years), memorizing, building their vocal, facial and physical rhythms, and practicing with a microphone. It is a recitation, not a dramatic monologue, which means a natural vocal delivery is preferred over stylization. In the competition they are judged on the following: Physical Presence, Voice & Articulation, Dramatic Appropriateness, Evidence of Understanding, Overall Performance and Accuracy.

Some of the work the students do with the poem is obvious. Looking up vocabulary, perhaps some context on the poem or poet. Reading some critical analysis of the poem. In other words, having a rough sense of what the poem might mean. But this will shift as they actually memorize the piece, and this will even shift during each individual recitation of it.

The recitation is all about suspension.

My role is not to tell them what the poem means. It is to listen with my best guess as to how the recitation is creating (or destroying) suspense in the audience. How time is controlled and develops. And then asking the student if that is the effect they want or what they intended.

How do sounds hang in the air and should they be allowed to fade, or overlap to the next? How does the sentence populate our mind with the intended idea? Sometimes that might not be clear until we reach the line’s end. How does a title, or an element of the poem get revealed? How do images take shape in the air? Which might need support from a gesture or pantomime to be better understood? Which lines or words need a moment to digest? Maybe to allow us to appreciate a crisp turn of phrase, to laugh, or to process a complex idea.

I ask them to move the poem around on the page to match how it will be spooled out in the air. Tear apart the form and “re-line” the poem as they will be revealing it. This helps in the memorization and making “the mind’s eye” remember a more accurate script of the poem. So, for example, an enjambed (mid-stopped) line might now be an unbroken sentence again. A series of repeated phrases (anaphora) might get pauses where there is no punctuation on the page. A stanza break might get a longer pause, or no real pause if the idea is connected.

Every poem has a different logic and has different weights built into the original text. Some poems are harder to “get” on just one reading, requiring more work on the part of the reciter to communicate meaning. Every student brings their own natural cadence to the piece. And at some point, the question becomes, “Who is the speaker of this poem?” and “What is the situation of this poem for that speaker?” This can become a huge interpretive move on the part of the student and where the magic of the recitation happens. The speaker doesn’t have to be what is suggested by an on-the-nose read of the poem itself. It can become a friend speaking to another friend, a teacher-like lecture, a young protestor trying to wake up the adults in the room, a moment to walk in the shoes of a parent, or a person visiting the photo album in their mind.

Once the student reaches that point in their work with the poem, the choices all need to flow from that understanding of the poem. Even if the listener doesn’t know the exact speaker the student is drawing from, they will still see the intentionality and unified tone that comes from the student having their own grounding in the poem.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to every recitation that my students have done, so these are not necessarily “signature pieces,” but quite a few were available on Youtube to share. I invite you to watch the recitation before reading the text of the poem. Sometimes it is also interesting to listen to the audio along with the text. (This year, I recorded audio during practice sessions and had my reciter fine-tune based on sound alone). I give a bit of commentary on some of the choices the students made in the recitations.

Meet Cameron Clarke who came in 2nd Place in NJ in 2013. (He’s taken the loss well. He became a Rhodes Scholar in 2017.) He recites “And Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen:

The challenge of the poem was to communicate this beast of a complex sonnet to the audience, sound natural, and clarify meaning for them. The sonnet itself lacks some of the verbal cues for turns that would provide natural “rests” for the listener, until the “yet” in the final couplet. It is essentially a series of questions with no question marks. It is revealed in “chunks” of images. Cameron’s rich vocal register allowed him to preserve the philosophical weight of the poem without feeling like he was trying on clothes too large for him.

His recitation plays with sound (particularly the sensuousness of “flesh” and the two reads of “awe-ful” and “awful” towards the close). He builds some beautiful momentum in the middle that echoes the movement and struggle of Sisyphus and Tantalus, and then backs up to coolly note the “inscrutable” ways of the divine). He clearly makes some choices in the poem and is polished and controlled, especially turning the comment into question at the poem’s close. We later learned that more movement was the standard in the competition, although on paper it was discouraged. He was being old school in his recitation style of arms down.

Current senior Samantha Paradero wasn’t able to compete at the NJ State competition due to the COVID cancellation. She will be attending New Jersey Institute of Technology in the fall to study machine learning and artificial intelligence. She recorded this recitation of “Snow Day” by Billy Collins:

This poem could go horribly wrong and just melt into a cutesy fluff of a recitation. It is narrative and accessible to the audience (up here we do get snow). But Samantha avoids the schmaltz by being cinematic in revealing the various settings as they shift (the white town, the walk with the dog, the kitchen, the playground). She was also sensitive to the playfulness with sound in the piece. The obvious example is that fabulous list of day care centers, which clearly Collins delights in revealing (just keeping the order straight in your head is a feat). But there is some subtle internal sound work happening (“libraries buried”, repetition of “closed”, “Toadstool School,” “darting and climbing and sliding,” “grandiose silence of the snow,” and “riot is afoot”) that Samantha showcases through her articulation. She gives us time to enjoy the charm of the moment and the humor that Collins is famous for.

Samantha transformed once she began practicing on the microphone. She started her work with POL with a strong spoken word cadence (that “vocal fry” quality). It is part of her style, so I didn’t want to tamper with it. As she found her way into the poem it naturally reduced because the style wasn’t serving meaning anymore. It gave her a way into recitation, which was valuable. She began to play with letting sounds hang and resolve in the air. And enjoying the textures of sounds.

As she practiced and recited the poem more often, the first two stanzas started to feel weird in context with the rest of the poem. Particularly the image of the train:

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling.

Why does Collins mention the train? “Fallen under this falling.” What? Falling snow, ok. But what does he mean by “fallen”? And then the war imagery of the opening (“revolution,” “white flag” of surrender, perhaps a train blockade) became clearer. On paper the stanza breaks also feel arbitrary in places (let’s go with five line stanzas, sure), but Samantha breaks that up into the logical narrative “movements” between settings.

Meet Celeste Sena, NJ State Champ in 2016, went to Nationals. She just graduated New School as a drama student. Here she is reciting T.S. Eliot’s “La Figlia Che Piange”:

In the recitation, the title is important as it is the kick-off of the piece, and it also gives the audience a second to mentally calibrate the reciter’s visual presence to the voice. Both Celeste and Cameron have these beautiful rich voices unusual for teenagers, so there is a moment of just letting the audience react to their instrument. This clip cut off the title, but she achieves the same effect with the epigram. I coach my kids to be in the vessel of the poem even for the title. Some students read the title as themselves, take a beat, and then start the poem as the vessel with the first line. To me that is disruptive to the flow of information in the poem.

Celeste, as you can see, is just a cool kid in general. Here we have a modernist piece where, yes, there is a sense of narrative to trace, but it jumps in time and there is a bit of ambiguity about who is the he and she, who is the speaker (or more accurately, when is the speaker?). For Celeste, this piece was navigating the segments of the poem as if she were a director, which is apparent in the explanatory mode she takes in the middle of the poem. So she’s a bit outside of the poem until the second half. She uses variety, playing with volume, facial expressions, etc. to isolate moments and phrases. Her voice has color and tone. The stretching of “lean” coupled with her gesture, the growl of “resentment” with that natural head shake, the crisp consonance of “light and deft” for example. Here her gestures are absolutely imperative to keep us moving through the poem. They don’t replace meaning, but they orchestrate our mental attention.

I still have no definitive answer to what Eliot means by “I should have lost a gesture and a pose,” but I believe that Celeste does. She keeps the language of Eliot pristine (I am obsessed with the word “cogitations”). She treats the subject seriously but with a bit of playfulness. This poem could become overly dramatized or shallowly glide over the sounds, but she keeps herself rooted in the language and tonal shifts.

Meet Breana Sena, NJ runner up 2017, NJ Champ in 2018, went on to Nationals. She is currently a law student at NYU. Yes, Celeste’s sister. Breana recites Nikki Giovanni’s “Mothers”:

Breana had just lost her grandmother that summer, so this poem spoke to her as a memorial piece. Breana wanted to keep the warmth and not just march through it. The conversational tone was important to her, as was the magic of the tonal shift in the middle of the piece “The room was bathed in moonlight…”. This poem is also deceptively simple. It is structured as a retelling, and there are many digressions and small personal details that could just turn it into a rambling mess.

Breana is radiant and charming. She brings us credibly into these family memories, speaking to us as if we are friends. And her timing creates the impression of receiving these memories as she speaks, but also gives us time to receive the images. Breana highlights sections of the poem for us, the images of the mother, the shift to inhabiting the child’s recollections, and nesting the recitation of the poem that becomes a family legacy into her recitation. But she keeps that bit of mystery in her voice about the evening backdrop of the poem and the child’s inability to fully understand the family dynamics at the time. This is a recitation about being present together, speaker and audience. And inviting the audience to reflect on their own family relationships.

And finally, meet Joseph G. Kim Sexton, 2019 NJ Champion, went on to Nationals. Joe took a gap year to study in Bolivia. He will be starting in the fall as a philosophy and film student at Princeton. He recites Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”:

We later learned the correct pronunciation of Brendan Behan(Bee-en)! Which was frustrating because we had researched so much the context and allusions in the poem. Ah well.

This poem shows up pretty often in NJ Poetry Out Loud competitions. Why not? O’Hara is cool. New York is cool. But it often feels like a little kid in the closet trying on an adult’s jacket. Again, as a narrative poem, it is deceptively simple. It is a huge list from the eyes of a bohemian observer set loose in Midtown New York on some errands before a dinner party. This poem creates a little world, a world accessible to people familiar with the city, but it is also very coded in terms of the specific titles, time period, and brands O’Hara references.

I just asked Joseph tons of questions about this poem. Mostly about the speaker’s tone towards his actions. Like why the distinction of the cigarette brands. Why O’Hara was buying smokes from a movie theater. If there was a logic to the gifts he was selecting for the hosts. For this recitation, establishing who the speaker was for Joseph was key, especially to Joseph’s own identity as a playwright and filmmaker himself.

O’Hara is playing a bit of a game here to impress and move in the world of publishing. But his self-recriminations, humor, and reflection at the end upon getting the news of Billie Holiday’s death show us the heart of his poetic self. Joseph leaned into his instincts as a stage person, inhabiting character while not forgetting he is delivering lines and imagery.

All of this is to say, I appreciate how Poetry Out Loud creates an opportunity for students to explore humanity within a sandbox that is poetry. Their selections and interpretations allow me to stand aside as a teacher and engage as a listener, being open to discovery and being in time with the student and the verse. In turn, students even surprise themselves by coming into a true ownership of an other’s words by inhabiting them so closely in mind and body.

“As a literary institution and publisher, CavanKerry Press sees the uniqueness and importance of such programs as Poetry Out Loud. NJPOL is a testament for the need of poetry and the skills it provides in literacy while boosting confidence but most importantly aids in our youth’s self-discovery. Literary arts equip young adults with the skills to communicate effectively and help them find and define their place in the world. We honor students, teachers like Holly, and NJPOL for their continuing commitment to poetry and the art of recitation.” – CavanKerry Press

Kevin Carey on “Night Swimming – Assumption College – 1979”

May 22, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 3 Comments

I went to Assumption College in Worcester, Mass (class of 1980). There’s a duck pond in the front of the campus as you drive in. At least I think it’s still there. Kids would end up in there from time to time, either on purpose or by getting tossed in by older kids. Usually there was drinking involved but not always. One night in 1979 a group of boys ran down to the pond in their underwear and jumped in, then ran back up to the dorms where they came from. After a short while, they noticed that one of the group hadn’t returned. By the time they ran back down, the boy was dead.

I remember it being unclear just how he had died. There was a lot of speculation, maybe he hit his head, or had a stroke. I don’t think I ever really knew for sure. It was hard to drive by that pond after that without thinking of him floating in there, even all these years later. I visited a few years ago and it was the first thought I had driving in.

I’ve written a few poems about my time at Assumption, the people I hung out with, some of the college madness of the day. I was surprised when I wrote this one to be honest. It must have haunted me all these years later. I think maybe because I was so reckless in those days; it could have happened to me on more than one occasion. All the silly pranks I was part of could have easily gone wrong. This kid was pretty low key, responsible in a way I wasn’t. When I wrote the poem, I wanted to try to imagine what he might have been thinking in that fateful moment, not to blame anybody for leaving him there, but to just be in that moment with all its unfortunate drama.

– Kevin Carey

Purchase Set in Stone to read more of Carey’s work.

Eleanor by Gray Jacobik Out Now!

February 3, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

Publication Date: March 2020

Have your copy on the release date by ordering today!

“Eleanor Roosevelt is a woman we need to hear right now– Gray Jacobik puts a rose inside ER’s ever cogent, necessary thoughts, right in time for the 100th Anniversary of the vote for women.” – Molly Peacock

About Gray Jacobik

Gray Jacobik is a widely anthologized poet and author of several notable collections; The Double Task was selected by James Tate for the Juniper Prize; The Surface of Last Scattering received the X.J. Kennedy Prize; Brave Disguises, the AWP Poetry Series Award. In 2016, The Banquet: New & Selected Poems received the William Meredith Award in Poetry. She’s been awarded The Yeats Prize, the Emily Dickinson Award, and the Third Coast Poetry Prize. Jacobik is a painter as well as a poet and several CavanKerry Press covers have featured her artwork.

About the Book

In Eleanor, Jacobik presents 58 poems in Roosevelt’s voice told against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the 20th century. Included are poems about Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, and her most passionate and intimate friendships, ER’s evolving relationship to servants and issues of class and human rights, as well as her service to the world community. Jacobik’s monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies ER’s emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations.

Truth Has a Different Shape by Kari O’Driscoll Out Now!

January 1, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: February 2020

Get your copy by ordering today!

Listen to an Excerpt from Truth Has a Different Shape

“O’Driscoll allows us to see her in the struggle, which will encourage other women to start being honest about their lives too. This is a generous book.” – Shauna James Ahern

About Kari L. O'Driscoll

Kari is a writer and mother living in the Pacific Northwest. her work has appeared in print anthologies on mothering, reproductive rights, and cancer, as well as online in outlets such as Ms. Magazine, ParentMap, The ManifestStation, and Healthline. She is the founder of the SELF Project, an organization whose goals are to help teenagers, teachers, and caregivers of teens recognize the unique challenges and amazing attributes of adolescents and to use mindfulness and nonviolent communication to build better relationships. You can find her at www.kariodriscollwriter.com

About the Book

A family built, a family lost. This is the story of the power of love and compassion. Growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Kari O’ Driscoll was taught that strength= stoicism and that a girl’s job was to take care of everyone else. For decades, she believed that and did what she could try and keep the remaining parts of her family together, systematically anticipating disaster and fixing catastrophes one by one. Until she broke. Despite trying to escape it, Kari found herself right back in the lap of loss as an adult and had to discover how to truly, profoundly care for those she loves without putting herself at risk.

Joan Cusack Handler Interview | CKP Board Meeting 2019

October 31, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

CavanKerry Press' Annual Board Retreat was a Great Success!

This year’s annual board retreat brought together the CavanKerry Press staff plus it’s entire group of board members to meet and discuss where CKP has been and where it’s going as we move ever-so closer to our 20th anniversary. The weekend was filled with conversations that involved publishing, branding, community outreach, and literary appreciation. Most importantly, the weekend was spent developing solid relationships among this newly established cohort. This was to ensure that CavanKerry Press would maintain it’s integrity through our continued commitment of expanding the reach of poetry to a general readership by publishing works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.

The Future Looks Bright for CavanKerry Press!

We have many things in the works! From publishing beautiful books, to festivals, launches, conferences, advocacy, collaborations, and celebrations, there are just so many ways to connect with our press.

To get more insight on who we are and where we’re going, we’ll take you back to the first evening of our 2019 Annual Board Retreat. The retreat began Saturday evening with a meet & greet that included introductions and a dinner that ended with our Senior Editor, Joan Cusack Handler being interviewed by CavanKerry Press author, Tina Kelley.

CavanKerry Press Chosen as a Top 5 Literary Organization that Promotes Community by ezvid

October 7, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

To be included with the likes of Split this Rock, The Poetry Foundation, Hocopolitso, and Inside Out Literary Arts Project is an honor. With public service being so much of what poetry has always been, it is a joy to be recognized for something that we care about so much. Thank you, ezvid, for spreading CavanKerry Press’ message to your 500,000 subscribers.

Can’t view the video on YouTube?

Click here, to watch the video on their website!

Robert Cording’s new book, Without My Asking, is Here!

October 1, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

“Cording’s poetry is fearless in his choice of subject. Rather than write quiet, domestic works, he expands each poem to effortlessly encompass themes of death, grief, God, and love.” – ForeWord Review

Listen to a Poem from His Collection

About the Book

Without My Asking takes its cue from Psalms 90’s petition– “teach us to number our days.” That biblical sense of limits– of what we can and cannot know– and the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn. In poems that attend to the events of our lives– from the deaths of patients to hummingbirds at a bird feeder– these poems work to utter “Yes” to all that happens, that “peculiar affirmative” that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “Life’s like that… also death.”

About Robert Cording

Robert Cording has published eight collections of poems, most recently, Walking with Ruskin and Only So Far. He taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a poetry mentor in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Orion, and many others.

The Birth of a Press Part 4: Building Our Image

September 18, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Our Logo

Next, I wanted a symbol for CavanKerry. Recognizing that a well conceived logo would go a long way towards advertising the press and would come to represent our books, I obsessed over this one. I wanted it to announce as many of CKP’s values as possible. I searched the Book of Kells and every book on Irish and Celtic imagery that I could find. I chose the linked horizontal circles for their separate identities, their friendship, and relatedness; each intricate, complex, and richly colored. They are the counties of Cavan and Kerry. They are my mother and father. They are my writing and together they are my country.

But the circles are far more than my history; they represent the equality of aesthetics that CavanKerry would represent. Having lived a good part of my writing life on the outside, it’s always distressed me how many journals, presses, and university programs emphasize and support only one type of poem to the exclusion of all others. My goal was to create a press that could not be defined by one aesthetic, but rather one that was inclusive. CavanKerry would not publish only my personal preference in poems but would rather strive for artistic diversity by representing a broad range of aesthetics. I am always honored and delighted when people comment that CKP writers are so different from one another and that other than the fineness of the art, one cannot define the poetry that CKP will publish. CKP looks for voices—diverse, distinct voices that are honest and accessible.

Not for Profit

One of our most critical steps was that we needed to establish the press as a not-for-profit. Since sales would never support us, grants would be necessary. And grants equaled not-for-profit. I had also reassured Alan that his money would not just dissipate; I truly believed in what I was about to do, and likewise, that once people and foundations found out about what we were doing, they would want to help support us through donations and grants. We would create a community and the community would help to keep itself alive.

I spoke with Sara Gorham at Sarabande and was given the name of an attorney who specialized in creating not-for-profits (her generosity also included suggestions for printers and a designer.) She cautioned me that to apply myself would be tricky at best, since the government did not view publishing per se as a not-for-profit venture. (Clearly, they’re more than mildly delusional about the profitability of publishing poetry!) With his help, once we defined our publishing program (which initially included First Books, Notable Voices, Reprints, Critical Collections, and Special Projects) and built a Board of Directors, we were defined as a not for profit/ 501(C)(3) organization and given five years to establish enough donor support to warrant permanent not for profit status.

Our Board of Directors

It was also clear that we needed a Board of Directors that would include experts in all of the arenas that our work would take us— a not-for-profit expert, a publisher/editor, poets, of course— and I found these in my teachers, colleagues and friends. I approached my teachers, Molly Peacock, Jerry Stern, and Louis Simpson, and poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Baron Wormser, whose creative work and integrity I admired and valued. Molly introduced me to Declan Spring, publisher/editor of New Directions, friend and not for profit guru, Didi Goldenhar, and Sandra Gold, a powerhouse of a woman and intellect and founder/chair of her own not-for-profit. Rounding out the Board along with Alan and me.

Fundraising

Fundraising was also a challenge. It rapidly became clear that my fantasy that we would readily attract supporters once our mission was clear and we were fully functioning was naïve. Not that we didn’t find grantors and donors, we very definitely did, but not as many and not as quickly as I had hoped. I was partially responsible for that.

It was my decision that we would not solicit donor support until we were well under way and had a track record that would validate our right to support. Our attorneys and accountant both disagreed with me on this but I was adamant; we waited for two years before we started an annual appeal program. In the meantime, we added a grant writer to our staff and began the exploration of available funding. During our second year, we were awarded our first 2 grants: one for LaurelBooks from the Gold Foundation which included an annual commitment to co-sponsor our Literature of Illness and Disability imprint, and the second from The Puffin Foundation for the cover of our first Laurel Book, Life With Sam. But these were from 2 private funders, it would be awhile before we could qualify for federal and NJ grants; these also required audits. In due time we received grants from NEA, NJ State Council on the Arts, and the NJ Cultural Trust along with grants from other private foundations.

Our advance period was up in 2004. We held our breath as our application for 501(C)(3) was reviewed by the Internal Revenue Service. Several tests had to be conducted on our donor numbers and would decide whether or not we had garnered enough support to warrant final 501(C)(3) status. Surprisingly, the emphasis was on the number of donors, not on the amount of their checks, so in the view of the IRS, a gift of $5 was the same as $1,000. We feared that our initial reluctance to appeal for donations until we could demonstrate that we warranted donor support significantly reduced the number of people we eventually attracted as supporters.

We were 2 years behind where we needed to be and though I still hold fast to the morality of that position, I spent that whole final year friend-and-fund-raising, in a constant state of high anxiety. The other way we could have added significantly to our donor base was if we had agreed to conduct a competition or charged reading fees for each manuscript we read. Both would have added hundreds of names to our list of supporters. But once again, these were non-negotiable; we had built our house on ‘no competitions’ and ‘no reading fees.’ We would not back pedal; principle would supersede practical.

The IRS had given us 4 to 5 years to do the critical work of building a viable press and community outreach program. In September of 2005, we received our final determination from the IRS that we were in fact made a 501(C)(3) public charity. We were afloat! We did it!

Read the Rest of “Birth of a Press”

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The Birth of a Press Part 3: “Strokes of Fortune”

August 1, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 3: Strokes of Good Fortune

Hallelujah!

Then as if all my collective saints, angels, and muses had heard my pleas and harangues and either concurred or together conspired to silence me, my dream became a possibility! The product of both an enormous stroke of good luck that took the form of an inheritance my husband, Alan received quite unexpectedly and most of all, his enormous generosity to me, I now had the start up capital to start my press. I was delirious. The first thing I did was call Molly and the second was to call my friends Karen Chase, Howard Levy, and Peggy Penn to tell them that I would be honored to publish their books. We were all elated.

I hit the ground running. I had to learn everything. Immediately! I decided to do it in tandem with the most capable person I knew who miraculously was looking for part-time work. Florenz Eisman (then Greenberg) was a former creative writing student of mine who, in addition to having a great gift for writing, had worked for several years as a vice president for a public relations firm. She, in the course of her career had done just about everything—from secretarial work, to research, to writing. She knew her way around people, business, and most importantly, books. Even computers!

Our Press Needed a Name

This was the first of many not-so-simple decisions we had to make. Surprisingly, in all of my dreaming, I had never come up with a name. That took considerable thought.

Remarkably at major points in my life—when life seemed to be clearing a path for me and success was in the wings, a woman in my life died. Or so it seemed. When I was given my husband, son, and Ph.D, it was my good friend Janice; when I was given my press, it was my mother. My love for Janice however was pure; my love for my mother was anything but. A driven and possessive woman, my mother was far more interested in my intellectual and social successes rather than my writing success. Her great pride was in the fact that I was a psychologist and a professional woman. It was “nice” that I wrote poems. During her illness, however, she developed a marked and seemingly earnest interest in my writing.

During her last visit to my home in East Hampton, she (and my father!) read my poems. In our family room I had a basket where I kept all of the journals that my published work was published in. I cautioned both of my parents that my work was brimming with profanity and what they’d consider obscenity, and that they violated all of Mom’s prescriptions about voicing personal family matters in public. They were undeterred as they handed poems back and forth to each other. Mom, did you read this one? Dad, look at this one.

My mother who could hardly see twisted the pages high into the light to read every poem. Remarkably, no one died. Not them. Not me. Rather than be horrified, they were interested in what the poems had to say. My father reminded me that he’d been a laborer all his life so he’d heard those words before. Nor was he surprised by all the raging that went on in the poems. They asked me questions, particularly about events recorded in the poems. They did not argue; they did not chastise; most importantly they did not judge.

It Was a Miracle of Sorts

These poems had been there in the same spot during scores of previous visits and they showed no interest in reading them, but this time they were ready. I don’t know what prompted that openness, but I know the three of us were grateful. This was an intimacy that we had never known. For years, I had kept much of myself from their view. They knew only facts about my life; I kept what mattered safe inside; I had strayed from their version of good and wholesome and I long since saw any value in exposing either them or me to the worlds that separated us. They did not need to know; I did not need to confess. Yet on this weekend, this Saturday afternoon in November— I like to think it was even Thanksgiving weekend, as we always spent it together—we were ready. The gift of that closeness served us well during my mother’s illness.

My parents have always amazed me in their ability to grow as human beings as they aged. My father’s steps were always steady and involved with virtually no regression. He held fast to what was important to him, namely his Catholicism and the Church as supreme authority, but he was open to influence about everything else. All his life, he loved to learn. The world of people and nature were magical places for him and he reveled in each story or creation.

My mother was more complicated. Her growth did not come until her cancer. Prior to that she was of one mind about most things and that mind was always hers. You couldn’t convince her of anything and she was unpredictable—completely open one day and then refusing to talk the next. If she let you in, perhaps revealing some confidence, she would quickly shut you out. After revealing a devastating account of her mother’s death when she was a very young child, she was furious when I referred to it later on. She was enraged that I had taken this secret wound from her. I had violated her. She refused to speak to me. I stayed away from her for long stretches of time.

Miraculously, however, when she got sick, she shut the door on all that anger and resentment; it was simply over. She had other places to go. Kinder, happier places in which to live. It was as if she were reborn, but this time without the darkness. With her own mother seemingly close and whole, she began forming the bedrock of love that we all count on to carry us into adulthood, trusting that the world will care for and love us. She finally knew she was blessed. She finally believed she was loved. She was grateful and said so for every kindness or attention. Being close to her was effortless. She invited it; we all accepted.

And she lost no time. She wanted to know everything about each of us. In my case, my writing—what was I writing? Was I writing? I should be writing. I should tell my story. She gave me Reader’s Digest large print books that included autobiographies of strong women. Write your story, she said. People will read it; you tell the truth. Her support was palpable and unwavering. I told her that I had been writing the memoir of my young self as a 12 year old girl. She wanted to read it; I read it to her during hospital visits; I sat by her bed for hours everyday writing while she slept.

Our Name

There was no greater gift I could have received than to be close to my mother when she was dying. It had always saddened me that such distance was necessary, but my sanity required it. Though she longed for closeness on one level, she destroyed it on every other. To face a parent’s death with coldness between you is a barren, painfully lonely land. To be able to go with her and face it together was a blessing. She talked to me of cooking for Dad, teaching him to cook, her concerns for the grandchildren, what she felt, what she wanted, what she worried about. I was able to give to her for the first time since I was a child.

Shortly after she died, the money miraculously arrived for the birth of the press. A friend suggested I name it for her. I liked the tribute and was relieved and very pleased that rather than cut her out as I had in the past, I now wanted to include her in this major event in my life. But to name it after her alone would be incomplete. There was more I wanted to say with that name and I didn’t want to exclude my father. I settled on CavanKerry—the two counties in Ireland where they were born—my father, Cavan; my mother, Kerry. Though CavanKerry would not be an “Irish” press, it was from that land—those two lands—that my own writing grew.

CavanKerry Press Authors Around the Internet!

July 22, 2019 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

Care to cool off by the pool, in front of the fan, or in an air conditioned library? Consider seeing everything the authors of CavanKerry Press have been doing despite the summer heat.

Book Review for The Body at a Loss– Cati Porter- Mom Egg Review

Book Review for Sweet World– Maureen Seaton- Mom Egg Review

Book Review for Cracked Piano– Margo Taft Stever- Mom Egg Review

Book Review for The Cracked Piano– Margo Taft Stever- The Dressing

Book Review for The Cracked Piano– Margo Taft Stever- Kirkus Reviews

Book Review for The Cracked Piano– Margo Taft Stever- The Pedestal Magazine

Book Review for The Body at a Loss– Cati Porter- Rhino Poetry

Book Review for Sweet World– Maureen Seaton- Rhino Poetry

6 Poems- Shira Dentz- Big Other

Cati Porter- The Body at a Loss

Congratulations to Harriet Millan and her book, Green Fox Fur for being a finalist for the 2019 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Congratulations to Danny Shot and January Gill O’ Neil who were both finalists for the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize

Congratulations to January Gill O’ Neil’s Rewilding which received honorable mention for the Mass Book Awards

We are proud to state that, for the third year in a row and the sixth year overall, CavanKerry Press was issued a Citation of Excellence by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for the year of 2019.

Poetry and Personal Wellness

May 1, 2019 By Gabriel Cleveland Leave a Comment

So, April was National Poetry Month. For a lot of people, that’s National “Who Cares?” Month or National “Ughhh, Poetry” Month. For friends and family of poets, it might double as National “So, when are you going to get a real job?” Month. But for readers of poetry and poets themselves, April is an acknowledgement and celebration of the practice of living life inquisitively, of not taking things for granted, of the struggle to comprehend the world on a deeper level, and of the personal rewards that a handful of metaphors chopped into a string of lines can bring.

As a poet myself, I can say that poetry is also a lifesaver.

The other day, I told my wife I’d written a new poem. Her response was, “Is it good? Is it terrifying, like always?” Fair point: one of the complaints – or, let’s call them observations – I get about a lot of my poems are that they are bleak, especially considering how upbeat and optimistic I tend to come off as as a person. But here’s the thing:

Neurologically speaking, I’m at least minorly depressed most of the time, even when I’m having a generally okay time of things. Despite lacking any desire to take self-harmful action, my mind feeds me thoughts of suicide on an alarmingly regular basis (a couple times a month at minimum). In middle school, I almost listened.

I am not a natural-born communicator, so before I committed myself to the study and practice of writing, living was a much scarier prospect. Like most adolescents, I had a great deal of painful things on my mind and very little means of expressing them. My bottle of emotions was shaking and building in pressure with perfectionism and self-hatred and uncorking it without some intervention would have been impossible or catastrophic.

But then: Poetry.

Fifteen years ago, probably during National Poetry Month, I had to do a 10th grade report on Li-Young Lee, of whom before which I had been completely ignorant. I devoured “Persimmons” and “I Ask My Mother to Sing” (Just typing the title of the latter waters my eyes). It was the first time poetry really connected with me personally. “Persimmons” expressed the struggle to communicate and the malleability of language in a way that resonated deeply. “I Ask My Mother to Sing” was vibrant and sad and triumphant all at once, and its quick, simple language planted someone else’s experience in my head forever after. I got one of my worst grades on that paper, but I gained something far more important: an appreciation of a genre that so many scoff at or view as archaic.

When pop culture remembers that poetry even exists, it typically reduces it to a couplet of trite, overly sentimental rhymes. If not that, poetry is used as a punchline in a comedy, usually to belittle whichever hapless fool expresses interest. The year before my epiphany, Newsweek published an opinion piece called “Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” That was just 2003’s entrant in a long tradition of clickbait statements perpetuated across news outlets for decades. It’s an appealing headline, for sure, and one that reinforces the stigma against poetry, but it turns out that people do care. Even the cynical writer of the Newsweek article got around to touting poetry’s value by the end of the piece, but who read that far?

The majority of people may not care about poetry, but perhaps that’s because it has long been introduced in classrooms with an anchor strapped to its ankle, sucked into the impossible depths of confusion by too much focus on overwhelming, ancient poems by the long-dead “Masters.” I can relate. For me, poetry was nothing but an abstract until I read the right poems. There are hundreds of exciting, relevant contemporary poets addressing, with extraordinary clarity, the challenge of living in the modern world with all its disparity, fear, and changes. These poets manage to find joy and hope amidst the struggle – they speak to the disenfranchised and afraid, the hopeful and alone who are yearning to know that someone else “gets” them. During these past few years of heightened social tension in the US, poetry has seen a resurgence. Perhaps, miraculously, more people are finally finding the right poems. To me, it’s fitting that National Poetry Month immediately precedes May, National Mental Health Awareness Month – I’ve struggled for a long time with mental health and poetry has been a constant companion, through the best and the worst. If you or someone you love is lacking poetry in your life, seek help. Poems are easy to find and many of them take less than a minute to read. One might make all the difference.

*The Waiting Room Reader, Vol. I: Stories to Keep You Company*

And if you or someone you love is facing mental health challenges of their own, you’re not alone. There are a million resources out there, but here’s a few:

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

National Alliance on Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264

Mental Health America

Be well,
~Gabriel

The Birth of a Press Part 2: “Starting Your Own Press; The Challenge”

April 4, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 2: Start Your Own Press

For years, I dreamed of starting my own press that would bring out the work of all these gifted writers along with my own and get our shows on the road. Despite my initial success in contests, interest in my work diminished as my fascination with the poem as a visual life in space increased. Once I abandoned the more traditional long line that started and returned to the left margin for a form that flowed from the emotional logic of the voice and used the whole page as canvas to bring this voice to life on the page, I was ‘out there’ on my own. Clearly, the more inventive I became, the more I reduced my already slim chances of winning a competition. I had stepped over the line. Journal editors remarked on the interesting form that would be a ‘typesetting nightmare’ to publish. Others found it too distracting. With each submission I offered to have the poem typeset myself if it interested the journal editors. (Those who accepted my poems did not ask me to do that.) Clearly, if I was ever to see my poems collected in a book, I would have to publish my own.

Other friends were coming to the same conclusion about their own books. Either bite the bullet and risk castigation by the literary elite for self-publishing or abandon the work to the bottom of a dusty file cabinet. Neither solution was attractive: inviting public criticism or disappearing. Of the two, I chose the first; the latter was unthinkable. I would give myself one more year to find a way to start my own press, but if unsuccessful, I’d publish my book myself despite the fact that my preference was always to publish other work beside my own. The dilemma was more than personal; it was and still is universal.

I had no training or experience with publishing but that seemed very surmountable. I knew the books I wanted to print. I had a clear vision of what books should look like. I had ideas. Lots of ideas. Which I shared freely with anyone who would listen– Alan, my husband, Molly Peacock, my mentor, my friends, other poets, other mentors. I talked and talked…and talked. Interestingly enough, especially given my complete lack of confidence during the first three-quarters of my writing life, I had full confidence that I could create this dream press of mine. I had come through a Ph.D. program with a concentration in research, and those skills taught me a bit about how to explore more than human behavior. I would follow the same logic to learn about publishing. What I didn’t have was money. More than a minor problem.

I continued to talk. I continued to dream.

My mission became all the more urgent as I heard more and more stories about friends without publishers—in some cases after three or four books (maybe all with different presses). It had always been my assumption that once you found a publisher for your first book, your problems were solved—you could count on them to publish subsequent work (provided of course that the art remained at the highest level.) Discovering that one cannot assume one has a home with a publisher at least until one has published several books and developed a significant name in the literary community, was devastating. Publishers for the most part only supported poets whose careers were already made.

My concerns were broadening, crystallizing. Given the paucity of publishing venues for poetry, the absence of opportunities for first book publication (other than those supported by fee for entry competitions), an apparent bias against older writers, as well as one against psychological and emotionally daring work, I dreamed of a press established, first, to provide publishing opportunities for gifted writers under-recognized or rejected by the literary mainstream, and secondly, to create a community of and for writers: a home where writers could share their art and the products of that art with each other and with the greater community of readers. My childhood living in a small blue-collar community which took on each other’s burdens as their own as well as my early years at The Frost Place Center for Poetry and Arts in Franconia, New Hampshire formed the bedrock of my commitment to a community of writers. A community of writers and a community or readers: I wanted to do my part to make that happen.

The Challenge

Along the way it became clear that to sell poetry, publishers needed to expand its audience. Since marketing and selling books will only be as successful as is the product/literature desirable, the way to sell poetry is to increase both its availability and relevance to general audiences. But poetry isn’t discovered in book stores. One doesn’t happen on a great book of contemporary poetry displayed on front tables; these are reserved for Stephen King, John Grisham and self-help. Poetry tends to be hidden on back shelves and must be searched out. But only by those who know it’s there—poetry enthusiasts, not the general reader.

Poetry can often overwhelm and intimidate the general reader; in fact, many believe they aren’t smart enough to understand it, that it’s more intelligent and more important than they are. It stands apart from them—several steps above them. It makes them feel small.

I knew first- hand how intimidating poetry can be based on the way it was taught to me in college (it was never part of my grade or high school curriculum)—day after day dissecting word after word after word of The Wasteland. Alas, that experience was a wasteland for me and turned me away from poetry for many years. Not surprisingly, readers like me, diminished by the arcane ways that poetry was presented would not turn to it for pleasure or solace as those who love it do. It follows that to sell books of poetry, publishing’s challenge would be to create a readership that cares about it and believes it cares about them. Fortunately for me, many years later, having experienced the endless bliss one finds in the simple but profound brilliance of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman, I returned to poetry and fell very deeply in love.

In my subsequent fantasies of my dream press, I vowed that it would increase poetry’s relevance to a general readership by publishing fine art that centered on real people living real lives and written in fine but accessible language. Ours would be a poetry of heart and emotion rather than exclusively intellect and ideas. Our challenge (and that of the broader literary/publishing community), would also include bringing that poetry to its readers rather than waiting for the audience to come to it. That would require an outreach program that brought the poems and poets to people where they live— in their homes, community centers, offices, hospitals, prisons, schools, geriatric centers, shelters. I was dreaming. I was planning. I was ready. Where would the money come from?

The Birth of a Press Part 1: “No Room at the Inn”

January 2, 2019 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

Part 1: No Room at The Inn

I’ve often thought of poetry as the orphan child of publishing. Commercial publishers have all but abandoned it. Other than the most visible and prestigious poetry virtuosos whose connection to a particular press give it a kind of pedigree— an aesthetic imprimatur— commercial presses do not publish poetry. There are reasons for this rather depressing state of affairs. Publishers cannot publish what they cannot sell. The audience for poetry is extremely small and is comprised mostly of writers, academics, and/or what might be considered an artistic elite. It would follow then that, since the audience is so limited, so also are the opportunities for writers of poetry seeking publishers.

To make matters worse, despite the fact that a writer may have as many as 30 or 4O poems published in literary journals, until you’ve published your first book, you are regarded as unpublished and are therefore ineligible for further awards, virtually stuck professionally. Without a book, you cannot teach. In some cases, you cannot even read your work since readings often take place in universities and book stores. Universities pay honoraria, but only to writers with published books; book stores tend to invite only published writers to read because they will sell books. Some poets turn to self-publishing for a solution, only to find it’s frowned on by the literary community. This, despite the fact that Virginia Wolfe and Walt Whitman, among many others like them, self-published. Sadly, the publishing community cannot help these new voices and rejects them when they try to help themselves.

The very noble task of keeping poetry alive then has been assumed by small independent presses. Bless them! Fortunately for all of us who write it, there are more and more cropping up every year. But alas, there are still too few to resolve the dilemma of the rudderless poet. The number of books that can be published by these underfunded small presses in a given year is a small fraction of the talent waiting in the wings for a vehicle to bring their work to their potential readers. Not surprisingly, the few available opportunities are offered to the more experienced, more widely published poets. The unfortunate result is that, other than a few occasional bows in the direction of a new talent, the majority of small presses do not print first books. Certainly not first books of poetry. They can’t afford to.

Except through contests.

Contests have become small press publishing’s very welcome resolution to the isolation of new poets. But the situation remains critical. Other than self-publishing, virtually the only way to get a book published as a new poet is to win a competition. But this means you have to be the one in a possible 2000 entrants to win one of a maximum of 15-20 first book competitions, so most new talent goes undiscovered. New poets are on their own, and the overwhelming proportion remain unpublished.

Regrettably but predictably, like their commercial older, bigger siblings, small presses too are constricted by the lack of funds, even more so since small presses that focus on poetry and literary prose do not have the popular best seller that their larger brethren count on to pay the bills. They must rely on other sources of income beyond sales. Most, therefore, are established as not–for-profit organizations that qualify for public support, such as grants and tax-deductible donations. But there too they encounter ceilings.

Small presses must live frugally. Most are founded, organized and managed by volunteers who work endless hours for little or no money. They love poetry and want to do their share to bring more of it—particularly contemporary poetry—into the world. Beyond grants and donations, most independent small presses help defray the enormous costs of giving birth to books by conducting the annual competitions mentioned above, which bring in substantial funds, making many more books possible and provide wonderful opportunities for the gifted, ‘unpublished’ writer who is the winner.

But contests have their downsides. Besides fueling the envy/competition (one winner versus hundreds, perhaps thousands of losers) that so many of us writers and artists battle with, contests require entry fees—many quite substantial. Since they are the only viable route to publication, more and more ‘unpublished’ writers spend countless dollars they often do not have entering multiple contests annually. For a fortunate few, there are letters announcing that they’ve been chosen as finalists; in the end, however, the likelihood of winning is miniscule.

The problem is even greater for an older writer. Readers for these contests are often young graduate students in creative writing programs. Their preferences in subject matter and writing style are often very different from that of their older sibs. As a result, publishing joins many other arts/professions which shy away from middle aged and senior writers—particularly those producing daring, unconventional work.

Along the way, this became my story too. I had started writing poetry when I was already 42 years old, but was now approaching 60 with no book. Sure, I’d received lots of encouraging letters from enthusiastic small press editors and contest judges telling me my book was in the running, a finalist even! Like so many others, I’d wait several months before the letter would finally come from the Academy or from Pitt… Each time, no shout of Congratulations! Instead, reaffirmations of how publishable my work is, how fine… but….

In the beginning you can’t believe it; you got here, all the way to this amazingly delicious place that says, yes! You belong here…in fact you’re right up there at the top with the best of them…. Unquestionably your book will be scooped up by another publisher, the editor reassures you; they see it time and time again; your book will find a home. And you tell everyone you know…

But then it happens again. And again… And all you want is to get your first book out there where people will read it—you imagine it beautifully placed in an artful collection. There’ll be a picture and ‘blurbs’ from people saying congratulations and calls for readings and getting to work on the second one. And you’re ready. The work is ready. But “We’re sorry…”

Too many of my friends, friends I got my MA with, friends I workshopped poems with, taught with, read with… all the same story, all this talent, all this art, all this disappointment/rejection. It was becoming increasingly clear that the likelihood of any of us winning became smaller with each year. Publishers seemed to pass over former finalists for the newest talent. Eventually we stopped entering… Some set manuscripts aside; others like me just continued to write more poems and finished second and sometimes third books and dreamed of finding them a home.

Harriet Levin elaborates…

December 18, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

My Water Bottle
Croix de Bouquet, Haiti

The real thing he pulled was greater than the water bottle
turned toy—bottle cap wheels attached to a string—
as it followed behind him across the cracked cement.

In it had been rivers and rain. The strong force of a waterfall.
A stream winding through certain bodies. Another child came running out
the door asking to play with it. I watched the string exchange hands,

loop a finger as the children outran it and their creation rolled,
wobbled, tipped forward on its neck.
The speckled wings fluttered and rose, even as I hid somewhere

in my childhood basement, my mother shouting from the kitchen
to pick up all my toys scattered from their boxes,
toys I held in the darkness of night, clutched close in whispers.

The child without any stood beside me, followed me around,
stayed near, waited until my last sip and my bottle was empty.
He tapped it lightly and my heart burst. It took time

for me to understand. What did I not offer?
The water bottle my fingers gripped in heat so extreme
each knuckle swelled, my breath grew slow, my head pounded,

walking was difficult, thinking, how far can I make it
with nothing to pull along? I’ve nothing,
nothing behind me. No bottle turned toy,

no container empty enough to transform
into a caterpillar’s sixteen bouncing legs,
waiting to grow the wings to support it in air.

In a matter of moments, I could shed my old skin,
pupating my greediness over what I did not offer,
though the boy did not consider me greedy. He waited

so patiently for me to hold the bottle to my lips
and drink the very last drop, having waited under rubble,
himself a survivor, overwintering in ash.

He sat next to me on the cracked cement steps,
leading to the collapsed second floor.
Water could not sustain him. He required nectar

sweet between leaves. It was all over the news.
The water was contaminated. Peacekeepers defecated in water,
bringing cholera to the Artibonite River.

The world’s carelessness now set afloat.
I know. I was ready to discard my bottle,
set it on its journey of decomposition,

strip it of its corporeal form. My bottle,
held in the hands of so many people who will never
drink from it, those who delivered it from earth,

mined it, heated it, spun it a long while to become the axis
on which the day moves, wholly imaginary.
A boy waiting with a string in his hand.

Commentary:

Apart from the 2010 Haiti earthquake which caused an unprecedented natural disaster, the population suffered a man-made disaster when waste from a UN base leaked into the rivers and introduced a cholera epidemic. When I wrote “My Water Bottle” I wanted to depict the resilience of the people I’d met in Haiti. While Haiti is a victim of poverty and corruption, (according to a July 17, 2018 Miami Herald article, 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), it is a place of beauty where everyday people engage in great acts of courage.

Since 2013, I’ve been traveling to Haiti as the leader of a Drexel University creative writing study abroad trip. On the trip we attend workshops at PEN Haiti and meet with renown Haitian writers, poets, artists and musician activists whose life and work cannot avoid representing change. Haitian literature has been compared to Russian literature before the Revolution, because it is that gorgeous, that rich, that filled with foment and despair. One great example is Marie Vieux Chauvet’s masterpiece Love Anger Madness. The early pages depict one of the main characters touching herself in her bed while she hears through her open window the screams of political prisoners who are being tortured in the nearby jail. These two actions are juxtaposed in a way that is uniquely Haitian and characterizes much of Haitian life and consequently its literature. Forrest Gander’s words in his new book, Be With, “the political begins in intimacy,” resonate here.

Besides meeting Haitian artists, our study abroad group fundraises for Love Orphanage, where we engage with the children for days at a time. Love Orphanage’s director Gabriel Fedelus is a father to eighteen children who were orphaned after the earthquake. Unlike the US, Haiti’s governmental agencies do not fund its orphanages. All assistance is received from overseas. The children lack basic needs such as soap and toothpaste not to mention medicine and meat. Needless to say, the children don’t own toys or games. Every penny that the orphanage receives goes toward sustaining the children’s basic needs. I was particularly awakened to this fact when I returned to the orphanage the following morning after one of the children, a six-year-old boy named Olson, asked me for my water bottle, to see he had constructed a pull-toy out of it. I could not help comparing his childhood to mine with its many toys. Are toys a kind of armor or shield against the imagination or do they give root to imaginative impulses? I think of Rilke’s idea of how necessary it is to be bored for the real imagination to grow.

Love Orphanage accepts donations at http://www.loveorphanage.org
No donation is too small.

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THE CATHEDRAL

—After Rodin’s The Cathedral

I watch my daughter imitate

the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.

Her arms curved in slow gyration.

It is her way of understating

the dark bronze, how two arms

can captivate the imagination

in their dizzying swirl,

find balance between

light and shadows. In truth,

the hands are both right hands

turning in on themselves, an architecture

almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective

of the space within, of what the

bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends

uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if

her whole body is questioning

what it means to be a girl.

She sees—maybe

for the first time—what is there

and what is not from the hollow

her hands make, all the empty angles

that never touch,

the almost-grasp of the intimate.

Her wrists slight and glistening

with summer’s patina,

her fingertips conjure her being

and becoming,

body and soul

closing and opening

at the same time.

A few years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted an expansive exhibit of sculptor Auguste Rodin. My daughter and I fell in love with his sculp

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