Sapling interviews Starr Troup
Last month, Sapling, a weekly newsletter from Black Lawrence Press that highlights the best of the small press world for writers looking for new venues for their work, interviewed our Managing Editor, Starr Troup.
Here is the full interview and many thanks to Sapling for allowing us to republish it our blog.
Sapling: What should people know who may not be familiar with CavanKerry Press?
Starr Troup: CavanKerry Press’s tagline is “Lives brought to life.” We hope to, through the wonderful words of talented writers, continue our mission to expand the reach of poetry to a general readership. We want to put highly readable poetry into the hands of as many readers as possible. We do that by publishing poets whose works “explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.” We are a literary press focused on community. Our outreach endeavors, among others, include: 1) the Gift Books program, 2) our involvement with New Jersey’s Poetry Out Loud Program for high school students, and 3) the sponsorship of a teacher scholarship to the Frost Place in New Hampshire.
Through the Gift Books program we donate books to organizations around the country, including schools, medical facilities, and other community-focused organizations. Our most recent version of the Waiting Room Reader has been donated to hospital and medical facility waiting rooms nationwide. We provide desk copies of our books to teachers across the country with hopes they will find intriguing poetry to use in the classroom.
New Jersey has a very successful Poetry Out Loud program, this year having the highest student participation and teacher participation in the country. During the state finals of the competition a CavanKerry author acts as a judge. CavanKerry gives books to the library of every participating high school, each of the students who is a regional finalist, and each state finalist.
Our Associate Publisher, Teresa Carson, teaches at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching each summer. She works with teachers who attend the workshops, from elementary school, middle school, and high school to undergraduate and graduate level, to bring poetry into their classrooms. CavanKerry provides a scholarship, each year, for the teacher of the student who has become the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud State Champion.
Sapling: How did your name come about?
ST: Our Founder and Publisher, Joan Cusack Handler, has a strong Irish background. Her parents were from County Cavan and County Kerry in Ireland.
Sapling: What do you pay close attention to when reading submissions? Any deal breakers?
ST: Our Publisher and Associate Publisher read all poetry submissions. Our Publisher and I, as Managing Editor, read all memoir submissions. The editors choose each title based on: the high quality of the writing, the cohesiveness of the collection, the distinctiveness of the writer’s voice, and the ability of the work to engage a diversity of readers intellectually and move them emotionally.
CavanKerry accepts submissions only during the open submission periods. We do not run contests. We consider manuscripts from first-time authors to late career authors. Our guidelines are clearly outlined on our website and we hope that all writers read what’s there before submitting.
Sapling: Where do you imagine CavanKerry Press to be headed over the next couple years? What’s on the horizon?
ST: CavanKerry continues to work on the improvement of business practices and procedures. We recently expanded our submission procedure to include the Submittable platform. We’ve also been expanding our community outreach programs and will continue to do so. We hope to see more of our books in classrooms. Recently, our author Loren Graham’s book, Places I Was Dreaming, was selected as the freshman seminar book for Carroll College in Montana. We’d like to have more of our books selected for school-wide reading.
Sapling: As an editor, what is the hardest part of your job? The best part?
ST: The hardest part of my job, as Managing Editor, is the very mundane, behind-the-scenes job of coordinating everything that has to do with the release of our titles. Working with the author, the copy editor, the designer, the distributor, and the printer requires great attention to detail… and attention to due dates. My office has clipboards hanging from nails in the wall – clipboards with production schedules, and event schedules, and design schedules. In spite of my reliance on technology for my daily work, I need those tangible hard copies of information hanging on my wall. It’s a constant reminder of what is coming due in one of the three seasons I am working on at any given time.
I love working with the authors. I begin contact as early as two years before the scheduled release date, and I continue working with an author sometimes up to two years after a book is released. We talk about the production schedule, copy edits to the manuscript, and marketing strategies for post-production. This past April I spent the days at AWP in Minneapolis with three of our authors – Dawn Potter, Loren Graham, and Brent Newsom – working the table, answering questions, and managing the book signings and sales. It was a wonderful experience. I felt both exhilarated and completely and totally exhausted after the long days of interaction, almost as a yin to their yang, as we spoke to the many participants at the conference.
Sapling: If you were stranded on a desert island for a week with only three books, what books would you want to have with you?
ST: If I had to choose today it would probably be: God Laughs and Plays, by David James Duncan – one of my favorite nonfiction authors; The Complete Robert Frost, to satisfy some of my poetry cravings; and the JRR Tolkien Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy to have a place to lose myself. I want to live in Lothlorien one day, and have since I first discovered the place when I was very young. Of course three books wouldn’t be enough, and the titles will probably be different if you ask me a month from now.
Sapling: Just for fun (because we like fun and the number three), if CavanKerry Press was a person, what three things would it be thinking about obsessively?
ST: As the Managing Editor of CavanKerry, I think if CavanKerry were a person she would be thinking about more ways to put our quality literature and beautiful books in the hands of readers. The other two things would have to be related to that, because after all, that is what publishing is all about.
Starr Troup is the Managing Editor of CavanKerry Press, headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and has worked for the press from her home in Central Pennsylvania for two years. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Wilkes University with a focus in nonfiction. In past lives she has taught fifth graders to love literature, owned and managed a business with her husband, and worked as Director of Education for Ixtlan Artists and Lakota Performing Arts. Starr is a writer of nonfiction, a part-time photographer, and a passionate lover of the natural world. She lives in York, Pennsylvania with her husband, Chris, and her two cats, Pippin and Macintosh.
On Accuracy at Poetry Out Loud, from Teresa Carson

Because of the bad fortune of a snowstorm that caused the postponement of the Region 6 New Jersey Poetry Out Loud competition, I had the good fortune to act as the Accuracy Judge on the snow date. While the other three judges had to evaluate each recitation in six categories, I had only one thing to worry about: Did the student “keep the poet’s language intact for the audience”? Once the student started his/her recitation, I followed along, without lifting my eyes from the text, until the recitation finished. So, throughout the entire time each student was on stage, I had to block out any aspects of “performance” and concentrate on the words themselves. Inaccuracies, which are classified as either “minor” (e.g. “a” instead of “the”) or “major” (e.g. skipping a line), can have a surprising impact on the overall score because they can result in a total deduction of 7 points. As a testament to the skill and commitment of the Region 6 students, there were few “major” inaccuracies—for the most part the inaccuracies centered on confusing pronouns/articles and skipping/replacing words.
Although some people might consider the role of the Accuracy Judge less exciting than that of the other judges, I very much enjoyed the experience. Since this was my first time as a POL judge, it allowed for an easy introduction to the fast-paced judging process. Also, it just so happens that my personality is very well suited to the block-out-everything-but-the-text concentration needed to act as Accuracy Judge. This concentration must be combined with an ability to respond to the recitation itself—for example, patiently waiting until one participant, who had gone completely “off script,” found her way back to the poem.
-Teresa Carson, Associate Editor
Another question for National Poetry Month
It’s poetry month and we asked our community to answer 3 important questions, one of them being…
What is the poem you’d give to someone living in your town 100 years from now?
Here are some of the answers we got.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Poet
I am astonished at their mouthful names–
Lakinishia, Chevellanie, Delayo, Fumilayo–
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery…
-Patricia Smith, “Building Nicole’s Mama”
Jack Ridl
Poet
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life…
-Willian Stafford, “Ask Me”
Teresa Carson
Poet, Associate Editor, CavanKerry Press
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine…
-John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
Holly Smith
Teacher
Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time…
-Terrance Hayes, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”
Danny Shot
Poet
The Hoboken Poem
By Jack Wiler
Hoboken, city of light.
Hoboken, a bump on the river.
Hoboken, four guys on a corner in guinea
tees gold chains and they’re all the mayor’s friend;
hey they work in his office.
Hoboken, elections every day.
Hoboken, opportunity around every corner.
Every corner a danger.
No stop signs.
No sign of anyone stopping.
Every taxi paused at every corner.
Hoboken, one taxi fare
2.25 cheap.
Hoboken, a bus every minute.
Hoboken, a train every ten.
Hoboken, burning.
Every building on fire.
Children falling from the windows.
Mothers running into the street.
Hoboken, even the fire houses on fire.
Hoboken, burnt.
Hoboken, rising and falling
burning and smoldering.
Hoboken, every factory closed.
Every park full.
Every man a king.
Every one works at the Board of Ed.
Hoboken, unlimited overtime.
No end to the money you can make.
Hoboken, home of baseball.
Hoboken, only one baseball field.
Hoboken, the first fly ball over the Elysian Field,
the first smoking fastball,
the first frozen rope drops just beneath the Maxwell’s sign,
the drop of coffee lands on the ball,
the fielder slips, the factory closes, the sign goes dark,
the children run in the street till well past eleven.
It’s Hoboken,
the fires are out, the factories are closed,
the sign is dark, the world is quiet,
the sun is setting.
Hoboken, good to the last bitter drop.
Hoboken, city of light:
city of paused taxis,
city of beer and fires and children in the street.
Hoboken
the factories closed, the lights out
pauses mid day.
No election today.
No overtime today.
No games are scheduled.
The children leave the house at nine in the morning dressed
as spooks and demons and march down the street.
Ragamuffins in a ragamuffin town.
A raga then for Hoboken.
A last song for a lost town.
Hoboken
taxis waiting for the children to pass.
Adele Kenny answers our NPM questions
What is the poem that you recite to yourself when you’re waiting for test results in a doctor’s waiting room?
Last Lines
by Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life–that in me has rest,
As I–undying Life–have power in Thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as wither’d weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine Infinity;
So surely anchor’d on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou–Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
What is the poem you’d give to someone living in your town 100 years from now?
East Rahway
By Adele Kenny
The past is a foreign country,
they do things differently there.
– L. P. Hartley
All it takes is something familiar: the shape of a
hand or a stranger’s eyes in the sudden light of
a theater when the movie ends. Then, something
deep in memory’s birthwood calls me back.
The past is my first language, a speakable grace.
On summer nights in East Rahway, our fathers
sat on front porches in worn t-shirts, their
calloused hands wrapped around beer cans as
the last stars took their places like nail-heads
on a dark and holy board. Inside, our mothers
sang as they washed the dinner dishes, and we
went to sleep with the easy grace of children.
All of our grandmothers spoke with accents,
rolled their stockings down to their ankles like
nylon UFOs, and people shouted at them when
they spoke, enunciating carefully, as if our
grandmothers weren’t only foreign but deaf.
Different from the beginning, we were the city’s
middle children, never as tough as the kids from
the projects, and only half as cool as the kids who
lived behind the high school on the other side
of town. Cut off from the rest of Rahway, we
lived between Route 1 and Linden Airport, in
a place where sleep was rubbed out of night to
the sound of trucks stumbling over potholes
and propjets taking off on runway number three.
Safe in our own society, we lived a little religion
of unlikely saints whose blood offerings were
elbows and knees that scraped like autumn
leaves on the sidewalks. In East Rahway, hardly
anyone died or went away. Those were the days
before we knew what dead meant. But when
Mr. Malone, who lived in the corner house,
did it, the bagpipes wailed and skirled for
three days in his living room, a hundred octaves
higher than all the blades of grass we ever
held between our thumbs and blew against –
a different kind of party. There were no soccer
games, no little league, no one drove us anywhere.
We walked to the corner store and hiked down
Lower Road to Merck’s Creek, the mosquitoed
water stained even then by chemicals we couldn’t
name; but, oh, the bright and oily rings that spread
above the stones we skipped like shivering circles
of mercury. There were forests then, across the
street, and deep. We were wood nymphs and
Druids, foreign legionnaires led by my cousin
Eddie. Soldiers of whatever fortune was, we
followed into the hymned and scrawling weeds –
the underbrush belled by our footsteps, trees
tuned to prodigal birds. We were Arthur and
Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan, all the knights, and
one Rapunzel who lost her hair in a bubble gum
accident. We did things differently then, believed
in summer’s synonymous sun, December’s
piebald light, white-maned and glistening, the
moon above us, cloud-ribbed in semi-silhouette.
The past falls like water from winter boots.
Merck’s Creek, darker, dirtier with new pollution,
moves more slowly. The streets, once so wide
and willing, are smaller. And the forest is gone,
the initials we carved lost with fallen trees,
the green spirits laid to rest beneath a block of
factories. But, still, if you cross Route 1 on
a night overworked with summer stars, and
stand on the corner of Scott and Barnett, you
will find our fathers there. Kents and Winstons
burn, beer cans shine in the baritone heat. Our
mothers and grandmothers sing, ghostly soloists,
eggshell voices – reedy, thin. And we are there,
lips pressed smugly on chocolate cigarettes; our
pockets ring with Pez candies. Listen! A child’s
voice calls Excalibur into the night, those old bones
still in the road – skull and neck, a few vertebrae
that we tossed like dice to tell our future.
(From What Matters, Welcome Rain Publishers, 2011)
What is the poem you’d give to an alien?
Theories of Time and Space
by Natasha Trethewey
How are we celebrating National Poetry Month?
By asking our poets, staff, and CavanKerry community three simple questions:
- What is the poem that you recite to yourself when you’re waiting for test results in a doctor’s waiting room?
- What is the poem you’d give to someone living in your town 100 years from now?
- What is the poem you’d give to an alien?
We will be sharing our results through the entire month of April.
Stay tuned!
Dawn Potter on Judging the NJ Poetry Out Loud State Finals
On March 13, 2015, I had the honor and the pleasure of serving as a judge at the state finals of the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud competition, held at Princeton University. For those of you unfamiliar with this program: Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation competition administered by the National Endowment for the Arts. High school students in all fifty states memorize poems, which they recite during in-school contests. The goal is to advance to the regional, then the state, and ultimately the national level.
I live in Maine, where I have judged a number of Poetry Out Loud contests at both the regional and the state level. Yet despite my familiarity with the program, I was entirely unprepared for Poetry Out Loud, New Jersey-style. To begin with, I learned that 35,000 New Jersey students took part in the program this year. That’s a staggering number, one that reveals a significant commitment to poetry inside nearly every high school in the state. Behind the twelve finalists I heard at Princeton were thousands of students, teachers, administrators, civil servants, poets, and family members who had supported and celebrated these performers in their work. The result, at the state level, was a remarkable level of confidence and poise. The finalists were not simply acting out the works they recited. They were enacting them—allowing the clarion voice of the poem to speak for itself. The results were spellbinding.
I daresay that most of these students, as adults, won’t necessarily define themselves as poets. But listening to them recite reminded me that poetry is just as important for people who aren’t poets as it is for people who are. Reciting a poem, like singing a song, allows us to exist inside that emotional and intellectual space, to inhabit its corners and crevices. And as we take the poem into ourselves, it becomes a permanent resident of our inner world—a solace and a strength, for the rest of our lives. New Jersey’s commitment to poetry in its schools offers a lesson to teachers, poets, and administrators everywhere. Young people are eager to find poetry, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that poetry finds them.
Journey to Publication by Sarah Bracey White

A skinny, brown-skinned girl sits on the porch of a weathered gray house in South Carolina. Pencil in hand, she writes a letter to another 12 year old in South Dakota — trying to make a pale-skinned version of herself understand what it’s like to live in a place where everyone who has power over you is white, and they all seem to hate you.
Fast forward 50 years. That little girl has grown up, but is still trying to make sense of her early years in a place where she was always considered “less than.” And trying to understand why her school teacher mother never chafed under second -class citizenship. Afraid to illuminate the truth of her early, painful memories, she first pens novels about southern families. “Her real life is what interests us,” publishers tell her agent. “Come back when she writes a memoir.” She thinks her life too simple and ordinary for a memoir; but occasionally, she creates small, but honest reflections for her writers’ group. They encourage her to dig deeper into the gold mine of her life. An essayist friend tells her that everything that happens in life is fodder for a writer. So, she begins to write essays about her life.
Her husband hatches a plan to get her true stories out into the world. He and his daughter buy her a domain name, “Onmymind.org” and tailor-make a web site for her. He encourages her to abandon the literary style of her novels and write in her own voice. It’s hard for her to abandon imitating the great writers she admired in college, but she does. Readers visit her website, read her stories and write laudatory messages about how much they enjoy her writing.
A friend, Linda Simone, suggests that she submit one of her oft-told stories to a contest that offers a $1,000 prize for the best story about a writer’s first experience of racism. She submits a piece about the summer of 1963 when, months after her mother’s unexpected death, she left South Carolina and worked in a girls’ camp on the shores of Lake Fairlee in Vermont. She does not win the $1,000 prize; but, she does get selected for inclusion in the anthology, “Children of the Dream.” Her essay is then selected for a reprint of the best essays from “Children of the Dream.” That reprint becomes a textbook, and she begins to receive reader’s comments about the power of her story. It makes her believe that perhaps her life has enough substance to interest readers. But there’s one last hurdle.
Southerners are taught upon exiting the womb that family business is not to be shared with the public. So, she believes that the life she shared with her mother, father and siblings doesn’t belong to her. However, she feels confident that her current life is hers. Essays about the state of her current life quickly make their way into local journals and commercial anthologies. Still, she can’t shake the need to reconcile the difficult years she spent in South Carolina and the need to understand her ambivalence toward her mother about her mother’s efforts to make a “proper” southern woman out of her. Without the intent of ever publishing her journey of self-discovery, she begins the search for what lay at the heart of the child who refused to accept the designation of “less than.”
She mines the depths of her past in three hour chunks. At night, after long work days when she’s too tired to make up anything, she sits at her computer and closes her eyes. In the voice of the five year old she remembers being, she begins her story. Along the way, sense memories rise and sweep her into a sea of recall where she relives the seasons of her childhood. On and off, for four years, she writes. By the end, she discovers the strength that sustained her. Then, she puts her memoir in a drawer — until this email message arrives from her friend Linda:
“This is your agent speaking. I think I’ve found a home for Primary Lessons. CavanKerry Press, a reputable poetry press has a memoir imprint and is accepting unagented, book-length memoirs during the month of February. Send them Primary Lessons.”
This email message makes her groan, but Linda is the same friend who prodded her to submit her piece to “Children of the Dream.” So, she prints out a hard copy, packages it along with a $20 reading fee and mails it to CavanKerry Press.
Six months later, a woman’s voice on the other end of a phone call asks for Sarah Bracey White. She answers affirmatively and the woman says, “This is Florenz Eiseman from CavanKerry Press. We’d like to publish your book.”
“What book did I send you,” she asks. Florenz laughs, then says, “That’s not usually the response I get when I call to say we’re going to publish an author’s work. We’d like to publish your memoir Primary Lessons. We thought it was the best of all the submissions we received during our open call.”
“Are you serious?” she asks Florenz. “Very serious,” Florenz answers. “I’m CavanKerry’s managing editor. You’ll soon get a call from Joan Cusak Handler , our publisher. And I’ll be sending you an email confirming everything I’ve said to you. Congratulations!”
She hangs up the phone, stares at it for a moment, then runs screaming into the living room to tell her husband the news: A publisher wants to publish her memoir!
Celebrating a New Mission
From Joan Cusack Handler, Publisher and Senior Editor
Interestingly enough, our mission statement changes as we grow. Our first emphasized our dual commitment: A not-for-profit literary press serving art and community. Unique among independent presses we wanted to single ourselves out for our programs as well as our books.
Next, we focused on clarifying that dual commitment: Through publishing and programming, CavanKerry Press connects communities of writers with communities of readers. We publish poetry that reaches from the page to include the reader by the finest new and established contemporary writers. Our programming brings our books and our poets to people where they live, cultivating new audiences and nourishing established ones.
Our third statement introduced our new tagline, Lives Brought to Life, the addition of memoir to our publishing program, and our commitment to diversity: CavanKerry Press is a not-for-profit literary press dedicated to art and community. From its inception in 2000, its vision has been to present, through poetry and prose, and to create programs that bring CavanKerry books and writers to diverse audiences.
And now, we are proud to announce our newly composed fourth mission statement which hones in on CavanKerry’s aesthetic and inclusive spirit: CavanKerry Press is committed to expanding the reach of poetry to a general readership by publishing poets whose works explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life. Our vision follows from that : A literary press at the center of a community of poets and readers.
I can’t say why this newest mission statement delights me so. While each of them has been accurate, none has expressed quite as succinctly what drives us today and what drove me to found the press in the first place. Clearly, it identifies our most basic yet profound raison d’etre. So much poetry published today does not include the general reader nor does it focus on the emotional and psychological truth of everyday life. On the other hand, CavanKerry was founded to focus on a bedrock commitment to broadening the reach of poetry and to the belief that poetry belongs to everyone.
I can’t imagine clarifying who we are any better than this newest mission statement, but who knows—we’ll keep you posted.
Thank you to all of you who help us do this work.
-Joan
CavanKerry Poets at Massachusetts Poetry Festival
“A Garden State of Poetry” from Mary Rizzo
On April 6, 2014, the Hoboken Historical Museum was abuzz. One hundred people crowded the exhibit floor, overflowing the chairs and standing wherever a space could be found. What brought so many people out on a beautiful Sunday afternoon? A poetry reading, organized by CavanKerry Press and funded by the New Jersey Historical Commission.
But “Something Old, Something (New) Jersey” was more than a typical poetry reading, as suggested by its poster which included Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams as readers. As part of the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of New Jersey taking place throughout 2014 (https://officialnj350.com/), this event had contemporary NJ poets reading the works of iconic NJ poets and then pieces they wrote that were inspired by these icons. Two living iconic poets, Alicia Ostriker and Herschel Silverman, read their own works.
As this suggests, New Jersey has an impressive legacy of poetry that dates back to the colonial period with the work of Philip Freneau (1752-1832), whose politically themed poems earned him the sobriquet “poet of the Revolution.” But when most people think about the importance of New Jersey, they probably think of Washington crossing the Delaware or the invention of the light bulb, movies, and sound recording technology, rather than poetry. As a historian, I’m interested in two related questions: why are there so many poets from New Jersey? And why doesn’t anyone associate poetry with New Jersey?
One answer to the first question has to do with New Jersey’s unique history, which has made it, without exaggeration, one of the most diverse places in the U.S. since its founding. If we look back to that founding moment in 1664, we see how diversity became part of our state. The British crown took New Jersey from the Dutch and split the territory in half. The east half, really the shore and South Jersey, was given to Sir George Carteret and the west half to Lord John Berkeley. They wrote the “Concessions and Agreement,” which provided freedom of religion in the colony of New Jersey, making it quite different from other colonies, like Massachusetts, which was extremely intolerant in terms of religious ideas. Because New Jersey allowed its settlers to have religious freedom—which equated with political freedom in those days—it drew diverse peoples to it. Also, Berkeley and Carteret sold land at low prices to encourage people to settle there bringing a variety of classes to the colony.
In addition to that diversity, New Jersey is a small, crowded state. Although in the 2nd half of the 19th century, New Jersey sank in terms of its rank by population, by the 1920s, this was reversed, suggesting the importance of immigration, industrialization, the Great Migration, and suburbanization on the state. Now, of course, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the U.S., with a higher population density than India or China, suggesting how tightly packed in we all are.
Diversity plus density means that we’re constantly rubbing shoulders with people who think differently than we do. New ideas are being created, challenged, and modified, which is perhaps part of the reason New Jersey has been home to so many inventions. That diversity means, very literally, that there are lots of languages, dialects, accents, and ways of speaking which have inspired poets like William Carlos Williams, from Rutherford, immeasurably.
Think of Walt Whitman, who spent the last part of his life in Camden. His writing is full of the flavor of diverse peoples and voices, which is why he’s cited as the poet of democracy. While he lived in Camden he wrote a prose piece called “Scenes on Ferry and River-Last Winter’s Nights” (1891) that captures the feel of the Camden ferry through its people. “Mothers with bevie of daughters, (a charming sight)—children, countrymen—the railroad men in their blue clothes and caps—all the various characters of city and country represented or suggested. Then outside some belated passenger frantically running, jumping after the boat….Inside the reception room, business bargains, flirting, love-making, eclaircissements, proposals—pleasant, sober-faced Phil coming in with his burden of afternoon papers—or Jo, or Charley (who jump’d in the dock last week, and saved a stout lady from drowning,) to replenish the stove, after clearing it with long crow-bar poker.” That diversity of people leads Whitman and so many other NJ poets, to an empathetic interest in their stories and lives.
But it would not be very New Jersey to only focus on the positive. Packing lots of people into a small space causes conflict, too. New Jersey’s poets have been at the forefront of analyzing those conflicts as a way to push our understanding of social structures, examining with razor-precision how we treat the working class and people of color and asking who has power and who does not—and what we can do about it. Amiri Baraka, the Newark poet, was a master at this, but so was another poet from New Jersey, Ntozake Shange. Shange, best known for her choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, was born as Paulette Williams in Trenton. Although she left Trenton when she was eight, her experience of growing up in that industrial city, especially in a middle-class black family, shaped her unflinching perspective that so beautifully connects race, gender and sexuality using a language infused by jazz in its riffing and improvisation. As in this piece, “Blood Rhythms, Blood Currents, Black n Blue Stylin’”
we gonna take this
new city neon light
sound
volumes for million to hear
to love themselves
enough to turn back the pulse of a whippin’ history
make it carry the modern black melody from L.A.
to downtown Newark City
freedom buses
freedom riders
freedom is the way we walk that walk
talk that talk
Such musicality of language shapes our musician-poets, too. I had the pleasure of being in a session led by Robert Pinsky on poetry and democracy for teachers a few years ago. One of them asked how to get boys interested in poetry and he recalled that when he was a young man he didn’t love poetry. He loved rock music. Lyrics were his first poems. Add to that the poetry of rap music (which one could argue began in Englewood with Sugar Hill Records) and now New Jersey’s poetry legacy has grown even richer—and become even more expansive.
Who else has captured the pathos of working-class New Jersey better than Bruce Springsteen? I remember being in 10th grade English class at Middletown South High School when my teacher Mr. Lynn had us analyze the lyrics to “Born to Run” as poetry. He was right, of course. Springsteen speaks to our more recent New Jersey, one in which the shift from an industrial economy to a postindustrial one combined with the rise of middle-class suburbs meant that the opportunities that had existed for working-class men and women that had existed during New Jersey’s “glory days” in the mid 20th century were ending. To take Camden, again, as an example, the city was once home to Campbell’s Soup’s manufacturing facilities, RCA-Victor, and New York shipbuilding. They are all gone and it is struggling to figure out what’s next.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Realize New Jersey’s Poetry Legacy?
Like Ben Franklin said, New Jersey is a keg tapped at both ends, with New York and Philadelphia draining us. Patti Smith, the punk poet from Woodbury, left NJ and helped create an art movement for disaffected youth everywhere. A poet like Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, left New Jersey to join the beat movement and then the counterculture in New York and California. Ginsburg used New Jersey in his poetry, but also clearly suggested that he saw it as a place of dead ends. In “Howl” he describes those “who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room.” New Jersey can inspire, but its smallness can also be a limitation.
But I don’t think that we should be disappointed by the fact that few people realize what New Jersey has given the world in terms of poetry. When we talk about great American poetry, so much of the time we’re talking about poets from New Jersey. That’s because New Jersey is really America writ small. For this reason, New Jersey has had an influence on poetry well beyond what its small size would suggest because America can be found in our borders. Our poetry is America’s poetry.
And it’s not just a legacy. Poetry is a living, breathing thing in New Jersey today, with poets from Alicia Ostriker to Steven Dunn to Rachel Hadas to Peter Murphy, to CavanKerry’s amazing roster of poets, keeping these traditions alive.
On this point, let me close with an image from a poet who currently works in New Jersey, Tracy Smith, at Princeton University, from her Pulitzer winning collection Life on Mars. What I love about these lines is how she describes the universe as a small, deeply connected community. To me, that also describes the poetry community we have in our state and why New Jersey will always be a home for poetry:
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes.
"A Garden State of Poetry" from Mary Rizzo
On April 6, 2014, the Hoboken Historical Museum was abuzz. One hundred people crowded the exhibit floor, overflowing the chairs and standing wherever a space could be found. What brought so many people out on a beautiful Sunday afternoon? A poetry reading, organized by CavanKerry Press and funded by the New Jersey Historical Commission.
But “Something Old, Something (New) Jersey” was more than a typical poetry reading, as suggested by its poster which included Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams as readers. As part of the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of New Jersey taking place throughout 2014 (https://officialnj350.com/), this event had contemporary NJ poets reading the works of iconic NJ poets and then pieces they wrote that were inspired by these icons. Two living iconic poets, Alicia Ostriker and Herschel Silverman, read their own works.
As this suggests, New Jersey has an impressive legacy of poetry that dates back to the colonial period with the work of Philip Freneau (1752-1832), whose politically themed poems earned him the sobriquet “poet of the Revolution.” But when most people think about the importance of New Jersey, they probably think of Washington crossing the Delaware or the invention of the light bulb, movies, and sound recording technology, rather than poetry. As a historian, I’m interested in two related questions: why are there so many poets from New Jersey? And why doesn’t anyone associate poetry with New Jersey?
One answer to the first question has to do with New Jersey’s unique history, which has made it, without exaggeration, one of the most diverse places in the U.S. since its founding. If we look back to that founding moment in 1664, we see how diversity became part of our state. The British crown took New Jersey from the Dutch and split the territory in half. The east half, really the shore and South Jersey, was given to Sir George Carteret and the west half to Lord John Berkeley. They wrote the “Concessions and Agreement,” which provided freedom of religion in the colony of New Jersey, making it quite different from other colonies, like Massachusetts, which was extremely intolerant in terms of religious ideas. Because New Jersey allowed its settlers to have religious freedom—which equated with political freedom in those days—it drew diverse peoples to it. Also, Berkeley and Carteret sold land at low prices to encourage people to settle there bringing a variety of classes to the colony.
In addition to that diversity, New Jersey is a small, crowded state. Although in the 2nd half of the 19th century, New Jersey sank in terms of its rank by population, by the 1920s, this was reversed, suggesting the importance of immigration, industrialization, the Great Migration, and suburbanization on the state. Now, of course, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the U.S., with a higher population density than India or China, suggesting how tightly packed in we all are.
Diversity plus density means that we’re constantly rubbing shoulders with people who think differently than we do. New ideas are being created, challenged, and modified, which is perhaps part of the reason New Jersey has been home to so many inventions. That diversity means, very literally, that there are lots of languages, dialects, accents, and ways of speaking which have inspired poets like William Carlos Williams, from Rutherford, immeasurably.
Think of Walt Whitman, who spent the last part of his life in Camden. His writing is full of the flavor of diverse peoples and voices, which is why he’s cited as the poet of democracy. While he lived in Camden he wrote a prose piece called “Scenes on Ferry and River-Last Winter’s Nights” (1891) that captures the feel of the Camden ferry through its people. “Mothers with bevie of daughters, (a charming sight)—children, countrymen—the railroad men in their blue clothes and caps—all the various characters of city and country represented or suggested. Then outside some belated passenger frantically running, jumping after the boat….Inside the reception room, business bargains, flirting, love-making, eclaircissements, proposals—pleasant, sober-faced Phil coming in with his burden of afternoon papers—or Jo, or Charley (who jump’d in the dock last week, and saved a stout lady from drowning,) to replenish the stove, after clearing it with long crow-bar poker.” That diversity of people leads Whitman and so many other NJ poets, to an empathetic interest in their stories and lives.
But it would not be very New Jersey to only focus on the positive. Packing lots of people into a small space causes conflict, too. New Jersey’s poets have been at the forefront of analyzing those conflicts as a way to push our understanding of social structures, examining with razor-precision how we treat the working class and people of color and asking who has power and who does not—and what we can do about it. Amiri Baraka, the Newark poet, was a master at this, but so was another poet from New Jersey, Ntozake Shange. Shange, best known for her choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, was born as Paulette Williams in Trenton. Although she left Trenton when she was eight, her experience of growing up in that industrial city, especially in a middle-class black family, shaped her unflinching perspective that so beautifully connects race, gender and sexuality using a language infused by jazz in its riffing and improvisation. As in this piece, “Blood Rhythms, Blood Currents, Black n Blue Stylin’”
we gonna take this
new city neon light
sound
volumes for million to hear
to love themselves
enough to turn back the pulse of a whippin’ history
make it carry the modern black melody from L.A.
to downtown Newark City
freedom buses
freedom riders
freedom is the way we walk that walk
talk that talk
Such musicality of language shapes our musician-poets, too. I had the pleasure of being in a session led by Robert Pinsky on poetry and democracy for teachers a few years ago. One of them asked how to get boys interested in poetry and he recalled that when he was a young man he didn’t love poetry. He loved rock music. Lyrics were his first poems. Add to that the poetry of rap music (which one could argue began in Englewood with Sugar Hill Records) and now New Jersey’s poetry legacy has grown even richer—and become even more expansive.
Who else has captured the pathos of working-class New Jersey better than Bruce Springsteen? I remember being in 10th grade English class at Middletown South High School when my teacher Mr. Lynn had us analyze the lyrics to “Born to Run” as poetry. He was right, of course. Springsteen speaks to our more recent New Jersey, one in which the shift from an industrial economy to a postindustrial one combined with the rise of middle-class suburbs meant that the opportunities that had existed for working-class men and women that had existed during New Jersey’s “glory days” in the mid 20th century were ending. To take Camden, again, as an example, the city was once home to Campbell’s Soup’s manufacturing facilities, RCA-Victor, and New York shipbuilding. They are all gone and it is struggling to figure out what’s next.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Realize New Jersey’s Poetry Legacy?
Like Ben Franklin said, New Jersey is a keg tapped at both ends, with New York and Philadelphia draining us. Patti Smith, the punk poet from Woodbury, left NJ and helped create an art movement for disaffected youth everywhere. A poet like Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, left New Jersey to join the beat movement and then the counterculture in New York and California. Ginsburg used New Jersey in his poetry, but also clearly suggested that he saw it as a place of dead ends. In “Howl” he describes those “who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room.” New Jersey can inspire, but its smallness can also be a limitation.
But I don’t think that we should be disappointed by the fact that few people realize what New Jersey has given the world in terms of poetry. When we talk about great American poetry, so much of the time we’re talking about poets from New Jersey. That’s because New Jersey is really America writ small. For this reason, New Jersey has had an influence on poetry well beyond what its small size would suggest because America can be found in our borders. Our poetry is America’s poetry.
And it’s not just a legacy. Poetry is a living, breathing thing in New Jersey today, with poets from Alicia Ostriker to Steven Dunn to Rachel Hadas to Peter Murphy, to CavanKerry’s amazing roster of poets, keeping these traditions alive.
On this point, let me close with an image from a poet who currently works in New Jersey, Tracy Smith, at Princeton University, from her Pulitzer winning collection Life on Mars. What I love about these lines is how she describes the universe as a small, deeply connected community. To me, that also describes the poetry community we have in our state and why New Jersey will always be a home for poetry:
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes.
Something Old, Something (New) Jersey was a hit!
More photos are to come but thank you to everyone who came out!
.@CavanKerryPress look at all the poetry lovers at the Hoboken historical museum! pic.twitter.com/HeP1JUjWiT
— Mary Rizzo (@rizzo_pubhist) April 6, 2014
.@CavanKerryPress This was an amazing event! They had to turn people away at the door. Poetry lives in NJ! .@NJ350 — Mary Rizzo (@rizzo_pubhist) April 7, 2014
CKP at AWP
“Thus Spoke Baraka” from Danny Shot
Danny Shot, who has been working with me to put together the Something Old, Something New (Jersey) reading at the Hoboken Historical Museum on April 6, is a poet, high school teacher, former publisher of Long Shot Magazine and good friend to CavanKerry Press and me. As he says in the opening paragraph, “Amiri Baraka was a controversial figure and people seemed to either love him or hate him. ” So why did Danny love him? read on. -Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher
Thus Spoke Baraka
The man went out with style. The funeral was on Saturday, January 18 at the Symphony Hall in downtown Newark. The morning couldn’t decide what it wanted, going from thick heavy snow to a drenching rain and back again. At least 3,000 people came to say their goodbyes during a four-hour service complete with actors, poets, musicians, firefighters, bagpipers, drummers, politicians, workers, communists, community organizers, friends, and family. You can see it on YouTube. Obviously, Amiri Baraka was a controversial figure and people seemed to either love him or hate him. I loved him (though I sometimes did not agree with him). Here’s why.
I met Amiri Baraka in 1982. He along with his wife Amina was doing a poetry reading at Rutgers with a portion of the door money going to Long Shot, a literary magazine founded by Eliot Katz and myself around that time. Cheryl Clarke, who at the time was in charge of the student center, went with us for a pre-poetry dinner at a New Brunswick restaurant. Eliot and I brought a big bottle of chianti; you know the type, with wicker around it. Cheryl Clarke lit into us, “Don’t you know that Amiri Baraka is a well known Muslim. Muslims don’t drink alcohol, don’t you know that?” I felt horrible for the obvious faux pas. When Amiri met us in front of the restaurant, he looked at the bottle in my hand, “What’s that you got there? You brought something to drink? Thank God, I’m thirsty.” That’s where our friendship began.
Over the next thirty years there are so many memories, many of them centered in his house in Newark at parties including a wide range of luminaries. I’ll never forget the drunken conga line at his fiftieth birthday, with me clasping the hips of actress Ruby Dee and doing my best to follow her rhythm. Or dancing (awkwardly) in the basement to jazz greats Archie Shepp and Max Roach.
Amiri always thought I was more politically committed than I was. He called me a cultural worker (which annoyed me) for being a poet and an inner city high school teacher. At times he could be amazingly undogmatic. Sometime in the early 80s I told him that I was thinking of voting for Millicent Fenwick for NJ Senator. My reasons were simple, or more accurately, simplistic. I was going to vote for her (a Republican) because she was a character in my favorite comic strip Doonesbury. Amiri was shocked at my reasoning, “You’re going to vote for a cartoon character? What the fuck?” He went on to explain that Frank Lautenberg was a good man, and that there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and that our votes do make a difference, as a matter of fact it is the one thing in America that is equal, and that each of us has exactly one vote, and that to throw it away would be foolish and disrespectful. I was chastened. I can proudly say that I’ve voted in each election, big and small, since then.
Amiri could be infuriating. In 2002, Joel Lewis and I drove down to the Dodge Poetry Festival, which at the time was held at Waterloo Village. For whatever reason, we got there late. The first person Joel and I encountered was Amiri, sitting alone but surrounded by reporters in the pub/food hall. “Mr. Shot,” he called out, “Come join me for a beer” (we were drinking buddies after all). He went on to introduce Joel and I as “young Jewish-American poets.” Joel and I were mystified, after all I guess we were Jewish, and I guess we were younger than Amiri, but neither of us identified ourselves that way. Of course, later we found out that he had just read his inflammatory Somebody Blew Up America poem and was using us to prove to the world that he indeed had Jewish friends. I felt manipulated and was pissed. I wrote a poem entitled 4,000 Jews Can’t Be Wrong, which begins with the following lines:
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day?”
Thus spoke Baraka
poet laureate of the garden state
having found these facts on the internet
and sure enough it’s there.
I sent a copy to Amiri, who responded: “Good. Good poem. Get it out of your system. I’m not going to apologize. The lines you find troubling are part of a larger landscape. Don’t get hung up on the small stuff.” I was still pissed, but figured what the hell.
Over the next decade I saw Amiri here and there, at readings in New York, at the Dodge Poetry Festival, now in Newark. In 2010, my 22-year-old son Casey and his friend Eric were amazed when Amiri called me over to an outside table at the Dodge Poetry Festival to join him “for a beer.” The boys delighted in hearing him talk about Newark politics and his dislike of Mayor Corey Booker, and his own son’s ambitions in Newark politics. He reminded the boys how important it was to stay involved, and of course to vote.
A week after he passed, I went to pay my respects to Amina and the family at their Newark house along with Nancy Mercado, Miguel Algarin and David Henderson. The house was warm, packed with people, music, food, beer, sad but good spirits, and the two bottles of chianti I had brought along. Rest in Peace Amiri Baraka…
— Danny Shot
"Thus Spoke Baraka" from Danny Shot
Danny Shot, who has been working with me to put together the Something Old, Something New (Jersey) reading at the Hoboken Historical Museum on April 6, is a poet, high school teacher, former publisher of Long Shot Magazine and good friend to CavanKerry Press and me. As he says in the opening paragraph, “Amiri Baraka was a controversial figure and people seemed to either love him or hate him. ” So why did Danny love him? read on. -Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher
Thus Spoke Baraka
The man went out with style. The funeral was on Saturday, January 18 at the Symphony Hall in downtown Newark. The morning couldn’t decide what it wanted, going from thick heavy snow to a drenching rain and back again. At least 3,000 people came to say their goodbyes during a four-hour service complete with actors, poets, musicians, firefighters, bagpipers, drummers, politicians, workers, communists, community organizers, friends, and family. You can see it on YouTube. Obviously, Amiri Baraka was a controversial figure and people seemed to either love him or hate him. I loved him (though I sometimes did not agree with him). Here’s why.
I met Amiri Baraka in 1982. He along with his wife Amina was doing a poetry reading at Rutgers with a portion of the door money going to Long Shot, a literary magazine founded by Eliot Katz and myself around that time. Cheryl Clarke, who at the time was in charge of the student center, went with us for a pre-poetry dinner at a New Brunswick restaurant. Eliot and I brought a big bottle of chianti; you know the type, with wicker around it. Cheryl Clarke lit into us, “Don’t you know that Amiri Baraka is a well known Muslim. Muslims don’t drink alcohol, don’t you know that?” I felt horrible for the obvious faux pas. When Amiri met us in front of the restaurant, he looked at the bottle in my hand, “What’s that you got there? You brought something to drink? Thank God, I’m thirsty.” That’s where our friendship began.
Over the next thirty years there are so many memories, many of them centered in his house in Newark at parties including a wide range of luminaries. I’ll never forget the drunken conga line at his fiftieth birthday, with me clasping the hips of actress Ruby Dee and doing my best to follow her rhythm. Or dancing (awkwardly) in the basement to jazz greats Archie Shepp and Max Roach.
Amiri always thought I was more politically committed than I was. He called me a cultural worker (which annoyed me) for being a poet and an inner city high school teacher. At times he could be amazingly undogmatic. Sometime in the early 80s I told him that I was thinking of voting for Millicent Fenwick for NJ Senator. My reasons were simple, or more accurately, simplistic. I was going to vote for her (a Republican) because she was a character in my favorite comic strip Doonesbury. Amiri was shocked at my reasoning, “You’re going to vote for a cartoon character? What the fuck?” He went on to explain that Frank Lautenberg was a good man, and that there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and that our votes do make a difference, as a matter of fact it is the one thing in America that is equal, and that each of us has exactly one vote, and that to throw it away would be foolish and disrespectful. I was chastened. I can proudly say that I’ve voted in each election, big and small, since then.
Amiri could be infuriating. In 2002, Joel Lewis and I drove down to the Dodge Poetry Festival, which at the time was held at Waterloo Village. For whatever reason, we got there late. The first person Joel and I encountered was Amiri, sitting alone but surrounded by reporters in the pub/food hall. “Mr. Shot,” he called out, “Come join me for a beer” (we were drinking buddies after all). He went on to introduce Joel and I as “young Jewish-American poets.” Joel and I were mystified, after all I guess we were Jewish, and I guess we were younger than Amiri, but neither of us identified ourselves that way. Of course, later we found out that he had just read his inflammatory Somebody Blew Up America poem and was using us to prove to the world that he indeed had Jewish friends. I felt manipulated and was pissed. I wrote a poem entitled 4,000 Jews Can’t Be Wrong, which begins with the following lines:
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day?”
Thus spoke Baraka
poet laureate of the garden state
having found these facts on the internet
and sure enough it’s there.
I sent a copy to Amiri, who responded: “Good. Good poem. Get it out of your system. I’m not going to apologize. The lines you find troubling are part of a larger landscape. Don’t get hung up on the small stuff.” I was still pissed, but figured what the hell.
Over the next decade I saw Amiri here and there, at readings in New York, at the Dodge Poetry Festival, now in Newark. In 2010, my 22-year-old son Casey and his friend Eric were amazed when Amiri called me over to an outside table at the Dodge Poetry Festival to join him “for a beer.” The boys delighted in hearing him talk about Newark politics and his dislike of Mayor Corey Booker, and his own son’s ambitions in Newark politics. He reminded the boys how important it was to stay involved, and of course to vote.
A week after he passed, I went to pay my respects to Amina and the family at their Newark house along with Nancy Mercado, Miguel Algarin and David Henderson. The house was warm, packed with people, music, food, beer, sad but good spirits, and the two bottles of chianti I had brought along. Rest in Peace Amiri Baraka…
— Danny Shot
January/February Newsletter Out Now!
Happy 350th Anniversary to New Jersey!
CavanKerry Press is pleased to celebrate the 350th anniversary of its home state. For a small state, New Jersey has produced, or been home to, a disproportionate number of poets who shaped, and reshaped, nineteenth and twentieth century American poetry through their innovative work. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the Garden State continues to be fertile creative ground for a diversity of poets.
During the upcoming year we’ll highlight some iconic and some contemporary NJ poets. Also we hope you’ll join us on Sunday April 6 at the Hoboken Historical Museum for “Something Old, Something New (Jersey),” a three-hour public event that will bring together the past and the present of New Jersey poetry. CavanKerry Press, and its collaborators (poet Danny Shot and the Hoboken Historical Museum), received a very competitive grant from the NJ Historical Commission to fund this event. We’ll give you more details about it in the next few weeks but for now we’ll leave you with this partial list to whet your appetite: Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Jack Wiler, Alicia Ostriker, Cat Doty, Joel Lewis…
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher
Angela Santillo in “The Unfelt Wonder”
Next week Angela Santillo, CKP’s Social Media Marketer, will perform in The Unfelt Wonder, a solo performance piece written by Angela.
Although Angela considers herself a playwright and not a poet, she is really a super-talented, super-original mix of both. Believe me when I tell you that the one-two punch of her poetic language and dramatic narrative will emotionally move and intellectually dazzle you. Don’t miss this must-see event at Dixon Place in NYC on January 29 at 7:30pm.
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher
The Unfelt Wonder
Written and Performed by Angela Santillo
Directed and Co-Created by Lillian Meredith
Sound/Projection Designed and Co-Created by Kevin Brouder
A look inside the bizarre and wicked experiment of the world’s only untouched woman.
Presented by Dixon Place
a Work-In-Progress Performance
January 29th at 7:30pm
161A Chrystie Street, New York, New York
For more info visit theunfeltwonder.com
Angela Santillo in "The Unfelt Wonder"
Next week Angela Santillo, CKP’s Social Media Marketer, will perform in The Unfelt Wonder, a solo performance piece written by Angela.
Although Angela considers herself a playwright and not a poet, she is really a super-talented, super-original mix of both. Believe me when I tell you that the one-two punch of her poetic language and dramatic narrative will emotionally move and intellectually dazzle you. Don’t miss this must-see event at Dixon Place in NYC on January 29 at 7:30pm.
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher
The Unfelt Wonder
Written and Performed by Angela Santillo
Directed and Co-Created by Lillian Meredith
Sound/Projection Designed and Co-Created by Kevin Brouder
A look inside the bizarre and wicked experiment of the world’s only untouched woman.
Presented by Dixon Place
a Work-In-Progress Performance
January 29th at 7:30pm
161A Chrystie Street, New York, New York
For more info visit theunfeltwonder.com
Announcing CavanKerry’s Spring 2014 Releases
Same Old Story
by Dawn Potter
Release date: March 2014
Even as she reminds us that writing “doesn’t solve anything,” Potter is driven to chronicle “the years murmur[ing] their old tune” in this compilation of sonnets, extended narratives, and shifting invented forms. Her rushing lyric voice binds together the personal, cultural, and imaginative histories that create the inevitable and complications of human character.
“Variously delightful in their strategies and shapes, the poems of Same Old Story know that merely examining life cannot make it worthy… Dawn Potter evokes the fragile poise of our longings. Her deft formal skills, her self-questioning wit, and her brave infiltrations of ordinary experience with poetry’s cumulative resources illuminate every page of this memorable book.” —Robert Farnsworth
Spooky Action at a Distance
by Howard Levy
Release date: April 2014
Spooky Action at a Distance , a phrase coined by Albert Einstein, seems an exact and powerful description of love between two people, the connection that impels the self to discover the joys and to embrace the pain. Levy’s poems seek to map these opposite poles and the landscape between, following the rivers of emotions that rise from the despairing sense of isolation and the exultant sense of being affined allowing the self to discover its link to all things in the world.
“Howard Levy’s remarkable second book chronicles the human struggle to overcome the often vast emotional distances between people, between the self and the world, and even between oneself and one’s own life… The collection’s final poems not only glimpse the world’s splendor but “offer it up as the heart and grace of love.” –Jeffrey Harrison
Bar of the Flattened Heart
by David Keller
Release date: May 2014
Keller’s poems captivate the reader with a musical style that asks us to “listen” while reading. The voice shares words with the reader encouraging emersion into the poem, with both style and content that connects us to what is real in the world around us.
“David Keller’s poems have the freedom of age. They don’t need to impress, they have no case to make, they don’t even insist on being right: their wonderful last words are “What the hell do I know?” With their genial frankness and amused curiosity they remind us over and over how surprising our ordinary days are, how interesting and touching it is to be alive.” –James Richardson
My Crooked House
by Teresa Carson
Release date: May 2014
Cat hoarding. Panic attacks. Rigid perfectionism. Carson reconstructs, through a hybrid of received and invented poetic forms, the literal and metaphorical experience of the psychological homesickness that controlled her life until she confronted it in therapy, and thereby opened herself to making a true home with her second husband.
“Carson’s search for a house to call home is a personal quest that becomes epic in the classical sense.
Beginning with calamity,My Crooked House circles back to origins, then passes through several harrowing perils and challenges on its way toward a more stable, if not perfectly straightened, present. It’s a house full of frank confession, brave excavation, obsessive lists, and hard reckonings. That the individual life, honestly recounted and accounted for, can be so thrillingly spun into gold is only the latest of this poet’s heroic triumphs. And one to celebrate.” –Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Stay tuned for more on our newest releases.
Announcing CavanKerry's Spring 2014 Releases
Same Old Story
by Dawn Potter
Release date: March 2014
Even as she reminds us that writing “doesn’t solve anything,” Potter is driven to chronicle “the years murmur[ing] their old tune” in this compilation of sonnets, extended narratives, and shifting invented forms. Her rushing lyric voice binds together the personal, cultural, and imaginative histories that create the inevitable and complications of human character.
“Variously delightful in their strategies and shapes, the poems of Same Old Story know that merely examining life cannot make it worthy… Dawn Potter evokes the fragile poise of our longings. Her deft formal skills, her self-questioning wit, and her brave infiltrations of ordinary experience with poetry’s cumulative resources illuminate every page of this memorable book.” —Robert Farnsworth
Spooky Action at a Distance
by Howard Levy
Release date: April 2014
Spooky Action at a Distance , a phrase coined by Albert Einstein, seems an exact and powerful description of love between two people, the connection that impels the self to discover the joys and to embrace the pain. Levy’s poems seek to map these opposite poles and the landscape between, following the rivers of emotions that rise from the despairing sense of isolation and the exultant sense of being affined allowing the self to discover its link to all things in the world.
“Howard Levy’s remarkable second book chronicles the human struggle to overcome the often vast emotional distances between people, between the self and the world, and even between oneself and one’s own life… The collection’s final poems not only glimpse the world’s splendor but “offer it up as the heart and grace of love.” –Jeffrey Harrison
Bar of the Flattened Heart
by David Keller
Release date: May 2014
Keller’s poems captivate the reader with a musical style that asks us to “listen” while reading. The voice shares words with the reader encouraging emersion into the poem, with both style and content that connects us to what is real in the world around us.
“David Keller’s poems have the freedom of age. They don’t need to impress, they have no case to make, they don’t even insist on being right: their wonderful last words are “What the hell do I know?” With their genial frankness and amused curiosity they remind us over and over how surprising our ordinary days are, how interesting and touching it is to be alive.” –James Richardson
My Crooked House
by Teresa Carson
Release date: May 2014
Cat hoarding. Panic attacks. Rigid perfectionism. Carson reconstructs, through a hybrid of received and invented poetic forms, the literal and metaphorical experience of the psychological homesickness that controlled her life until she confronted it in therapy, and thereby opened herself to making a true home with her second husband.
“Carson’s search for a house to call home is a personal quest that becomes epic in the classical sense.
Beginning with calamity,My Crooked House circles back to origins, then passes through several harrowing perils and challenges on its way toward a more stable, if not perfectly straightened, present. It’s a house full of frank confession, brave excavation, obsessive lists, and hard reckonings. That the individual life, honestly recounted and accounted for, can be so thrillingly spun into gold is only the latest of this poet’s heroic triumphs. And one to celebrate.” –Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Stay tuned for more on our newest releases.
The Frost Place Announces 2014 Faculty
The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, directed by CKP authors Dawn Potter and Teresa Carson, has announced its 2014 faculty.
Held each year in June, the conference is a unique opportunity for participants to work closely with both their peers and a team of illustrious poets who have particular expertise in working with teachers at all levels: K–12, graduate and undergraduate, and nontraditional and community-based instructors.
For all the details, visit The Frost Place
Farewell 2013!

This year has been quite the busy one here at CavanKerry.
Our highlights include:
- Published six new titles including first Memoir and second edition of The Waiting Room Reader.
- Donated 1,619 GiftBooks to twenty-four organizations including NJ Poetry Out Loud, Project Literacy, Bergen County Cooperative Library System, and VA Healthcare.
- The Laundress Catches Her Breath received Tillie Olsen Award from Working Class Studies Assn.
- Darkening the Grass named a “Must Read” by Massachusetts Book Awards.
- Motherhood Exaggerated and The Laundress Catches Her Breath were finalists for Foreword Bookof the Year.
- Jack Ridl received Gary Gildner Award for Poetry.
- Joan Cusack Handler received an Honorable Mention in the NJ Poet’s Prize.
- Bergen County Cultural Affairs honored Joan Cusack Handler for CKP’s decade-long support of its Poetry Out Loud program.

Support us as we prepare for a busy 2014 full of new releases and outreach programming.
Donate Today
Every contribution is significant and tax deductible.
Give through a secure online donation at Network for Good

Now, let’s end this year with a poem.
Home
So wild it was when we first settled here.
Spruce roots invaded the cellar like thieves.
Skunks bred on the doorstep, cluster flies jeered.
Ice-melt dripped shingles and screws from the eaves.
We slept by the stove, we ate meals with our hands.
At dusk we heard gunshots, and wind and guitars.
We imagined a house with a faucet that ran
From a well that held water. We canvassed the stars.
If love is an island, what map was our hovel?
Dogs howled on the mainland, our cliff washed away.
We hunted for clues with a broken-backed shovel.
We drank all the wine, night dwindled to grey.
When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow,
But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.
From Same Old Story, coming in 2014
by Dawn Potter
Happy New Year from all of us at CavanKerry!
This Season, Give to CavanKerry

“CavanKerry has distinguished itself as unique among American literary presses for its twofold mission: it is dedicated equally to the advancement of fine writing and to outreach programs that bring this art to communities.”
–Molly Peacock
Looking Towards 2014
Four new titles, one new podcast series, hundreds of books donated, and co-sponsorships with NJ Poetry Out Loud and The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching are just some examples of the things we have accomplished this year.
Support CavanKerry as we prepare for an even busier 2014 full of new releases and outreach programming.
Donate Today
Every contribution is significant and tax deductible.
Give through a secure online donation at Network for Good
Or send a check to:
CavanKerry Press, 5 Horizon Road, #2403, Fort Lee, NJ 07024
What Does Your Gift Mean to CavanKerry?
$25 Helps CKP ship one box of GiftBooks to an underserved community
$100 Helps CKP provide its books to Bookshare, an accessible on-line library for persons with print disabilities
$250 Helps CKP renew non-profit mail5ing permit from Post Office
$500 Helps CKP offer two Poetry Heals workshops to medical professionals
$1000 Helps CKP give collections of poetry to the 100+ high schools that participate in New Jersey Poetry Out Loud program
As always, we thank you for your support.
#GivingTuesday is here! Give to CavanKerry!
Help us reach our GivingTuesday Goal:
$2,250 for 250 books
We want to donate two CavanKerry books to the libraries of 125 high schools participating in the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud program.
What is Poetry Out Loud?
A national program that encourages the nation’s youth to learn about poetry though memorization and performance.
Donate Today
Go to our Network for Good page
Under “Designation” enter GivingTuesday
Thank you and spread the word!
Dearest Florenz-
It’s hard to believe that over a month has gone by since the death of Florenz Eisman, our beloved friend and colleague. As so often happens, during her final illness we did not have the chance to tell her–in detail in person–how much she meant to us. But Joan wanted Florenz to know just how important she had been to the founding and growth of CavanKerry Press and thus wrote this letter, which Hy Eisman then read to Florenz.
Teresa Carson
Associate Publisher

September 17, 2013
Dearest Florenz—
You’re with me always these past weeks–your laugh, your smarts, the sound of your voice, your red lipstick, the way turquoise and magenta are rendered that much brighter on your skin, your gigantic heart and deep penetrating soul–wondering how you are, wishing there was something I could do to let you know how much I love you. I need to let you know who you have been in my life. So I’m writing.
I’ve always admired and adored you. How long has it been? 15 years give or take from our first workshop—your writing so fine, so quirky, so smart—just like you.
When I started to think about the press back in 1999, miracle of miracles, you were available for work. I jumped at the chance to collaborate with you. And once the money came, we hit the ground running. We had to educate ourselves on the process of starting a press—neither of us had a clue. Remarkably, that didn’t bother us—we were on a mission and went about our work systematically, in tandem, until we learned and actually got good at it. Trusted partner throughout, you gave back to me in steady logical terms what I was struggling to figure out. Physically you’d always outdistanced me– oftimes you did intellectually as well. You had so much knowledge in so many fields and what you didn’t know, you researched. I remember being amazed at your savvy with the computer, grace with people, your awareness not only of books and the world, but what good writing was, and how quickly you “got” the kind of work I wanted to publish. Remarkably, our taste was virtually the same — I dearly remember you calling that Sunday afternoon spilling over with excitement about Caravaggio—we were both beside ourselves with excitement at publishing it and alas, so pained at discovering that another press had “won” it.
Remarkably, you kept the press running despite the fact that I was often in great pain in those early days and certainly when I went through my surgeries—and I knew you would. I never feared that you would not take complete and utter care of this new baby we had just given birth to. And yes, we were equal partners giving birth, nurturing and rearing a child. The press was our invention and still is and will always be. Without you beside me as my Managing Editor, I could never have accomplished so much with CKP. The miracle that is this press is as much yours as it is mine.
Perhaps the most stunning part of the gift of your partnership in parenting this fledgling, toddler, finally adolescent idea is that you never lost sight of my mission. It was uncanny how you focused on what I wanted—always and in all ways. Wherever the discussion went, you always brought it back to what I wanted, what I had dreamed. No one in my life has ever done that–removed themselves and their want completely from the equation and focused only on me and helping to give life to what had only existed in my head. When I was in a whirl of task, idea or emotion, your steady hand/head/heart always brought me back, focused me, outlined the direction we’d have to take to get what I saw in my mind translated into life.
Not having you with me/us these past two months has been heartbreaking. Though we all continue to work, the fun, spunk, and spirit of the work is gone. As Teresa asks, “What are we doing all this for? What’s the point without Florenz?” Yes, we will find our way back at some point but not to the family that we were –we’ll have to find a new one. And in time we’ll do that with you behind and among us–believing in us, keeping our imaginations actively creating, and doing the work that you prepared for us.
Meanwhile, perhaps I’ll take the liberty of writing again when the missing you becomes too large to be contained. I love love love you, dearest friend.
Always,
Joan
CavanKerry and Giving Tuesday!
This year, we are excited to participate in Giving Tuesday on December 3rd.
Stay tuned for more details!
From Poetry Heals: Joan Seliger Sidney
From Joan Seliger Sidney:
This past April, National Poetry Month, on a grant from the New Jersey Humanities Council to CavanKerry Press, I led a Poetry Heals workshop in Newark at the University Hospital, UMDNJ. I wanted to explore with the diverse participants some connections between poetry, medicine and nursing, especially as they related to their work and their lives, so the poems would become a conversation, like they have with their patients. In addition, I had been asked to focus on “change and loss.” After reading and discussing a few poems together, Dr. Diane Kaufman wrote her powerful poem, “My Mother Wore Red Lipstick.”
My Mother Wore Red Lipstick
My mother wore red lipstick
A Coco Chanel style suit
I think she knew that she was beautiful
But could have cared less
My mother thought brains were more important than beauty
That a woman should depend on herself and not a man
My mother wrote her life in poetry
Hand typed poems
One hundred each in thirty volumes
Scraps of paper pushed into shoe boxes
I have them all
Too painful to have in the house
I carried them out to the garage
My mother yearned for my father’s love
She never got it in the ways she wanted
He can’t love she told me constantly
Killed in a car accident in 2001
I will forever miss my mother
Diane Kaufman, MD
UMDNJ-Poetry Heals workshop
Marcus Jackson on Judging NJ Poetry Out Loud
My experience judging the NJPOL Finals was a very rewarding. Hearing wonderful poems read aloud is always a pleasure, but witnessing such a remarkable group of high school students bringing their own lively interpretations to the stage was quite a treat.
The participants poured every gram of their brains and hearts into reciting the poems they were dealt, and their commitment translated into a valuable interaction with language for the listeners in attendance.
Even more pleasing was the tangible connection each reader seemed to have with each poem. It was obvious that the works they were delivering had gotten inside of them and had sung notes the students could not have otherwise encountered.

Why support Poetry Out Loud? (from Teresa Carson)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3LNQEitaqA&w=560&h=315]
On March 15, Joan Cusack Handler and I sat in the Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University and listened as eight high school students each recited three poems in the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud finals. The winner, Kavita Oza, and the runner-up, Cameron Clark, both recited one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets: “The Sun Rising” by John Donne. As I listened to their very different yet equally as heartfelt interpretations of the poem, I realized how much those interpretations were challenging my understanding of the poem, were opening up new possibilities of meaning in it. The “out loud” reading of a poem by someone who has established a deep relationship with it can tell you more than a hundred “silent” readings can. Kavita and Cameron’s recitations revealed the poem’s heart. The next day I opened a volume of Donne’s poems and dove into the depths of “The Sun Rising.”

Joan and I were honored guests at this event. Since its earliest days CavanKerry Press has given GiftBooks to the students who competed in the Region 3 poetry recitation contest held at the Bergen Performing Arts Center. In fact, at this year’s Region 3 finals, Carol Messer from the Bergen County Office of Cultural and Historic Affairs, presented Joan with a beautiful print as a “thank you” for all that CKP has done. In 2012-2013 we decided to expand our support and to cover the entire state. Thus, we donated books to the libraries of all schools that participated in the program PLUS gave a book to every participant in the regional contests PLUS gave a signed copy of Neighborhood Register, by Marcus Jackson, to each state finalist PLUS gave a scholarship to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching to the teacher of the winning student. Whew.
So why have we chosen to give this high level of support to NJPOL? Well, in his opening remarks at the finals, the poet Paul Muldoon stated, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if we don’t teach poetry at the primary and secondary levels then we might as well forget about teaching it at the tertiary level. I’ll go even further and say that if we don’t find ways to encourage students to engage with poetry then we risk losing them as readers of poetry later in life. The Poetry Out Loud program encourages students to engage with poetry: this year 123 high schools and 20,000 students participated in NJ Poetry Out Loud. Let me repeat: 123 high schools and 20,000 students. As a press, we have a commitment to expand the audience for poetry; NJPOL is one way in which we meet that commitment. Oh and another reason: how can you not support a program where an African-American boy from a public school in Jersey City and a Asian Indian girl from a private school in Hightstown end up not only reciting but also embodying a poem written over four hundred years ago by a white Englishman?
Hollywood & Broadway on Bleecker: A success!
On February 10th, we hosted a celebrity benefit to raise money for the free distribution of The Waiting Room Reader, Volume II to hospitals and medical care facilities.
The company was amazing: CavanKerry staff, friends, fans and writers. There was good food, drink and a stellar reading by some of NYC’s finest actor. And through this event we raised almost $3,000.
Many many thanks to the folks at Le Poisson Rouge and our board member, Eddie Kaye Thomas, for organizing such a wonderful reading.
Hollywood & Broadway on Bleecker: A success!
On February 10th, we hosted a celebrity benefit to raise money for the free distribution of The Waiting Room Reader, Volume II to hospitals and medical care facilities.
The company was amazing: CavanKerry staff, friends, fans and writers. There was good food, drink and a stellar reading by some of NYC’s finest actor. And through this event we raised almost $3,000.
Many many thanks to the folks at Le Poisson Rouge and our board member, Eddie Kaye Thomas, for organizing such a wonderful reading.
CKP Wants to Prepare You for the Mayan Apocalypse
We know the national news has been difficult lately, so CKP is going to take a comic, lighter approach to rest of the week. I want everyone to be prepared for the flurry of unusual activity you will see tomorrow on our various social media sites.
-Angela Santillo
Social Media Marketer
In case you haven’t heard, the apocalypse is (possibly) near.
This Friday, 12/21/12, the Mayan calendar ends and some believe the end of times have arrived. (For more details, see this article from Huffington Post.) Here at CKP, we believe poetry is a necessity and it should never be forgotten. So in case Friday brings hellfire, the arrival of aliens, or if zombies start walking around, we want you to be prepared. After all, you could be one of the last people to remain and the fate of poetry will rest solely in your hands.
So tomorrow, we are counting down the last day of our times with:
CKP’s Poet Survivalist Kit: Tools for the Mayan Apocalypse
Every hour on the hour, we are sharing tips and tools you need to ensure that whatever happens, the world will still have poetry.
So Thursday is going to be a busy day on our Facebook and Twitter. Get ready.
(And to see how serious this could be, see the below speech from the Prime Minster of Australia.)
This December, give to CavanKerry
It has been a very busy and exciting year for us at CavanKerry. Check out our highlights:
As a non-profit press, our success relies on the support of our readers and community. This December, consider making a tax-deductable gift to help us continue our mission of art, outreach and publishing works that showcase Lives Brought to Life.
To donate online visit Network for Good
Or mail your donations to:
CavanKerry Press
5 Horizon Road, #2403
Fort Lee, NJ 07024
For more information about supporting CKP, visit our website
We are so thankful for our writers, readers and supporters and look forward to another wonderful publishing year.
Taking Action after Newtown
Like everyone, CKP has been shocked by the events in Newtown. As Florenz Eisman emailed the staff:
Like everyone else I’m still anguished about this tragedy. [But] we tend to forget these massacres as we get preoccupied with the minutiae of our work and lives — a tragic flaw of our own human nature.