On Saturday, November 11th, Jeanne Marie Beaumont will be reading with Baron Wormser.
Location:
Big Blue Marble Bookstore
551 Carpenter Lane
Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, PA
Reading starts at 6:00OPM EST.
Lives Brought to Life
CavanKerry Press Authors in the Community: Paola Corso Interview with Baron Wormser
Since its inception, CavanKerry Press has been committed to community. It’s outreach programs include Giftbooks, Waiting Room Reader, Bookshare, New Jersey Poetry Out Loud, and The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. And in return for CavanKerry Press authors getting their books published, they offer free talks and workshops to under-served readers in their communities and free books to those who can’t afford them. They are also committed to sharing information with fellow writers to build a supportive and nurturing literary environment.
In a new series of interviews on community outreach, CavanKerry Press author Paola Corso will speak with other press authors about these projects and how they turn words into acts of community.
In this interview, Paola speaks with Baron Wormser, author and co-author of 14 books, most recently, the poetry collection, Unidentified Sighing Objects with CavanKerry Press. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and at his home in Montpelier, Vermont. One of his offerings is a generative poetry workshop he calls, “Open the Doors.”
Paola Corso: The title of your workshop, “Open the Doors,” sounds like a workshop for creating new possibilities. Tell me about the kinds of doors that participants have walked through.
Baron Wormser: Participants write new work on the spot. I use poems as prompts to get them engaged. We talk about the poem for a while and then they leap from the poem into their own imagination. I have found that a poem-prompt offers enough structure to lessen anxiety—what do I write about and how?–while avoiding being prescriptive. The discussion beforehand also helps participants to situate themselves in the realm of the actual—the poem in front of them—and the possible—the poem they may write. There is no predicting, of course, what will come out. What’s especially interesting is that often poems arise that speak to very intense, personal situations that the participant has either not written about or tried to write about but not succeeded. Writing to a prompt often opens the door to material that previously has been suppressed or repressed.
Paola Corso: How about an example of a poem-prompt?
[Read more…]
September 24-25, 2016
Location: 74 Lake Avenue, Ocean Grove, New Jersey
Cost: $370 (includes lunch each day)
Size: Six participants
Contact: baronwormser@gmail.com
This workshop will be devoted to discussing the poetry of Stanley Kunitz. Over the course of his long career, Kuntiz consistently braided the lyrical, the personal and the mythic. His poems possess a depth that stems from a haunted, articulate caring for all manner of spirits that—were it not for poetry—would otherwise be lost. This will be an opportunity to see how his work evolved and to consider an artist who has everything to teach us about poetry’s ability to fathom the dark and light of imagination.
The Being with Poets Series was initiated by Baron Wormser. Each workshop allows for the sustained consideration of important poets of the recent and not-recent past. Workshops have been devoted to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Hayden Carruth, Dante, Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov and Donald Justice, among others. Workshops are open to anyone who is interested in talking about poems.
Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books, including two books about teaching poetry. He currently teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and was the founding director of the Frost Place Seminar and the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. He has taught many dozens of workshops in many different venues throughout the United States.
Poems:
“In the Dark House,” “Halley’s Comet,” “The Wellfleet Whale,” “Quinnapoxet,” “The Testing Tree,” “Three Floors,” “River Road,” “Revolving Meditation,” “The Scourge,” “The Dragonfly,” “The Harsh Judgment,” “Night Piece” (all poems from The Collected Poems)
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice
And polar bears with no place to go.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life;
Downstairs her mother weeps. The words wife,
Unfair, too long, elongate and explode.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
Her father tries to soothe this endless strife.
He talks like that, full of what he calls woe.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life
Where no beautiful animals entice
Little girls to live in homes of snow.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
Igloos melt, mothers mutter, knife
The empty kitchen air, pace to and fro.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.
What’s been done is done not so much in spite
As fear—love marooned on a floe.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.
Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. The founding director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, he teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and at his home in Montpelier, Vermont.
Through this workshop we intend to open doors for each participant that have not been opened before. We invite each participant to start afresh with each piece of writing, to find new ways through the thicket of the self and welter of the world.
Fiction workshop with Baron Wormser and Rachel Basch, June 13-17, 2016. Rachel Basch, a novelist, has been teaching fiction and creative nonfiction on the graduate and undergraduate level for 28 years. In addition to her university teaching, she’s been leading writing workshops out of her home since 2004.
Poetry workshops with Baron Wormser, June 26-30, 2016 and August 15-19, 2016. Baron Wormser is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry along with nine books of poetry, a memoir, a novel, and a book of short stories. He has led generative workshops for decades.
Nonfiction workshop with Baron Wormser and Kim Dana Kupperman, July 27-31, 2016. Kim Dana Kupperman is an award-winning essayist who has worked as an editor, writer, and teacher for over thirty years. Open the Doors is one of the most exciting and provocative creative-writing teaching experiences she has ever had.
Check out Baron Wormser’s lecture, part of Sundog Poetry Center’s Poets & Their Craft series.
Vermont PBS is currently making a series of the lectures and sit down interviews with the featured poets. It will air later this winter.
[vimeo 143393760 w=500 h=281]
Poets & Their Craft: Ep10 – Baron Wormser at Misty Valley Books in Chester from Mt. Mansfield Community TV on Vimeo.
When: February 6-7, 2016, 10 to 4 each day
Where: 417 Riverside Drive, Apartment 7A, New York, NY
Cost: $325 (including lunch)
Limited to six participants
Over the course of two days we will look closely at poems by Jane Kenyon, a poet of great resonance whose quiet, naturalist details shimmer with metaphorical power. Her work is an encounter with something timeless: the precise evocation of a scene, mood or moment. Kenyon’s mastery of free verse technique meshed beautifully with the art of seemingly casual narrative. This will be a chance to consider the work of a poet who spoke truly and deeply.
Teachers: Baron Wormser has led numerous “Being with Poets” workshops devoted to sustained discussion of an important poet. He is the author/co-author of fourteen books and teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program. Nadell Fishman has taught at Vermont College and is the author of two poetry collections, Drive and At Work in the Bridal Industry.
Acceptance into the workshop is on a first-come, first-served basis. No deposit is required. Amount is payable upon coming to the workshop.
Contact Baron Wormser at baronwormser@gmail.com to register.
When: February 6-7, 2016, 10 to 4 each day
Where: 417 Riverside Drive, Apartment 7A, New York, NY
Cost: $325 (including lunch)
Limited to six participants
Over the course of two days we will look closely at poems by Jane Kenyon, a poet of great resonance whose quiet, naturalist details shimmer with metaphorical power. Her work is an encounter with something timeless: the precise evocation of a scene, mood or moment. Kenyon’s mastery of free verse technique meshed beautifully with the art of seemingly casual narrative. This will be a chance to consider the work of a poet who spoke truly and deeply.
Teachers: Baron Wormser has led numerous “Being with Poets” workshops devoted to sustained discussion of an important poet. He is the author/co-author of fourteen books and teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program. Nadell Fishman has taught at Vermont College and is the author of two poetry collections, Drive and At Work in the Bridal Industry.
Acceptance into the workshop is on a first-come, first-served basis. No deposit is required. Amount is payable upon coming to the workshop.
Contact Baron Wormser at baronwormser@gmail.com to register.
The remnants of love come down to
An old calico cat sitting in the early morning
Before our bedroom door croaking
Feed me
You fed me yesterday
And whatever came before yesterday
And the Boy Scout knife I carry
Though it is not a knife, file, letter opener,
Scissors, or can opener but
An ugly faded green plastic and metal
Relic of something I never cared for anyway
But thought I should.
And your sleeping face
One of countless, present-yet-absent masks,
A breathy flower,
Eyes closed, sedate, sightlessly staring
Into the heights of nothingness
Until some memory spooks your soul—
The fourth-grade cloakroom,
Two bigger girls who have it in for you.
And the patchwork quilt on our bed—
Our saving genius.
Frayed and lumpy
Assembled by patient hands
From the unnoticeable, from cloth
That started out sunny as sight,
Confident matter ending with a wince—
Cat whining, knife dull,
Your face mortally still, slandered by oblivion—
Yet become a whole:
Something larger, if not grander.
From Unidentified Flying Objects
By Baron Wormser
NIN ANDREWS
This collection (Unidentified Sighing Objects) is clearly the work of a master. I read it straight through, gliding from poem to poem. How long did it take you to compose?
BARON WORMSER
Five or so years. Some of the poems have been on my desk for longer than that, though.
NA
Reading your poems, I am reminded of Buddhist lectures I have attended, especially the teachers who have a humorous take on our very human natures. I wondered what you would think of that?
BW
Makes sense. Life, for me, is tragicomic. I try to honor both sides of that equation. I was born, too, with a fair ration of Jewish irony in me.
NA
I love the poem, “The Present Tense of Jazz: On a Photo by Roy DeCarava.” I especially love the line about weeping for the loneliness of being in a body—so beautifully put.
The Present Tense of Jazz: On a Photo by Roy DeCarava
Prim in a dress, a jumper,
A young white woman listens.
A few tables away, a young Negro man
Wearing a carefully knotted tie listens.
It must be past midnight.
Reason has headed home.
Only a few seekers still are up,
Tapping their internal feet
To the sound the planet would make
If it could riff a bit on its axis,
Invite a few stars down
To agglomerate the gravity.
Though bound by time and space
You can feel these two people
Aren’t likely to speak.
They’re listening.
That feels sad, the miserable starch of history
Floating on top of the unmelted pot
But feels right and respectful too
Since with each note their souls
Throb and faint,
Since as people
They didn’t know they were so big and small,
So free despite themselves.
These two people in New
York City in the 1950s,
Not looking further than the moment
Not touching one another
Which could make you weep for the loneliness
Of being in a body and praise it too:
Their dignity,
The music you can’t hear but must be there.
NA
I also love your poem, “Inquest,” which is entirely in two other voices. Was that literally taken down from what you heard two people saying?
BW
It’s all made up.
NA
Usually when I read a book of poetry, I can sense whom they might have been influenced by. But in your case, I’m not sure. Who has influenced you? What poets do you admire?
BW
I’ve read fairly widely over the years and like to think a certain amount of it has stuck. That means I’ve been reading poetry on a daily basis since I was fifteen or so, which means over fifty years. As to names, there’s Shakespeare and then the rest of us. I try to keep a finger in one of his plays at all times. And if you’re willing to allow that a lyricist is a poet then Bob Dylan has been a Shakespeare to me. It’s a rare day when some Dylan lines aren’t in my head. As far as contemporary poets, the Polish poets in translation—Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, Zagajewski—have meant a great deal. So has Stanislaw Baranczak.
NA:
There are just so many moments in this book that take my breath away, such as in “Ode to Basketball” that ends so beautifully this:
like stutter steps toward some
Distant emotional hoop / like a fashion designer standing before a cadre
Of cameras and smiling a real fake smile and thinking of some guy
She knew once how she loved him and how he never got off his ass
Even though he could leap through the air and seem to fly but there
Was no place to fly to no homeland no wheelchair no nothing only a ball
Reading that poem (and so many of the poems in the book), I felt a mixture of exhilaration and despair. I wanted to know if you could say a few works about the poem.
BW
What I love about poetry is its ability to capture the thrill of being—of being here, of being alive through the physicality of language, of rhythm and of sound. That sense often pushes in both directions you’ve noted—the exhilaration of physical being and the despair engendered by our confusion and ignorance. In that poem, as in the other odes, I was trying to get a number of conflicting forces into the poem but letting each have its natural say, not forcing anything.
NA
Titles are often such a challenge. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your choice of title—when it came to you as the title, and how or if it shaped the book.
BW
Some books have had their titles based on a poem within the collection but others haven’t. It’s hard to summarize a collection in a title. For this book, the phrase appealed to me for its punning aspect but also for its sense of human beings, their inherent emotional waywardness. Given that title, I knew, by the way, that my wife’s painting was perfect for the cover.
NA
Could you describe your writing and editing process?
BW
I do a first draft long-hand. Who knows where the inspiration comes from? Then I work intensely on the poem for awhile. Then I put it in a folder and keep pulling it out, more or less randomly, over a period of time, often years. As long as I have the interest, I keep revising. I’ve revised poems that were in books and, in some cases, in anthologies. I typically have some ideal in my head about the poem and typically I haven’t reached that ideal. I work a lot through rhythm and sound and that can be very elusive.
NA
You really have a good sense of how poems should be ordered. What is your secret?
BW
There are a lot of dynamics in putting poems together for a collection: points of view, length, subject matter, tone, form, endings / beginnings, and sheer energy. It’s a matter of trying to calibrate those dimensions. Then there’s the issue of sections or a straight shot without sections. It definitely takes time. I’ve helped a certain number of other poets with this, so I have some additional practice.
NA
You’ve written so many great books, and now this one. How has writing changed for you over the years? Would you say it ever gets easier?
BW
When I started out, I was learning about myself and about poetry. I know a bit more about myself and about poetry now. It certainly has not gotten easier. “Easy” is not a word that goes with writing poetry, for me at least.
NA
Is there anything else you’d like to say about Unidentified Sighing Objects?
BW
This book speaks to a lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the years, balancing, as it were, history—our living in circumstantial time—and the spectacle-drama of individual emotions. Also, there’s the balancing of the formal impulse and what a poet-friend of mine calls the “loose limbed” impulse that surfaces in the odes in this book.
NA
The two poems that brought me to tears were “Poem Beginning with a Line by Holderlin” and “Leaving.” I wondered if we could close the interview with “Leaving.”
Leaving
Not to be here anymore, not to hear
The cat’s fat purring, not to smell
Wood smoke, wet dog, cheap cologne, good cologne,
Not to see the sun and stars, oaks
And asters, snow and rain, every form
I take mostly for granted, makes me sad
But pleased to be writing down these words,
Pleased to have been one more who got the chance
To participate, who raised his hand although
He didn’t know the answer or understand
The question. No matter. The leaving makes me sad;
So much was offered, so freely and completely.
Before the stench is vicious
Sketch the corpses
Where the bomb has visited,
Where limbs and torsos roost
Obediently
And the vitals lie open
To frank but harmless light.
Resist the impulse of simile.
Art instructs us
To linger in the present.
Human hands assembled
These deaths. Stained
Fingers remain beautiful.
Blame God for dexterity.
Resist too the camera’s
Encompassing wisdom.
Mark by eager mark
Ferret this disaster—
The hand’s best work
Is to feel like the blind
Through the fog of suffering.
Do not fret. Do not turn
Away. Later there
Will be the valedictions
Of flowers and creeds.
Cries and wails will shred
The air but loss cannot
Be summed. Draw, then,
So lines can fashion
Feeling. What is blank
Can be contoured in black.
No priest can undo
Such persistent vision.
On that half face there—
The effigy of a grin.
In this, his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the range of subjects and imaginative approaches his readers have come to expect—from the life of a candle to the life of a Jewish Résistance fighter, from elegy to monologue, from a Godard film to the National Football League. The historical circumstances that touch, anneal, shatter, and buttress a life are paramount. The reality of consequences remains the ongoing, ineluctable drama. We all live in the History Hotel where love and betrayal, hope and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems.
Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have a appeared in my literary journals and anthologies including Agni, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of many books including Miss August (CavanKerry Press 2017), The Book of Orgasms, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press 2009), and Why God Is a Woman.
Christian Barter
Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry – The Singers I Prefer in 2005, In Someone Else’s House (2013), and most recently Bye-bye Land, winner of the 2017 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Tin House, New Letters, Georgia Review and The American Scholar and featured on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and The PBS Newshour. He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the 2014 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and was the Centennial Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park. For thirty years he has worked for the trail crew there as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of Letters from Limbo (CavanKerry Press, 2016), Burning of the Three Fires, Curious Conduct, and Placebo Effects, a winner of the National Poetry Series (Norton, 1997). She coedited The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. In 2019, her play Asylum Song had its world premiere at the HERE Theater in New York. Her poem “Afraid So” was made into an award-winning short film by filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. She won the 2009 Dana Award for Poetry. She teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y. www.jeannemariebeaumont.com
Pam Bernard
Pam Bernard, poet, professor, and editor, received her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and BA from Harvard University. Her awards include a NEA Fellowship and two Mass Cultural Council Fellowships. She has published three full-length collections of poetry, and a verse novel entitled Esther (2015). Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, where she teaches creative writing at Franklin Pierce University, and also conducts private workshops in memoir and poetry.
Bhisham Bherwani
Bhisham Bherwani studied Fine Arts at New England College. He is also a graduate of New York University and Cornell University, and the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, New England College, and The Frost Place. He was born in Bombay, India; he lives in New York City. With CavanKerry Press, Bherwani released The Second Night of the Spirit in 2009.
Celia Bland
Celia Bland‘s three collections of poetry (including Soft Box, from CavanKerry, 2004) were the subject of an essay by Jonathan Blunk in the summer 2019 issue of The Georgia Review. Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero, 2018) featured pen and ink drawings by Japanese artist Kyoko Miyabe. The title poem received the 2015 Raynes Prize. Her work is included in Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation (Tupelo Press 2019). Selected prints of the Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration created with artist Dianne Kornberg, were exhibited at Lesley Heller Gallery in New York City, and published by William James Books with an introduction by Luc Sante. Bland is co-editor with Martha Collins of the essay collection Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan, 2019). She wrote the catalogue essay for “In the Midst of Something Splendid: Recent Paintings by Colleen Randall” opening at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College in January 2020. She is the author of young adult biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald (Chelsea House Books). Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Bland teaches poetry at Bard College, where she is associate director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.
Annie Boutelle
Annie Boutelle, born and raised in Scotland, was educated at the University of St. Andrews and New York University. She teaches in the English Department at Smith College, where she founded the Poetry Center. She lives with her husband in western Massachusetts. How They Fell released with CavanKerry Press in 2014.
Andrea Carter Brown
Andrea Carter Brown is the author of The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Domestic Karma (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Brook & Rainbow (winner of the Sow’s Ear Press Chapbook Prize, 2001). September 12, her collection of award-winning poems about 9/11 and its aftermath, is forthcoming in 2021 for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Her poems have won awards from Five Points, River Styx, and PSA, among others, and are cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. She was a Founding Editor of Barrow Street and Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. Currently she is Series Editor of The Word Works Washington Prize. An avid birder, she lives in Los Angeles where she grows lemons, limes, oranges, and tangerines in her back yard.
Eloise Bruce
Eloise Bruce’s book Rattle was published by CavanKerry in 2004. She is member of the critique and performance group Cool Women. In 2018 she received the New Jersey Governor’s Award for Arts Education. She has had various roles at the Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts. Since its inception she has been integral in nurturing and guiding Poetry Out Loud in New Jersey and she is youth editor for RavensPerch Magazine. A chapbook Scud Cloud, a conversation in poetry with her husband David Keller about living with his dementia is due out in 2020 from Ragged Sky.
Christopher Bursk
A recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships, Christopher Bursk is the author of sixteen books, including A Car Stops And A Door Opens, Dear Terror, The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns, Cell Count and The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (winner of the Donald Hall prize in Poetry from AWP). Most importantly he is the grandfather of six, and has three imaginary friends, Wobbly, Oliver, and Nobody.
Kevin Carey
Kevin Carey is the Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. He has published three books – a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People (Red Bird Chapbooks) and two books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station and Jesus Was a Homeboy, which was selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize. Kevin is also a filmmaker and playwright. His latest documentary film, Unburying Malcolm Miller, about a deceased Salem, MA poet, premiered at the Mass Poetry Festival in 2016. His latest play “The Stand or Sal is Dead” a murder mystery comedy, opened in Newburyport, MA. at The Actor’s Studio on June 21st – 24th 2018. A new collection of poems, Set in Stone, released in May of 2020. http://kevincareywriter.com
Marina Carreira
Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency Fellowship. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, Artfront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, and Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others.
Teresa Carson
Teresa Carson holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008); My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Congress of Human Oddities (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She is a co-founder of the Unbroken Thread[s] Project, which explores how histories/myths/memories are excavated, interpreted, transformed and transmitted. A fairly new resident of Sarasota, Florida, she works to bring poetry to everyone in Sarasota County through her Poetry in Un/Expected Places project, which involves collaborations with artists from all genres.
Sandra Castillo
Born in Havana, Cuba, Sandra M. Castillo left the island of her birth with her family in the summer of 1970 on one of the last of President Johnson’s Freedom Flights and grew up in South Florida. Her work explores issues of memory, history, gender and language, but it reflects a personal vision, tied primarily by history, personal and otherwise. She depicts contradictory worlds, the memory of a homeland and memory politics while examining the ordinary reality of exile as well as the duality of existence. Eating Moors and Christians (CavanKerry, 2016) is a startling collection of poems of her life in post-revolutionary Cuba, of exile in Miami, and her journey back, each time unearthing powerful new memories and voices that become part of this great ajiaco of magic, glorious food, and unforgettable people, as well as the haunted spaces between “history and sorrow.”
Karen Chase
Karen Chase lives in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of two collections of poems, Kazimierz Square and BEAR as well as Jamali-Kamali, a book-length homoerotic poem which takes place in Mughal India. Her award-winning book, Land of Stone, tells the story of her work with a silent young man in a psychiatric hospital where she was the hospital poet. Her memoir, Polio Boulevard, came out in 2014, followed by FDR On His Houseboat: The Larooco Log, 1924-1926 in 2016.
David S. Cho
David S. Cho was born and raised in the Chicago area, along with his brother and extended family, the proud children of Korean immigrants in the early 1970s. He holds a BA from the University of Illinois, MFA and MA from Purdue University, and MAT and PhD from the University of Washington, and has taught in West Lafayette and Crawfordsville, Indiana; Chicago; and Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Formerly an associate professor of English and director of the American Ethnic Studies program at Hope College (Holland, Michigan), he now serves as the director of the Office of Multicultural Development at Wheaton College. He is the author of a chapbook, Song of Our Songs (2010), a book of poems, Night Sessions (2011), and a scholarly monograph on 20th-century Korean American novels, Lost in Transnation (2017).
Robert Cording
Robert Cording taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is now a poetry mentor in MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Nation, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New England Review, Orion, and the New Yorker. He has released five books with CavanKerry Press: Against Consolation (2002), Common Life (2006), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019).
Sam Cornish
Sam Cornish grew up in Baltimore, MD and lived in Boston, MA until his death in 2018. Following his move to Boston, he was a teacher at the Highland Park Community School in Roxbury, MA, and was also active in the Poetry in the Schools Program in Boston and Cambridge, MA. In the early 80s, he was the Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities and subsequently, an instructor in Creative Writing at Emerson College until his retirement in 2006. In addition to his nine books of poetry and two children’s books, he has been published in dozens of periodicals, including Essence, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe. In 2007, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. CavanKerry Press released An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems in 2008.
Paola Corso
Paola Corso is the author of 7 poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mills. Most recent are The Laundress Catches Her Breath (CavanKerry Press, 2012), winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not Breathing, winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award, and her forthcoming collection Vertical Bridges: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of City Steps. Her nonfiction has appeared in venues such as The New York Times, Women’s Review of Books, and U.S. Catholic. Writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and inclusion on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Cultural and Literary Map. A literary activist, Corso is co-founder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She is a member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Collective who exhibits her photographs in libraries, galleries, and open studios. She divides her time between New York City where she is on the English Department Faculty at Touro College and Pittsburgh. paolacorso.com
Shira Dentz
Shira Dentz is the author of two chapbooks and five books including Sisyphusina (PANK, 2020), door of thin skins, a cross-genre memoir (CavanKerry, 2013), and how do I net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist. Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Iowa Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. A recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, she is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches in upstate NY. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com.
Moyra Donaldson
Moyra Donaldson lives in Northern Ireland. She has nine poetry collection, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the Ice, The Horse’s Nest and Miracle Fruit, from Lagan Press, Belfast and an American edition of Snakeskin Stilettos, published in 2002 from CavanKerry Press. Her Selected Poems and The Goose Tree, were both published by Liberties Press, Dublin. Moyra has also collaborated with photographer Victoria J Dean, resulting in the art book Dis-ease and with visual artist Paddy Lennon, resulting in a limited edition book of poetry and paintings, Blood Horses, from Caesura Press. Her latest collection, Carnivorous was published by Doire Press, Spring 2019. In 2019, Moyra received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Catherine Doty
Catherine Doty is a poet and educator from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of two collections of poetry: momentum (CavanKerry, 2004) and Wonderama (CavanKerry, 2021). She has received prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. An MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies.
Sherry Fairchok
Sherry Fairchok was born in Scranton in 1962. She spent the early part of her childhood in Taylor, PA, a coal-mining town, in which her family has lived since the 1880s, and where her grandfather, great-uncles, and great-grandfather worked as miners. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and an M.F. A. degree from Sarah Lawrence college. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, DoubleTake, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. She works as an information technology editor and lives in Mount Vernon, NY. In 2003, CavanKerry Press published her collection The Palace of Ashes.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist (University of North Texas, 2012), won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, the New Republic, Tin House, jubilat, FIELD, and the Literary Review. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine with his family. His second collection, Deke Dangle Dive, released with CavanKerry in 2021.
Marie Lawson Fiala
Marie Lawson Fiala, born in Europe, came to the United States as a child. Her first language was Czech, and she learned English only after starting grade school. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with Distinction from Stanford University, her Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School, and her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Ms. Fiala is a full-tie practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. Letters From a Distant Shore was released in 2010.
Sondra Gash
Sondra Gash grew up in Paterson, NJ. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, and her full-length collection Silk Elegy was released by CavanKerry in 2002. She has received grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo, and won first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. In 1999, the Geraldine Dodge Foundation awarded her a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey, where she teaches writing and directs the poetry program at the Women’s Resource Center in Summit.
Ross Gay
Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up outside of Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Atlanta Review, among other journals. Ross is a Cave Canem fellow and has been a Breadloaf Tuition Scholar. Against Which, Gay’s debut collection of poetry, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. In addition to holding a Ph.D in American Literature from Temple University, he is a basketball coach, an occasional demolition man, a painter, and teaches at Indiana University.
Loren Graham
Loren Graham was raised in and around Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He studied as a writer and composer at Oklahoma Baptist University, Baylor University, and the University of Virginia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2009 for poems that became part of Places I Was Dreaming (CavanKerry Press, 2015). He currently lives in Helena, Montana, with his wife, Jane Shawn.
John Haines
John Haines, poet, essayist, and teacher was born in 1924 and died in March 2011. After studying painting, he spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer and New Poems 1980-88, for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, University of Montana, Bucknell University, and the University of Cincinnati. He was Resident at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy and Rasmuson Fellow at the U.S. Artists Meeting, Los Angeles. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. In 2008, Sewanee Review awarded Haines the Atkin Taylor Award for Poetry. CavanKerry had the honor of publishing Descent in 2010, as well as A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, a collection of reflections on Haines’s writing.
Joan Cusack Handler
As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books with CavanKerry – GlOrious (2003), The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making (2008), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir (2012), and Orphans (2016) – and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.
Judith Hannan
Judith Hannan is the author of Motherhood Exaggerated (CavanKerry Press, 2012), her memoir of discovery and transformation during her daughter’s cancer treatment and transition into survival. Her most recent book is The Write Prescription: Telling Your Story to Live With and Beyond Illness. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, AARP: The Girlfriend, Woman’s Day, Narratively, The Forward, Brevity, Opera News, The Healing Muse, and The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. Ms. Hannan teaches writing about personal experience to homeless mothers, young women in the criminal just system as well as to those affected by physical and/or mental illness. She is a writing mentor with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Visible Ink program where she also serves as an interventionist in a study to evaluate the benefits of expressive writing among elderly cancer patients. In June, 2016, Ms. Hannan joined the faculty of the inaugural Narrative Medicine program at Kripalu. In 2015, she received a Humanism-in-Medicine award from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. Ms. Hannan serves on the board of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan where she is also Writer-in-Residence. www.judithhannanwrites.com
Elizabeth Hall Hutner
Elizabeth Hall Hutner was a writer, scholar and musician who lived in Princeton, N.J., where she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her short essays have been published in A Real Life, a bimonthly magazine. Hutner graduated from Yale University, where she studied with Mark Strand and J.D. McClatchy, and she worked with Marvin Bell at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. She also held a Master of Arts from Princeton. She died of breast cancer in November, 2002. In 2004, her collection of poetry, Life With Sam, was published as the first entry in CavanKerry’s LaurelBooks collection.
Marcus Jackson
Marcus Jackson was born in Toledo, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many other publications. He has received fellowships from New York University and Cave Canem. His debut collection of poetry, Neighborhood Register, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2011.
Susan Jackson
Susan Jackson is the author of Through a Gate of Trees (CavanKerry Press, 2007) and the chapbook All the Light in Between (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her writing has been published recently in Tiferet Journal, Lips, Paterson Literary Review, and Nimrod International Journal. She was awarded a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grants to the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Pushcart nomination, and recognition from the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. During the summer, Jackson coleads a group in “Poetry as Spiritual Practice.” With four grown children and two granddaughters, she and her husband live in Teton County, Wyoming.
Gray Jacobik
Gray Jacobik is a widely anthologized poet; 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 CKP covers have featured her art. She has released two poetry collection with CavanKerry Press – Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (2011) and Eleanor (2020). http://www.grayjacobik.com/
David Keller
David Keller is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Bar of the Flattened Heart 2014. He has taught poetry workshops in New York and has served as Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Biennial Poetry Festival, on the Board of Governors for the Poetry Society of America, and as a member of the Advisory Board of The Frost Place. Along with the late Donald Sheehan he founded the Frost Places Center of Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, NH in the late 1970’s. He had published widely in magazines and journals including Poetry, Sou’wester, and Gettysburg Review.
Tina Kelley
Tina Kelley’s fourth poetry collection, Rise Wildly, was released in 2020 by CavanKerry Press, which also published Abloom and Awry (2017). Ardor won the Jacar Press 2017 chapbook competition. Her other books are Precise (Word Press), and The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and was a reporter for The New York Times for a decade, sharing in a staff Pulitzer for coverage of the 9/11 attacks. She wrote 121 “Portraits of Grief,” short descriptions of the victims, and many stories about oppression: the health problems of a Native American tribe living near a Superfund site, a high school student who challenged a proselytizing public school teacher and who received a death threat for his stance, a transgender vocational school principal in a rural town, and the lives of children waiting to be adopted out of foster care. Her journalism has appeared in Orion, Audubon, and People magazines, and her poetry has appeared in Poetry East, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, and on the buses of Seattle. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.
Christine Korfhage
Christine Korfhage was born in Albany, NY and grew up overseas. A former artisan and juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, she began writing poetry at age 49. Returning to school after three decades, in 1999 she received her B.A. from Vermont College’s Adult Degree Program where she was awarded a Fellowship for Excellence in Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2001. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Nimrod International Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Red Rock Review and The Spoon River Poetry Review. A mother and grandmother, Christine lives in New Hampshire. CavanKerry Press published her poetry collection, We Aren’t Who We Are and this world isn’t either, in 2007.
Laurie Lamon
Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, Ploughshares, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Innisfree Poetry Journal, North American Review and others. She has two poetry collections published at CavanKerry Press: The Fork Without Hunger (2005), and Without Wings (2009). She was the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. She currently holds the Amy Ryan Endowed professorship at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and is poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling. She lives with my husband Bill Siems, and their two Dachshund Chihuahua dogs, Willow and Johnny.
Joseph O. Legaspi
Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, is the author of two poetry collections from CavanKerry Press, Threshold (2017) and Imago (2007); and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). His poems have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, World Literature Today, Best of the Net, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a national organization serving generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, NY.
Harriet Levin
Harriet Levin is the author of The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), a National Poetry Series finalist; and My Oceanography (Cavankerry, 2018). Her novel How Fast Can You Run, (Harvard Square Editions, 2016) grew out of a One Book, One Philadelphia writing project from interviews with Sudanese refugee Michael Majok Kuch and was excepted in The Kenyon Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University.
Howard Levy
Howard Levy is the author of CavanKerry’s first book, A Day This Lit (2000), as well as Spooky Action at a Distance (2014). His work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He has served as a faculty member of the Frost Place Poetry Festival and currently lives in New York.
Kali Lightfoot
Kali Lightfoot lives in Salem, Massachusetts. She worked as a teacher, wilderness ranger in Washington state, executive at Road Scholar, and most recently as founding executive director of the National Resource Center for Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. Lightfoot earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies and been nominated for Pushcart Prizes by Lavender Review and Poetry South, and Best of the Net by Star 82 Review. Kali received an honorable mention in the SFPA Speculative Poetry Contest, and she has written reviews of poetry books for Broadsided Press, The Hopper, and Solstice. Her debut poetry collection, Pelted By Flowers, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.
Frannie Lindsay
The Snow’s Wife, released by CavanKerry in November 2020, is Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume. Her others are If Mercy (The WordWorks, 2016); Our Vanishing (Red Hen, 2012); Mayweed (The WordWorks, 2010); Lamb, (Perugia, 2006);and Where She Always Was (Utah State University, 2004). Her honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award; the Washington Prize; the May Swenson Award; and The Missouri Review Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Lindsay’s work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Field, Plume, and Best American Poetry. She is a classical pianist and teaches workshops on grief and trauma.
Christopher Matthews
Christopher Matthews was born in Donegal, Ireland and grew up and was educated between that country and England. He took his bachelor’s degree at the University of Ulster and obtained a PH.D from the University of Durham: its subject was Ezra Pound. His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, The Dublin Review and other journals. He currently teaches literature to undergraduates in Lugano, Switzerland. Eyelevel: Fifty Histories released with CavanKerry Press in 2003.
Michael Miller
Michael Miller‘s Darkening the Grass (2012) is the third book by an accomplished American poet who is in his eighth decade. The Joyful Dark, his first book, was the “Editor’s Choice” winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, Raritan,The Southern Review, The Yale Review and other publications. Born in New York City in 1940, he now lives in Massachusetts.
Martin Mooney
Martin Mooney’s poetry, short fiction, reviews, criticism and cultural commentary have been published in Irish and British periodicals. Following Grub, which on its original release in Ireland won the Brendan Behand Memorial Award, Mooney published Bonfire Makers, Operation Sandcastle, and Rasputin and His Children. His poems have appeared in Field and The Gettsyburg Review. He was writer-in-residence as the Brighton Festival and the Aspects Festival of Irish Writing, and twice was appointed a member of the resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place Poetry Festival in Franconia, NH.
Dipika Mukherjee
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of two novels: Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Rules of Desire is her short story collection. She has published two books of poetry, The Palimpsest of Exile and The Third Glass of Wine, and received the Liakoura Poetry Prize in 2016. She teaches at the Graham School at the University of Chicago, as well as StoryStudio Chicago, and holds a doctorate in sociolinguistics. More at dipikamukherjee.com.
Mark Nepo
Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time.” A #1 New York Times bestselling author, his twenty-two books (Including 2007’s Surviving Has Made Me Crazy) and fifteen audio projects have been translated into over twenty languages. Mark has appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV. In 2015, he was given a Life-Achievement Award by AgeNation. And in 2016, he was named by Watkins: Mind Body Spirit as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Richard Jeffrey Newman, an associate professor at Nassau Community College, New York, is an essayist, poet and translator who has been publishing his work since 1988, when the essay “His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights” appeared in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays, poems, and translations have appeared in a wide range of journals, among them Prairie Schooner and Birmingham Poetry Review. He has given talks and led workshops on writing autobiographically about gender, sex, and sexuality. The Silence of Men was released by CavanKerry Press in 2006.
Brent Newsom
Brent Newsom is the author of Love’s Labors (CavanKerry Press, 2015) and the librettist for A Porcelain Doll, an opera based on the life of deafblind pioneer Laura Bridgman. His poems have also appeared in Southern Review, Hopkins Review, Cave Wall, and other journals. He lives and teaches in central Oklahoma.
Kari O’Driscoll
Kari L. O’Driscoll is a writer and mother of two 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. Her memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape, was published in Spring 2020. You can find her at www.kariodriscollwriter.com.
January Gill O’Neil
January Gill O’Neil is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and a board of trustees’ member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s podcast “The Slowdown,” the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and is the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She has released three collections of poetry with CavanKerry Press – Underlife (2009), Misery Islands (2014), and Rewilding (2018).
Rebecca Hart Olander
Rebecca Hart Olander grew up in eastern Massachusetts between Gloucester and Boston. She earned a BA from Hampshire College, an MAT in English from Smith College, and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry, book reviews, and collaborative writing and collage have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. A chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was released in 2019 by dancing girl press. Rebecca lives in western Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women. Uncertain Acrobats, her full-length debut, is due out in November 2021 with CavanKerry Press.
Georgianna Orsini
Georgianna Orsini attended Wellesley College and Harvard University and received her B.A. degree from Columbia University, during which time she worked as a Program Coordinator at International House. She has lived in Tuscany and New York. Her gardens have been featured in House and Garden, House Beautiful and American Women’s Garden. At present, she lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she continues to make gardens. An Imperfect Lover, her collection of poems and watercolors, was released by CavanKerry in 2004.
Adriana Páramo
Adrianna Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist and winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, and Phati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber for Voice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice. Her memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, was released by CavanKerry in 2013.
Peggy Penn
Peggy Penn’s poetry appeared in several publications including O Magazine, The Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Western Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review and Margie Review. She won the poem for the first poem published in the journal Kimera, and the first Emily Dickinson Award for innovative poetry. She released two collections with CavanKerry Press – So Close (2001) and My Painted Warriors (2011) – before her death in 2012.
Donald Platt
Donald Platt’s seventh and sixth books are respectively One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020) and Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017). His fifth book, Tornadoesque, appeared through CavanKerry Press’s Notable Voices series in 2016. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Nation, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Yale Review, and Southern Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1996 and 2011), of three Pushcart Prizes, and of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. Currently, he is a full professor of English at Purdue University.
Cati Porter
Cati Porter is a poet, editor, essayist, arts administrator, wife, mother, daughter, friend. She is the author of eight books and chapbooks, including My Skies of Small Horses, The Body, Like Bread, and The Body at a Loss. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Contrary, West Trestle, So to Speak, The Nervous Breakdown, and others, as well as many anthologies. Her personal essays have appeared Salon, The Manifest-Station, Lady / Liberty / Lit, and Zocalo Public Square, Pratik and Shark Reef. She lives in Inland Southern California with her family where she runs Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and directs Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit and home to Inlandia Books, including The Hillary Gravendyk Prize.
Dawn Potter
Dawn Potter is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, including How the Crimes Happened (2010), and Same Old Story (2014) . New work appears in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Split Rock Review, Vox Populi, and many other journals. She has received fellowships and awards from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writers’ Center, and the Maine Arts Commission, and her memoir Tracing Paradise won the Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Dawn directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and leads the high school writing seminars at Monson Arts. She lives in Portland, Maine.
Wanda S. Praisner
Wanda S. Praisner, a recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Dodge Foundation, PFAWC, and VCCA, has work in Atlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. Books include: A Fine and Bitter Snow (USCA, ’03), On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (Spire P., ’05), Where the Dead Are (CKP, ’13), Sometimes When Something Is Singing (Antrim H., ’14), Natirar ( Kelsay B., ’17), and To Illuminate the Way (Aldrich P., ’18). A resident poet for the state, she’s received sixteen Pushcart Prize nominations, the Egan Award, Princemere Prize, Kudzu Award, First Prize in Poetry at the College of NJ Writer’s Conference, and the 2017 New Jersey Poets Prize.
Jack Ridl
Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1100), in April 2019 released Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press). His Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (WSUPress, 2013) was awarded the National Gold Medal for poetry by ForeWord Reviews/Indie Fab. His collection Broken Symmetry (WSUPress) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport.Then Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. Every Thursday following the 2016 election he sent out a commentary and poem. The students at Hope College named him both their Outstanding Professor and their Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 90 of Jack’s students are published, several of whom have received First Book Awards, national honors. For further information about Jack, his website is www.ridl.com.
Kenneth Rosen
Kenneth Rosen was born in Boston, and has lived in Maine since 1965. He recently taught at the American University in Bulgaria, and as a Fulbright professor at Sofia University. Whole Horse, his first collection, was selected for Richard Howard’s Braziller Poetry Series. Others are The Hebrew Lion, Black Leaves, Longfellow Square, Reptile Mind, No Snake, No Paradise, and The Origins of Tragedy. He founded the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in 1981, and directed it for ten years.
Andrea Ross
Once a park service ranger and wilderness guide, Andrea Ross now teaches writing at UC Davis. She has been awarded several California Arts Council residencies and a fellowship at the Mesa Refuge. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, Terrain, the Café Review, and the Dirtbag Diaries Podcast. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. Her debut memoir, Unnatural Selection, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Find out more at andrearosswriter.com.
Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle has published several books of poetry, including Among the Musk Ox People (Carnegie Mellon, 2002). Apparition Hill was completed in 1989 in China, where she was teaching. It falls between her books, The Adamant (University of Iowa, 1989) and Cold Pluto (Carnegie Mellon, 1996). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.
Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton has authored numerous poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award, NEA, Illinois Arts Council Grant, Audre Lorde Award, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 & 2018), also garnered a “Lammy”. With poet Denise Duhamel, she co-authored Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); and with poet Neil de la Flor, she co-edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami and published Sweet World with CavanKerry Press in 2019.
Robert Seder
Robert Seder was a production and lighting designer for many dance and theater companies for 20 years, working with David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Carolyn Brown, Eric Bogosian, and Philip Glass, among others. He was a semifinalist for the Julie Harris Playwright award in 1987 with LIGHT, and wrote several other plays, produced in New York City, Madison and Boston. He also wrote novels and short stories in addition to his narrative of his first bone marrow transplant. He was an enthusiastic participant and teacher in the Bard College Language and Thinking Program and also offered “Writing Our Illness” workshops to the community. After undergoing a second bone marrow transplant in August 2001, he died on March 6, 2002, from multiple infections that his weakened immune system was unable to defeat. His posthumous collection, To The Marrow (2007), chronicles his journey through bone marrow transplantation.
Fred Shaw
Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection, Scraping Away, released with CavanKerry Press in April 2020. A book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working. The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.
Danny Shot
Danny Shot was longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz. His poems and stories have been widely anthologized and he’s performed his work everywhere. Mr. Shot lives in Hoboken, NJ (home of Frank Sinatra and baseball). He was featured in the widely acclaimed TV show State of the Arts. His play Roll the Dice was produced in September 2018 as part of the New York Theater Festival. Danny currently serves as Head Poetry Editor of Red Fez (https://www.redfez.net/) online magazine. WORKS was published by CavanKerry Press in 2018.
Joan Seliger Sidney
Joan Seliger Sidney is writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. She also facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult writing workshop. Her dream-came-true job was teaching creative writing at the Université de Grenoble, France. Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Louisville Review, Kaleidoscope, and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems published in 2003 were nominated for a Pushcart Prize XXIX. She has three published books: The Way the Past Comes Back (The Kutenai Press, 1992), Body of Diminishing Motion (CavanKerry Press, 2004), and Bereft and Blessed (Antrim House, 2014). She lives in Storrs, Connecticut, with her husband. Their four adult children are thriving.
Robin Silbergleid
Robin Silbergleid is the author of several books and chapbooks, including In the Cubiculum Nocturnum (Dancing Girl Press, 2019) and the memoir Texas Girl (Demeter 2014); she is also co-editor of Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations (Palgrave 2017). Currently, she lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she teaches and directs the Creative Writing Program at Michigan State University. Her collection The Baby Book was published by CavanKerry in 2015.
Dianne Silvestri, MD is a graduate of Butler University and Indiana University School of Medicine. She was associate professor of dermatology at UMass Chan Medical School until leukemia forced her retirement. She has studied poetry at workshops including Tupelo, PoemWorks, and Colrain, and authored the chapbook Necessary Sentiments. Her poems have appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, Barrow Street, The Main Street Rag, and Naugatuck River Review, among others. She is a past Pushcart Prize nominee, and cofounder and leader of the Morse Poetry Group in Massachusetts. The mother of four and grandmother of seven, she enjoys gardening and ballroom dancing with her husband. www.diannesilvestri.com
Judith Sornberger
Judith Sornberger’s newest poetry book, I Call to You from Time came out in July 2019 from Wipf & Stock. Her other full-length poetry collections are Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018) and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently Wal-Mart Orchid, winner of the 2012 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize (Evening Street Press). Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany was published by Shanti Arts Press. She is a professor emerita from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and created and taught in the Women’s Studies Program.
Sarah Sousa
Sarah Sousa is the author of the poetry collections See the Wolf (2018) named a 2019 ‘Must Read’ book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, Split the Crow, and Church of Needles. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Yell, which won the 2018 Summer Tide Pool Prize at C&R Press, and Hex which won the 2019 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, North American Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her honors include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She is a member of the board of directors of Perugia Press.
Margo Stever
In 2019, CavanKerry Press published Margo Taft Stever’s Cracked Piano and Kattywompus Press published her chapbook Ghost Moose. She is the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding editor of Slapering Hol Press. She teaches poetry to at-risk children at Children’s Village. For more information, please see www.margotaftstever.com.
Carole Stone
Carole Stone has published three books of poetry and seven chapbooks. Her most recent poetry collections are American Rhapsody, CavanKerry Press, 2012, Hurt, the Shadow, Dos Madres Press, 2013, Late, Turning Point, 2016, All We Have is Our Voice, Dos Madres Press, 2018. Her most recent poems have been published in Slab, Cavewall, Bellevue Literary Review and Blue Fifth Review. Her poems shared second place in The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest in 2014 and 2015 and honorable mention in 2017.
Daniel B. Summerhill
Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet, performance artist, and scholar from Oakland, California. His work has been published in Obsidian, Rust + Moth, COG, Columbia Journal, The Hellebore, Gumbo, The Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His collection Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press, 2021) was a semifinalist for the Wheeler Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. A Watering Hole fellow, Summerhill is the inaugural poet laureate of Monterey County. He lives on California’s central coast and is an assistant professor of poetry / social action and composition studies at California State University, Monterey Bay.
Cindy Veach
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming October 2021) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press, 2017), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode and elsewhere. She received the 2019 Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and the 2018 Samuel Allen Washington Prize. www.cindyveach.com
Phoebe Sparrow Wagner
Artist, poet, co-author of Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martins Press, 2005) and author of We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders (CavanKerry Press, 2009). Her third book, poems and original art, Learning to See in Three Dimensions (Green Writers Press, 2017) is now also available from Amazon and other booksellers. Visit http://phoebesparrowwagner.com for Wagner’s poetry.
Sarah Bracey White
A southerner transplanted to New York, Sarah Bracey White mines her past in memoir, essays and poetry. Her published works include Primary Lessons: A Memoir; The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale; and Feelings Brought to Surface, a poetry collection. Her essays have been anthologized in Children of the Dream; Dreaming in Color, Living in Black White; Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother and numerous other publications. The New York Times, the Afro-American Newspapers and the Journal News have published her essays. Sarah is a frequent contributor and performer with Read650. Visit her website www.onmymind.org for more information.
Jack Wiler
Jack Wiler was raised in New Jersey and lived in Jersey City until his death in 2009. Diagnosed with AIDS in 2001, Jack spent the last years of his life writing and educating students about poetry. For much of his life, he worked in pest control, most notably for Acme Exterminating in New York. He worked for Long Shot Magazine for many years and in association with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation worked as a visiting poet in the schools. Jack’s words can be found online at http://jackwiler.blogspot.com and in his two CavanKerry collections, Fun Being Me (2006) and Divina Is Divina (2010).
Baron Wormser
Baron Wormser is the author of eighteen books (including The Poetry Life Ten Stories, 2008, Impenitent Notes, 2011, and Unidentified Sighing Objects, 2015). Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. In June, 2020, Songs from a Voice, Being the Recollections, Stanzas and Observations of Abe Runyon, Songwriter and Performer, a fictional consideration of the early years of Bob Dylan will be published. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife Janet.
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.
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.
Taking care of one’s health is important to us. We understand that poetry is one of the many art forms that can love, heal, and make one feel less alone.
In the spirit of our Waiting Room Reader series, we would like to offer poems and excerpts from our latest books on a regular basis throughout the coronavirus outbreak. It is our hope that these selections will offer comfort and companionship through this season of isolation and quarantine.
From the press and our authors to you: here are some words to keep you company.
Not like Rodin’s famous
Kiss, in which the two, larger than-lifesize, naked bodies
rise out of rough
stone smooth-skinned and turn blindly into each other,
his huge hand
grappling her hip, her arm flung around his neck to draw
him down
to her. Neither a kiss to be bragged about afterward
like Tania
telling the whole dinner table how thirty-two years ago
Allen Ginsberg
had kissed her full on the mouth. “Not many women can say
that.” She blushed
proudly. No. It happened at a stand-up party where everyone
had to scream
over the grunge rock and was jammed shoulder-to-shoulder
in a small, hot, swaying
apartment. My wife was downstairs. I had just
entered the living
room, seen Sharon in her emerald shawl, waved, elbowed my way
through the throng
to give her my gros bisous. Intending to kiss her once on each cheek,
I missed
the second time and brushed my upper lip against only her ear
and fine, lavender-scented
auburn hair. “Me too,” yelled Nathan as a joke and a dare,
tilting his cheek
up at me, tapping the tanned flushed flesh with a forefinger.
“Here, Don,
right here!” I obeyed and kissed him, my lips soft
against his new-shaven
sharkskin stubble, my nose grazing his thick, lustrous black
hair that I had wanted
to sink my hands into and tangle all night. I held the kiss two seconds
longer than
necessary to call his wise-ass bluff, let him know
that I meant it
Shocked, he stepped back. His wife, Katie, laughed. But Sharon and he
got it, how I had surprised
myself, in that small moment when my lips touched his skin
smelling of cheap
English Leather after-shave splash, with passion.
I find it rolled up in her nightgown,
glazed cloisonné, blackberries
etched on the lid.
Beneath the clasp
Mama’s scented face powder
sprinkled over the mirror.
I clear a space with my finger
and she’s here — in my cheeks,
my dark curls, the same eyes,
green as her jade healing stones.
Mama thinks she’s in Odessa
but she’s weaving dreams
in the asylum. She’s told me
so many stories that sometimes
I think I’ve been there.
And so many times she’s told me,
I come from a long line
of rhapsodic women.
Morning, and the body unfolds
Before the tulips in the garden open
As the sun edges over the mountain
Where the hawk glides,
A kite without string.
Now I awaken to light
Yawning through the window,
To sleeves of the sun
Stretching out to us,
To the calls of cardinals
With crests of flame
And mourning doves wooing
The winter from my bones.
I turn from the blur of years
To nuzzle into your sleeping valleys
Before you move from loveliness
To rituals as the day arrives
Without mistakes or lies,
Without the frayed ends
Of old dreams or the loose ends
Of thoughts waiting to be tied.
Our bodies ease into openness
Like morning glories climbing
The trellis behind the house
While the remains of night disappear
Like stars in a constellation
We can only remember,
And then we consider
The divisions we live with,
The distance between
The soul’s requirements
And the other life
That the day demands.
There are no beginnings or endings
But only the love which
Continues because it does,
Because it falls with
The last snow of winter
And rises with the tulips
That push into light.
the image will automatically refresh every five minutes
At 5 am the frame may be black
but the ocean’s right there
if I could hear it. beating
against striations of iconic rock.
I’m not sure when the light goes dark,
it’s on a timer like the webcam
and their syncopation’s off.
On other days at 5 am the light,
as they say, is a beacon:
casts its bluish haze over the ground,
as they say, sweeping,
but which looks to me like an ultrasound,
the light in its center a fetus.
With each refresh day advances.
I usually miss that moment dawn
because it happens in the interval
and I suspect the webcam’s
five minutes is closer to ten.
The sky is dark, the sky is light.
There’s the rough outcrop, whitewashed
lighthouse anchored in rock but tipped
toward the silver, viscous ocean.
In one frame the scene is nature’s,
then there’s a girl
mid-sprint on the yellow grass,
running away from me.
There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom,
and the human form at the top. Because we are men.
—LE CORBUSIER AND AMÉDÉE OZENFANT, 1918
Mother of pearl and bone buttons,
Coats & Clark thread.
I’d sort and touch every notion
in her basket
with its silk loops for thimbles
and pine posts for bobbins.
First day of school outfits, hems,
elbow and knee patches she conjured
from that basket.
I need some notions
meant a trip to Woolworth’s—
ice cream at the soda fountain for me,
every flavor of rickrack, bias tape, grosgrain
for her. How she could darn
socks by the hour,
create buttonholes by hand,
always kept her notions
organized, neat
so she could find what she needed—
a rhinestone button, safety
pins, scarlet embroidery floss
to stitch I love you.
She said a woman
could never have enough—
fabric could unravel, split, fray,
but a woman with notions
could mend what was torn—
make it like new
button up
against his absence.
A bird skating on ice on its wing tip a wide photo album cream-white inside
sepia-tones spotted with teal ochre siren red wet like in marbles a san francisco
honeymoon spanish omelette colors a trolley what’s that? their future kids say
both movie stars mother in her mid-calf elegant swing coat blonde waves and
betty boop lipstick have to say iridescent moon yes moon-white not sun-white
the man astaire no harm in his face just good times white dress dancing the
biggest smiles ever never saw her smile like that a princess did the bat think the
dark shoe it perched on and stayed with was another bat?
The house in Donnybrook Street was a hive of draughts,
cold infesting the long crack in the skirting
and the hardly imaginable space below the floor;
that first winter, a lace curtain of frost
on the inside of your windows brought you under
my quilt and three blankets for the first time,
where to put out your arm was to run the risk
of frostbite, and to sleep with a cheek exposed
was to dream of a visit to the dentist. . .
For the first time we went through the looking-glass
chapter by chapter, me reading, you dwindling
quickly to sleep, up to your eyes in bedclothes,
with Alice no longer the little girl she was
and my voice like the idiot grin of the Cheshire Cat,
still hovering inexplicably over your head
muttering ‘curiouser and curiouser’ to itself.
Sarah counted butterflies visiting
the larkspur. Growing restless, she toed
the dirt in a circle with her buckle shoe,
tugged gently to be let free
into the kitchen garden, where
a young woman wearing a wide-brimmed
hat bent into a bed of purples and greens.
Still deep in thought, Esther followed
Sarah, stopping at the low hedge of box
and stood for a long while
watching the woman.
She was humming in the reverie
of her work, somewhere vast
and boundless, where, it seemed for a moment
the world had dropped away.
Only the wind now and humming—simple
human mettle buoyant in the sunlight.
Neither happiness nor unhappiness
inhabited that garden, just the lovely
quotidian of day.
Even though she was wrinkly and held the corner
of her mouth in a fixed, down-turned knot—
and though she went buggy about the use of dull pencils,
the way we handled scissors, our rate of consumption
of red construction paper and white paste—
and although she got spooked if you chewed on a crayon
and made you wash your mouth out with Listerine
and rinse it out three times with cold water afterwards—
and even if she poured red sawdust floor sweep
everywhere in her tile-floored, second-grade domain
and herded it constantly into piles with a push broom,
enlisting us all to scoop it up in dustpans
with her scratchy “Let’s keep it clean, boys and girls!”—
for all that, I still loved her, because everyone knew
she read the best stories of any teacher in the school.
Every day she made us clean up following lunch,
and then we sat in our seats with our foreheads down
on the cool tops of our desks, every eye closed,
each of us imagining for the next twenty minutes
what it felt like to be someone else: a family
who went to Kansas in a covered wagon, a boy
who killed giants for the king, a stuffed rabbit, a pig,
a girl who had a dream about a deck of cards,
a man who accidentally learned a magic word.
Who has figured out why Joe Penner,
radio star no one knows now,
made us laugh, asking a million times,
Wanna’ buy a duck?
But like all the figures
we worshipped, he didn’t really help.
Hollow, they couldn’t save the world:
Buck Rogers whom we wanted to follow
into space, the Lone Ranger, masked man,
fighting injustice in the Old West,
Hi-yo, Silver,
the Green Hornet who went after criminals
G-men couldn’t find. Because the dial
we touched, warm from the radio tubes,
couldn’t stop evil
from lurking in the hearts of men.
The Shadow taught us this.
And we can’t pretend.
Off duty after his morning hike around the lake,
my father’s binoculars nap inside a plush-lined case,
their brass rims lidded with plastic caps
like coins laid on the eyes of Roman dead.
Weighty they look, and valuable,
with the intelligent metallic squint of all his instruments:
his car keys, his watch, his mechanical pencils,
his eyeglasses glittering on the coffee table.
When I work the focusing dials, like a television’s,
to tune into what he’s seen,
he grumbles from his couch, Don’t touch,
as though the high pitch of my awe will crack a lens.
But if I fold my arms like wings against my sides,
my father may hold the binoculars to my eyes
the way he once raised a cup of juice to my lips.
When he shows me a flipping aspen leaf
or an oriole’s black beak split by song,
I think his vision and mine may meet
the way each scope’s separate view
resolves into one seamless stare.
The morning he taps my door, calls out
Want to come along?
and loops the binoculars’ strap across my head,
my neck bows to take their weight.
Now the canals shredded by lake winds
and the slow-flapping heron
can feel as close, as far away
as my lather standing beside me in the field.
1
Sheets are wet
worrisome mounds
in the basket, socks
a pair of sorry balls
dripping in self-pity,
underwear a limp limbo
of cotton blends
no longer soaking wet
and not yet dry
waiting to be hung by a woman
who scrubs away
original sin
on a rock
along the stream
with her hands
and the strength
of resolve.
2
Sheets are hung
on the line, socks
clipped at the heel,
drawers droop
with fear
of never taking shape
from human proportion,
a clothesline low in the middle
as if bowing its head, waiting
to be propped up by a woman
who raises this offering
that much closer
to where
the air gathers
puffs of wind
with breath enough
for divine intention.
This is a place of recuperation, in the snows.
The luminous autumn sky giddies and rises.
Its knuckles of stone and blue are bruised in interknitting,
they secure the horizon to itself. Our flesh is gentle.
Afternoons a white stupor breathes from heaven.
There are blue nights when every heartbeat is a kiss
the breast shakes with. Everywhere the ice
mirrors your single face in sheets and flaws
and shows it cloven. The trailing sack of day
is stuffed then with resilient abstinence.
I can’t say how we came here. Half-numb, burning,
your face wears a pied mask of ice and fire.
The hearth in this high lodge flares. A gaunt window is open.
Our smiles blaze and freeze, cold air, cold flame.
Because I refuse to learn to say goodbye,
these words—but because they are not my skin,
and because my fingers are not syllables,
and because your voice on the phone is not
breath I can take into my mouth and taste,
and the phone when we speak is not your body
in my arms or your hand lifting my chin
so our eyes meet when you say I love you,
and because when I imagine your hand
lifting my chin, I want to live within
that moment with you the way language
lives within us, I am here, wrestling these lines
into form, and because the form is me
when you read it, I’ll be there, and we’ll touch.
My dog’s hips grind where no one can see.
She wants to keep up, but has to sit.
I take her home, pet her a while,
and go for groceries where
the old man packing bags
is staring off. I know by his heavy
silver eyes that he is a widower
and just as he life my no-fat cottage cheese
he sees her floating somewhere before him
and the soda and the swordfish and the English
muffins are piling up as the black belt keeps
moving, and I gently take the cottage cheese
from his hand, and he returns, looking at
me, a bit dizzy to still be here.
He sighs, rubs his eye, and asks, “Paper
or plastic?” I help him bag
what no one can bag.
After putting soda in the fridge
I eat out anyway, and next to me,
a small woman trying to be heard
while her large partner pretends nothing
is wrong. She knocks over the salt as he
butters his bread. He shakes his head
and wonders who she is.
Beyond them, in a booth by a window,
an elderly couple. It is clear they can’t speak.
They sign each other and their faces
are lively with yes and no and in between.
Suddenly over coffee, the man sees something
across the road. He’s full of joy, pointing
and smiling, wanting his wife to see.
It could be a hawk opening its wings
or a burst of light budding
a thin maple.
His wife never really sees
but he thinks she does
and he feels relieved.
I realize we are all this way.
Whether seeing dead faces at the register
or butterflies behind light poles, sometimes
the skin of mind is torn and we are not
separate beings. Once the talking is done,
we point and point at the proofs of love
for all we’re worth.
I feel more today
than one being should
and can’t tell
if I’m in trouble
or on holy ground.
Like shreds of fog. Or the kind of tea
a poet might sip on his grey weathered
deck, hinting at something irretrievable,
the wisdom of China, or Oban, for that
matter (shells, caves, distillery fumes),
it’s never about what can be held or seen
or even sniffed, but what flickers before
it’s doused.
Unlikely ghost in the shape
of eight-year-old Quentin (Greek-god
to-be, with his aristocratic nose)
lurking behind Duncraggan’s sodden
rhododendrons for a glimpse of me;
or Willie’s nimble fingers (trained
by stamp collecting, as well as playing
the recorder) as he unfolds the note
on his desk, slid there during recess,
invitation to my party, in unexpected
iambic trimeter (it will be the first time
he wears long trousers).
And how many
scarves insist on fluttering their silken
bravado in the chancy reflection of who
we might have been, or who dreamed
us up (or who dreamed up whisky, fire
in the throat, peat and brine) and who
were we, and what might not be left?
And Gordon with his slicked hair,
flirting in the backseat with my sister,
and how jealous I was, knowing nothing
about flirting, and not likely soon to learn.
And Harris (tall, loyal, clumsy) wanted
to kiss me, but didn’t, and what his lips
might have felt like, brushing mine,
or crushing mine, there in the dark,
and how that energy stormed directly
at me, then dashed lightly away.
My hand, the shell of a ghost-crab,
cracked open when I slapped my father’s face.
I mistook my hand for a bird, a sandpiper.
That I struck my father is not as important
as it is for us to keep our eyes on our hands.
I glove mine in desire
to write, take pleasure, maim, or bestow.
In the language of desire, my own hand
can command the fingers of my left
to scurry into the sea while the remaining ones
fly up at sunset. This is not a fiction;
the bones of our hands remember
forbidden fruit and the discovery of fire.
In February on the beach of my virginity,
I warm my hands over burning driftwood.
My middle-aged self has been writing of our hands,
how her fingers moved, soft as feathers
over her lover’s skin. Our hands will be warm.
The weather is wild. The wind whips my hair.
Sparks rise in bursts toward heaven.
I am yesterday, perfectly longing for tomorrow.
Winter Clouds in Hoboken
are different than New York City clouds
occasionally cumulus, lately ominous,
biblical in fact. New Jersey is not a place but
a state of mind according to my Brooklyn students,
the last frontier between irrelevance and extinction.
Everything you think it is, and more.
New Jersey is whole lotta place(s). My place is Hoboken
where neighbors share home-brewed coffee
the morning after Sandy flooded basements
in apocalyptic power surge, then darkness.
Where brass bands carrying statues fire cannons
in honor of obscure Italian saints though the midday streets.
Graffitied walls proclaim PK Kid is alive, Viva!
Not art to be sold in galleries across the river.
Where an empty parking space is a conversation starter
and a drunk girl cries next to a smashed cell phone
on my stoop two weeks before Saint Patrick’s Day,
a pool of green puddled at her feet.
Where we pretend we invented baseball
where everyone’s grandma dated Sinatra.
Where the poets drink like poets
and are ignored like poets.
Where the ends justify the ends
and happy hours last all night.
Seagulls peck French fries
off a white Mercedes Benz
on Washington Street
The clouds are different here.
They just are.
There is one beauty
it knows. The rest is blindness,
earth closing around itself,
surrounded by hunger.
For a hundred days,
a thousand, it is the same
dark eye looking
inward. Thinking of light.
Remembering the pressure
of soil. The seam
of water finding its heart.
And afterward
blossoms ringing through
stone.
In Japan long ago, when Koson
folded back the sleeves of his kimono,
picked up his pen and began drawing
the image that would later be carved
into cherrywood, then pressed
onto paper and colored in,
he had no idea that a century later
a man in rural New Hampshire
would unpin that print from his bedroom wall
where it had been hanging longer
than he could remember, roll and tie it
with curling red ribbon, then leave his home
in the dark, and drive past frozen fields and woods,
past farmhouses with wreath-covered doors
and candlelit windows, on and on,
to the roadside mailbox of a woman
he hadn’t seen in over a year.
He just knew that as he moved that pen,
line by line, feather by feather, beak by beak,
loneliness drew two wild geese flying
before a moon so large it nearly filled
the page.
Given these twenty-below-zero nights—
gale winds straight from the Siberian plains of hell,
and every tormented tree in the forest groaning its misery—
this mourning dove should be dead.
Yet here she crouches, hogging the feeder tray,
pebble-eyed and jaunty despite the ice cube
that, for two arctic days, has encased her pink left foot
like an elegant cement overshoe.
Persistent chickadees flutter and dip,
yearning to snatch a perch. The dove,
eight times their size and oblivious to complaint,
just keeps gobbling. In woodpecker fashion,
she’s clamped her broad tail over the tray edge
for balance, yet all the while her icebound foot,
a rosy block of sparkles, dangles in the knife-edge breeze.
Among these busy airborne birdlets,
her shackle swings like a locket packed with lead shot.
Even so, I’m tempted to circle
optimism on the metaphysical scorecard.
After all, the bird’s not dead, not even almost dead,
though no doubt her frostbitten foot
will rot and fall off, and she’ll be forced to endure
a blackened stump for the balance of her brief days—
that is, if a fox or my own cheerful dog doesn’t
hunt her down at twilight and break her neck.
Yesterday my son was clutching me in panic:
“What can we do? What can we do?”
But today he forgets to notice her.
The dove has become ordinary window dressing.
She gobbles seed; she snaps her beak at finches;
she flaps heavily into the snow-stiffened boughs.
Her feathers gleam and her beady eye glitters.
From where we stand—
here: in our kitchen, our own snug invention—
any happy can look like an ending.
You find blue sheets the color of sky with
the feel of summer, they smell like clothes
drying on the line when you were small.
They feel unusual on your skin; you and your
husband sleep on them.
You find thick white towels that absorb a lot
of water. When you come from the bath, you are
cold for a moment, you think of snow for a moment,
you wrap yourself in a towel, dry off the water.
Now, you unpack your silver, after years, polish it,
set it in red quilted drawers your mother
lined for you when you were young.
You and your husband are in bed. The windows are open.
There is a smell from the lawn. It’s dark and late. You
and your husband are in the sheets. He is like a horse.
You are like grass he is grazing, you are his field. Or
he’s a cow in a barn, licking his calf. It’s raining out.
He gets up, walks to the other room. You listen
for his step, his breath. It is late. For moments
before you sleep, you hear him singing.
He comes to bed. He touches your face. He touches
your chin and lips. Later, he tells you this. He puts
his head on your breast. You are dreaming of Rousseau
now, paintings of girls and deserts and lions.
Our daughter looks like me
people say, the architecture
of her eyebrows and pointed stare.
But in the photograph of you
at thirteen months: our baby’s
toothless grin after she’s grabbed
the cat by the tail. Every child
you said needs a mother who reads
and each night I let her suck
thick cardboard illustrations,
Big Red Barn and Goodnight Moon,
while I balance her on my lap.
If you lived with us, you
would know this. Perhaps
you would bring me a cup of tea
while I nurse her on the couch,
a book of poems open nearby.
Sometimes I wonder if you wonder
about us, when you’re at work
in the laboratory or when
you’re feeding your new son a bottle.
The stories of our children
are woven together. The tapestry
couldn’t be more beautiful, filled
with these widening holes.
Mummy’s king-sized bed is half vacant.
My brother gravitates to the master bedroom.
He always has, but there is about it something
conspicuous now, something pre-Newtonian—
more fundamental, more mysterious,
than mechanics, more rudimentary than
calculus—an undetectable magnet betraying its
inestimable ethereal force. Mummy weeps more
in the monsoons, staring into the rain and over-
cast sky through windows shut to keep them from
swinging uncontrollably in cyclonic
winds and slamming. Her tears are always
stifled, her lamentation is never clean, never
a burst like a torrent. Always gasps, always
bird-like fluttering. I want her to stop.
I plead her.
She doesn’t stop.
I scream at her.
She doesn’t stop. I slam doors, I curse
the weather. She doesn’t stop. I curse
god. She is inconsolable. She is
a girl. Her moist cheeks, shining, are soft. Angelic,
she is a seraphim gazing out as if that is where
her void is, as if that’s where it’s always been.
My brother stretches out where papa slept.
He extends his arm toward her
and grunts. There is no sense in anything.
I am beset by the brutality of nonsense.
My brother sits up and walks to the bathroom.
He brings out a towel. He stands beside her,
looming above her frame, pressing
towel to her face, dabbing her cheeks. I watch
void offset void
like negatives that must
negate each other into an elemental
emptiness so dark that from it can emerge
nothing but a sliver of light like hope.
Three years after the fight of the century, we gathered once more around our beloved tube radio, this time for “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight for the World Heavyweight Championship between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known to Mom as Jorge Foreman. Things had changed around our home. Father was gone; so was my brother. My three oldest sisters had dropped out of school and found jobs in Bogotá. For them, high school had to wait. The well-being of our family was in their hands.
“This is going to be good,” Mom said wrapping the rosary around her fingers. “Ali’d better get off the ropes this time. He’s what, thirty something? He can’t compete with this kid Jorge.”
Ali started the fight with a ferocious attack, and the audience went wild. We could hear the spectators in Zaire chant, “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!” an African mantra that put my two sisters, Mom, and me into a trance and seduced us with its foreign cadence. We didn’t know what it meant and didn’t care. We were high on Ali and chanted along with our invisible African friends: “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!”
Mom thumped the table with her palm. Grains of salt reverberated on the wood. She kept the pounding, on and on, until she fell into a steady five-beat rhythm; her pounding melted into the noises from Zaire, and soon my sisters and I started smacking our own palms against the table. “Ali boma ye! Ali boma ye!” and it felt like we were building something big, something important, a tribe of angry, thump-crazy, sweaty, women warriors.
All of a sudden, Ali went to the ropes and allowed Foreman to hit him. Mom cried, “No, no, Chucho, Chuchito, help him! God, get him off the ropes, please, Heavenly Father!”
But Ali had different plans. He spent round after round leaning on the ropes, staying loyal to his “rope-a-dope tactic,” absorbing Foreman’s punches, taunting him with “Is that all you got, George?” or “My grandma punches harder than you do,” which made Mom snort.
Toward the end of the fight, Ali sprang from the ropes and delivered a sequence of flawless blows that sent Foreman to the canvas. The fight was over in round 8; Ali had reclaimed the WBA/WBC heavyweight titles. We jumped up from the table and hugged each other as if Ali’s victory were our own.
When the fight was over, the commentator translated the spectators’ feverish chant: Ali boma ye! meant “Ali, kill him!” Mom, being a God-fearing woman, started counting beads. She faced the radio as if directing her repentance towards Zaire and whispered an apology to Jorge Foreman for wishing him dead. “We don’t speak African, Lord. Forgive my girls and this old sinner. We’ll never chant anything we don’t understand. And please, heal poor Jorge’s eyes; Ali really did a number on that guy. Amén.”
She switched the radio off and let her fingers linger over its burgundy surface as if saying good night. Then she moved it back against the wall and covered it with a white crocheted coaster.
In winter the sun is nearer the earth than ever,
But what does it matter, every crypto-,
Proto-lover hidden in holy snow,
Living only as after-images,
The vivid violet of pigeon feathers
Or cyclamen petals that blossomed
Under Persephone’s heels
As she fled. In February, the toy bear,
The groundhog who lunches on flowerbuds—
Last year the rascal beneath my garage
Ate the tops off all my lilies—comes out to see
How everything is doing. Everything,
It just so happens, is nothing
But the puzzle of his shadow.
He peers at this as if to decipher a cause:
“How can I know what it is that I know?“
Then he tries to get back to the solitude
Of his so-called slumber,
Dreams of brown-eyed woodchuck girls
And the message he decodes
From the silence at Persephone’s cave,
Which is, “Wait. Wait for spring
Or until it’s as warm out there
As it is in here.” Or just, “Wait. Wait.“
One day we were big
and our mother got a job
and she knitted herself two vests
to wear to work
a green one with a turtle on the pocket
a good one, she said, to wear
while filing cases
and one of a blue, diaphanous
sparkly fuzz that made her
look like kin to the water cooler.
She loved to work, loved the office
across from the courthouse
the pigeons and the poor
around Eva’s Kitchen
where occasionally the hungry
got surplus Popsicles
and pitched the sticks
in the bushes in front of
the courthouse, bones
of a food that couldn’t
nourish, that couldn’t
be saved or sold. Our mother
thought of our poorness
then, of when we were little
of letting us eat the rolls
from the go-go bar dumpster
the guava jelly and quail eggs
and cans of soup
that showed up on our steps
one Thanksgiving weekend
and gratitude came over her
like an ecstasy, gratitude
came off her like steam
for her gorgeous job
her restaurant lunches
thank you thank you thank you.
She all but curtsied when a pill cup
of macaroni appeared unbidden
next to her pastrami.
She brought home pastries
window-boxes like orchid corsages
clipped recipes, warmed up pot pies
bought cream, fruit, nuts
an electric knife
thank you thank you thank you.
At her metal desk in the corner
she filed her frauds
and on payday rushed to the bus
as we ran from our jobs
to meet in her yellow kitchen
to tip back our graying heads
to be healed with fatness.
After days of healing,
he would get away to fish.
Curator of fluff and feathers,
he tied his own flies,
designed his own waders
and up to the lake country
for trout and walleye.
I would ask him, what is it
out there on the water,
and he would say, all week
I swim lead for my school of patients,
take this, take that,
don’t eat this, don’t eat that,
I tell them swim away from the hook,
don’t take that bait, that bug there
has sharp metal innards,
that worm glints steel,
but we are such dumb fish,
such sorry things that we all get pulled
from our lives.
So, weekends,
I choose to be the redresser of balances.
I know that he hid behind this facile
diagnosis because I went with him once
and as we stood thigh-deep
in the cold and clear lake,
he began his meticulous detailings,
the striations of the bottom rocks
and how each different sediment
reflects the light, the distribution
of firs along the shore,
the speckling of the speckled trout
and each thing, he said,
is a symptom and so a clue
into the fevered chemistry of beauty.
Dad used to say, most men are good-for-nothings, but don’t think about that. Think about the men who are good for something because you are where your thoughts are, and he was right. That’s why I’m with Elvis so many nights. I can’t help it. I’ve been with him so long, I feel him deep inside me like an ache or pang I can never get rid of.
I mean right now there’s Elvis playing on the radio. He’s singing gospel, and I’m remembering the first time I heard him sing. Dad played his album on the stereo. I was a girl, maybe five or six years old. Mom was out of town, so Dad fixed me a whiskey or two—sweet drinks, he called them—an inch of sugar with whiskey, water, and lemon on lop. He said it would give me a cultured taste for booze, something important to have for the future, and anyway, he didn’t like to drink alone, and I liked whiskey, as my dad said, just like an ant likes sugar. It was in my blood before I knew what it was, this feeling Dad called whiskey love, and I call Elvis, the two of us sipping cocktails together, loving it together, with him on the flowered couch, reading the paper, eating Triscuits, me cross-legged on the floor in front of the fan, letting the wind fool with my bangs, humming, and when my dad stopped reading, he announced This guy is great, and he sang along, Are you lonesome tonight?
And I was. Suddenly I was so lonesome, I was drunk with it, lonesome for Elvis singing, and my dad, lonesome for the fan blowing in my face and the cicadas outside, and the tree frogs, lonesome for that dusk that was all around me, the daylight fading so fast, I knew nothing ever lasts, not him, not Elvis. I was so lonesome, I was afraid I’d bust. That’s when I thought of Terrence. I had to do something, so I thought of Terrence Jones, this kid at school who gave me a black eye. And when I thought of him, Elvis went away, and so did my dad. And the urge to cry. It was nice. I knew everyone’s good for something. Even Terrence. Because I couldn’t be there with my mind in that place where lonesome stays. And Elvis sings long after he’s dead, and my dad too, now that he’s gone, he just croons, Does your memory stray to a bright summer day? And my heart fills with pain when he comes back again and again, oh yes it does, too, until I think of someone else, some guy who’s a real asshole, and I think, at least he’s good for something. Look on the bright side. They can’t all be Elvis. Except when I close my eyes.
As if cleaning could make things right
I take down the small glass bottles
blue, green, rain-water, one by one
from the window ledge
where chimney soot has settled
with the dust rising up from
the street here to the 20th floor
while steam and sun streak the sky
with color in this undulating afternoon.
My daughter’s leg will heal
we feel sure of it
even though she’s groggy with pain
and fitful right now.
As I rinse the sponge in the sink’s
soapy water, soot blackens the porcelain
reminding me how mangoes
planted next to coffee fields
take on a coffee flavor.
I wish I had mangoes to offer her today,
I think, as I watch the shining cars
stream down 2nd Avenue
their flow mesmerizes me in the moment,
this day captured like a photo on her wall,
this photographer daughter
and maybe when she wakes
I will ask please one day
when you feel better
take a picture of all this
the lights, the cars, the darkness,
somehow our life.
Before closing the curtains
I stand by the lamp,
momentarily framed, arms
raised to the invisible sky,
silhouetted in a window of light.
In the dream I was getting on the school bus
from the back of the bus for some reason, only this time
instead of jeers and everyone sliding over
to the aisle-side so I couldn’t sit down, someone said,
“There’s a seat up here, Chris.” It was
next to Mary Jo Stillwell, pretty as she was
in eighth grade, who had slid to the window
to let me sit, and when a kid put me in a headlock
I simply lifted him over my head and set him
in the seat in front of me, said, “Stay there,”
and a little boy had grabbed a little girl
by the hair, only this time I pulled him off
and sat him down, saying, “You don’t ever grab a girl,”
and sat her down, too, and asked her if she was all right.
No one jeered at this, or swore at me,
or threatened my life for disrupting the way things
were supposed to be on the school bus going to
Mountain View Middle School in Sullivan, Maine—
if that’s even where we were going—
and when I sat back in my seat, Mary Jo leaned forward
in a very serious manner, and I kissed her
as though it were the most natural thing to do
with Mary Jo—short, serious kisses—on that
school bus that was nothing like any school bus I had ever ridden,
that was exactly like every school bus I have ever ridden,
and when she started kissing my neck in a way that tickled,
I woke up exactly in my life.
We’re driving to town to buy groceries (brown rice,
Baking powder, raisins, safflower oil), flashlight
Batteries, sunflower seeds so the blue jays can continue
Lording it over the smaller birds that also want to eat,
And we start talking about how the U.S., which started
Out as the bravest promise the human spirit
Had made so far, the light of William Blake’s
And many another’s enraptured eye, became a homage
To vehicular motion: commoners having been freed
From the yokes that princes placed upon them
To transpire the vapors of octane desire.
“Invention overrules intention,” my wife mutters
While fiddling with the car radio.
I begin to sputter my own homily
When suddenly Buddy Holly starts singing,
His voice twenty-one years old and staying there
As long as machines can play recordings.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Peggy Sue,” he warbles
And so, simultaneously, do we, plus some finger popping
And rhythmic squirming within our seat-belted confinement.
He lights up another minute; then he’s spent.
We keep tingling—savoring the pure thrall
Of foreshortened American joy.
He’s the incalculable voice of poetry.
Our beautifully engineered beast rolls on.
In a city that was not my own I crossed
a bridge over the river and wandered a long while.
Later, I crossed another flowers had been
woven around. Something was going on today
in the city. It rained. Stopped raining. Rained again.
I found a gallery of lost women, their dresses shrunk
to doll-size, their non-names engraved on plaques.
Leaning over my coffee, I listened as story led to
story. I bought a movie ticket and waited in a red seat
for the feature presentation. In the film a woman
set herself afire. Two patrons walked out. After,
I browsed spices and baking supplies—enticing
but I didn’t bite. I crossed the river and searched
through moldering books in a back room. I viewed
an ancient scroll that stretched for yards, each episode
rolling to the next. I knew the city was a repository
I had only begun to tap. I knew the bridges sutured
the river, that I kept crossing between the dead and
the living. Much digging was underway. I recalled
the phrase from an old tale predicting the bright sun
will bring it to light. Walkers every day tamped down
with their feet what squirmed again to the surface
demanding to be recognized. One day of wandering
was coming to an end. It was the inescapable labor
of time—the city would unearth my secret name
and soon be summoning me back. When my cup
was served, a heart steamed toward me from the foam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
more questions, more blood, more tests,
more blood, more results, more consultations.
John shows me how, with biofeedback,
his heart rate can be changed from scared to calm
Emerson’s Essays open on my lap
but my eyes glued to the screens. He shakes
his arm, the peaks go nuts. A nurse
appears in seconds, looks him in the eye,
straightens the sheet, and leaves without a word.
Subforms of creatine kinase found.
Orderlies wheel him to CCU.
Blood saken hourly through the night,
vitals monitored 24/7, surgeons—trailed by
their followers—sweep in and out of the ward.
No one knows exactly what’s wrong until dye reveals
a blocked anterior descending artery.
The interventional cardiologist shrugs:
The minute I saw John’s face I knew
something had happened to his heart.
John watches pictures of his black-and-white heart
as they snake a stent to the blockage site.
Later we laugh at heart attack jokes
while nurses lift the small sand-weighted bag
off his groin. Blood pressure numbers drop.
How do you feel? OK.
The numbers steadily drop. You still OK?
The numbers seem impossibly low.
One nurse, inches away from his face, keeps asking.
The other prepares an adrenaline shot. I leave.
By the time we’re handed YOUR FOLLOW-UP CARE
with its list of Call physician right now signs,
he wants to go home so badly but
a part of me wants him to stay
where nurses and machines can keep an eye on him,
where doctors can diagnose, order tests, do procedures STAT,
where blood and screens and charts and the clues
that those in the know can find in a face
prove better ways than any I possess of finding out
what’s really going on inside John’s heart.
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)
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 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.
1
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.
2
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a love poem about empty places.
About blank walls.
About light in the night and noises on the street.
This is a love poem where no one is there.
This is a love poem for you.
This is your house.
This is the light you make.
The soft light of a summer night.
The noises from the bar down the block.
The girls screaming at their lovers.
Your clothes spread across the bed.
You spread across the bed.
The sun in the afternoon.
Too hot sometimes to bear.
The smell of your skin.
You mixed carrots and soda for tanning cream.
That taste is this poem.
This is a poem without you in it.
Like every love poem should be.
A poem with an empty heart.
A poem with a smell you can’t quite name.
I say you smell almost like cotton candy.
You show me your perfume and it’s cotton candy.
I say you smell like my life.
You show me getting up and going to work and coming home tired.
I say I love you and you say I love you
and we could say that over and over and over.
But all I know is the spray of tanning oil on the deck.
The spilled Corona.
The taste of your breath, thick with beer and tobacco.
This is a poem with no one in the house but me and two dogs.
This is a poem with the deep sighs of my dogs.
The breeze from a summer night.
The wail of a siren.
The music from my neighbor’s radio.
Cumbia.
Soft mountain music.
Music about places and islands I’ve never seen.
Your hair is scattered on the sink.
Clothes are tossed on the bed.
The dogs are snoring.
The girls and boys from the bar are yelling.
It’s a loud poem. It’s a poem that won’t let me forget.
So I wander out and look at the pale Hudson County sky.
I can’t see a single star.
The moon is hazy with neglect.
The dryer is turning and turning.
The dogs are tossing.
Everything in the world is asking about you.
The year Neil Armstrong landed on the moon,
Tía Velia, our mariner, sent us a picture
of nine-year-old Norma.
Hair pulled back, “Apollo 11” inscribed
on the white of her shirt,
she stood against a peach-colored house,
the green thickness of American grass, and a turquoise sky
and smiled from the shade
of a Florida palm tree.
No longer was America just data:
airmail envelopes, shopping carts,
stories about Tio Luis, who Mother said
had cut the surface of Lake Okeechobee
with his body, with his gravel truck,
or Primo Luisito, who was in jail
for the third, maybe the fourth time;
she was cousin Norma;
she was men on the moon.
And I held onto that picture,
as real as a recurring dream,
and imagined myself flying,
scuffing the surface of Tía Velia’s color photograph,
and, like Armstrong’s Eagle, landing
in a sea of tranquility.
Later that year,
Fina, our seamstress,
made each one of us two dresses,
and Mother helped us give away
our clothes, our toys,
and kept us from talking about Norma
and all those who had left before us.
Watch my grandmother
fight the sun
with her rag hat
and loose white clothes
that breeze
with the summer wind.
Watch her
plant the seeds,
tiny dahlgi,
strawberry hard seeds,
in her left hand—
trembling.
Watch her hoe the ground
with the right hand,
left arm hanging like
a hose, paralyzed
from a stroke
twenty years ago.
Watch my mother’s right hand
unrind the beah, the pear
down to a carcass,
peeling counter-clockwise
the white freckled skin.
She learned this
from her mother.
I have watched her
do this every dinner
since I was a boy:
lips pressed, eyes narrowed
down to the knife
on skin, she smiles
and leaves a trail,
one curled snake of white flesh.
My mother learned through
hushed supper stories
of her brother fleeing
for the arms of some girl
from the states,
arranged not by custom,
not from Seoul.
Watching her mother cry
until breathless, grandmother
unwrapping the pear whole.
Watch her son
chew the beah, listen
to hushed dinner stories retold.
What whispers
sound like laughter
twenty years from the cry
I look over at Mama’s photo on my night table, the same picture she kept on top of her piano. I always found it hard to believe that she had ever looked like that—vibrant, eager, happy. In the picture, her smiling lips and cheeks have a rosy glow, and her eyes are dreamy and contented, a look I never saw in them. What I always saw was resignation and regret. In my opinion, she had much to regret. I plan to do whatever I want and never regret anything.
Several times during the next few days, I catch Aunt Susie staring at me, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. I always look away and try to think of something other than Mama. Often I take out the brochure that Mrs. Lee left for me. The camp’s name is Beenadeewin, and according to the brochure, it’s near the New Hampshire border. I wonder whether colored people live in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Beenadeewin is very expensive, but the brochure makes it seem like a magical place where parents gladly pay 600 dollars for their daughters to commune with nature for four weeks. There’s horseback riding, archery, shuffleboard, and arts and crafts. Best of all, there’s supervised swimming in the camp’s very own lake. Colored people aren’t allowed in Sumter’s public pool, and I was terrified of the snakes that lived in the water holes near Green Swamp Road so I never learned to swim. I’ve always wanted to, though, and I’m sure I’ll have spare time to learn.
These daydreams ease my fears about going to Vermont, but a voice in the back of my mind keeps asking whether the white people in Vermont will be as cruel as the white people in South Carolina are. Nobody is that cruel, I tell myself. Northerners were opposed to slavery.
One day Aunt Susie calls me into the living room and pats a spot near her on the sofa. “Sit down. There’s something I want to tell you. Mr. and Mrs. Lee haven’t been getting along lately. Mr. Lee won’t be going to camp this year. He—” She pauses and clears her throat.
“Does that mean I won’t have to go either?” I ask.
“That’s all the more reason you have to go,” Aunt Susie says. “Mr. Lee’s run off and left Mrs. Lee to work the camp kitchen alone.”
I wonder whether Mr. Lee left his wife for the same reason Daddy left Mama.
Aunt Susie continues. “Mrs. Lee’s hired a young boy to do the heavy work in the kitchen, but she’s counting on you to help her with the cooking.”
“Why is she counting on me? I don’t even know how to cook.” What I don’t say is that I’m tired of people depending on me.
Aunt Susie puts her arm around my shoulder. “I told her how much help you were to your mama. She’s my friend, Sarah, and she needs you. I’m counting on you. Please don’t let me down. Okay?”
I nod. What else can I do?
——
The smell of bacon awakens me. I climb from bed and see two suitcases near the door. Then I remember. Today is the day I meet Mrs. Lee and leave for camp. I stretch my arms high, yawn, and whisper, “Ready or not, Vermont, here I come!”
“About time you got up, sleepyhead,” Aunt Susie says affectionately as I slide into my usual place at the breakfast table.
“Did you get all your stuff together? Mrs. Lee wants everybody at the station before ten o’clock.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answer.
“Don’t look so sad,” Aunt Susie says. “You’ll have a good time. And you’ll eat some real good food. Mrs. Lee’s a great cook.” She pauses. “Wish I coulda been in your shoes when I was your age. I always had to pick cotton or clean white folks’ houses. Things are different now. This is a real opportunity.”
I love Aunt Susie, but she doesn’t understand. Cooking in white folks’ kitchens isn’t an opportunity. Opportunity is participating in the lunch counter sit-ins at the five and dime or doing voter registration with SNCC. I make myself smile as I put eggs, bacon, and toast on my plate.
This morning I watched my daughter
unpack her new cello out of its black
vinyl bag, cherry wood, lacquered
a rough sheen gleaming
from its wide bout.
I have seen this face before—stern,
determined—all business as she wraps
her small fingers around its neck,
the scroll resting on her shoulder
the outline of a body on a body,
from the navel to where
the bridge begins, its ribs
sloped against her ribs,
the middle curve a snug fit
between her knees
while she draws back the horsehair bow
pulling the strings into a sound
deep as a groan, almost voice,
fingers moving without
form or technique,
the truth of her body leaning into the music.
Already she knows how to shape
a sort of song, which comes
as easy to her
as breathing.
Maybe, since you’re something like me,
you, too, would’ve nearly driven into oncoming traffic
for gawking at the clutch between the two men
on Broad Street, in front of the hospital,
which would not stop, each man’s face
so deeply buried in the other’s neck—these men
not, my guess, to be fucked with—squeezing through
that first, porous layer of the body into the heat beneath;
maybe you, loo, would’ve nearly driven over three pedestrians as your head
swiveled to lock on their lock,
their burly fingers squeezing the air from the angels
on the backs of their denim jackets
which reminds you of the million and one secrets exchanged
in nearly the last clasp between your father
and his brother, during which the hospital’s chatter and rattle
somehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatable
song between them, and just as that clasp endured through
what felt like the gradual lengthening of shadows and the emergence
of once cocooned things, and continues to this day, so, too,
did I float unaware of the 3000 lb machine
in my hands drifting through a stop light while | gawked
at their ceaseless cleave going deeper,
and deeper still, so that Broad Street from Fairmount
to the Parkway reeked of the honey-scented wind
pushed from the hummingbirds now hovering above these two men,
sweetening, somehow, the air until nectar,
yes, nectar gathered at the corners of my mouth like sur-colored spittle,
the steel vehicle now a lost memory
as I joined the fire-breasted birds in listening
to air exchanged between these two men, who are, themselves,
listening, forever, to the muscled contours of the other’s neck, all of us
still, and listening, as if we had nothing
to blow up, as if we had nothing to kill.
In the South
Where I was born color
Bars and Jim Crow cars
Fine brown skin girls
Sang and black men danced
In their dark faces
The merry and dangerous
Whites of their eyes
I was young and made
My music beating
On hat boxes
My music was color blind
I traveled with my gin
A quart of whiskey a day
And ice
Across a country black
And white played on the streets
Where policemen walked in groups
And Fats Waller sat
At the piano
His fingers seemed to sing
And so did Negro America
Through rural towns with moonshine
And poor whites
riots and thoughts of war
The music was swing
And radio was the voice
That brought us together
My music was color blind
For fine young men in zoot suits
And brown skinned girls
Saving money the summer
before moving to New York,
I painted houses during days,
nights in a restaurant kitchen
hosing dishes, loading them
into a steel washer that gusted
steam until two a.m.
Once, when I came home,
my back and neck bidding for bed,
asleep on the couch laid dad.
Flicker from muted TV
was the room’s lone light,
but I could see his face fine,
broad nose, thick cheeks
holding glow as he breathed.
In five hours I would wake,
ride in the crew truck
to the assigned site,
gallon buckets and stepladders
chattering over road bumps,
axels clanging
like prongs of a struck fork.
Still, I stood and stared
at dad, a man
who poured four years
into the Navy during war,
who worked worse
jobs for shorter pay than me,
whose hands have blackened
fixing cars that quit
no matter how many replaced parts.
Above our house, clouds
polished moon as they passed.
Dad wriggled,
body pain or threatening dreams.
What else could I do
but bend down slow
and touch once
my lips to his brown brow?
What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field.
What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms.
It shall be and it begins with you.
Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous.
How it frightens and confounds and enrages.
How strange, unfamiliar.
Our love carries all those and the contrary.
It is most incandescent.
So, I vow to be brave.
Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear.
I’m done with silence. I proclaim.
It shall be and it sings from within.
Truly we are enraptured
With Whitmanesque urge and urgency.
I vow to love in all seasons.
When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl.
When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England.
When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies.
When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds.
I vow to love you in all places.
High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands.
In our dream-laden bed,
Cradled in the nest
Of your neck.
Deep in the plum.
It shall be and it flows with you.
We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops.
You embrace my resilient metropolis.
I adore your nourishing wilderness.
I vow to love you in primal ways.
I vow to love you in infinite forms.
In our separateness and composites.
To dust and stars and the ever after.
Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family
We have arrived.
Look. The bird has come home to roost.
Summer, the dominion
of crickets, music that can never be seen,
never be reached. Inside the workshop,
I’m running the miter saw,
cutting 1x2s to make frames,
the blade whirring steadily.
The jagged music of the blade
up on its knees, spinning all the way around
and back again,
like water carrying its depth.
Shoeless and shirtless, sunlight beats down,
making me squint, groggily.
Some nights I dream of gasoline, of flames, of
Running barefoot through sprinklers in the dark in my
Night dress, late as always, slipping stupidly
On the damp lawn, sprawled cold beneath
The street lamps yellow flare
Others, I dream of a towering city, skyscrapers
The car whooshes between and over, skimming
The rooftops as blue lava erupts, as buildings collapse
Into ruin as the driver and I dodge the flow, dart
Between blue hot fountains, shelter
In a dim apartment as we wait for the fall
Other nights, I dream of faceless women
With my name, of a gaping house, a shifting
Feast laid out on tables amid a skittering crowd.
We move between rooms, feigning estrangement.
These dreams pile up, indecipherable,
Notes taken in a handwriting that I recognize
As my own, but cannot comprehend
Outside my window, four palm trees
shake their mop-tops in the windy cold
like they’re the Beatles, and it’s 1964 . . .
and I’m fifteen, stretched out before the altar
of a console TV, the wooden doors opened
because it’s Sunday, and television is allowed,
recompense for early morning attendance
at church. My father reads the paper,
something, no doubt, about JFK’s assassination,
and perhaps the rumors of the war to come
in southeast Asia. My mother sews.
And just when I think Sullivan cannot speak
any more slowly, he lets out the magic words
“youngsters from Liverpool,” and the audience explodes
and the night accelerates and the Beatles’
“All My Loving” fills our living room,
and I’m looking at Paul looking at John,
and even they can’t believe what is happening.
What is happening?—I’ve forgotten tomorrow
is Monday, forgotten the north Jersey sky
outside our door, and how, starless
and alien, it’s always tinged with green
from a neighbouring electric plant;
I’ve forgotten the tedious blocks
of 50 x 100 lots, and the ranch houses
with four basic floor plans we all live in.
The Beatles are in our living room,
and whatever is happening includes me
when Paul smiles his isn’t-this-cool,
isn’t-this-nuts smile. I’m shaking
my head, trying to make my too short hair
spill around my face, and I’m beginning
to think the world I know isn’t the only one.
And when the Beatles go right into
“She Loves You,” I’m all Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,
so far outside my usual self
I let my father’s complaints about the lyrics
slip by uncommented on. And even now,
forty years later, I can see their smiling faces.
We’re all there in the living room,
my mother humming along, my father
lost behind the Sunday papers, and me,
unimaginably free, shaking myself alive,
summoned into a future knowing so little
and wanting so much, armed with
nothing more than joy and wonder.
As my girls get older, I am learning that if you are a person who has made your children your life, it is hard not to lean on them when you need support. Also, if you are lucky enough to have mature, emotionally stable kids, when the rug gets pulled out from underneath you, it is powerfully tempting to ask them for help and support. And if both of those things are true—that your children are your life and they are mature and caring—it takes a great deal of courage and conviction to not divulge every little detail of your fear and despair, anger and disappointment and overwhelming sadness to them in the hopes that they will prop you up when you fall and remind you that they are on your side.
The closest buoy is the one we most often want to reach for, but if that buoy turns out to be my children, I know I have to keep on swimming. They need me to be a mother. It is not their job to be mine. Finding a balance between letting them see my pain and fear as a human being and letting them know that it isn’t their responsibility to fix it for me gets more challenging the older they get and the closer I get to losing Mom. But I am determined to let them be children, to spend a few more years ensconced in the protective knowledge that they will be cared for, nurtured, and loved as they explore and become who they are. Maybe one day when they are adults and they have built their own solid foundations, if I need their help, they can come to my aid, but until then, I can’t steal their adolescence by asking them to solve adult problems for which they aren’t equipped.
For Phil Levine
In the East Village
the city wakes
garbage trucks grinding
bikers on a green asphalt path
walkers left and right
dissolving into each other
the sun hits the former tenement
buildings, makes shadows off the fire escapes
big Zs up and down
each brick and stuccoed canvas
every once and a while
it gets quiet
like everyone has been stopped
at a gate I can’t see
a mass of people, cars and trucks
and bikes all idling behind a stop sign
waiting for permission
to return to the commute,
and here they come:
zoom, swish, grind
here they come
and never stop.
Later in the Egg Shop
on Kenmare and Elizabeth
I listen to a Marshall Tucker song
on the speakers around me
waiting for my maple sausage
and biscuit
it’s 80 degrees, the doors open
construction workers on the sidewalk out front
the city in full swing now and I think
about my life writing, teaching
coming here to see a film my son edited
and it brings me back
to another time when I wanted
to disappear
and I know how easy that is
just to float over the table
step through the Sheetrock dust
on the sidewalk
sneak along the boulevard
with a suitcase
hop a train and vanish into a city
like another customer
another construction worker
another biker
another tattooed wait server
another cab driver
another homeless man
another mixed-up kid with a two-wheeler
lugging cases of soda
down into dark sidewalk cellars
and Toy Caldwell lays into a lyric like I’d seen
on an episode of Nashville Now
and it carries over the late morning sun
like an anthem to this city
and there I am not turning back
riding a southbound . . . till the train it run out of track.
When I was really little I thought the other side of the water like where City Island is was The Other Side that Mom and Dad talk about. I’m really proud of them, they left home and their Moms and Dads and brothers and sisters and came to a new country where they knew no one except maybe for Mom’s cousin in Rochester who had a Rooming House where too bad for her Mom worked as a maid. But Mom didn’t mind being a maid, she was so deliriously happy that she could live someplace and with someone even her cousin. Of course I think it’s exciting that Mom and Dad crossed the ocean to a new country but it’s mostly Scary, I don’t think I’d ever be able to do that. But I hope I can, I want to travel to far off places on planes and boats and see what life’s like across the Ocean.
And even though I’m still not completely crazy about Ireland which mustn’t be exciting at all, I mean why else would Mom and Dad and the other Greenhorns leave there, I still want to go and meet my Grandma and Grandpa before they all of a sudden die. Then off I’d go to London that has about a million buildings and Big Ben and the guys who make the laws who all wear wigs! that’re kind of long and have really tight tight curls that look like rows of ropes across the back of their heads. And there’s the huge Palace with the Queen and if you wait outside you can maybe see her. And I’ll go to Paris too where all the love stories happen and walk around and maybe I’ll meet a Prince and see the Eiffel Tower that looks like a Huge Erector Set and I’ll go for boat rides on the river. And I think I’ll go to Spain where they have the Bullfights which’re really sad for the bulls so maybe I won’t go and Italy too where they have great spaghetti and pizza and the Leaning Tower and of course the Vatican where Pope Pius lives and I’ll maybe someday even see Him. And I want my own car as soon as I can get it, which won’t be til after college and teaching for a while and saving up all my money so I can buy maybe a White Cadillac Convertible or a Thunderbird. But for sure I want a convertible, my hair flying and dancing all around in the wind, I love the Wind.
An hour before sunset and that golden light
stretching the days of mid-June illuminates
our bedroom in the light of religious paintings
when something is revealed. I’m lying on our bed,
reading a poet I like who keeps jabbing
at people’s sentimental “love
for everyday things”—roadside flowers, sparrows,
a sugar bowl and spoon—that cannot save us
from the “void ahead.” I laugh,
but then start thinking how, only a few minutes
ago, I looked up and saw you disappearing
around the edge of the shower curtain.
So, I’m revealing the source of my happiness—
your nearly sixty-year-old still lovely ass.
I might have shouted out a Hallelujah,
unbidden praise, except I was afraid
you’d startle and slip. But there it was,
mooning me as Yahweh mooned Moses,
showing him the hind parts, that fraction
of the whole, before vanishing again into mystery,
or, just then, a cleft in the rocks. You will resist
the analogy, no doubt, yet what I know
of Yahweh is just as blank and, truly, as loved;
I learned in Sunday school to love
what we never see by loving what we do—
this plum-colored mug, say, underglazed
in deep blue we brought back from Cornwall.
Bedside, it’s giving off steaming auras of tea
and waiting for you to step from behind the curtain
as this golden light yields to the loosening dark
and, ultimately, to that emptiness
we can never see into that waits beyond
the little, loved kingdom of our everyday things.
1919
I was alone on my thirty-fifth birthday,
if any woman with five children is ever alone.
A topaz dawn dissolved to a scintillant
blue sky, a clear October day.
The two youngest were in the nursery
with Blanche. The door to the summer kitchen
slammed, then slammed again.
Servants about their business.
Otis was cranking the car.
It sputtered and backfired three times.
I was a familiar drudge, plodding through duties,
bound by purposes defined by others.
I looked up from my writing desk
to the walled back courtyards of R Street,
and thought of Saint-Gaudens’ statue, Grief,
as she sits in Rock Creek Cemetery,
hidden in a grove of holly and laurel,
the dark green leaves leathery and tatty.
Franklin was off to hunt in New Brunswick,
the Campo house opened to accommodate
him and six companions. I imagined the men
sitting before the fieldstone chimney after dinner,
enveloped in cigar smoke, amber whiskey
glinting in firelight, Franklin’s voice loudest
among a raucous trumping of speculations
and gossip, the certain recounting of the week’s
proud kills—moose, elk, deer, fox, quail.
Then I heard myself sighing, heard sorrow
and a long and tiresome loneliness rise up
from my diaphragm and release through
my mouth. This is what I do. I sigh.
Buck up, I heard Uncle Teddy intone brusquely.
Buck up, you silly goose.
O yes, I thought, I am a goose of a woman—
my long neck, my steep-sloping shoulders,
six feet of lofty, homely awkwardness.
I have been a shy goose among more practical fowl.
But I began that instant—although every moment
of my upbringing was against it—to care less
for the success of my husband’s projects,
and more for the success of my own.
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.
Read this love letter to life. Its pages turn in the ice-fling
off of the fast car’s roof. Follow the traveling carillon,
the communism of the gospels, the ice rink’s joyful
four-fold spotlight, how it shines the hair and adds grace.
Eyes and words swerve into focus, nouns marry in metaphor,
lines enter a stranger’s memory and stay for seven years,
Smell the multiflora roses, honeysuckle, burning leaves.
Feel the inside of the body, the smooth core, watch the wren
pull the dead fledgling from the hole feather by dusty feather.
Guess the stories: tailless squirrel on the woodpile, condom
under the old folks home sofa, the lady’s internal monologue
as she guards the Lamborghini at the auto show, red guts spilt
like berries from rabbit mouth. I’d write even if each page’s
only destination were the stove, for winter heat. Again and again.
The warm shadows are back along the streets,
and the world loves us again, so lovely,
like the small octopus in a tank,
an exhibit for children. See it there,
its tentacles like gauze stretching
along the sides of the tank. If I tap,
one tentacle or another reaches upward
toward my finger, a ghostlike and translucent
blue-grey. How impossibly delicate
it seems, each sucker independently
holding or releasing, the limb
like the large fire engines in Boston
with the second man driving the back wheels
around the curved city streets, and the other,
so that each tentacle seems under
its own control, slowly waving along the tank
toward my fingers on the glass.
There is a sign off to one side,
informing us that the octopus ‘sees’
by feeling pressure waves, which, I imagine
is what my tapping brings up,
though my fanciful wife suggests
that the tentacles long for some connection
with me. Touching, one might say.
Tasting is more likely the case.
The water, too, seems as warm and forgiving
as the air in the small exhibit room
where children come to learn about touch,
about the gauzy longing like hunger in them.
It is spring, and in us, too.
sixteen weeks
1
Beyond lithe triceps, bulging biceps,
above taut calves and washboard abs,
unsurpassed by lats and hams
is our mother muscle hustling
blood through her brood of tubes,
muscle by which all other muscles flex.
2
What-what-what-what-what-
wafts through the Doppler mic
held against the slight, gelled
swell of your mother’s uterus.
Your body’s first voice
utters a stutter
I have no answer for.
3
Praise the four-chambered
orchestra playing staccato
sonate da camera in your chest,
percussive as the timpani,
or more so: allegro, vivace, presto—
how would Mozart mark
one hundred sixty sixteenth notes
per sixty seconds? Prestissimo.
4
We’ll take you home to four small rooms,
one just for you: your name brilliant
in bubbled letters, glass balloons
like buoys in the corner. Your mother
pressing you to her breast, we’ll step
into our asthmatic old apartment,
an April wind rushing in behind,
fresh oxygen borne in our blood.
When they were little I read
to them at night until my tongue
got tired. They would poke me
when I started to nod off after twenty
pages of Harry Potter or one of
the Lemony Snickett novels. I read to
them to get them to love reading
but a parent is never sure if the
stories are having an impact or if it
just looks like the right thing to do.
But one day, my daughter (fifteen then)
was finishing Of Mice and Men in the car
on our way somewhere. She was at
the end of it when I heard her say,
No, in that frightened voice and I
knew right away where she was,
“Let’s do it now,” Lennie begged,
“Let’s get that place now.”
“Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta.”
And she stared crying, then I started
crying, and it was as if Steinbeck
was sitting in the backseat telling
nodding his head and it felt right,
like I’d done something right,
and I wanted to tell her to keep going,
read it to me, please, please, I can take it.
Wonder what I’d be today if I was still married to my Wall Street
husband besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin
in a silk sheath outside Delmonico’s. I might be a size 4. I might
be a secret Democrat or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes
flew over the yard in a V as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender
pancakes al fresco. The V flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous.
It alarmed me, sounding a lot like the war movies of my fifties’ childhood.
My cranky Chihuahua was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there
not thinking about hate. Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An
intoxicating time, richly infused with the liquor of death, but good too
because no one expected much of me and I was left to my own mind,
which is what I’m missing most these days. Unless that’s it over there,
screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. Today I typed gnos
instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app designed
to mess with me. I’ve never thought to call the world sweet before.
Surviving something can do that, make things taste different.
Suddenly you’re a hero/ine. All this devastation—
and you’re still standing in the middle of it.
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.
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.
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 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!
CavanKerry is deeply grateful for our community of friends and supporters, whose generosity builds and sustains our organization. We extend a heartfelt thank you to all who gave during the 2023 Fiscal Year:
Nin Andrews
Patricia Barone
Mary Lynn Broe
Carl Carlsen
Andrea Carter Brown
Barb and Doug Caruso
Alan and Valerie Catlin
Karen Chase and Paul Graubard
Susan Coppock
Catherine Doty
Roberta Enoch & Steve Canner
Meris & David First
Jean Flanagan
Anonymous $500 Donor
Edith Goldenhar
Loren Graham
Lorraine and Frank Granza
Shaun Griffin
Judith Hannan
Jeffrey Harrison
Deming P. Holleran
Anonymous $1,000 Donor
Claire Keyes
Philip Kirsch
Kathleen Kremins
Gina & John Larkin
Patrick Lawler
Howard Levy
Anonymous $25 Donor
Earl Metheny
Marion Paganello
Christopher Parker
Donald Platt
William Prout
Anonymous $250 Donor
Jack and Julie Ridl
Maida Rosenheck
Carol Scanlon
Anonymous $50 Donor, in Honor of Robert Cording
Arlene Scozzari
Joan Seliger and Stuart Jay Sidney
Jane Simon
Anonymous $100 Donor
Carol and Fred Snyder
Jonathan Spinner
Anonymous $100 Donor
Anonymous $25 Donor
Cindy Veach
William Wenthe
Anonymous $50 Donor
Tracy Youngblom
Monica Yus
Pamela Yus
Thank you also to the Handler Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for your ongoing belief in us and for providing the financial bedrock that makes all we do possible.
Additional thanks goes to the following organizations and agencies for your past and/or current partnership and sponsorship of CavanKerry’s programming:
Words truly do not capture how much your support means to us. We hold each of you close to our hearts.
With Gratitude,
Joan, Gabriel, Dimitri, Tamara, & Dana
If you would like to make a donation to CavanKerry Press, you may do so Here or send a check to 5 Horizon Rd #2403 / Fort Lee, NJ / 07024
As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.
Gabriel Cleveland is a poet and fiction writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College. Along with Joan Cusack Handler, he co-edited Places We Return To, a 20th Anniversary retrospective on the publishing history of the press. An avid video gamer and music lover, he hosts The Andover Special, a weekly internet radio program on HomeGrownRadioNJ. Gabriel is also a mental health advocate, often working online to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues. He has spent several years in the field of caregiving for people with increased physical and/or mental needs and wants you to know that you’re not alone.
Dana Harris-Trovato, is a fiction writer who has been professionally involved in creating and managing nonprofits for over 25 years. She was longtime Associate in Education and Program Development for the Touchstones Discussion Project, which uses the discussion of literature to help students in K-12 schools build critical thinking skills. As Chair of the CityLit Project in Baltimore, she works to support authors and promote underrepresented voices. In 2020, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY, where she is currently an Adjunct English Professor. Dana is in the final edits of her first novel.
Dimitri Reyes is a Boricua multidisciplinary artist, content creator, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. Dimitri’s most recent book, Papi Pichón (Get Fresh Books, 2023) was a finalist for the Omnidawn chapbook contest and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. His other books include Every First & Fifteenth, the winner of the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award, and the poetry journal Shadow Work for Poets. Dimitri’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and you can find more of his writing in Poem-a-Day, Vinyl, Kweli, & Acentos. In 2023, he was a part of the inaugural poetry cohort for the Poets & Writers Get The Word Out publishing incubator.
Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman (she/her) is a bi-racial Muslim writer, historian, poet, and artist. Her first book of poetry The Raven, The Bayou, & The Willow was released from FlowerSong Press in 2022. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a Rad(ical) Poetry Fellow, and a poet for the Houston Grand Opera & MFAH’s event “The Art of Intimacy.” She is a Best of the Net Prize nominee. Her work can be found at www.tamaraalqaisicoleman.com
Joy Arbor, Copyeditor
Joy Arbor is a poet, writer, and copyeditor with an MFA from Mills College and a PhD from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A writing teacher for fifteen years, she resigned her tenured professorial position in 2018 to write and edit full-time; she now edits poetry, memoir and other nonfiction, and scholarship/academic materials. She feels honored to be able to help get writers’ words out into the world. For more about Joy’s editing, poetry, and other writing, please visit her website at https://joyarbor.net/.
Ryan Scheife, Designer
Ryan Scheife is a graphic designer specializing in all aspects of book design, including cover design, page design, typesetting, and production. Ryan manages various aspects of production, coordinating with editors, artists, and printers to produce the highest quality books. He also manages eBook conversion for both ePub and Kindle. He enjoys working with the finished text to create beautiful, engaging, and exciting works, and prides himself in offering an experience that is time-efficient and worry-free. Visit http://mayflydesign.com for more information.
Baron Wormser, Content Editor
Baron Wormser is the author of nineteen books (including The Poetry Life Ten Stories, 2008, Impenitent Notes, 2011, and Unidentified Sighing Objects, 2015). Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. In June, 2020, Baron published Songs from a Voice, Being the Recollections, Stanzas and Observations of Abe Runyon, Songwriter and Performer, a fictional consideration of the early years of Bob Dylan. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife Janet.
Carol Snyder, President Emeritus
Retired Human Resources Director for major chemical company
Joan Cusack Handler, Ph.D.
Psychologist, Poet, Publisher
Alan Handler, Ph.D.
Retired psychologist and learning center owner/director
Monica Yus
Manager of merchandising and sourcing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with 13 years of global merchandising experience from her time at Brooks Brothers.
Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady’s seven poetry collections include: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation and a professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton.
Judith Hannan
As a speaker and panelist on the topic of the healing power of writing, she is a writing mentor with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Visible Ink program where she also serves as an interventionist in a study to evaluate the benefits of expressive writing among elderly cancer patients. In June, 2016, Ms. Hannan joined the faculty of the inaugural Narrative Medicine program at Kripalu.
Afaa Michael Weaver
Weaver was a member of Cave Canem’s first faculty at the retreat in 1997, and in 1998 he became the first “Elder” of the Cave Canem organization. His papers are held in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Elena Neoh
As an editor and previous Social Media Coordinator at CavanKerry, Elena’s fascination for words progresses alongside her Teaching Assistantship and graduate studies in Creative Writing. Her works can be found in Cleveland Magazine, LivewireAu, Luna Negra, and more. During her free time, she reads manuscripts for Autumn House Press, listens to podcasts, and strums the guitar.
Sony Q. Ton-Amie
Sony Ton-Aime is the director of Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. He is the author of a chapbook, LaWomann (2019), & the forthcoming Haitian Creole translation of Olympic Hero: The Story of Lennox Kilgour. He is the co-founding editor of ID13, & holds an MFA from the NEOMFA.
Talena Lachelle Queen
Poet Laureate of Paterson, NJ who holds an MFA from the University of Washington.
Jack Ridl, The Red Dock, (Douglas, MI)
Tuesday, August 9th
Kevin Carey, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Lenfell Mansion (Madison, NJ)
Thursday, August 11th at 6:00pm
Dawn Potter & Baron Wormser, Town House Forum (Strafford, VT)
Thursday, August 11th at 7:00pm
Click here for more info
NIN ANDREWS
Orphans is such a powerful and heart-breaking memoir. I thought maybe I’d start the interview by asking for an excerpt from “No Day Was Brighter:” on page 39, beginning on page 39: “I’ve spent my life trying to explain/my mother . . . and ending with “God stealing her mother in every /face and gesture for the rest of her days.”
I’ve spent my life trying to explain my mother; she lived in two countries love and loss_ her mother the center of both. Left alone (a child of 6 again) on the threshold of her mother’s room watching as death and God took her mother away. How does a child confront that oppressor? She finds God stealing her mother in every face and gesture for the rest of her days.
You were named after your grandmother who died in childbirth when your own mother was six. And you resembled your grandmother. How does one pronounce Siobhan, the Irish name for Joan? Did you feel as if somehow you were her mother? I’m thinking of these lines:
I’m named for my mother’s
mother. Siobhan translated
is Joan. Perhaps
that explains what goes on
between me and my mother.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Siobhan is pronounced Sha Vaughn (as Joan tells us in Confessions,it rhymes with fawn.
I felt like her mother in the sense that I felt responsible to make her happy and responsible for her sadness. As a child and as an adult. The lines refer to my feeling that she put all her hopes in me— I was her mother’s replacement so she was particularly possessive of me. With that as a background, our relationship was very complicated.
NIN ANDREWS
When I was reading Orphans, I was so swept up in your telling—it was as if your words were waves washing over me. And in the early section of the book, you wrote about a beach vacation. Did you start writing this when you were in Aruba? How did the book begin?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
The book began with the mother poems –the ones in my voice. My husband and I are great fans of cruises—particularly transatlantic ones. In the presence of the ocean or sea, I often feel inspired. If I’m not writing, I’m reading and vice versa. “Orphan at Sea”– the Aruba poem was written on a Caribbean cruise and is one of the oldest in the book.
I tend to write in clusters of poems. And in both cases, I wrote a great deal when my parents were close to the ends of their lives.
When my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, my friend Karen Chase, suggested that I record her voice and my father’s. I did that. Though unsure of how I would use those conversations, I knew I wanted to write about my parents. At some point. What better way than to let them tell their own stories. My assistant, Donna Rutkowski, transcribed those conversations and I edited them as prose. When the book was 90% finished, another friend, Carol Snyder, commented that someday she’d love to hear my parents’ voices in poems. Needless to say, I couldn’t ignore what I thought was a brilliant idea, so I decided to try. The result are the Mother and Father Speaks sections. That process was amazing. I elaborate on it further down.
NIN ANDREWS
This book seems completely open, as if you are bearing your soul to the world. While writing it, did you ever feel a need to withhold a family story or not talk about a sibling?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I do feel the pull to withhold family or sibling stories and in fact I sometimes do. The decision is based on whose poem it is. Though I reveal a great deal, I also hold back a lot about my family (believe it or not!) in all of my books, and only reveal the stories that are fundamentally mine. When it came to writing this book, I knew it would not be published until after both of my parents had died.
NIN ANDREWS
There is so much pain in the book, first the pain of being beaten and manipulated by your mother, and second, the pain of feeling responsible for your father’s fall when he was an old man, and third, the general pain and grief after your parents’ deaths and with the recognition of your own mortality. You keep asking yourself, why, as in the poem, “Questions”:
Why
did I coach you to “Trust yourself,
you can do it?” And why did I
go back to sleep that morning?
And in the poem, “What’s Gone,” you write of both what’s gone and what is left, and both are guilt. You begin the poem with a list of nots:
What’s Gone
Is guilt:
Not placing him first
No visiting more often
Not making soup
Not stopping by on my way to East Hampton
Not joining him for a walk
Not being good enough
Not going to mass
Not believing . . .
Would it be fair to say you are very hard on yourself? Was it difficult to write these poems?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Yes, one could say that I’m hard on myself. And yes, it was difficult to write many of the poems. But I was/am committed to the truth. I’m not interested in distortion particularly in the service of the ego. Pain is a real part of life and relationships and I believe that most people recognize that. It’s natural for a person to question themselves, their motives and behaviors when a loved one dies. Hopefully, we’re assessing these throughout our lives. The good and the bad. That’s one of the reasons I’m so attracted to the Jewish Yom Kippur; a day a year dedicated to facing one’s life and taking stock is worthy work indeed. The speaker in this book is flawed and to tell her story honestly, I had to reveal those flaws.
NIN ANDREWS
I kept calling this book Orpheus instead of Orphans because it read like a trip to Hades and then back again. The difference, of course, is that the singer was not lost in the end.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Hallelujah!
NIN ANDREWS
You end the book with the poem with the image of water, and a nod at your childhood home in Edgewater, so the book comes full circle. I wonder if you could post the lovely last stanza here and maybe say a few words about that poem.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I’ll need someone to cover me, find a thick down blanket to warm my thin and flaking bones. Don’t forget a pen and my notebook no use for them. In their place, unfinished poems, family photos, CDs of David’s music, a book of Chekhov’s stories my wedding ring, on my finger please. And, if possible, the sound of water (if not at its edge).
The poem has gone through a considerable transformation; it was once much longer, more optimistic and separate from the rest of the book as a Coda. As I lived with that Coda for a good while, and shared it with friends and editors, I came to see it as out of sync with the rest of the book. I created this lovely scene at my graveside with my son and daughter –in-law and our wonderful Cassidy Vaughn, their 5 month old daughter; it was Christmas and we were drinking mimosas and eating ice cream; they were showing me their presents and chattering away. It was an idyllic. And a lovely fantasy. But it was not real. I was pushing myself too far into acceptance of my death than I was at the time. I removed the Coda and wrote this poem –which told the truth of where I was emotionally. There are days now when this ending continues to hold true and others when I regress to more of the terror expressed in the poems that precede it. Fortunately, as time passes, I regress less often.
NIN ANDREWS
How long did it take you to write Orphans?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
About 7-8 years.
NIN ANDREWS
Was it more challenging to write this book than others?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Yes, in that I was dealing with three voices and I was committed to presenting both of my parents in as authentic a way as I could. Finding the form for each of the 3 voices was very challenging and great fun. When I set out to transform the prose into poems, I automatically went to my typical form that uses the whole page as canvas and draws/follows the emotional energy down the page, but my parents’ voices would not speak in my form. They needed their own. I tried several others but was unsuccessful, until I tried simple couplets which gracefully fit my mother’s voice, and I found my father (whose refused to speak in couplets!), spoke most naturally in irregular stanzas of free verse (introduced by a first line separated from the rest of the poem with a space). It was the most amazing learning experience to watch the words insisting on their own form.
NIN ANDREWS
How has your life as a therapist informed your writing?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I’ve always been fascinated by peoples’ stories and I’ve heard many in my 35+ years practicing. And I’m committed to helping patients face and eventually accept theirs. Without recrimination. That part is the hardest and takes the longest.
Many of us have spent countless years ashamed of who we are. The goal of therapy is to become one’s own good mother. That’s not possible until we forgive ourselves our humanity. It’s the bedrock of therapy—learning to accept and love ourselves with all of our imperfections. Having spent over 30 years in my own therapy tackling just that, I’ve come to a place where I’m no longer ashamed of who I am. That has freed me to write openly. I no longer demand perfection from myself. There’s incredible relief in that. So it was actually therapy–my own and the practice of it– that brought me to writing. And freed me to write the poems I want to write.
Along the way, I discovered Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Wild Geese” which I return to often; it’s the permission that all of us need daily in our quest to accept ourselves, forgive and honor ourselves…
You do not have to be good
You do not have to crawl on your belly…
NIN ANDREWS
What did you inherit from your parents? Do you attribute your life as a writer to either of them?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Actually, I credit both of them for my writing. Living my life drenched in the music of their voices and their accents certainly nourished my love of poetry and the love of language. I also credit them for my sense of humor and commitment to family.
I credit my father for my spirituality and acceptance of others. And for my commitment to community and ‘loving my neighbor as myself’. And my love of nature and silence.
I credit my mother with my love of home, my quest for education, my ambition and for the importance of ‘keeping something in my own name’; for my interest in fashion, Law and Order Special Victims and Criminal Minds.
I also credit her for teaching me how to carry my height with pride.
NIN ANDREWS
Are there any books or memoirists that serve as role models for you?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Raymond Carver, Steinbeck, Hemingway. All were brilliant psychologists; they knew what it was to be human. I remember being stunned by Chekhov’s liberal use of the word ‘hate’ as in he hated her (or she him). I thought it was too strong an emotion to ever feel toward someone you love. But the more I study that question, the more I’m convinced that he’s right—we humans have within us the potential for the full range of feeling from love through hate. Sometimes with the same person.
So I return to these men periodically. I read them almost exclusively while I was writing Orphans. When one writes in another’s voice, the translation has to be impeccable. I wanted to be fully respectful of my parents. So I gravitate/d toward the masters to study how each created character. Sometimes, I’m honing my skills or looking for some new insight or permission. I’m seldom conscious of doing this, but on observation, I’m convinced I do.
Then there are the poets who so brilliantly illuminate emotion. Start with Whitman, add Brooks, Clifton, Peacock, Gluck (Ararat), Carson, Legaspi….among so many others.
NIN ANDREWS
I’d love to hear you talk about how you balance your life as a psychologist, editor and writer.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
That’s become more graceful. My life has always been busy with my multiple interests and careers, but I’ve slowed down considerably and look forward to slowing down more. I’m almost retired from my psychotherapy practice. My editing responsibilities are heaviest during our open submissions period (because Teresa, Baron and I read every manuscript); the rest of my editing responsibilities like editing our LaurelBooks selections are spread out over the year as is writing I do for the press—the blog/newsletter etc. My own writing makes its way to the top of the heap when it’s necessary. Unlike so many writers that have an even routine of writing daily, I write when a line, or a poem, or a memory pulls me to my notebook. The pacing of the project becomes that much greater as I move toward a book. At that point, writing is all.
Fortunately, I have my husband and son to remind me when that happens so I can remember that I have many loves in my life. And all deserve attention.
NIN ANDREWS
What do you love most about writing?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
The discovery in the poem. I love surprising myself. That said, nothing competes with that magical experience when the poem takes over and I am the medium. It reminds me of a quote of Hayden Carruth. “Why ask what’s the use of poetry?/ Poetry is what uses us.”
ORPHANS (CavanKerry Press; March 2016; $18.00) is an indelible memoir in verse from award-winning poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler that explores the intertwined lives of a daughter and her two Irish immigrant parents. Using three distinct voices, the poet probes both the subtleties of her parents’ stories as well as the complexities of her own, boldly delving into memories cherished and truths concealed. Tackling large themes that affect so many—navigating the imperfection of our families, the challenges of watching our parents age and die, the acknowledgement of loss and the acceptance of our own mortality—the memoir unflinchingly, yet eloquently explores our most primal and ambivalent relationships.
“Joan Cusack Handler tackles the big subjects—family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, belief and unbelief, and her own impending mortality—with a fierce, wrenching fearlessness,” says Elizabeth Spires. “She creates portraits of her mother and father that are fully rounded, alive, and moving, the central question for the poet not “Who am I?” but “Who were they?” “Our terrors take over pilot us through/this most shaking of times…” writes Handler with force and grace, recognizing that the bright and the dark, love and the absence of love, must always coexist with each other. ORPHANS is a brave, searchingly honest, and compassionate book.”
In a sequence of poems called “My Mother Speaks,” Handler gives voice to Mary O’Connor Cusack, born in Ireland and left motherless herself at a young age. Like many others, she sailed to America and etched a new life from nothing. Devoutly Catholic, a devoted, if complicated mother, she both confounds and compels her daughter:
I’ve spent my life trying to explain
my mother; she lived in two countries—
love and loss—her mother
the center of both.
(from “No Day was Brighter”)
“My Father Speaks” presents the parallel story of Eugene Cusack, also an economic refugee from Ireland:
The day I left my father went with me
on the train to Cavan Town. We smoked
a cigarette together…
He lit my cigarette and his own
and we sat there saying nothing for quite some time.
We could buy that small field that abuts our pasture, he said.
But I said nothing.
He understood
I don’t know where he thought
he’d find the money for more land.
When we got off the train and said goodbye,
he handed me the pack of Players.
That was the last time I saw him.
The family story that Handler weaves in ORPHANS is at once familiar and unique. It is at center a love story—not only the quiet love story of her parents, but the larger, messier story of family love—that resonates with telling details of childhood and beyond. As the parents inevitably age, and die, the poet herself grapples with what it means to be the orphan herself.
When did it happen
that the future started
to darken,
shrink,
pick up speed in that
final sprint that will wipe out all
love from my life?
(And I face what’s left helping us die.)
(from “The Poem”)
In ORPHANS, Handler continues to play with the signature use of visual form that has long marked her poetry. Heralded for “both honesty and balance” (Baron Wormser), this five-time Pushcart Prize nominated poet is working at the peak of her powers, writing with clarity and sentiment, while eschewing sentimentality.
~~~
NIN ANDREWS
These are such profound and meditative poems (Only So Far), I wondered as I was reading them if you had a spiritual practice? Or if writing might be, for you, a kind of spiritual practice?
ROBERT CORDING
Yes, I do think of writing as a form of spiritual practice, if for no other reasons, that writing makes me look hard at the world and myself. For years now, I’ve tried to sit and look at the world immediately around me, or walk and note daily changes in the life of my neighborhood, both in the natural world and in houses and the activities of the people around me. I also have done the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises twice and still use their “Examen” daily, which is a series of short prayers that give praise, ask for help in the long process of self-honesty and self-examination, and ultimately in the even more difficult activities of loving and hoping. And I try to read a Hebrew Psalm each day.
NIN ANDREWS
Reading this collection, I had the desire to weep. It’s so beautiful and so full of sorrow and grief. Were most of these poems composed in the aftermath of your father’s death?
ROBERT CORDING
No, a good portion of the poems was written at a retreat called the Hermitage in Englewood, Florida on the west coast. I did two three-week stays in January over two consecutive years. The poems about my father came quickly about a year after his death just when I thought I had finished my grieving.
NIN ANDREWS
In the opening section, you have this lovely poem about your father, “Still Listening.” I was wondering if you might post a section from the poem here.
ROBERT CORDING
This is from the last section called “My Father’s Hearing Aids.”
Too costly to throw out,
my mother says, my father’s hearing aids,
some whole, some in various stages
of disassembly, lie in his top drawer
like a museum exhibit of a lost past—
when he was still living,
hand constantly raised to his ears,
trying to take hold of the sounds
that fell out of the air or floated
around him like apparitions.
I pick one up and fit it into my ear
as if, my own hearing amplified,
I might pick up something he is
still saying, but all I get is that loud hum
and screech, which, like a rip
in the scrim of memory,
bring him back—he’s at it again,
working to tune in the scramble
of insect chirr, rain chattering
on the trailer’s metal roof,
wind in the pines, a grandchild’s
high-pitched play, the buzz
of his wife’s voice. He wants to hear
again without thinking
of what he’s hearing, wants the Sinatra
song on the radio to sound exactly
the way he remembers it,
and not as if some damaged stylus
were sliding across the black ice
of an old LP. In the end,
nothing ever came to him clearly enough.
I see him spinning those little dials
on his hearing aids back and forth,
nearly frantic, nearly in tears,
the world he’s hearing
like the static of space, those gurgling,
stuttering, anomalous noises
we have our radar pointed at
as if we cannot imagine, being human,
the deep, enclosing silence
without another voice.
NIN ANDREWS
This collection moves seamlessly from poem to poem—almost as if they were composed in order. But I am betting that’s not the case?
ROBERT CORDING
No, that’s definitely not the case. In fact I had more trouble with the ordering of the poems in this book than I’ve ever had. Even after I hit on the ordering principle of the two epigraphs and the movement between sorrow and joy, or life’s dead-ends and those moments, which Woolf called “matches struck in the dark,” I didn’t see my way. The person who truly saw the pattern of organization that the book’s final form took was my editor and friend, Baron Wormser. I am deeply grateful for his help.
NIN ANDREWS
There’s a dialectical movement throughout the book, sometimes a linear divide—whether it be Kafka’s Fence, the North Korean border, Philippe Petit’s tightrope, or the road one is crossing in “Amnesty.” Was that a conscious choice?
ROBERT CORDING
Yes, I wanted the poems to vacillate between the poles of the Herbert poem that serves as one of the epigraphs to the book.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.
NIN ANDREWS
I love your lines about Emerson in the poem “Midwinter Emerson,” his belief/ we were made for ecstasy and his fear of just that, which reminds me of the lines in the poem about Camus, “Watching Cranes, I think of Camus,” who wondered how we could ever be // miserable, so much beauty in the world,/ but also, how we could ever be happy, / so much shit in the world. Do you share their feelings?
ROBERT CORDING
Yes, I do. I have always lived, it seems, in a kind of “in between” place. By that I mean: on the one hand, my experience tells me that I live in a creation that is a gift of love. On the other, I see quite well the more rationale understanding that the world we live may simply be the result of accident and Darwinian evolution. I think Keats’ notion of “Negative Capability” and Simone Weil’s idea about contradiction have always been touchstones for me: that we must live in the contradictions of our experience without an “irritable reaching out after fact and conclusion,” to quote Keats.
NIN ANDREWS
Tell me about the title.
ROBERT CORDING
The title, Only So Far, comes from a phrase in the poem “Like a Dream” about manatees. Here’s the ending:
Have they made some placid truce
with our noisy world above them,
unable to do more than what they do?—rise
to the surface, their buoyant peace
a kind of offering and sacrifice,
a story to be told thousands of years from now
on some cathedral wall—of creatures that passed
beneath us, at rest in their movement,
then disappeared from our world,
never needing anything from us,
their peace only able to bear us so far,
even if we always wanted to believe in it.
The larger idea in the book is that we can only “get so far.” Like Moses overlooking the Jordan River, we can see the Promised Land, but never get to cross the river. Our place is always that “in between” I spoke about: between the “wilderness” and the Promised Land; between what we can know and the mystery we must acknowledge.
NIN ANDREWS
Do you have a specific time of day or year that you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Are their poets whom you work with?
ROBERT CORDING
When I’m writing, I work each morning from 8-12. I tend to read and make notes for poems for months, then write for two months, a schedule that came from teaching no doubt. I was never able to do much more than make notes and do revisions once a semester started up. Then in May, when the second semester ended, I would write every day for four hours until school resumed at the end of August. In response to your second question, I exchange poems on a fairly routine basis with the poets Jeffrey Harrison and William Wenthe.
NIN ANDREWS
Who are your primary literary influences?
ROBERT CORDING
Because I loved and taught British and American literature for forty years, my influences range widely, but behind most of my poems and thinking you can find George Herbert, William Wordsworth and John Keats on the British side, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens on the American.
NIN ANDREWS
I admire so many of these poems, I wanted to underline most of the book. “A Christmas Story” is one of my favorites, especially when you describe the Polish poet’s revelation. I wondered if we could close with the interview by posting the poem below.
ROBERT CORDING
A Christmas Story
Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough
of the Advent hope that candles are lit for;
and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity
for our guest who, glassed in behind those black,
small, rectangular frames, reminded me
of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle
of non-sequiturs to prove again how language
is defective and life leads to nothing more
than dead-ends. So, after a night of wondering
if our never-more-than-hardly-surprised guest,
a young professor whose field of expertise
seemed to be ironic distance, would give
a moment’s thought, as he took apart everyone’s
unexamined stances, to how and why his own
might be constructed, I blurted out a story
over our Christmas dinner dessert, about
Alexander Wat, how the Polish poet,
taken one day from his Soviet prison
to see a local magistrate, stood in the sun,
reveling in its warmth on his face and arms
and hands; as he took in the beauty
of a woman in a light green dress, he knew
he would soon be back in his prison cell.
He never forgot, he said, the irony of
his freedom, and yet he felt, standing there,
something like a revelation, the autumn day
surging in those silly puffiest white clouds,
and a hardly bearable blue sky, and the bell
of a bicycle ringing, and some people
laughing in a nearby café, and that woman,
her bare languid shoulders turning in the sun—
it was all thrilling, achingly alive, a feast
happening right there on the street between
the prison and a government office, nothing else
mattering, not even the moment he knew
was coming, and arrived, right on schedule,
when he stood woodenly before the magistrate.
And when I had finished, my face flushed,
my guest looked at me with astonishment,
unable to process where so much emotion
had come from, and then asked, calmly as ever,
what I meant when I’d used the word, revelation.
PAOLA CORSO
The Frost Place conference is held every summer at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. Let me begin by asking who participates, how it works, what’s your role, and why is it a CKP outreach project?
DAWN POTTER
Participants in the conference come from all over the United States. Most are K-12 classroom teachers, but we are drawing an increasing number of participants from government and social-service settings, MFA programs, and university departments. The geographical and economic distribution is extremely varied. We have participants from giant urban schools and tiny island schools; some teach in wealthy prep schools, while others teach in very poor districts. Some think of themselves as poets, while others are timid about engaging with poetry. My role as director is to foster an intense intellectual and emotional engagement among these disparate colleagues, and every year I am overwhelmed by the way in which a focus on poetry both creates and reinforces an intense communal commitment to the vocation.
CKP has long been connected to the Frost Place. Over the years, many CKP poets and staff members have participated or taught in its various poetry programs. Currently, Teresa Carson, CKP’s associate publisher, is the associate director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching. She and publisher Joan Cusack Hander immediately recognized that the press’s educational mission aligns with ours at the Frost Place. Not only have they begun donating numerous classroom copies of CKP books to our participants, but they have also established a scholarship, linked to the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud program, which each year sends a New Jersey teacher to the conference. Their generosity has truly enriched our work.
PAOLA CORSO
How do you make poetry a living art there rather than an outdated literary trope and what impact does this have on community building?
DAWN POTTER
Robert Frost’s poetry and other writings are the linchpins of the conference. While we do talk about many other poets, from many nations and time periods, we keep his work at the center. At the same time, we’re living and working in his barn and house—these quiet, modest structures on a dirt road in rural New England. There’s something about focusing so intently on his words, in this place where he himself worked so intently, that is tremendously vivifying. I am not generally inclined to proselytize about spiritual matters, but there’s no question that the living spirit of poetry is present in this place, and we try very hard to keep that flame burning.
PAOLA CORSO
Please give an example or two to illustrate your point.
DAWN POTTER
We focus on the language of poems rather than their meaning. This is something that is new to many teachers: they are used to guiding their students directly into the abstract elements of poetry rather than using language itself as the stepping stone into the abstract. Meanings reveal themselves as we acquaint ourselves with the physical materials of the work. And talking in this way also means that everyone in the room is an equal colleague in the endeavor. No one “knows more” or “knows better.” Every one of us can hear a sound, a word, a comma. Every one of us can learn from what someone else has heard.
PAOLA CORSO
Can you relate the relevance and importance of activating words in the community to our world today and horrifying news about war, refugees, terrorist acts, mass shootings, racial injustice, etc.?
DAWN POTTER
For a long time I struggled with the thought that, as a writer, I couldn’t do anything or change anything. It’s taken me a lifetime to understand that some of us are put on this earth to be witnesses and to speak about what we see. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten both more comfortable with this role and more willing to use it publicly. Poets are artists of observation and ambiguity. We see black and white, right and wrong, but we are surrounded by politicians and demagogues who are constantly feeding us their narrow notions as truth. We are surrounded by neighbors who accept these notions, for reasons of fear, mostly. So poets must stay alert to the world, and vulnerable to it. And we must keep speaking about what we see.
This barely says what I am trying to say, and I fear it sounds smarmy and pat. But what else can I do but keep watching and talking? Telephoning my senators and demonstrating in the streets are equally useless responses. Working as a doctor might be more helpful, but few of us know how to be doctors. Giving lots of money is also helpful if one has a lot of money to give. But neither health care nor donations solve the basic problem of endemic cruelty and fear.
PAOLA CORSO
I want to discuss your background and how it’s helped shape your writing life. You don’t have an advanced degree or an ivory tower that can come with academic affiliation. Do you think this has made you more grounded in the community, and why or why not?
DAWN POTTER
You’re right that I don’t have an advanced degree. In fact, I’ve never taken a graduate class. In many ways, this has been a completely stupid life choice, and I’ve suffered both financially and career-wise because of it. But as far as my artistic life goes, it’s been a gift. Since graduating from college at the age of 21, I’ve never had to follow anyone else’s reading trajectory or anyone else’s rules for “how to be a poet.” Of course I’ve learned from other people. I’ve studied poems, and absorbed valuable advice, and studied the craft; but throughout it all, I’ve remained in charge of the tenor of my apprenticeship.
Still, I don’t think it’s the right choice for everyone, and I’m glad that writing programs exist for the people who thrive in them. I think life circumstances dictate what works for different people, though I do wish that hiring entities recognized that all artists-teachers don’t follow a single graduate-degree path toward excellence. Partly I was fortunate in being such an intense reader as a child, with a mother who not only fed me difficult books but also nurtured my autodidact urge. She left me alone with them; she let me find my own way. From the beginning I was obsessed with reading what my inner self knew I had to read.
As far as making me grounded in community: in most ways, no. I’m drawn to the old: Beowulf, Wyatt, Milton, Coleridge, that sort of thing. This is where much of my artistic urge comes from, whereas my poet contemporaries tend to be inspired by contemporary work. And for the most part, my friends and neighbors don’t read or think about poetry. We talk about other things, when we talk. And that’s okay. When the conversations do arise, now and again, with the handful of poet-lovers I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life, they are always a gift and a miracle. Part of my goal as director of the Frost Place Conference is to construct a week, once a year, where these kinds of miracles happen constantly.
PAOLA CORSO
You live in rural Maine, what you have called a “downtrodden” place with poverty and disenfranchised people. Nonetheless, you say it’s prompted you to define solitude, and, in turn, to define community. Define them and how has this changed the way you live your life?
DAWN POTTER
Maine is famous for its beautiful coastline, but many of the inland regions of this enormous state are composed of long stretches of forest, fields, and barrens dotted with aging mill towns and frontier-like hamlets. The county I live in is one of the poorest in the state, and I moved here when I was in my late twenties, right before I got pregnant with my older son. So basically this town is where I learned how to be an adult, and it’s also where I learned how to be a writer. It’s is not a particularly beautiful place. In many ways it encapsulates all the stereotypes that people have about rural America: extreme poverty, unemployment, cultural isolation, domestic violence, opiate addiction, rampant gun ownership, conservative politics, religious fundamentalism. Living here is not easy, and it is often lonely. But it has forced me to construct my own cultural life, and also to understand that community means more than common interests and like-minded eating habits. We’re all in the same boat here—suffering through winters and deaths; laughing at our children’s Little League games; sharing compassion and affection. We put up with each other, even if we don’t always comprehend each other.
PAOLA CORSO
I was struck by a quote of yours: “At every turn, I’ve met another person struggling to link eye with ear with hand with mind.” Tell me more.
DAWN POTTER
People everywhere, in all walks of life, long to find some way to articulate their inner lives. Some of the most moving poems I’ve read have been written by teenage boys in vocational education classes—students who may never write another poem in their lives but who have used this rare opportunity to share their hearts with poignancy and grace. I find this with musicians too. I play in a band, and the guys I play with are a farmer, a contractor, and the owner of an appliance business. Week in and week out, they come together to practice—to share an emotional bond with one another, to make themselves vulnerable to feeling. It’s very moving.
PAOLA CORSO
What has the literary community given to you and what do you hope to give back?
DAWN POTTER
Poetry is not a rarified art, but neither is it rambling anecdote. It is difficult and sustaining and terrifying. It requires nakedness and awe. It requires also that we stay to true to our own yearnings.
I do feel that discovering myself as a poet was a way of being born again. My primary mentor and model has been CKP poet Baron Wormser, and I try always to live up to what I have learned from him. I want to be the person Baron was for me, for the poets who come after me.
PAOLA CORSO
How has your community outreach experience with CKP been different for you than with other presses?
DAWN POTTER
Unlike any other press that I’ve worked with, CKP has invited me to participate as an active member of its mission. It doesn’t just ask for my financial support; it asks for my moral support. And when it sees an area in which an author’s work and the press’s mission aligns, it works to create a collaboration. That’s certainly been the case in the partnership we’ve built between CKP and the Frost Place teaching conference.
PAOLA CORSO
I’d like to end with a sonnet of yours from Same Old Story that captures some of the abiguities we discussed:
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.
“Baron Wormser was once Maine’s Poet Laureate and there’s a definite feel and reference for that place. He writes of unheroic people, slurping tea, leafing through Year Books. Pop culture is also part of his style—colloquial, humorous—creating synergy that means he’s really writing about his readers.”
ONLY SO FAR (CavanKerry Press; October 2015; $16.00, paperback), the eighth collection of poems from Robert Cording, once more probes what Baron Wormser has identified in this poet’s work as “the rich borderland between spirit and religion.” In poems that find their poignancy and grace in the inevitability of loss, Cording seeks explanation and solace in the everyday miracles that both surround and sustain us. At once lyrical and uncompromising, these poems are about the humility of the human experience in the face of something greater that we can only try to understand.
Cording launches Only So Far with the reflective “Kafka’s Fence”:
In a drawing by Kafka, a man stands behind a fence,
looking out. He could easily step over
the fence—it is that low—yet we imagine him
pacing back and forth like a prisoner.
The man could have just come to this boundary,
or been here his entire life. Call him Moses, and call
the land on the other side of the fence, Canaan,
and it doesn’t matter how small the fence is, does it?
And you and I?—surely, we’ve spent a lifetime
arriving precisely at this fence. Haven’t we
always known we’d reach an end we couldn’t complete,
the promised land a step away, still unreachable?
This notion of reaching the Promised Land, of some paradise that may exist beyond our challenging lives, permeates the collection. A number of poems chronicle a father’s death, first the ignominy of the descent, then the passing—and later, a mother’s death, too. The memories of them survive in dreams, in nature, in their very absence. An inexplicable death, of a young nephew, prompts thoughts of the painter Constable, whose “canvases record what occurred/each day, as if there were nothing more/he could do” (“Reconfiguring”).
The natural world is never far in Cording’s work, and in Only So Far it once again illuminates our own, human, position in the greater scheme of things. A sojourn in Florida opens new vistas, as the poet explores new terrain that proffers both revelations and recognition. Life—and poetry—is always about discovery for Cording, about elusive truths gleaned from the ordinary manifestations of the extraordinary:
The tide’s going out, and the sand,
washed clean, could be a Zen garden plot
ready to quiet all thought in silence.
The fisherman has broken down his rods
and carries them off now in an empty bucket,
happy enough, it seems, with his few hours
of meditative practice. I used to worry
about running out of words for things.
Now I worry I won’t use up all the words
I’ve been given. Here, in my ill-lit cabin,
shadows moving across the walls,
I live for that poem or two that seem
to gather from the world, or my mind,
or both, what they have to give.
(from “Studio”)
Cording also shares a deep affinity with those who have come before, and his poems here are tied to Emerson and Thoreau, to Camus and Kafka, to Anne Ferry and Wallace Stevens—fellow seekers all, who “lived for that poem.” Often steeped in religion, Cording’s poems also spur philosophical ruminations from the Bible, from St. Augustine, and from the language of faith. In the final poem, “No-name Pond,” he writes, “I’m mostly a restorer, putting back/a few stones tumbled by time, /and thinking of the people who, like myself, /might have enjoyed an afternoon like this one—“
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Celia Bland’s essay, “Instructions for Children” was just re-published in the new Storyscape anthology
Dawn Potter and Baron Wormser (Harlow Gallery, 160 Water Street, Hallowell, ME)
Friday, September 11th at 7 p.m.
Visit Harlow Gallery for more info
In his tenth collection of poems, UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS (CavanKerry Press; September 2015; $16.00, paperback), Baron Wormser continues a poetic journey begun more than three decades ago—a journey that has traversed the quotidian and the unexpected with equal measures of insight, emotion, and lyric grace. Through the formal features of odes and villanelles, Wormser here delivers his own brand of everyday realism, shaped by the wisdom gained from a lifetime viewed through an expectant eye. Man falls, Wormser tells us. But, he also rises.
From sports to art, from childhood to death, Wormser’s poetic purview is all-embracing and ever curious about the world we inhabit. Whether writing of Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, the Nuremberg trials or the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jazz or the Dave Clark Five, he lends humor and wisdom to the quest for meaning each of us endures.
If I could add the days and make a sum
Of moments—faces pulled, unpulled, peas
Pushed around a forlorn plate, jokes
Gotten, ungotten, the taking in of each tree,
Building, chair, strand of hair lying
In the bathroom sink—I wouldn’t be human
In the sense we use that word as a form
Of gauze over a large but approximate wound,
A gesture of dismissal and acceptance
Adding up (there is that notion again!)
To bludgeoned wisdom dispensed too free of charge
To all and semi-sundry. “I can’t do the math,”
I told the teacher and left the room, though
At once I looked about and started counting.
(“On Narrative”)
By working in established forms, Wormser is consciously hitching his wagon to those poetic stars who have come before and inspired: Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, et. al. “Night comes full of stars and not greatly concerned about us,/A line to quote not about a human beginning or end,/But the seemingly steady middle,/The place that placidly looks backwards and forwards,” he writes in “Poem Beginning with a Line by Hölderin.” He turns to the ode to contemplate a range of subjects: Arbus and her photographs, ghost dancers, speech, a character in Easy Rider, and even basketball—
She knew once how she loved him and how he never got off his ass
Even though he could leap through the air and seem to fly but there
Was no place to fly to no homeland no wheelchair no nothing only a ball
There is an elegiac temper to many of the later poems in the collection, which touch on aging and death — the passing of a former lover, a long distance call to make amends, a paranoid FBI agent wielding a gun, a funeral for a young schizophrenic, a school friend killed in Vietnam, a witty eulogy for a beloved editor. And yet, Wormser’s is not a dark voice, finding instead the joy, the compassion, and the acceptance that must come with living.
Not to be here anymore, not to hear
The cat’s fat purring, not to smell
Wood smoke, wet dog, cheap cologne, good cologne,
Not to see the sun and stars, oaks
And asters, snow and rain, every form
I take mostly for granted, makes me sad
But pleased to be writing down these words,
Pleased to have been one more who got the chance
To participate, who raised his hand although
He didn’t know the answer or understand
The question. No matter. The leaving makes me sad;
So much was offered, so freely and completely.
(“Leaving”)
UNIDENTIFIED SIGHING OBJECTS is the culmination of an estimable career spent studying, teaching, and writing poetry—an exquisite collection that finds Baron Wormser working at the peak of his powers.
Baron Wormser, Newbury Library (Newbury, VT)
Monday, April 13 at 7 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Brent Newsom, Poetry at Round Top (Round Top, TX)
Friday, April 17th at 9:30 p.m.
Brent will be part of the Round Top fellows reading
Wanda S. Praisner, Roxbury Arts Alliance (72 Eyland Ave, Succasunna, NJ)
Sunday, April 19, 2 :oopm
Wanda will be reading with Susanna Rich, Edwin Romond, and Sander Zulauf
Celia Bland’s poem “Cherokee Road Kill” has been awarded the 2015 Raynes Poetry Prize, judged by L.S. Asekoff
The Literacy Society of West Michigan honored Jack Ridl with a lifetime achievement award for his work to expand the knowledge and understanding of contemporary poetry.
Baron Wormser, The Institute Library (847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT)
Wednesday, March 11th from 6pm-8pm
Poetry Reading with Nan Meneely
Joan Cusack Handler, BlogTalkRadio
Thursday, March 12th at 3 PM
Joan will be interviewed by Alison Laurie about her experience with the publication of my first book, GlOrious
Dawn Potter, New Jersey State Poetry Out Loud Championships (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ)
Friday, March 13th
Dawn will be a judge for the NJ State Finals
Wanda S. Praisner and Elizabeth Stallings, Bridgewater Library, Community Room C (1 Vogt Dr., Bridgewater, NJ)
Tuesday, November 4th at 7pm
Open Reading
Visit pccc.edu for more info
Baron Wormser, Enoch Pratt Free Library (400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland)
Wednesday, November 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Reading from Teach Us That Peace
Visit Pratt Library for more info
Karen Chase, FDR Presidential Library and Museum, Henry A. Wallace Visitor Center (Hyde Park, NY)
Tuesday, November 6th at 7pm
Reading from Polio Boulevard
Visit FDR Library for more info
Wanda S. Praisner, Laura Boss, & B.J. Ward, Winchester Gardens (333 Elmwood Ave., Maplewood, NJ.)
Sunday, November 9th at 7:30 PM
CavanKerry is grateful for past and current support received from the following organizations: