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Teresa Carson on Poetry: “Poem-Lunking”

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This week’s poem & video:

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s begin with first impressions:

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

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

Now let’s go a bit deeper:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Teresa Carson on Poetry: Attention to Summer

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This week’s poems and music:

“August,” by Naila Moreira

“Summertime” sung by Janis Joplin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s poems & art:

“Concord Street Hymn,” by Dawn Potter 

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

“Out My Window,” a painting by Leslie Butterfield

“Untitled,” a painting by Jeff Haste

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

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

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

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

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

"Out My Window" - Leslie Butterfield

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

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

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

"Untitled" - Jeff Haste

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

As Dawn roundly puts it:

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

Yet, she continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now take a look at “Concord Hymn.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s poems:

“Hope” and “Slumber” by Danny Shot

Art by Zerbe Sodervick 

Art by Brian Riley

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

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

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

Poet Danny Shot’s Responses to COVID-19

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

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

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Visual Artist Brian Riley’s Response to COVID-19

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

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

Visual Artist Zerbe Sodervick’s Response to COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Birth of a Press
The Birth of a Press

Literary Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEAR by Karen Chase
An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems by Sam Cornish
Life With Sam by Elizabeth Hall Hutner
Elegy for the Floater by Teresa Carson
Sweet World. Poems by Maureen Seaton

LaurelBooks

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

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

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

Have you noticed

how the laurel dips down

crawls along the ground

to find the sun

like any life or body 

that’s known love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Poetry Explorers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The recitation is all about suspension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,   

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

and beyond these windows

 

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost   

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When the Caregivee Becomes the Caregiver

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This post is part of our series in honor of ADA Awareness Month.  While on a national level the focus is disability employment awareness, CKP is focusing on artists.

In this raw essay,  Jackie Guttman, a member of the CKP ADA Advisory Board, writes with searing honesty about the change from being taken care of by her husband to becoming his caregiver. I’m grateful to her for daring to speak about the resentment associated with caregiving.

-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

WHEN THE CAREGIVEE BECOMES THE CAREGIVER
By Jackie Guttman

A sentiment I’ve heard a lot from friends – and which I share – is “this is not the life I expected.” One friend did not expect her very sociable husband to develop dementia; one did not expect her always healthy husband to die at 69 of pancreatic cancer; one did not expect her young up-and-coming husband to make bad decisions that left them having to watch their pennies in retirement. One even had her lover of three decades dump her when he became widowed; she was married and he no longer wanted a clandestine girl friend. It’s a loss of equilibrium. For better and worse, people evolve as they mature, inevitably changing the rules of the marital game. The scales tip.

In my own case, my husband was my caregiver by the time I was 30. My rheumatoid arthritis, in addition to affecting my hands, shoulders, knees and other joints, caused enormous fatigue. Howard never complained. He did the laundry; he took us for rides when walking was difficult; he did the bulk of the shopping; he didn’t cook, but neither did he expect me to produce meals. (We sent out a lot.) When necessary, he helped me dress – and still does on occasion. Over the past 25 years he has seen me through four major knee surgeries. All this enabled me to attend graduate school and work, albeit part-time. There was nothing he would not do for me, and to this day he opens bottles, jars, cans, medicine containers and recalcitrant fruit and vegetable packages.

About 20 years ago he was diagnosed with breast cancer. A mastectomy and Tamoxifen took care of it until it returned 11 years later. This time he had surgery, chemo and radiation, all of which left him somewhat damaged. A robust and big guy at 6’3” and 215 pounds, he lost 30 pounds and turned into this bald, skinny, pale-faced man. After both of his surgeries I dealt with his drains, pinning them to his undershirts so they would not pull. I sat with him as he slept through chemotherapy. Together, we laughed at post-op instructions that told him not to shave under his arms or wear an underwire bra. He gained back much of the weight, his color improved and his gorgeous white hair grew back, but since that time he has had more than his share of medical problems. He has had a hip replaced and had three spinal surgeries with extensive rehab. He has severe neuropathy of his hands and feet. Despite having normal cholesterol levels and blood pressure, he had a very mild and initially misdiagnosed stroke two years ago. At 79 he is bent over and walks with a cane or walker at the speed of a slow snail. With a diminished appetite he has lost additional weight and we are struggling to deal with that before frailty sets in. He drives, but far less than he used to. And just today, in another bitter blow, he was given a diagnosis of probable oral cancer – he who never smoked.

I, thanks to superb medical care and luck, have held my own and even improved. In many ways, and despite limitations, I am in better shape than I was 20 years ago. I do not appear ill so I am perceived as my husband’s designated caregiver. I do much of the driving, though my joints regret it if I exceed 90 minutes. When we go to our vacation home, I bring most things to and from the car. I sometimes help him with buttons, a frustrating challenge. Loading and unloading the dishwasher has been his purview for years; now I often do it. Though I’m fairly tall, he always reached the things in high places; now that has become my job, when I can do it, or we have to ask others. I drop him off and park the car, as he used to for me. I pave the way. I advocate. He is still quite strong, but everything takes him so long that I do more than I need to out of sheer impatience. We rented a scooter for him on a recent cruise. It was a godsend for him, but as I trotted alongside it I felt like it was my pace car. Doors on ships are extremely heavy and not always automatic; I became the doorwoman, pulling them open with both hands and slithering around to lean on and hold them.

Though I can and do offer emotional support, I am not a natural nurturer; he is. This is not a role I relish. I see one friend cater to her husband’s dietary needs and another one tenderly feed her husband meals. She also changes his diapers and keeps him clean. I don’t think I could do that. After over 40 years with RA, while I’m grateful that I can do what I do, I admit I resent the caregiving. As I see my husband begin to need more, I find I cannot be his keeper. That sounds heartless even to me, but I know that when I do extra lifting, carrying and driving, it takes me three days of rest and painkillers to recover. I must protect myself. I see my friend drive to Albany and back in one day for her husband’s medical needs; one way would be too much for me.

Our retirement plans included travel but it’s become complicated; we used to take long auto trips with our kids and I’d hoped to do more. Not gonna happen. Flying involves wheelchairs and, again, careful planning. Cruising ditto. We do it, but… this is not the life I expected. Ironically, I thought that I’d be in a wheelchair by now and am grateful that I’m still on my feet, but why-oh-why can’t we both be more able?

We don’t laugh like we used to; there’s too much bad stuff. However, we often tell each other how fortunate we feel, and we really do. We do not have financial problems. We do have each other, for however long. Our minds are intact, mostly. We have our kids and grandchildren. We have love.

Ah, but I do miss the old Howard. My protector is gone.

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This October: ADA Awareness Month

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2016posterenglishfront

Welcome to CavanKerry Press’s third annual “October is Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Awareness Month.” Throughout the month we’ll be posting new essays by members of the CKP ADA Advisory Board, re-posting “greatest hits” from previous years, and providing useful links to ADA resources (e.g. journals that publish disability-related creative writing; advocacy groups; interesting articles).

If you have any comments or disability-related resources that you’d like to tell us about then email Teresa Carson at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

 

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News and Events: Week of March 28th

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Events

Sarah Bracey White, Greenburgh Public Library (Elmsford, NY)
Tuesday, March 29 at 7 pm.
Sarah will be an inaugural speaker for series “Women and Culture”

Teresa Carson, Fox and Crow (594 Palisade Ave, Jersey City, NJ)
Tuesday, March 29th at 8pm
Teresa will be having a reading of her latest book, The Congress of Human Oddities 

Wanda S. Praisner, Princeton Library (65 Witherspoon St., Princeton, NJ)
Sunday, April 3 at 2 PM
Wanda will be part of the U.S. 1 Worksheets Publication reading

News

Celia Bland’s essays on rereading Look Homeward, Angel and Jane Eyre recently appeared on the National Book Critics Circle website as part of the “Second Thoughts” series

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CKP Authors in the Community: Paola Corso interviews Dawn Potter

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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 CKP authors getting their books published, they offer free talks and workshops to underserved 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 this new series of  interviews on community outreach, CKP author Paola Corso will speak with other press authors about these press projects and how they turn words into acts of community.
In this first interview, Paola speaks with Dawn Potter, author of, most recently, the poetry collection Same Old Story with CKP and director of  the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, which brings together classroom teachers and poet/teachers to share their experiences of how to effectively present poetry in the classroom.
DawnPotter
Dawn Potter


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.

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Celebrating ADA Awareness Month at CavanKerry

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ada25_2

Happy 25th Birthday to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law on July 26, 1990!

Today I have the pleasure of kicking off the second annual “October is ADA Awareness Month” on our social media outlets.  First a confession: while on a national level the focus of this month is disability employment awareness, CKP will be making “artists” the focus.  In the upcoming weeks we will be posting a cornucopia of stories, interviews, resources and educational materials.

But, in honor of this significant milestone in the life of the ADA, let’s start with the basics.

What is the ADA? Who does it cover? What does it cover? The ADA website is chockfull of good information including this description of the ADA:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush. The ADA is one of America’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life — to enjoy employment opportunities, to purchase goods and services, and to participate in State and local government programs and services. Modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin – and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the ADA is an “equal opportunity” law for people with disabilities.

To be protected by the ADA, one must have a disability, which is defined by the ADA as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.

And what is the definition of “a disability”? Per the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended:

Sec. 12102. Definition of disability

As used in this chapter:

(1) Disability

The term “disability” means, with respect to an individual

(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual;

(B) a record of such an impairment; or

(C) being regarded as having such an impairment (as described in paragraph (3)).

(2) Major Life Activities

(A) In general

For purposes of paragraph (1), major life activities include, but are not limited to, caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.

(B) Major bodily functions

For purposes of paragraph (1), a major life activity also includes the operation of a major bodily function, including but not limited to, functions of the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder, neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, and reproductive functions.

(3) Regarded as having such an impairment

For purposes of paragraph (1)(C):

(A) An individual meets the requirement of “being regarded as having such an impairment” if the individual establishes that he or she has been subjected to an action prohibited under this chapter because of an actual or perceived physical or mental impairment whether or not the impairment limits or is perceived to limit a major life activity.

(B) Paragraph (1)(C) shall not apply to impairments that are transitory and minor. A transitory impairment is an impairment with an actual or expected duration of 6 months or less.

(4) Rules of construction regarding the definition of disability

The definition of “disability” in paragraph (1) shall be construed in accordance with the following:

(A) The definition of disability in this chapter shall be construed in favor of broad coverage of individuals under this chapter, to the maximum extent permitted by the terms of this chapter.

(B) The term “substantially limits” shall be interpreted consistently with the findings and purposes of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008.

(C) An impairment that substantially limits one major life activity need not limit other major life activities in order to be considered a disability.

(D) An impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.

(E)

(i) The determination of whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity shall be made without regard to the ameliorative effects of mitigating measures such as

(I) medication, medical supplies, equipment, or appliances, low-vision devices (which do not include ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses), prosthetics including limbs and devices, hearing aids and cochlear implants or other implantable hearing devices, mobility devices, or oxygen therapy equipment and supplies;

(II) use of assistive technology;

(III) reasonable accommodations or auxiliary aids or services; or

(IV) learned behavioral or adaptive neurological modifications.

(ii) The ameliorative effects of the mitigating measures of ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses shall be considered in determining whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity.

(iii) As used in this subparagraph

(I) the term “ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses” means lenses that are intended to fully correct visual acuity or eliminate refractive error; and

(II) the term “low-vision devices” means devices that magnify, enhance, or otherwise augment a visual image.

Stay tuned for more.

-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

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The ADA and Me by Jacqueline S. Guttman

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My first conversation with Jackie Guttman, who recently joined the CavanKerry Press ADA Advisory Board, was about non-profit development. My main impression of her at our first meeting certainly was the impression she mentions in this essay: a tall, fairly well-built woman of a certain age – a leader type – articulate, intelligent, with a reasonably good sense of humor and proportion. That first impression has certainly been expanded and deepened by what I’ve learned over time, in more personal conversations, about the “limitations” that rheumatoid arthritis has placed on her life. In this essay, her honesty and vulnerability about her experiences—e.g. the split between “public face” and “private reality,” the changes brought about by improvements in her condition—challenge us to think about how the label of “disability” can fail to capture the complexity of human experiences.
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

THE ADA AND ME
By Jackie Guttman

The 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act led me to muse about that key word, disability. How do we define disability? I’ve had moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis for 45 years, during which time I’ve had periods in which I was less than able-bodied, and I do have a handicapped placard, yet at this moment I don’t define myself as disabled – though I have a dear old friend who insists on describing me as such. Whatever. Below is the beginning of an essay I wrote in 1993, shortly after the ADA legislation was passed. In recognition of this significant anniversary, and in gratitude to my rheumatologist, I share it with you:

The Public Face: One morning, I stood up, walked over to a lectern and gave a speech before an audience of 1000 people. I was, if I may say, rather elegantly dressed in a blue and black jacket, long black skirt and low-heeled Ferragamo pumps, with nearly every hair in place. The speech was unusually well received and later, as I made my way out of the building, I was stopped by many people to tell me how moved they had been, even how inspired. It was very gratifying.

 The Private Reality: My husband had to dress me. He helped with my underwear, put on my knee sox (thus the long skirt), zipped the skirt, assisted me with my jacket, fixed my necklace. The shoes, earrings, watch, makeup, contact lenses and hair I managed to handle on my own.

 People who know me casually see a tall, fairly well-built woman of a certain age – a leader type – articulate, intelligent, with a reasonably good sense of humor and proportion. Only those who are close know the true me – same qualities, but with an overlay of limitations on my life and myriad accommodations to make it as nearly normal as possible. There have been days when it’s an effort to walk from my front door to my driveway. On those days, if I can’t find a parking space within twenty feet of my destination, I go home. Sometimes I cannot write in the morning. I cannot hold a telephone receiver for more than a minute or two. I am rarely able to cut my own food. I cannot get into or out of the tub or down on or up from the floor unassisted. My computer endurance is often an hour or less.

 It is a chore to get into a coat or jacket without help. My wardrobe is built around whatever shoes I can wear. Thus, instead of being the short-skirted, high-heeled vamp I’d like to be, I usually wear slacks or ankle-length skirts with clunky shoes or sneakers. I’ve cultivated a casual chic look, vaguely and hopefully Katherine Hepburn-ish, and because of my height it works pretty well.

 This is my reality with decades of rheumatoid arthritis.

 Although people like me may have handicapped placards for our cars, our disabilities are nearly or totally invisible. Unlike people in wheelchairs or those who use walkers or canes, our difficulties go unrecognized, and while none of us would prefer to be wheelchair-bound – and dread the possibility of that happening at some future time – we all have our own set of issues, at home with our spouses, children, siblings and even parents, in social situations where we may not be able to keep pace with others, and in the workplace, where we are sometimes regarded as being unwilling to pull our weight.

2015

Miraculously, though I still and will always have limitations and have had to give up my flute- and piano-playing, I’m the only person I know who is actually in better shape now than 20 years ago, thanks to more sophisticated treatment and medications and amazing artificial joints. Ironically, my husband and one-time caregiver now needs a cane or walker to get around, so we are once again limited as we travel and go about our lives. Recently, we took Amtrak to Boston; he used his walker and I was the pack-horse, shlepping our rolling suitcase along. I was simultaneously furious that my own need for assistance went unnoticed… and thrilled that my own need for assistance went unnoticed!

So – do I have a disability or not? If you saw my deformed hands you’d say yes. But then you’d see me striding along and wonder.

The point I’m circuitously trying to make is that disability is perceived in many ways. Too often, architects equate it with “wheelchair.” Thus a handicapped hotel room is waaay far away from the elevator, because, as they see it, someone in a chair either has a pusher or a motor. Forgotten is the ambulatory person who can walk a short distance but can’t trek a city block to reach a hotel room. Forgotten is the person who can walk but whose arms and hands make turning doorknobs and opening heavy doors an impossible challenge. I’ve often thought that if I lived alone I’d have to hire someone to come in once a week and open the ketchup, mustard, medications, milk and God only knows what else, in order for me to function independently.

On this very important occasion, remember that disability takes many forms and perceptions are sometimes very narrow. I think of myself as limited rather than disabled, and I’m supremely grateful for that, but, still, the assistance I require is very real. Perhaps, as both the general population and I grow older, we need to create a new category called “limited” and deal realistically with its ramifications. Call the legislation the Americans With Limitations Act. Happy Anniversary, ADA.

Jacqueline S. Guttman
July 23, 2015

Jacqueline Guttman’s entire career – as educator, flutist, arts administrator, choir director and writer – was centered on the arts. In 2013 she founded the Arts for Life Network of New Jersey, which presents and promotes high quality participatory arts programming for active older adults. She is the author of Partners in Excellence: A Guide to Community School of the Arts/Public School Partnerships and co-author of ARThematics: Integrated Projects in Math, Art and Beyond. A musician whose fingers no longer work, she now writes and conducts.

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ASL Poetry: A Moving Experience by Karyn Lie-Nielsen

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This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1990. CavanKerry Press is committed to finding ways to educate others about this law–especially about its impact on the lives of those in the CKP community. Therefore, in keeping with the CavanKerry Press tagline of “Lives Brought to Life,” we will be publishing a monthly blog in which a member of our diverse community writes about an ADA-related topic.
This series kicks off with “ASL Poetry:  A Moving Experience,” by Karyn Lie-Nielsen, a member of the CKP ADA Advisory Board. My first conversation with Karyn taught me how very, very little I knew about the fascinating world of American Sign Language poetry.  I’m so glad Karyn is willing to share her extensive knowledge of it.
Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

portrait-1 (1)ASL Poetry:  A Moving Experience
by Karyn Lie-Nielsen

It doesn’t take long to discover how American Sign Language, the unique language of the Deaf, can increase our enjoyment of poetry.  Most of us realize how listening to poetry, recorded or delivered live at poetry readings, seems to enliven the words, mood, and meaning. Likewise, those of us who have seen a poem performed in ASL find that poetry can transcend to yet another level. The experience makes us feel like we have entered another dimension.

That’s because ASL is a visual language. “Speaking” in Sign involves not only fingers and hands, but also eyes, mouth, head, shoulders, arms, legs, and space—Signers call it the “sign space.” In ASL, printed words are freed from the flat page and lifted into space. Viewers have the chance to realize a poem that is truly embodied.

The language of ASL has no written equivalent.  It is based on English, but it’s movement, not writing, not sound.  Users of ASL do not speak English while they sign, because the sign-order of ASL is often very different from the word-order of English.  Moreover, there’s not necessarily a gesture for each word in the English vocabulary.  Sign consists of handshapes, facial expression and body positioning that make up a vocabulary of what we might call “words,” yet the lexicon of ASL is more accurately described as signs, or symbols, that represent ideas or concepts.  If there isn’t a word-sign equivalent for a word written in English, the signer might fingerspell that word. (ASL has a manual alphabet.) Or, since fingerspelling is slower and more difficult to “read,” a sign-translator can pantomime the idea.  When you want to communicate visually, you’ll sign, spell, gesture, turn your body, move your feet, anything it takes to get the concept across.

Translating a poem from English into ASL is different from merely word-to-word interpreting.  Sign language interpreters are called in to help the hearing impaired with doctor’s visits, news announcements, lectures, meetings, and general conversation.  But when it comes to translating poetry, the methodology isn’t the same. After all, poetry is not casual conversation, it is a literary art. Poets, as we are well aware,  intentionally measure each word, carefully calculating line and space.  An English-language poem translated into ASL requires the same skill and attention it takes to translate poetry from French or Spanish or Swahili.  Translators pore over the original language and distinctly make choices that allow the original intent to live on and reach the reader, or (in the case of ASL) the viewer. It’s not an on-the-spot task.  Yet, I am convinced there is no idea that can be written in English that can’t be represented with Sign.

You can see my own translations of two English language poems on my website.  One, “Among Vegetables,” is a contemporary poem written by CavanKerry poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont.  Another is Yeats’s “Never Give All The Heart.”

Strictly speaking, ASL poetry is at its most fascinating when the poem is originally created in Sign.  One of the most beloved poets in the Deaf signing community is Clayton Valli (1953-2003).  His original ASL poem “Dandelion” has been one of the most-watched Sign videos of all times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XzFWYWv7fM

Valli was a pioneer in the art form, defining how the repetition of handshapes are the signer’s equivalent to rhyme and meter.  There are English translations of “Dandelion,” available, but the best source is translated by the poet Raymond Luzak, and can be found in the anthology Deaf American Poetry, edited by John Lee Clark, a gifted poet himself, who is not only deaf, but is also legally blind.

While you’re looking around the web for ASL poetry, don’t miss “Flying Words” featuring Peter Cook and his speaking/signing partner Kenny Lerner.  This is a collaborative effort of two wonderful artists who bring unforgettable energy to their performances of ASL poetry and story-telling to both Deaf and hearing audiences. Cook is deaf, Lerner, hearing, so that the Sign is simultaneously spoken in English. Watch some of their work as well as some of the great pioneers of ASL poetry at slope.org.

When you look closely at ASL poetry, you’ll surely start to notice how imagery, metaphor, and emotion are enhanced through visual expression.  As Jim Cohn, teacher and early trailblazer of ASL poetry said, “What deaf people do with language is what hearing poets try to make their language do.”

Karyn Lie-Nielsen lives in mid-coast Maine where she writes poetry, short stories, and personal essays, and honors the perennial challenges of gardening in the New England climate.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Comstock Review, Maine Magazine, Words and Images Journal, and online at Cabildo Quarterly. She is a two-time winner in the annual Maine Literary Awards for both poetry and creative nonfiction.  Raised by deaf parents, she is fluent in American Sign Language and enjoys performing and translating ASL poetry.  She has taught sign language, worked as an interpreter for the Deaf, and performed with the National Theater of the Deaf.  Her poetry chapbook, Handbuzz and Other Voices, is forthcoming from Damfino Press.  These “Handbuzz” poems center on her experiences growing up within the Deaf community.  She holds an MFA from the University of Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program and is pleased to be involved with the CavanKerry Press ADA board.

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Sapling interviews Starr Troup

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saplingLast month, Sapling, a weekly newsletter from Black Lawrence Press that highlights the best of the small press world for writers looking for new venues for their work, interviewed our Managing Editor, Starr Troup.

Here is the full interview and many thanks to Sapling for allowing us to republish it our blog.

Sapling: What should people know who may not be familiar with CavanKerry Press?

Starr Troup: CavanKerry Press’s tagline is “Lives brought to life.” We hope to, through the wonderful words of talented writers, continue our mission to expand the reach of poetry to a general readership. We want to put highly readable poetry into the hands of as many readers as possible. We do that by publishing poets whose works “explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.”  We are a literary press focused on community. Our outreach endeavors, among others, include: 1) the Gift Books program, 2) our involvement with New Jersey’s Poetry Out Loud Program for high school students, and 3) the sponsorship of a teacher scholarship to the Frost Place in New Hampshire.

Through the Gift Books program we donate books to organizations around the country, including schools, medical facilities, and other community-focused organizations. Our most recent version of the Waiting Room Reader has been donated to hospital and medical facility waiting rooms nationwide. We provide desk copies of our books to teachers across the country with hopes they will find intriguing poetry to use in the classroom.

New Jersey has a very successful Poetry Out Loud program, this year having the highest student participation and teacher participation in the country. During the state finals of the competition a CavanKerry author acts as a judge. CavanKerry gives books to the library of every participating high school, each of the students who is a regional finalist, and each state finalist.

Our Associate Publisher, Teresa Carson, teaches at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching each summer. She works with teachers who attend the workshops, from elementary school, middle school, and high school to undergraduate and graduate level, to bring poetry into their classrooms. CavanKerry provides a scholarship, each year, for the teacher of the student who has become the New Jersey Poetry Out Loud State Champion.

Sapling: How did your name come about?

ST: Our Founder and Publisher, Joan Cusack Handler, has a strong Irish background. Her parents were from County Cavan and County Kerry in Ireland.

Sapling: What do you pay close attention to when reading submissions? Any deal breakers?

ST: Our Publisher and Associate Publisher read all poetry submissions. Our Publisher and I, as Managing Editor, read all memoir submissions. The editors choose each title based on: the high quality of the writing, the cohesiveness of the collection, the distinctiveness of the writer’s voice, and the ability of the work to engage a diversity of readers intellectually and move them emotionally.

CavanKerry accepts submissions only during the open submission periods. We do not run contests. We consider manuscripts from first-time authors to late career authors. Our guidelines are clearly outlined on our website and we hope that all writers read what’s there before submitting.

Sapling: Where do you imagine CavanKerry Press to be headed over the next couple years? What’s on the horizon?

ST: CavanKerry continues to work on the improvement of business practices and procedures. We recently expanded our submission procedure to include the Submittable platform. We’ve also been expanding our community outreach programs and will continue to do so. We hope to see more of our books in classrooms. Recently, our author Loren Graham’s book, Places I Was Dreaming, was selected as the freshman seminar book for Carroll College in Montana. We’d like to have more of our books selected for school-wide reading.

Sapling: As an editor, what is the hardest part of your job? The best part?

ST: The hardest part of my job, as Managing Editor, is the very mundane, behind-the-scenes job of coordinating everything that has to do with the release of our titles. Working with the author, the copy editor, the designer, the distributor, and the printer requires great attention to detail… and attention to due dates. My office has clipboards hanging from nails in the wall – clipboards with production schedules, and event schedules, and design schedules. In spite of my reliance on technology for my daily work, I need those tangible hard copies of information hanging on my wall. It’s a constant reminder of what is coming due in one of the three seasons I am working on at any given time.

I love working with the authors. I begin contact as early as two years before the scheduled release date, and I continue working with an author sometimes up to two years after a book is released. We talk about the production schedule, copy edits to the manuscript, and marketing strategies for post-production. This past April I spent the days at AWP in Minneapolis with three of our authors – Dawn Potter, Loren Graham, and Brent Newsom – working the table, answering questions, and managing the book signings and sales. It was a wonderful experience. I felt both exhilarated and completely and totally exhausted after the long days of interaction, almost as a yin to their yang, as we spoke to the many participants at the conference.

Sapling: If you were stranded on a desert island for a week with only three books, what books would you want to have with you?

ST: If I had to choose today it would probably be: God Laughs and Plays, by David James Duncan – one of my favorite nonfiction authors; The Complete Robert Frost, to satisfy some of my poetry cravings; and the JRR Tolkien Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy to have a place to lose myself. I want to live in Lothlorien one day, and have since I first discovered the place when I was very young. Of course three books wouldn’t be enough, and the titles will probably be different if you ask me a month from now.

Sapling: Just for fun (because we like fun and the number three), if CavanKerry Press was a person, what three things would it be thinking about obsessively?

ST: As the Managing Editor of CavanKerry, I think if CavanKerry were a person she would be thinking about more ways to put our quality literature and beautiful books in the hands of readers. The other two things would have to be related to that, because after all, that is what publishing is all about.

Starr Troup is the Managing Editor of CavanKerry Press, headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and has worked for the press from her home in Central Pennsylvania for two years. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Wilkes University with a focus in nonfiction. In past lives she has taught fifth graders to love literature, owned and managed a business with her husband, and worked as Director of Education for Ixtlan Artists and Lakota Performing Arts. Starr is a writer of nonfiction, a part-time photographer, and a passionate lover of the natural world. She lives in York, Pennsylvania with her husband, Chris, and her two cats, Pippin and Macintosh.
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News and Events: Week of June 1st

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Events

Wanda Praisner, Salt Brook Elementary School (40 Maple Street, New Providence, NJ)
June 1st-June 4th
Wanda has a Poetry Residency teaching four third grades classes

Teresa Carson, Terraza 7 Cafe (40-19 Gleane St. Elmhurst, NY)
Tuesday, June 2nd at 7pm
Teresa will be reading at Richard Jeffery Newman’s First Tuesdays, a monthly neighborhood reading series

Andrea Carter Brown, Rock Creek Nature Center (5200 Glover Road, NW, Washington, DC)
Sunday, June 7th at 3 pm
Andrea will read reads with Miles David Moore in the Joachim Miller Poetry Series 

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On Accuracy at Poetry Out Loud, from Teresa Carson

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Beatrice Dimaculangan, State Champion, from NJPOL

Because of the bad fortune of a snowstorm that caused the postponement of the Region 6 New Jersey Poetry Out Loud competition, I had the good fortune to act as the Accuracy Judge on the snow date. While the other three judges had to evaluate each recitation in six categories, I had only one thing to worry about: Did the student “keep the poet’s language intact for the audience”? Once the student started his/her recitation, I followed along, without lifting my eyes from the text, until the recitation finished. So, throughout the entire time each student was on stage, I had to block out any aspects of “performance” and concentrate on the words themselves. Inaccuracies, which are classified as either “minor” (e.g. “a” instead of “the”) or “major” (e.g. skipping a line), can have a surprising impact on the overall score because they can result in a total deduction of 7 points. As a testament to the skill and commitment of the Region 6 students, there were few “major” inaccuracies—for the most part the inaccuracies centered on confusing pronouns/articles and skipping/replacing words.

Although some people might consider the role of the Accuracy Judge less exciting than that of the other judges, I very much enjoyed the experience. Since this was my first time as a POL judge, it allowed for an easy introduction to the fast-paced judging process. Also, it just so happens that my personality is very well suited to the block-out-everything-but-the-text concentration needed to act as Accuracy Judge. This concentration must be combined with an ability to respond to the recitation itself—for example, patiently waiting until one participant, who had gone completely “off script,” found her way back to the poem.

-Teresa Carson, Associate Editor

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Another question for National Poetry Month

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It’s poetry month and we asked our community to answer 3 important questions, one of them being…

What is the poem you’d give to someone living in your town 100 years from now?

giphy

Here are some of the answers we got.

Richard Jeffrey Newman
Poet

I am astonished at their mouthful names–
Lakinishia, Chevellanie, Delayo, Fumilayo–
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery…

-Patricia Smith, “Building Nicole’s Mama”

Jack Ridl
Poet

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life…

-Willian Stafford, “Ask Me”

Teresa Carson
Poet, Associate Editor, CavanKerry Press

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

       Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

       By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine…

-John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”

Holly Smith
Teacher

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time…

-Terrance Hayes, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”

Danny Shot
Poet

The Hoboken Poem
By Jack Wiler

Hoboken, city of light.
Hoboken, a bump on the river.
Hoboken, four guys on a corner in guinea
tees gold chains and they’re all the mayor’s friend;
hey they work in his office.
Hoboken, elections every day.
Hoboken, opportunity around every corner.
Every corner a danger.
No stop signs.
No sign of anyone stopping.
Every taxi paused at every corner.
Hoboken, one taxi fare
2.25 cheap.
Hoboken, a bus every minute.
Hoboken, a train every ten.
Hoboken, burning.
Every building on fire.
Children falling from the windows.
Mothers running into the street.
Hoboken, even the fire houses on fire.
Hoboken, burnt.
Hoboken, rising and falling
burning and smoldering.
Hoboken, every factory closed.
Every park full.
Every man a king.
Every one works at the Board of Ed.
Hoboken, unlimited overtime.
No end to the money you can make.
Hoboken, home of baseball.
Hoboken, only one baseball field.
Hoboken, the first fly ball over the Elysian Field,
the first smoking fastball,
the first frozen rope drops just beneath the Maxwell’s sign,
the drop of coffee lands on the ball,
the fielder slips, the factory closes, the sign goes dark,
the children run in the street till well past eleven.
It’s Hoboken,
the fires are out, the factories are closed,
the sign is dark, the world is quiet,
the sun is setting.
Hoboken, good to the last bitter drop.
Hoboken, city of light:
city of paused taxis,
city of beer and fires and children in the street.
Hoboken
the factories closed, the lights out
pauses mid day.
No election today.
No overtime today.
No games are scheduled.
The children leave the house at nine in the morning dressed
as spooks and demons and march down the street.
Ragamuffins in a ragamuffin town.
A raga then for Hoboken.
A last song for a lost town.
Hoboken
taxis waiting for the children to pass.

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This Sunday: Something Old, Something (New) Jersey II

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About two years ago Hoboken poet Danny Shot, now poet in residence at the Hoboken Historical Museum, and I hatched a plan to run a reading to celebrate the 350th birthday of New Jersey in 2014. I remember the two of us sitting in a bar and trying to come up with a name for the event. Since we had already decided to mix the work of iconic (old) and contemporary (new) poets, we were playing with “Something Old, Something New.” Suddenly Danny said, “’Something Old, Something New Jersey’and we’ll put Jersey in parentheses.” Once we found the name of the reading, we found its format: ten contemporary NJ poets reading the poems of iconic NJ poets and their own poems. We also decided that two of the readers would be “living legends” who would read only their own work. With support from the Hoboken Historical Museum, CavanKerry Press, and a grant from the NJ Historical Commission, we set out to put on a show.

Danny and I will be the first to admit that we had no idea how successful the reading would be. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in April, an overflow crowd turned up to hear ten poets read poetry. Let me repeat that: on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in April an overflow crowd turned up to hear a poetry reading. We were exhausted, elated and gratified by this response. Right after the reading finished, Bob Foster, the executive director of the Hoboken Historical Museum, said to us, “Let’s celebrate NJ’s birthday every year with a reading.”

So here we are, getting ready to celebrate New Jersey’s 351st birthday with Something Old, Something New (Jersey) II. Not only have we invited a new group of contemporary NJ poets to read but we’ve also chosen a new group of iconic poets to honor. We hope you’ll join us on Sunday, April 19 at 3pm. It’s sure to be one hell of a reading!

-Teresa Carson, Associate Editor

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An Interview with Jennifer Kuszmerski, Teacher of NJPOL State Champion

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CavanKerry Press believes that committed teachers are the key to New Jersey’s successful Poetry Out Loud program. Yes, the students are the ones up on the stage but the teachers are the ones who get POL started, and keep it going, in their schools. Therefore, every year we give a scholarship to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching to the teacher of the NJPOL state champion. I’m pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2015 scholarship is Jennifer Kuszmerski, who teaches at Jonathan Dayton High School in Springfield. How lucky her students are to have a teacher whose enthusiasm for poetry comes through so strongly when she lists her favorite poets and poems.

TERESA CARSON
How did you get involved with Poetry Out Loud?

JENNIFER KUSZMERKSI 
I am a Teacher of English at Jonathan Dayton High School and the advisor of the school’s literary magazine, Jargon. I guess for this reason I was receiving emails announcing Poetry Out Loud and encouraging our school to participate. In truth, I ignored these emails for the first year or two that I received them, not knowing what Poetry Out Loud was. But, during the 2013-14 school year, something made me pay closer attention. That was the first year we registered and participated.

TC
How many Jonathan Dayton High School students participated in POL? Tell me a bit about the students who participated.

JK
The first year we participated we had 12 students compete at the school level. They ranged from freshmen to seniors. Most of them were active members of the literary magazine club and very passionate about writing and poetry. Most of them were poets themselves. This year, we actually only had four students compete at the school level, even though we promoted the competition in an even bigger way. My hope is that Beatrice’s success will inspire and encourage more of our students to participate next year.

TC
What value is added to your students’ experience of poetry by participating in POL?

JK
Poetry Out Loud has brought excitement to our students’ experience of poetry for sure.

TC
What value is added to your experience of teaching poetry?

JK
I have been requiring my literature students to select, memorize, recite, and present on a “favorite” poem for years, so, if anything, the Poetry Out Loud competition just validates what I already felt was a valuable endeavor.

TC
How did you help Beatrice prepare for the competition at the school/regional/state level?

JK
One thing Beatrice and I did early on was watch the video of her performance at the school-level competition and discuss what improvements she could make before competing at regionals. We talked about adding more emotion to her delivery and different ways that she could use her body to enhance her performance (without overdoing it). However, to her credit, Bea has been incredibly self-motivated from the very beginning and did a lot on her own to prepare. For example, she recorded herself reciting the poems and would listen back to the audio in her free time, not just to help herself memorize the poems but as a way to improve her delivery.

TC
What were the highlights of your POL experience at the regional competition and at the state finals?

JK
I’m sorry to be trite, but the entire experience has been a highlight! I knew from the very beginning that we had a strong competitor in Beatrice, but she has surpassed our expectations. I was happy enough when she made it into the second round at regionals. Imagine how we felt when she won the state finals!

TC
What advice or thoughts would you offer teachers who want to get their students involved in POL?

JK
I imagine that one of the more challenging aspects of organizing a school-level competition might be getting colleagues to help spread the word and to help judge the contestants. I have been incredibly lucky in this respect. Both last year and this year I had a group of colleagues who were happy to give of their time and judge the competitions. Our school principal, Elizabeth Cresci, has also been incredibly supportive.

Teachers who want to get their students involved should absolutely do so. Start small if you have to. All you need is two interested students to get involved! The overall experience of Poetry Out Loud, as well as the incredibly generous cash prizes, is too valuable to pass up. We owe it to our students to offer them the opportunity to participate.

TC
Based on Beatrice’s success at the state finals, you were awarded the scholarship to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. How do you feel about winning this scholarship?

JK
I feel very excited! I am very grateful to CavanKerry Press and your family for providing me this opportunity. I’m also grateful to Bea – without her hard work and dedication to this process, this opportunity wouldn’t be possible for me.

TC
How long have you been a teacher? What subjects do you teach? Do you have a favorite poet? A favorite poem?

JK
This is my seventh year as an English teacher. Before this, I was the Publicity Director for a small publishing company called Barricade Books, located in Fort Lee, NJ. Currently, I teach AP Literature and Composition at Jonathan Dayton, as well as a freshman course called Writing and Research. I enjoy Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, of course, and I also love the poems of Anna Akhmatova, Marge Piercy, Billy Collins, and Sharon Olds. As you can see, I’m a little bit all over the place! One of my favorite poems is “The Sentence” by Anna Akhmatova. It’s a haunting poem that I teach alongside 1984 by George Orwell. There’s also a very contemporary poem by Craig Morgan Teicher I love called “Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday.” The last line is “I must learn to have been so lucky,” which sums up how I am feeling lately in both my personal and professional lives. On a lighter note, I enjoy Billy Collins’s humor – I share his poem “To My Favorite Seventeen-Year-Old High School Girl” with my students when they need a laugh.

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News and Events: Week of March 23rd

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Events

Celia Bland and Shira Dentz, CalArts &Now Festival
Friday, March 27th at 2:30
Celia and Shira will be joined by Pauline Oliveros and Kathy High for “Blast Radius,” a discuss about the collaboration of  poetry, music and video

Teresa Carson, Wanda Praisner, Sondra Gash, and Carole Stone, West Caldwell Library (30 Clinton Rd., West Caldwell, NJ)
Saturday, March 28, 1:00-4:00pm
Four CavanKerry writers will read at Girl Talk: A Reading in Celebration of National Women’s History Month

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Surprise, Surprise by Brent Newsom

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In Track a Book, we follow one manuscript’s journey from creation to publication.  This monthly series will look at Brent Newsom’s upcoming CavanKerry release Love’s Labors, which is scheduled for release in April 2015.
Surprise
by Flickr user Benson Kua

I am home with my two kids when the call comes. It’s early August, midafternoon. Snack time. Water and ants on a log. No—be honest, Brent—probably it is Goldfish and apple juice. My son, four, sits at the dining room table, my daughter, not quite two, still in a high chair. Hot as Hades out in the Oklahoma sun, and not much cooler in our dining room, a converted sunroom with tall windows and three skylights on the west side of the house. My phone buzzes in my pocket. No name on the caller ID. A New Jersey area code. Telemarketer, no doubt. A call I would ignore if it came two weeks later, at the beginning of a new semester. But the kids are occupied, I’m bored, what the heck. I answer: Hello. This is he. (No—honest, Brent—This is him.)

A woman on the other line introduces herself: Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher of CavanKerry Press. It takes a moment or two for this to register. To remember the manuscript I sent off back in March. To realize this person does not want to sell me anything. She is not offering a free cruise if I just answer a few simple questions and pass a credit check. She is not conducting a national poll of randomly selected poets living in landlocked states with panhandles. She wants to publish my book. I sit down. She wants to publish my book.

I remember sitting down, though I remember little else of my conversation with Teresa. That was the first surprise in the process of making my book, and it still surprises me some days: This is really happening. They want to publish my book. But there have been other surprises too, starting with how long the process would take. Teresa initially told me I could expect the book to come out in something like the spring of 2025. Ages and ages hence, it seemed, whatever it was exactly. No matter. The book was accepted. I could wait. Then another surprise: something had changed, and the release date was moved up to spring 2015. Suddenly there was so much to do and so little time.

And it seemed each step of the process contained another small surprise of one kind or another. Developmental editing, for example: an email came out of the blue one day from an editor who doesn’t appear on CavanKerry’s masthead, a poet whom I greatly respect. (He had some very helpful comments, with blessedly few criticisms.) Or copyediting: something in Microsoft Word made my manuscript’s formatting go wonky when I sent it to the copyeditor. (Multiple emails later, an unformatted version finally displayed correctly on her computer.) Marketing and promotion: writers with small presses often write their own marketing copy. (I’d rather write a poem any day.) Cover art: getting permission to use a woodcut image by J. J. Lankes, who illustrated some of Robert Frost’s work and about whom Sherwood Anderson wrote in Virginia Quarterly Review in 1931, turned out to be too difficult. (Instead I chose a fantastic photo by my friend, graphic designer Corey Lee Fuller.)

Each of these surprises, of course, is a consequence of that first one, the one that came with an unexpected phone call on a hot August day. When I hung up, I was trembling with nervous energy and a quickened pulse. I stood to my feet and, searching for anyone with whom to celebrate this good news, looked at my four-year-old son, and said, “They’re going to publish my book!” Unaware that the world had somehow fundamentally changed in the past few minutes—no longer so oppressively hot, so drearily summerish, now glowing with light and grace—he looked at me warily, chewing all the while, and gave me a thumbs up. (Four-year-olds are good for keeping things in perspective.) “Dad,” he asked, “can I have more Goldfish?”

 

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For Florenz: “The First Signs of Spring” by Teresa Carson

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When CavanKerry Press accepted Elegy for the Floater, I was clueless about, and daunted by, the publication process. Lucky for me I had Florenz as my guide. She calmly, kindly and patiently helped me to get done what needed to be done—e.g. the many, many pages of the UPNE questionnaire; the search for blurbs. No matter how “stupid” my question was, she never was curt or snippy or short-tempered with me. Never. Now that I work for CKP and know what pressures the Managing Editor works under, I have more admiration for, and am more grateful for, how Florenz treated first-time-author me.
In honor of Florenz, here’s my favorite poem from Elegy for the Floater.
-Teresa Carson

 

The First Signs of Spring

Because it was April

the tulip buds cracked then revealed

satin sheened blood red petals,

and the blossoming pear trees on Ninth Street

filled the air with bridal stillness—

the perfect setting for

the song of an unseen bird.

Then the woman in front of Balducci’s screamed,

Adam, give me your fucking hand,

at the small boy with the dropped head,

his fists clutching his jacket.

I knocked her down, picked up the boy,

and fled up Sixth Avenue.

We stopped to get Toby, the ginger-striped cat

asleep in the lap of a drunk on Fourteenth

who had scribbled on cardboard:

Toby and me are homeless PLEASE HELP.

I put ten bucks in his paper cup.

On the ferry across the Hudson

we tore the past off our skins

and threw the pieces into the river.

That night in my kitchen, windows wide open,

fragrance of hyacinths filling the room,

Adam and I laughed, danced to a salsa beat,

while Toby stretched out on a blue velvet cushion

and scrupulously licked his fur clean.

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ADA Awareness Month: Joan Seliger Sidney

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Although I first met Joan Seliger Sidney at a gathering of CavanKerry Press authors, I didn’t really meet her until I read Body of Diminishing Motion, her powerful collection of poetry and prose which was published by CavanKerry in 2004. In the four-plus years that I’ve been working at CKP, Joan has been, and continues to be, one of my go-to people because she, in actions as well as words, supports the work, particularly the community outreach work, done by the press. She’s also one of my go-to people because I love how she, a founding member of the CKP ADA Advisory Board, brings her keen mind, quick humor and big heart to whatever she does. Check out her website to learn more about her and about her books.
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

 

MY WHEELCHAIR LIFE

by Joan Seliger Sidney

Since this is Disabilities Awareness Month, Teresa asked me to blog about some of the obstacles I’ve faced despite being helped by the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Let me begin with today’s experience at the Mansfield Community Center, where most mornings I swim up to half a mile—that’s eighteen laps! Because my multiple sclerosis (MS) has progressed to where I can no longer be independent in the Women’s Locker Room—a place I miss both for friendship and poetic inspiration—my husband, Stu and I use the Family Changing Room, which we have helped make wheelchair-accessible. There’s even a sign on the door with a wheelchair symbol and the words, “In consideration of patrons who need to use the accessible changing room, please use another one, if it’s available.”  Well, you can probably guess what comes next, my gripe: This morning, as happens too many mornings, Stu and I shivered in the hallway in our wet swim suits while one person occupied the room, telling us she’d be out “in a minute.” I recognized the voice of an English Department secretary, who emerged ten minutes later without a cane or wheelchair, energized by her strenuous “boot camp” exercise class. “Why do you need this room?” I asked. “Because I have osteoporosis in my back and need to sit down.” As if there aren’t benches in the Women’s Locker Room for her slim body. If all the (MCC) members with osteoporosis behaved like her, I’d never get to use this changing room.

Next gripe: Since from my wheelchair I drive my ramped mini-van with hand-controls, there’s the usual parking problem with healthy drivers taking handicapped spots: “I was only a minute” is the usual answer, while I wait much longer, wondering where’s the police who could ticket and collect a hefty fine. Once, even a resident trooper refused to ticket the guy he found relaxing in Starbucks, who said, “It won’t happen again.” In contrast, another time a resident trooper traced the woman who threatened to run me over as I copied down her license, and fined her in her kitchen! Of course, there are still the ignorant people with handicapped permits who park in the crosshatched area, blocking my ramp, making it impossible for me to get back in my car. Shouldn’t there be some kind of education along with each permit the Department of Motor Vehicles issues? Speaking of permits, though they’re no longer Lifetime Pendants, it’ll take awhile to get rid of the dead people’s permits that healthy relatives use, and unless they put photos on the new pendants, there will still be family members abusing them.

Now, finally, onto the story I told Theresa, which generated her suggestion for this blog. In connection with my new book, Bereft And Blessed, my publisher, Antrim House, arranged for me to participate in his local TV series, “Speaking of Poetry.” But when I came to the studio, there was no way to drive my wheelchair onto the stage. Was I the station’s first non-ambulatory on-screen participant? Fortunately, since I’m a lightweight and the producer was young and strong, he lifted me up and into the comfortable armchair onstage.

 

 

 

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ADA Awareness Month: Robert Carr and The Cultural Access Network Project

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As I mentioned in my first piece for ADA Awareness Month, I recently attended an ADA Plan training session facilitated by John McEwen and Robert Carr of the Cultural Access Network Project. John and Robert are passionate about helping New Jersey’s cultural organizations make their programs accessible to everybody. Robert generously agreed to answer some questions about the work of CAN and about the importance of accessibility for all. He asked John to field the last question. Thank you Robert and John!
-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

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CavanKerry Press
What is the Cultural Access Network Project and why was it established?

Robert Carr
The Cultural Access Network Project, established in 1992 is a co-sponsored program of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The Project provides a wide range of services and programs to assist theatres and cultural organizations in making their programs and facilities accessible to seniors and people with disabilities. It was created in response to the Americans with Disabilities Act signed into law in 1990.

It is comprised of a committee of arts administrators, advocates and professionals that are well versed in the field of accessibility.

CKP
Why is it important for NJ cultural organizations to make their programs and facilities accessible to seniors and individuals with disabilities?

CARR
According to the recent census, it is estimated that over 10% of NJ citizens identify themselves with having a disability. As organizations in the “audience business”, not to include this population in their audience development efforts makes little sense. Our population is aging and offering accommodation only ensures that this population will continue to consider attending the rich and wonderful programming our arts organizations offer.

CKP
Please give some examples of ways in which cultural organizations provide access to programs or services.

CARR
Many performing arts organization offer American Sign Language interpretation of plays and musicals as well as providing Open Captioning and Audio Description. Offering large print Programs are an easy way to accommodate those patrons with low vision. We have seen great examples in the visual art world whereby certain paintings in collection have been converted to raised line drawings for patrons who are blind to feel in order to get an idea of the content of the painting.

CKP
Have there been changes in technology that make it easier for organizations to provide access?

CARR
Technology in the access arena is developing rapidly. More and more technologies are being developed to harness the power of smartphones and other personal devices. The New Jersey Theatre Alliance purchases and loans Assistive Listening devices that work by transmitting an FM signal that is picked up by a personal receiver for use in either Audio Description or Volume Enhancement. I expect 3D printing technology to be a boon for Visual Arts organizations by offering samples of artwork and sculpture that may not be able to be handled directly but can be recreated by having the item be 3D printed as a facsimile.

CKP
How does the Cultural Access Network Project support cultural organizations in their efforts to make their programs and services accessible?

CARR
We offer a wealth of programs and services such as technical assistance workshops, sensitivity training and equipment loan to aid organizations as they develop their access efforts. We also administer in partnership with the NJ State Arts Council, the collection and evaluation of ADA plans that are a part of the Arts Council grant requirement.

CKP
How long have you been involved with the Cultural Access Network Project? What changes, particularly in how cultural organizations approach accessibility, have you seen since you began?

CARR
I am currently entering my 10th year of work with the Cultural Access Network.  The greatest change I have witnessed is the growing sense of priority in the arts field. More and more organizations are “getting on board” with this work.

CKP
Please describe your vision for the future of the Cultural Access Network Project.

CARR
I would defer this question to the Founder and Chairman of the Cultural Access Network and Executive Director of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, John McEwen. I have asked him to answer this one.

John McEwen
As a result of the work of The Cultural Access Network Project, I see a future where every cultural organization in New Jersey has an understanding and commitment to making its programs, services and facilities accessible to all patrons.  In addition, I envision organizations, large and small, designing  innovative programs to ensure a wide range of constituents, including older adults and people with disabilities, can enjoy and participate in the arts with dignity and independence.

About Robert Carr
Robert is a life-long resident of New Jersey, a spectacular cook and a seasoned veteran in the arts community. Since 2005, Robert has served as Director of Programs and Services/ADA Coordinator for the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, the award winning service organization for NJ’s professional theatres. Previously, Bob served as General Manager for the 12 Miles West Theatre Company. He called Playwrights Theatre home from 1998 to 2004 and in his professional career has worn many hats as producer, actor, director and teaching artist. He has also served on the faculty of New Jersey School of Dramatic Arts in Bloomfield. As a performer he has worked in many of the Alliance’s member theatres including 12 Miles West, The Bickford Theatre, The Growing Stage; The Children’s Theatre of NJ, Luna Stage Company and Playwrights Theatre. Carr is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and is a proud member of Actors Equity Association. Robert is husband to Stephanie and father to Sabrina. 

 

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ADA Awareness Month: From Jack Ridl

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You can read Jack Ridl’s bio here. What can I add to what’s there? That he’s a generous, funny, goodhearted man. And that he’s a founding member of the CavanKerry Press ADA Advisory Board.
–Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

For eight years my wife, Julie, has had Lyme disease. She has refused to allow how it limits her from keeping her from continuing her art, writing, knitting, delight in books, films, music, friends, and caring for the multiple souls she cares for. I’ve published two poems that come out from our experience.

Within the Moment of Indefinite Suffering

All it takes is a tick. You can be walking

your dog. Your dog can be stopping to

sniff a patch of jewel weed or pausing

to pee on a post surrounded by poison ivy.

 

You could be watching a swallowtail slowly

lifting and settling its wings while resting on

a swatch of crown vetch. The sun could be

lost behind clouds, clustered in a cumulus

 

mound of white or sinister gray, the moon

could be full, waning, new, the stars moving

across their scrim of deep space, everything

still benign in its revolving threat. You

 

could be sweeping the walk, passing under

the pergola draped in wisteria, wedding veil,

honeysuckle, or merely sitting on the bench

beside the brook out back. Or taking a path

 

through the park, joggers steady-stepping, or

walking along the well-worn trail to the pond

at the edge of town where you could be sitting

under the willow, its branches hanging their braids

 

over your wait for the sunfish to surface. It could all be

beautiful: the day, the light, the breeze bending the tall grass.

             — To all those suffering under the politics of Lyme disease

On Going with My Wife to Her Doctor

We don’t know what’s wrong. We’ve waited

for more than a year to find out what’s wrong.

We’ve waited for five specialists to tell us

what’s wrong. We’ve waited through thigh length

blood clots, migraines that seem the eternal

twin of sustained electro shock, pains that twist

her stomach into the devil’s balloon animal.

Every diagnosis has amounted to nothing

more than maybe. Med after med, strung out

and taken daily, a rosary prescribed by priests

with malpractice insurance. Now here we sit

again. I try to read a month old Newsweek.

They call her name. “You wait here.” Yes,

here is where I’ll wait. No one sits next to

anyone. Now and then a cough hovers

over all of us. Nearly everyone stares.

Now and then a sigh. Behind the counter,

the kempt receptionist welcomes each entrant,

checks date of birth, current address, accepts

the co-pay. It’s mid-April. It’s still cold.

One specialist proclaimed, “It’s likely lupus.”

Another, “Let’s first work on those headaches.”

Another ordered, “We’ll set you up for a series

of steroid shots. Can you start tomorrow?”

I look across the room. The TV is tuned to

a health channel. A woman in a bright pink

shirt is smiling and talking about what to eat.

Sitting under the set is a man, unshaven, cuts

across his forehead. He has a cause and a cure.

“In sickness and in health.” I am ashamed.

I open the Newsweek: “The War in Iraq.”

A nurse calls, “John Larson?” The unshaven

man gets up, walks across the room. “How are

you today?” and they disappear down the hall.

I turn a few pages: Brad and Angelina and

their kids. The woman on the TV is talking

about diabetes. The mail carrier comes in,

drops a stack on the counter. “Hi, girls!”

I think, “We will be okay.” I think, “Too

many medications. That many cannot work

together.” I laugh to myself thinking, “We’re

living in a age of side effects. What would

it be like to have an erection lasting four hours?”

I know in mid-June our gardens will be lush,

blossoms surrounded by the comforting hues

of ground covers, grasses, mosses. Maybe she

will be glad for that. A patient sits down next

to me, asks, “Why are you here?” “It’s my

wife.” “She sick?” “Yes. You?” “Yeah, I’m

sick too. I think it’s just what’s going around.”

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Nin Andrews Interviews Teresa Carson

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Teresa_small_photoBW

NIN ANDREWS
This is such a carefully constructed book (My Crooked House) about the anatomy of a house and a psyche, and the healing of both. I’d love to hear you talk about how the idea for the book came to you.

TERESA CARSON
Well, the poems started coming before the architectural structure of the book announced itself. For a few years I’d been thinking, writing, and talking in therapy about the many aspects of my homesickness. For the first forty years of my life I didn’t feel at home in my body or in my mind or in my writing or in my job or in my family or with friends or in my first marriage or in any place where I lived. This unease with every aspect of my self and my life left me feeling “broken in some fundamental way.” I projected this psychological state on my actual house—e.g. letting the house fall into disrepair and feeling unable to do anything about it. What I’m trying to emphasize here is: my house wasn’t just a metaphor for me, it was me. The root of the symptoms of homesickness was my homesickness for my core self.

At the same time, I was also thinking a lot about “the stories we tell” and how we tell them. Why do people repeat the same stories about their lives? Why do we choose to tell this story and not that one? What were the stories I told, time and again, about myself? Why did I keep circling around the same stories? Somehow those stories seemed part of my basic structure—the walls and floors of me. What did those stories mean? What would happen if I walked around in them? What would happen if I played with using aspects of my brokenness in the forms of the poems—e.g. the lists and the excessive numbering of things that come out of my obsessive compulsive nature? Then, at some point, a line was crossed and the construction of the poems turned into the construction of a book. I knew the poems were beginning to fit together but wanted an objective opinion so I worked with Dael Orlandersmith, a playwright and solo performance artist, for a few sessions. She helped draw the plans for the book. The book was built the way a house is built but from words/poems/stories not from wood/plaster/nails.

NA
I am so in love with your voice in these poems. You are so honest. In your poem, “How It Happened, Part 4,” you talk about how you signed up for a poetry workshop, and the teacher pushed you to “hide less, go further, get out of your head.” You followed that advice brilliantly. Who is this workshop leader? (I think I want to sign up.) At what point did you decide to be a poet?

TC
There were a lot of obstacles for me to overcome before I could declare myself a poet. I come from a family/class/geographic/social/occupational background where the announcement “I’m a poet” would be greeted with “Who the hell do you think you are?” and I bought into that accusation for many, many years. So even though I knew quite early—around the age of ten—that the land of metaphor was where I felt at home, I ran from being a poet in the same way in which Jonah ran from his fate. But, as Jonah couldn’t escape his fate, I couldn’t escape mine. I took a workshop here and there and, though teachers praised my “surfaces,” nothing felt “right” until I had the good fortune to sign up for a workshop with Joan Cusack Handler. It was years before she started CavanKerry Press. In the beginning I believed she hated my poems because every week she’d compliment my craft but add, “hide less, go further, get out of your head.” At the time I didn’t realize she was giving me an incredible gift—the gift of writing my poems, not anyone else’s.

NA
Your poems are so sad, so funny, and so very true. And you surprise me again and again, as in the poem, “About Time through Time, Part 7,” when you talk about wanting to show your therapist what a good client you are.   I can relate! But I never would have called myself on it. And the poem about folding fitted sheets. But really, how does anyone fold fitted sheets? Maybe you can post that poem here?

TC
Isn’t it funny how sometimes what feels like one’s private shameful flaw turns out to be quite common and far from shameful? Whenever I read this poem at a reading both women and men come up to tell me that they also cannot fold fitted sheets! Take that Martha Stewart!

Fitted Sheets

At the age of fifty-six, I don’t know how to fold a fitted sheet. Even worse, I feel folding fitted sheets into small neat rectangles that fit on shelves in an orderly fashion is beyond my abilities. I am not kidding. Every week when the sheets come out of the dryer I start folding with optimism—this time I will surely figure it out—and end with rumpled messes, which spill onto the floor when anyone opens the closet door. Every week my belief becomes stronger: I am broken in some fundamental way and thus incapable of learning how to fold a fitted sheet. I trust my ability to understand complex scientific theories such as dark matter or to fix an outage affecting telephone lines or to travel alone in a foreign country but not my competency with easily-mastered-by-everyone-else-in-the-universe tasks such as applying makeup, buying shoes, blow-drying my hair, managing money, cooking simple meals, housekeeping, or tending a flower garden. It has been this way my whole life. I get by because you can get by with wrinkled sheets in disorderly closets by pretending you’re above worrying about such nonsense but, truth be told, week after week I’m in the basement trying to figure it out.

My Crooked HouseNA
You write about panic attacks and accidents, almost as if there is a meta-Teresa who watches you go through them. And with absolute clarity. I know it’s a lame question, but I have to ask: How do you do that?

TC
I’m not sure how I do it. From a very young age, one of my primary survival techniques was to watch closely every one in the room because the slightest change could signal great danger. And in order to avoid setting off any one else, I had to watch myself. So I became quite skilled in a mind-trick called “splitting”; one side acts, the other watches. In the panic attack and accident poems I wanted to recreate this experience for the reader.

NA
I think my favorite poems in the book are your poems about Jack Wiler. I love that method you use of reversing time, writing from two days before an event up to two minutes before the event. It’s so effective. I was wondering if you could say a few words about Jack, and maybe post a poem about him.

TC
Two summers ago, at Frost Place, I heard Luray Gross, a NJ poet, read a poem that used the reversal of time. as its overarching structure. When I was struggling to find a way to write about Jack’s death, I remembered her poem and adapted the method to my purposes. (By the way: Thank you Luray!)

As a person and as a poet Jack was a force of nature. His poems grab you by the lapels from the first syllable then take you from Toledo to Tampa to Walla Walla before he lets go after the final period. His advice, in regards to writing poetry and to living life, centered on “pay attention.” Jack haunts My Crooked House. I hope that I did him proud.

Gone

     for Jack Wiler

Three days before, we give a reading at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction. As always you blow off the roof with your performance. You also do a great job reading the Talker role in one of my sideshow poems. The audience loves you. Afterwards our host takes us to dinner at a fancy place, not a chain or a dive. She tells us to order whatever we want from the menu and whatever we want from the bar. We drink glass after glass of a good merlot; eat scallops and filet mignon; laugh at everyone’s stories about the poetry world. At one point you, a satisfied calm on your face, turn to me and say, “This is the first time I really feel like I’m being treated with respect as a poet.”

Two days before, we eat breakfast at the Polka Dot Diner and you ask if I really told you that We Monsters wasn’t the right title for your next collection or if you dreamed the conversation. When I answer that you dreamed it, you tell me that you’re thinking of changing the title but don’t know to what. We drive from Vermont to New Jersey in a terrible storm. You’re in the back seat. You complain about a chill. At various times during the trip I hear mumbling and turn to see if you’re talking to John or me. I’m a little worried because you seem to be pleading in a childlike way with an invisible person. When we drop you off, I give you a hug and say, “I love reading with you.” You agree.

Thirty hours before, I send that new poem for your comment but you don’t answer.

Fifteen minutes before, I’m walking towards the car because John and I are going to Tuesday night yoga when he comes out of the garage, his eyes full of shock, and says, “Johanna just called. Jack’s gone.” Gone where? Oh no, did they have another big fight and Jack walked out? Gone where? And John looks at me and keeps saying, “He’s gone.”

One minute before, I’m walking down the hallway to your bedroom and telling the cops standing outside the door that we’re close friends and I haven’t yet stepped into the room, haven’t yet seen your body, covered with a sheet, on the floor, haven’t yet seen your face.

And then there’s only before.

NA
I imagine, while reading these poems, that they flowed out of you as naturally as water from a faucet. Is that true? What is the biggest challenge for you as a writer?

TC
Oh god, no. I negotiated at length with each and every poem—e.g. What form do you want to be? What metrical pattern? What word here? What word there? What is your story and how should I tell it? (To tell the truth, sometimes it was more of a battle than a negotiation.)

My biggest challenge? Did you ever make popcorn in a hot air popper? First the heat rises but no kernels pop then there’s a stray pop here and there then, all of a sudden, the finale to a Fourth of July fireworks explodes in the popper then silence. My biggest challenge is to avoid panicking during the “no kernels pop” and “silence” times.

NA
How does a poem begin for you? What is your writing process like?

TC
A subject catches my attention. A second subject catches my attention. A third. A fourth. Etcetera. The connections between the subjects are a mystery to me at this stage. I throw myself into an intense research period during which I circle and circle those subjects. This is my lost in the dark woods stage. A line, or a few lines, of a poem pop into my head. (See my answer to the previous question for the whole kernel popping metaphor.) Bit by bit, the poems lead me out of the dark woods and into the landscape of the project. From that moment until the project ends, I’m moving in that landscape day and night.

NA
Who are your primary literary influences?

TC
Shakespeare, Keats, Melville, and Emerson. In the past few years I’ve become obsessed with epics so Homer, Virgil and Dante have played a larger part in my poetry life.

NA
I’d love to close with a poem of your choice.

TC
Thank you, Nin for your thoughtful and attentive questions.

Since My Crooked House is essentially a long love poem to my husband John, I choose:

What I Was Waiting For

John says, before he falls asleep each night,
without a hint of dark, “I love you, Tree.”
Some nights, awake enough, I add my part,
“And I love you, the sun, the moon, the stars.”
Yet even when I’m too far gone to speak,
to hear, and words get missed, his love, his love, abides.

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For ADA Awareness Month

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I grew up in a time not only when the needs of individuals with disabilities were not taken into consideration by cultural organizations but also when the individuals with disabilities themselves were not taken into consideration by the public. Heck, few, if any, organizations at that time even had ramps for alternate access to their buildings.

When we encountered individuals with disabilities, we either treated them as if they didn’t exist or we stared at them. Worse, calling persons with disabilities ugly slang names was considered appropriate and even funny. In fact, calling persons without disabilities by those same names was also considered funny. I feel such shame at the memory of my complicity in those activities. Thanks to the efforts of disability rights activists those days have gone. Now the ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability. But the ADA doesn’t change our personal behaviors.

So, how can we learn to “interact more effectively” with individuals with disabilities? One way to start is by downloading the Tips on Interacting with People with Disabilities booklet, which is available from the United Spinal Association at http://www.unitedspinal.org/disability-etiquette/, because it’s a comprehensive and easily understandable guide.

-Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

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News and Events: Week of October 6

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Events

Teresa Carson, Barron Arts Center (582 Rahway Ave., Woodbridge, NJ)
Wednesday, October 8th at 8pm
Teresa is reading the Poet Wednesday series
For more info visit Teresa’s website

Joan Seliger Sidney, Asylum Hill Congregational Church (814 Asylum Avenue, Hartford CT)
Thursday, October 9th at 7pm
Riverwood Poetry Series featuring Joan an Edwina Trentham
For more info visit Riverwood

Sarah Bracey White, Bethel Baptist Church (Port Chester, NY)
Sunday, October 12th
Women’s Day Book Event

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October is Americans with Disabilities Act Awareness Month at CKP

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from Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

On Monday I attended a workshop, facilitated by John McEwen and Robert Carr from the NJ Theatre Alliance, on creating a three-year Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) plan, which the NJ State Council on the Arts requires of all of its grantees. Three years ago I was puzzled when I discovered that it was my responsibility to write the ADA plan. How did such a program apply to CKP? What did the ADA have to do with publishing books? CavanKerry isn’t a presenting organization. We don’t give gallery talks.  CavanKerry doesn’t have a facility. As a matter of fact we don’t even have an office. So what was I going to include on an ADA plan? But writing that plan not only taught me how little I understood the ADA but also turned me into a strong advocate for it. My first “aha” moment happened at a meeting of the Bergen County Division of Disability Services when I watched, and cringed, as an individual with a disability struggled to open the sealed CKP brochure which described our LaurelBooks imprint, which are books about illness and disability. The irony was not lost on me.

I was very struck by one particular point that Carr made at the workshop: “An organization’s approach should be: we want to make sure that everybody can participate in our programs.” While CKP has always had some ADA-related programming and activities in place, I’m always looking for what more we can do. One thing we can certainly do more of is talk about the ADA. So, the CKP ADA Advisory Board has designated October as “Americans with Disabilities Act Awareness Month” on the blog. Some individuals with disabilities will write about their experiences. We’ll share articles and handbooks. I’ll do an interview with Robert Carr. I’ll talk about CavanKerry’s commitment to ADA-related programs and activities. You’ll meet the members of the CKP ADA Advisory Board.

But let’s start with the basics: What is the ADA? Who does it cover? What does it cover? The ADA.gov website is chockfull of good information including this description of the ADA:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush. The ADA is one of America’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life — to enjoy employment opportunities, to purchase goods and services, and to participate in State and local government programs and services. Modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin – and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the ADA is an “equal opportunity” law for people with disabilities.

To be protected by the ADA, one must have a disability, which is defined by the ADA as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.

And what is the definition of “a disability”? Per the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended:

Sec. 12102. Definition of disability

As used in this chapter:

(1) Disability

The term “disability” means, with respect to an individual

(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual;

(B) a record of such an impairment; or

(C) being regarded as having such an impairment (as described in paragraph (3)).

(2) Major Life Activities

(A) In general

For purposes of paragraph (1), major life activities include, but are not limited to, caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.

(B) Major bodily functions

For purposes of paragraph (1), a major life activity also includes the operation of a major bodily function, including but not limited to, functions of the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder, neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, and reproductive functions.

(3) Regarded as having such an impairment

For purposes of paragraph (1)(C):

(A) An individual meets the requirement of “being regarded as having such an impairment” if the individual establishes that he or she has been subjected to an action prohibited under this chapter because of an actual or perceived physical or mental impairment whether or not the impairment limits or is perceived to limit a major life activity.

(B) Paragraph (1)(C) shall not apply to impairments that are transitory and minor. A transitory impairment is an impairment with an actual or expected duration of 6 months or less.

(4) Rules of construction regarding the definition of disability

The definition of “disability” in paragraph (1) shall be construed in accordance with the following:

(A) The definition of disability in this chapter shall be construed in favor of broad coverage of individuals under this chapter, to the maximum extent permitted by the terms of this chapter.

(B) The term “substantially limits” shall be interpreted consistently with the findings and purposes of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008.

(C) An impairment that substantially limits one major life activity need not limit other major life activities in order to be considered a disability.

(D) An impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.

(E)

(i) The determination of whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity shall be made without regard to the ameliorative effects of mitigating measures such as

(I) medication, medical supplies, equipment, or appliances, low-vision devices (which do not include ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses), prosthetics including limbs and devices, hearing aids and cochlear implants or other implantable hearing devices, mobility devices, or oxygen therapy equipment and supplies;

(II) use of assistive technology;

(III) reasonable accommodations or auxiliary aids or services; or

(IV) learned behavioral or adaptive neurological modifications.

(ii) The ameliorative effects of the mitigating measures of ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses shall be considered in determining whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity.

(iii) As used in this subparagraph

(I) the term “ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses” means lenses that are intended to fully correct visual acuity or eliminate refractive error; and

(II) the term “low-vision devices” means devices that magnify, enhance, or otherwise augment a visual image.

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Saying Yes to Poetry Out Loud from Holly Smith

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POL_png
New Jersey Poetry Out Loud turns 10 this year! During the 2014-15 school year CavanKerry will celebrate this significant anniversary by inviting New Jersey teachers and students to write about their NJPOL experiences. If we’re lucky some of them will also share their own poems.
I find it quite fitting that a piece by Holly Smith is launching this series because she was the first recipient, in 2013, of the CavanKerry Press scholarship to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching because her student, Cameron Clarke, was the state runner-up that year. Holly is a Language Arts teacher and departmental coordinator at Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School in Jersey City, NJ. She currently teaches AP Literature, Journalism, and Critical and Creative Writing.
 -Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher

Saying Yes to Poetry Out Loud
by Holly Smith

The last thing you want to say to a teacher in the first month of school is “Hey, how about you organize a whole-school, nationally affiliated, kinda-of-a-big-deal poetry program in your building.  Now.” When you’ve barely got your roll book set up, the papers are mounting into a summit that needs climbing, and you’re nursing your first cold of the year.

But I am telling you that Poetry Out Loud is the stuff we need to make time for. And that it is the best teacher-cheat in the world. Students will hand you a list of high-interest poems of literary merit to use in the classroom.

Trust your students and their voices and that the poems will speak to them.

For those of you who simply cannot add another thing this year, here’s the seed to plant:

  • Look up the State Regional Competition for your county.
  • Shoot an email to the regional coordinator  to set up getting free reserved spots for however many kids you can bring (a full house is welcome for the competition).
  • Come late Fall, pick a small but hardy group of freshmen, sophomores and juniors to take to the competition as spectators. Let them know. Show them the Poetry Out Loud website. Perhaps select one or two seniors who might be able to come back next Fall to help coach or guest judge a school competition. Pick students who show a love of drama, or are flagrant bookish types, or are just so hardworking that you know if they get lit up with excitement will follow through.
  • Then, a few days after the Regionals, have a chat with them about what they saw.

I hope that you will also find they will own it and be eager to take the next steps to bring POL to the school. You can start the program with a small handful of committed kids that have seen it in action, and “get it.” Keep it as small as the POL rules allow until the program builds the word of mouth (ha, puns). You might even find allies in your Department or school will emerge to help.

If you are already on board with the idea and ready to bring Poetry Out Loud to your school – my suggestion is to use your teacher sense of backwards planning.

The POL website can be a bit daunting with dates, rules, etc. Pull out your planner, your school calendar, fire up the browser window– now work backwards.

  • When are Nationals? (Ah, the “luxury problem “ of making it to Nationals!)
  • When are States? (Another “luxury problem.”)
  • Regionals?
  • When do you need to have your 2 school competitors reciting at Regionals locked-in with poem choice and poem order?
  • When do they need to be coached and off-book?
  • When does the school-wide competition need to happen?
  • When do classroom competitions need to happen?
  • When do we get the word out to teachers and students?
  • When can you have an informational meeting with students (planting that seed)?

Pacing and planning gives you and the competitors time to prepare. Let’s face it, we are asking them to do something so anachronistically un-teenage.  In public. Under a spotlight. We want them to have a good experience and honor their effort.

My school is entering into our second year of full-on Poetry Out Loud action. And backwards planning has saved me. Here’s what it looks like on the playback in chronological order:

  • I put Poetry Out Loud on my staff meeting agenda from the first day of school.
  • Our school is registered with NJ Arts.
  • We have selected Nov. 19 as our school-wide competition date, and it is on the school calendar. (I learned last year December is way too crowded. I got the competitors, but not the audience.)
  • On October 1, I will do an after school info session open to any interested student. This can be as simple as a walk through of the Poetry Out Loud webpage and viewing recitations on Youtube.
  • In-class competitions with participating teachers will begin in mid-October. Mine are October 20th, and I have already posted the rubrics and criteria to my class wiki.
  • Then we move from classroom to whole school. A few willing teachers will judge an audition-type preliminary on November 5 to select the 12 school-wide competitors.
  • Those competitors will have some vacation days to memorize two pieces (for most of them, is just adding one, as they did a piece in class). We will coach the 12 during the week of November 10th. I will get the 12 students excused from class early and do a dress rehearsal on the 19th for the school-level competition.
  • Once we have our winner and alternate from our school competition, we can take our time and guide the two Regional representatives through the process of selecting pieces, finding voice, and practicing recitations in December and January.
  • In January, there are submission and paperwork deadlines. Then practice until Regionals in February.

And then we breathe.

Unless we’ve made it to States. But that’s another blog entry.

And, did I mention, Poetry Out Loud is a free program?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD5GSZtfavM]

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Summer and Jack Wiler by Teresa Carson

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Jack Wiler
Jack Wiler

A few times this summer I drove past the building, in the Jersey City Heights, where Jack and Johanna were living when he died. By habit I’d glance up at the back porch of their second floor apartment. The porch proper was a small area—four people felt crowded in the space—but, at the edge of it, a rickety ladder led down to a garage roof, which was large enough to hold a canopy, a table, chairs for more than a dozen guests, and an aisle wide enough for performances by Johanna’s friends.

Jack and Johanna loved summer, loved having summer parties, parties with loud music and lots of alcohol, parties that began in the late afternoon and ended around dawn of the next day. When I glanced up, I saw Jack happily cooking bratwursts and hamburgers on his grill or refilling his fancy wine glass with the chilled, cheap vinho verde that we both liked to drink in the heat. I saw Johanna spending hours to prepare an authentic arroz con pollo or urging me to smear mayonnaise and Parmesan cheese, instead of butter, on the corn on the cob. And I saw Jack and me sitting side by side, trying to hear each other’s words, as dusk fell. One night, out of the blue, he expressed concern about not having written a poem in a few weeks then, right on the tail of his concern, came a dismissive wave of his cigar-holding hand and the statement, “But I never write in the summer.” Why? Because he was too busy enjoying, too busy “paying attention” to each and every minute of his favorite season. But you only have to read “Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer” or “Hoboken in June” or “The Love Poem Johanna Asks For” to know that in the summer when Jack wasn’t physically writing, he really was writing. In fact, he is, in some inexplicable and wonderful way, the most “still alive” in his summer poems and thus, when I read them, he comes back from the dead and, if only for a minute or two, we’re back on the porch, the stars are out, and he hands his red sweater to me because there’s a chill in the air.

Here’s my favorite “summer” poem by Jack, from his posthumous collection, Divina is Divina:

The Love Poem Johanna Asks For

She asks for a love poem.
She says it has to be done in a week.
I say, sure.
I say, I can do it easy.

Then I go to sleep and dream.
I dream all the things that people dream and then
I get up and work and work and people intrude.
I work and I come home and I eat and my love poem
fades and fades.

She doesn’t.
She is here every day.
Large and happy some days.
Small and scared on others.
The music loud, the beer cold, friends all around,
but really it’s only she and I here.

She and I and the dogs we picked.
They run through the house like my love.
On the porch are our flowers.
It’s fall now so some of them are collapsing from
a rich summer of sun.
Like sometimes Johanna and I collapse after a day at the beach.

Tired and drunk.
Happy and laughing.
Ribs on the grill, friends all around arguing over this and that.
But always on the porch all I can see is Johanna.
She fills my house.
She makes our house.

She strolls through the rooms trailing smoke and joy.
She screams bloody murder at the dogs.
She lolls at her leisure and calls me at work to say,
I’m lonely.
Me too.
I’m lonely.

All around me people are yelling and angry.
Trucks are stuck in traffic and
my coffee gets cold but I can see her on the porch
with the dogs jumping like maniacs
happy like me to come home to her.

This is our house.
The house we made.
A house we prayed for and received.

We have a porch and flowers and an office
and a bedroom and a living room and a kitchen.
Johanna works hard doing what she doesn’t want to do.
I work hard doing what I have to do.
But all the time I see her on the porch,
twirling around in the sun.
Laughing and laughing.
Spinning joy out of nothing.

So.
She asks for a love poem.
She gave me lots of rules.
She says I should talk about how we live a life most people don’t.
We do.
She says I should talk about how she feels.
I don’t.
Because all I can see is her on the porch,
dancing with our dogs,
smoke billowing around her,
flowers blazing in the beautiful sun.

Sometimes you get exactly what you want.

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From Eliot Katz: A Letter to Allen on the State of the State, May 2013

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Can you imagine having, as Eliot Katz did, the iconic Allen Ginsberg as your “generous teacher and friend” for twenty years? No wonder this poem radiates love, respect, and gratitude–not only for Ginsberg himself but also what Ginsberg stood for. Though Katz can’t, as he points out, “speak for the dead,” he can, and most certainly does, “help carry on” Ginsberg’s poetic and activist legacies.
-Associate Publisher, Teresa Carson

 

A Letter to Allen on the State of the State, May 2013
—Written for the 10th Annual Howl Festival in NYC

Ah Allen, another of your birthdays is coming and the world keeps
moving. I think it moves forward, but sometimes it can be tough
to tell—amid the zigzags and the circling back, the nuke-plant leaks
and the killer rains, the robot drones with minds of their own dropping
sloppy bombs on countries most Americans couldn’t even find
on a map. President Obama recently gave what was supposed to be
a landmark speech on changing direction of Bush’s global war on terror.
Viewers from across political spectrum seemed to inhale it like
a Rorschach smoke test, seeing what they wanted to see, and hearing
whatever they’ve been waiting all these years to hear. As a longtime
political animal, both optimist and skeptic, I heard some promising lines
that pledged narrowing the endless war, and other lines that awkwardly
attempted justify some of administration’s most chronically ill
and painful long-term schemes.

From beyond the grave, Allen, can you see whether there is an alternate
quantum universe where John McCain or Mitt Romney was elected
President? I have to believe it would be a far worse government than
this one. But President Obama, who seems like he wants to be a decent
person, appears to have lost the Constitutional Law books he once taught.
No matter how many times a U.S. president asserts that murder-by-drone
is legal under international law, I still haven’t seen the permission clause
for remote-control long-distance killing without trial written up in the
U.N. Charter or Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And after his
administration has practiced the new blood sport of Mixed Martial Arts
Mass Public & Media Spying, the president and his attorney general
are asking Congress to pass a reporter shield law, like Wall Street thieves
begging to be locked up so they can’t be tempted to rob again.

Allen, people keep asking me what you would say if you were still here
with us. My answer always the same—I don’t think it would be fair
to pretend an ability to speak for the dead, even a one-time teacher
and longtime friend, that all we can do with our major influences is try
our imperfect best to help carry on their legacies. But, Allen, if the dead
can ever communicate with the living, can you figure out a way one
of these nights to write out a few new suggestions in my night-table
notebook for moving this planet on a more just and ecological road?
I promise I’ll do my best again to read your difficult-to-read handwriting
like I did when I helped transcribe some of your great poems during
that one-month apprenticeship I took with you summer 1980 at Naropa.
It’s like with growing planetary crisis of climate change—the president
says he believes it a crucial issue, but hasn’t done anything concrete
about it yet. In his speech, President Obama noted the Guantanamo
prison has become a global symbol of an America that daily violates
the rule of law, but where was his promise to release immediately
those prisoners already cleared, many locked up over 10 years now
and hunger-striking, each day closer to death?  Where his apology for
extending Bush’s clinically insane idea of indefinite detention sans trial?

Allen, I wonder whether you would have admired the creative Code Pink
activist, Medea Benjamin, as much as I did, for being the only person
in the room willing to shout out some tough questions? The only one
willing to press the president on some of our country’s key peace and
human rights concerns? Some later called her rude, but I thought her
interruption mild considering the boiling-hot issues at stake. With continual
wars across the planet, rock-stubborn ethnic strife, un-erased hunger
and homelessness, literal and metaphorical tornados, fanatical right-wing
groups rambling across the radio dial, one would think more reporters
might be willing to sing out for a more progressive course. Allen,
when you were writing “Howl” in the mid-1950s, how long did you
imagine it might take for our country and planet to get onto a more humane
and sustainable path? Deep in your heart, did you believe things would
dramatically improve by the 21st century? Or that Moloch-like greed
and mean-spiritedness might even wipe us out long before now? So soon
after the Holocaust and in the midst of McCarthyism, where did you
find the hopefulness to stare into a wide range of human eyes and declare:
“holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul.”
Do you think, sometime during this 21st century, activists will figure
out new ways to pressure elected officials into turning at least a little
more of our soul’s extra intelligent kindness into reality?

Eliot Katz, 5/13

Additional pieces on Allen Ginsberg by Eliot Katz include:

Eliot Katz is the author of six books of poetry, including Unlocking the Exits, and Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America’s Skull, a collaboration with the artist William T. Ayton. He was a cofounder of the long-running (1982-2004) literary journal, Long Shot, and also a coeditor of Poems for the Nation, a collection of political poems compiled by the late poet, Allen Ginsberg. Katz has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes. A website with some of his poetry and prose can be found at www.poetspath.com/exhibits/eliotkatz.
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“How to Fight Off Hungers” by Teresa Carson

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At first: under table when he explodes, on windowsill when her eyes blank.
(Fold up in corner of closet at chorus of slamming doors.)
The week in bed with chicken pox: drab woolen army blanket, wrinkled sheet,
her fringed chenille coverlet, thick with her smell.
(The line-dried sheet smelling of sky.)
As lower leg blisters from spaghetti water spill:
bite lip, offer up pain to God for sins.
(Think of next week, next month, next year, when twenty-one . . .)
But then: Broadway cast albums: Funny Girl, Oliver!, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls.
(Every word, every song. As if on stage.)
Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire?
(Astaire. No, Kelly. NO, definitely Astaire.)
Nancy Drew then Tolkien then Tolstoy then Eliot then Austen then Dostoevsky.
(Always another book to eat.)

Teresa_small_photoBW From My Crooked House
By Teresa Carson

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"How to Fight Off Hungers" by Teresa Carson

By Leave a Comment

At first: under table when he explodes, on windowsill when her eyes blank.
(Fold up in corner of closet at chorus of slamming doors.)
The week in bed with chicken pox: drab woolen army blanket, wrinkled sheet,
her fringed chenille coverlet, thick with her smell.
(The line-dried sheet smelling of sky.)
As lower leg blisters from spaghetti water spill:
bite lip, offer up pain to God for sins.
(Think of next week, next month, next year, when twenty-one . . .)
But then: Broadway cast albums: Funny Girl, Oliver!, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls.
(Every word, every song. As if on stage.)
Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire?
(Astaire. No, Kelly. NO, definitely Astaire.)
Nancy Drew then Tolkien then Tolstoy then Eliot then Austen then Dostoevsky.
(Always another book to eat.)

Teresa_small_photoBW From My Crooked House
By Teresa Carson

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#aapimonth shoutout! Joseph O. Legaspi (@jfinch57) author of “Imago” and “Threshold.” Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, is the author of a previous collection, Imago (CavanKerry Press and University of Santo Tomas Press), and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary and Subways. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, jubilat, Orion, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Salt Hill. He is the cofounder of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American writers. He lives in Queens, New York, with his husband. #aapiauthors #poetry #poets #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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#aapimonth shoutout! Joseph O. Legaspi (@jfinch57) author of “Imago” and “Threshold.” Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, is the author of a previous collection, Imago (CavanKerry Press and University of Santo Tomas Press), and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary and Subways. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, jubilat, Orion, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Salt Hill. He is the cofounder of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American writers. He lives in Queens, New York, with his husband. #aapiauthors #poetry #poets #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
1 day ago
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1/9
#mentalhealthawarenessmonth and some poems to sit with before the long weekend. What poems speak to you this month? #poetry #poetryhealsthesoul #poetrycommunity #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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#mentalhealthawarenessmonth and some poems to sit with before the long weekend. What poems speak to you this month? #poetry #poetryhealsthesoul #poetrycommunity #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
6 days ago
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2/9
#aapimonth shoutouts!! @dipikamukherjeeauthor for “Dialect of Distant Harbors” available through the link in bio! 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. #poetry #poetrycommunity #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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#aapimonth shoutouts!! @dipikamukherjeeauthor for “Dialect of Distant Harbors” available through the link in bio! 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. #poetry #poetrycommunity #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
1 week ago
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3/9
Our entire Spring 2023 Collection is now available! These books invite you to delve deep into the human condition. Pick up your set today! Link in bio! #poetry #poetrycommunity #springrelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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Our entire Spring 2023 Collection is now available! These books invite you to delve deep into the human condition. Pick up your set today! Link in bio! #poetry #poetrycommunity #springrelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
2 weeks ago
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4/9
#aapiheritagemonth, we are celebrating Bhisham Bherwani’s “Second Night of the Spirit” Link in bio! 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. #publishing #readaapiauthors #poetry #nonprofit
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#aapiheritagemonth, we are celebrating Bhisham Bherwani’s “Second Night of the Spirit” Link in bio! 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. #publishing #readaapiauthors #poetry #nonprofit
2 weeks ago
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5/9
Join us as we celebrate the release of Susan Atefat-Peckham's "Deep Are These Distances Between Us" tomorrow, May 16th, 7 PM EST. Featuring these amazing poets: Darius Atefat-Peckham, Allison Joseph, and Tawanda Mulalu! Tickets are free, link in bio! #poetry #poetryreading #NewRelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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Join us as we celebrate the release of Susan Atefat-Peckham's "Deep Are These Distances Between Us" tomorrow, May 16th, 7 PM EST. Featuring these amazing poets: Darius Atefat-Peckham, Allison Joseph, and Tawanda Mulalu! Tickets are free, link in bio! #poetry #poetryreading #NewRelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
2 weeks ago
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6/9
Cling to the poetry and stories that connect with you, that help you through it all. Tell us some of your favorite poems, lines, or stories for #mentalhealthawarenessmonth. What connects with you and your experience? #poetry #mentalhealthawareness #poetryheals #healingwithwords #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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Cling to the poetry and stories that connect with you, that help you through it all. Tell us some of your favorite poems, lines, or stories for #mentalhealthawarenessmonth. What connects with you and your experience? #poetry #mentalhealthawareness #poetryheals #healingwithwords #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
3 weeks ago
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7/9
If you’re going to be at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival this weekend check out our authors at the CKP table! #poetry #poetryfestival #masspoetryfestival #poetrycommunity #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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If you’re going to be at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival this weekend check out our authors at the CKP table! #poetry #poetryfestival #masspoetryfestival #poetrycommunity #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
4 weeks ago
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8/9
Happy #pubday to “Deep Are These Distances Between Us” by Susan Atefat-Peckham! Pick up your copy of this beautiful collection through the link in our bio! #poetry #poetrycommunity #newrelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
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Happy #pubday to “Deep Are These Distances Between Us” by Susan Atefat-Peckham! Pick up your copy of this beautiful collection through the link in our bio! #poetry #poetrycommunity #newrelease #publishing #nonprofit #cavankerrypress
1 month ago
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9/9

CavanKerry Press

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Fort Lee, New Jersey 07024
Contact Us Here

Proudly Distributed by the University of Chicago Press
Proudly Distributed by The University of Chicago Press
At CavanKerry Press, we firmly believe in making fine literature available to everyone. If you need accommodations to access any of our events or readings, please email Dimitri Reyes, Marketing & Communications Director, at least two weeks in advance in order for us to ensure we have ample time to make arrangements with necessary accessibility services. Click here to review CavanKerry's complete accessibility statement.
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