Cati Porter participates in OSHER Life Lecture Series reading & discussion, UCR Extension
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanities
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanitiesporter
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of HumanitiesCati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of HumanitiesportporterCati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanitiesporter
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Temple University Library Midday Arts Series: Readings by Andrew Mossin and Harriet Levin
Register through Eventbrite
Presented in collaboration with the Intellectual Heritage program
Programs offered by Temple University Libraries are accessible to people with disabilities. Please contact Richie Holland, Director of Library Administration, at richieh@temple.edu or 215-204-3455 for more information, to request an accommodation, or with questions/concerns.
Cati Porter reads at the Tuesday Literary Series at the Janet Goeske Center
Pen + Brush Presents Joan Cusack Handler, Ali, Raffel
Pen and Brush Presents… is a reading series founded by Kate Angus and hosted by Pen and Brush. The series supports the work small press editors do in identifying excellent writing, as well as supporting the writing itself, by featuring exciting new work by established and emerging authors. Each month, “Pen and Brush Presents…” features readings by three writers, each one selected by editors at a press, journal, or organization with a strong female editorial presence.
Join us in December to hear from:
Joan Cusack Handler, reading on behalf of CavanKerry Press. Joan, the founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press, is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. She has four published collections: three poetry–GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. A Bronx native who lives now in Brooklyn, NY and East Hampton, NY, Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.
Ashna Ali, reading on behalf of Bone Bouquet. Ashna is a Brooklyn-based poet, researcher, and educator. Their poetry has appeared in Bone Bouquet, HeART Online, femmescapes, and The Felt, and they have academic work published or forthcoming in Gender Sexuality Italia, Global South, Journal of Narrative Theory, and MAI Feminism and Visual Culture. They are a doctoral candidate of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and they teach Literature at Queens College and Food and Film at The New School.
Dawn Raffel, reading on behalf Dzanc Books. Dawn’s most recent book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, was chosen as one of NPR’s best books of 2018 and awarded a 2019 Christopher Award for books that affirm the highest values of the human spirit. Previous books include a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects; a novel, Carrying the Body; and two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division. Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor for seven years, and subsequently held senior-level “at-large” positions at More magazine and Reader’s Digest. In addition, she served as editor of The Literarian, the literary journal of the Center for Fiction in New York. She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations. She has taught at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Tblisi, Montreal), and continues to lead creative writing workshops, some of which incorporate yoga and yoga nidra.
RSVPs to <rsvp@penandbrush.org> are welcome but not required.
Cati Porter reads at The Friends of the Murrieta Library
Cati Porter is a poet, editor, essayist, arts administrator, wife, mother, daughter, friend.
She is the author of eight books and chapbooks, most recently, “My Skies of Small Horses” and “The Body at a Loss.”
She is founder and editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, established in 2005. She lives in Riverside, California, with her family where she directs the Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.
George Kalogeris, Crystal Williams, and Margo Taft Stever at Chapter & Verse Series
Joan Cusack Handler Interview | CKP Board Meeting 2019
Danny Shot and Tina Kelley Reads at The Newark Arts Festival
Curated by: Dimitri Reyes
Featured Artist(s): Tina Kelley, Danny Shot, paulA neves, Dimitri Reyes
Poet #1 will begin by reading a poem, where poet #2 will have to recite a poem based on one of the themes from Poet #1. Poet #3 will have to recite a poem based on a theme from poet #2 and so on.
Audience participation will also be encouraged!
CavanKerry Press @ Newark Arts Festival Grand Opening & Street Fair
See CavanKerry Press vending at the Newark Arts Festival!
Join us for opening night of NEWARK ARTS FESTIVAL 2019!
Thursday, October 10th, 4PM – 8PM
1180 Raymond Boulevard, Newark 07102
There is rain in the forecast which means no street fair! But do come by the Headquarters for our Official Grand Opening and Ribbon-Cutting!
Enjoy:
Groovy music
Snap some pics
Pick up your map
Visit the food trucks
Afro Taco Food Truck
Mayor Ras J. Baraka
and
Steve Lovell! and more!
Then head out to all the galleries, pop-ups and events around town!
For more information and a complete listing of Newark Arts Festival events, please visit newarkartsfestival.com.
CavanKerry Press Chosen as a Top 5 Literary Organization that Promotes Community by ezvid
Cati Porter at Mind & Mill Poetry Night
Practice your finger snaps! We are excited to work with RivCo Rocks on a County wide poetry night during Riverside Arts Walk on October 3rd. We are assembling an incredible lineup of poets to perform spoken word and share about poetry events and groups in every region of the County. We will close the night with a special performance by Hunter Lavender. Stay tuned for more details!
Robert Cording’s new book, Without My Asking, is Here!
The Birth of a Press, Part 4: Building Our Image
Sarah Sousa at Stockbridge Coffee and Tea
Without My Asking – Pre-Order Now!
The Birth of a Press, Part 3: “Strokes of Fortune”
CavanKerry Press Authors Around the Internet!
The Birth of a Press, Part 2: “Starting Your Own Press; The Challenge”
The Birth of a Press, Part 1: “No Room at the Inn”
Harriet Levin elaborates…
My Water Bottle
Croix de Bouquet, Haiti
The real thing he pulled was greater than the water bottle
turned toy—bottle cap wheels attached to a string—
as it followed behind him across the cracked cement.
In it had been rivers and rain. The strong force of a waterfall.
A stream winding through certain bodies. Another child came running out
the door asking to play with it. I watched the string exchange hands,
loop a finger as the children outran it and their creation rolled,
wobbled, tipped forward on its neck.
The speckled wings fluttered and rose, even as I hid somewhere
in my childhood basement, my mother shouting from the kitchen
to pick up all my toys scattered from their boxes,
toys I held in the darkness of night, clutched close in whispers.
The child without any stood beside me, followed me around,
stayed near, waited until my last sip and my bottle was empty.
He tapped it lightly and my heart burst. It took time
for me to understand. What did I not offer?
The water bottle my fingers gripped in heat so extreme
each knuckle swelled, my breath grew slow, my head pounded,
walking was difficult, thinking, how far can I make it
with nothing to pull along? I’ve nothing,
nothing behind me. No bottle turned toy,
no container empty enough to transform
into a caterpillar’s sixteen bouncing legs,
waiting to grow the wings to support it in air.
In a matter of moments, I could shed my old skin,
pupating my greediness over what I did not offer,
though the boy did not consider me greedy. He waited
so patiently for me to hold the bottle to my lips
and drink the very last drop, having waited under rubble,
himself a survivor, overwintering in ash.
He sat next to me on the cracked cement steps,
leading to the collapsed second floor.
Water could not sustain him. He required nectar
sweet between leaves. It was all over the news.
The water was contaminated. Peacekeepers defecated in water,
bringing cholera to the Artibonite River.
The world’s carelessness now set afloat.
I know. I was ready to discard my bottle,
set it on its journey of decomposition,
strip it of its corporeal form. My bottle,
held in the hands of so many people who will never
drink from it, those who delivered it from earth,
mined it, heated it, spun it a long while to become the axis
on which the day moves, wholly imaginary.
A boy waiting with a string in his hand.
Commentary:
Apart from the 2010 Haiti earthquake which caused an unprecedented natural disaster, the population suffered a man-made disaster when waste from a UN base leaked into the rivers and introduced a cholera epidemic. When I wrote “My Water Bottle” I wanted to depict the resilience of the people I’d met in Haiti. While Haiti is a victim of poverty and corruption, (according to a July 17, 2018 Miami Herald article, 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), it is a place of beauty where everyday people engage in great acts of courage.
Since 2013, I’ve been traveling to Haiti as the leader of a Drexel University creative writing study abroad trip. On the trip we attend workshops at PEN Haiti and meet with renown Haitian writers, poets, artists and musician activists whose life and work cannot avoid representing change. Haitian literature has been compared to Russian literature before the Revolution, because it is that gorgeous, that rich, that filled with foment and despair. One great example is Marie Vieux Chauvet’s masterpiece Love Anger Madness. The early pages depict one of the main characters touching herself in her bed while she hears through her open window the screams of political prisoners who are being tortured in the nearby jail. These two actions are juxtaposed in a way that is uniquely Haitian and characterizes much of Haitian life and consequently its literature. Forrest Gander’s words in his new book, Be With, “the political begins in intimacy,” resonate here.
Besides meeting Haitian artists, our study abroad group fundraises for Love Orphanage, where we engage with the children for days at a time. Love Orphanage’s director Gabriel Fedelus is a father to eighteen children who were orphaned after the earthquake. Unlike the US, Haiti’s governmental agencies do not fund its orphanages. All assistance is received from overseas. The children lack basic needs such as soap and toothpaste not to mention medicine and meat. Needless to say, the children don’t own toys or games. Every penny that the orphanage receives goes toward sustaining the children’s basic needs. I was particularly awakened to this fact when I returned to the orphanage the following morning after one of the children, a six-year-old boy named Olson, asked me for my water bottle, to see he had constructed a pull-toy out of it. I could not help comparing his childhood to mine with its many toys. Are toys a kind of armor or shield against the imagination or do they give root to imaginative impulses? I think of Rilke’s idea of how necessary it is to be bored for the real imagination to grow.
Love Orphanage accepts donations at http://www.loveorphanage.org
No donation is too small.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont reads “Yet”
January Gill O’Neil elaborates…
THE CATHEDRAL
—After Rodin’s The Cathedral
I watch my daughter imitate
the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.
Her arms curved in slow gyration.
It is her way of understating
the dark bronze, how two arms
can captivate the imagination
in their dizzying swirl,
find balance between
light and shadows. In truth,
the hands are both right hands
turning in on themselves, an architecture
almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective
of the space within, of what the
bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends
uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if
her whole body is questioning
what it means to be a girl.
She sees—maybe
for the first time—what is there
and what is not from the hollow
her hands make, all the empty angles
that never touch,
the almost-grasp of the intimate.
Her wrists slight and glistening
with summer’s patina,
her fingertips conjure her being
and becoming,
body and soul
closing and opening
at the same time.
A few years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted an expansive exhibit of sculptor Auguste Rodin. My daughter and I fell in love with his sculpture, The Cathedral. We were enthralled. And while she moved on, there was something intimate about two hands almost-grasping. It seemed to be the perfect metaphor for us as she enters her teenage years and we enter a new phase of our relationship.
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Harriet Levin elaborates…
My Oceanography
A strand of algae leaves its rubbery
translucent swatch on my skin. My first impulse
is to peel it off lest a horror
movie version of contagion unfold
and my skin turn zombie green—telltale alien,
more slime than flesh, attracting gnats, pinhead skitters
moving so rapidly all is flux.
My second impulse is to keep it as a totem
of subterranean life, a scrap chiseled
from things that are meant to sink. Deep is form,
like a snail that burrows into silt, shell
growing out of sludgy cravings.
A life-in-death feel. The croaks frogs make
drowning in natural desire. Believe me,
diving into this mosh pit, I do not
float softly through water.
Pond life is too shallow. No flotsam or jetsam,
sneakers, ice-hockey gloves, Chinese message
in a bottle. Even the dam’s stopped up,
no bigger than an oversized sink filled
nightly with dishes. No reputable
oceanographer will chart its depth—
another thing I’ll never know
about myself. Territorial and fiercely defensive,
rock bottom will not be reached.
To be essential something must be both deep
and wide. Eyes with skies in them. Upswept
lashes and brows. A western monsoon.
Dreams that stretch over many nights to mimic
the feel of sea-foam on ankles,
down to the cellular properties of summer.
Eva Hesse escaped Nazi Germany as a five-year-old, separated from her parents and placed on the kindertransport to London. They eventually reunited and immigrated to the US. Although “My Oceanography” is rooted in my experience, the inspiration for this poem is certainly my preoccupation with Hesse. Alienation, fragmentation and absurdity are recurrent themes in her work.
Similar to so many people, I suffer from not feeling like I belong anywhere—a combination of of my particular background and psyche and the general human experience. Although I did not set out to write this poem in a way that would capture Hesse’s immigrant experience, (one to which I can find connections as the granddaughter of refugees and immigrants who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe), once I assembled the book I began to see how the poems are saturated with this history. For me, writing is a largely subconscious, intuitive process. I immerse myself in a project, often for years, (this time, in Hesse) and it entirely takes over my being. You could say it’s like method acting! I’m hard to be around because it’s all I can talk about.
The neuropsychologist Alice Flaherty discusses creativity in terms of irrepressibility in her book The Midnight Disease. She says that writers often experience extreme feelings of empathy when they think that everything relates to their project, so much so that they might believe that the universe is bestowing upon them gifts or signs. She gives the example of a flock of geese flying up after she lost twin daughters and how she believed the geese were a sign for her to finish writing her book instead of giving herself over to her grief. An irrefutable network of coincidence and connection guides me through all my projects. In fact, I would say that the mania of feeling like everything I say or do is forwarding a particular work, brings it into existence. I often walk around the ponds where “My Oceanography” is set, but on this particular day a strand of algae stuck to my skin.
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January Gill O’Neil elaborates…
SUNDAY
You are the start of the week
or the end of it, and according
to The Beatles you creep in
like a nun. You’re the second
full day the kids have been
away with their father, the second
full day of an empty house.
Sunday, I’ve missed you. I’ve been
sitting in the backyard with a glass
of Pinot waiting for your arrival.
Did you know the first sweet 100s
are turning red in the garden,
but the lettuce has grown
too bitter to eat. I am looking
up at the bluest sky I have ever seen,
cerulean blue, a heaven sky
no one would believe I was under.
You are my witness. No day
is promised. You are absolution.
You are my unwritten to-do list,
my dishes in the sink, my brownie
breakfast, my braless day.
Sunday
Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned, so it’s important to stop and breathe. No day is promised. We must appreciate the small moments—even when the kids are away, even when I am alone. It is in my moments of melancholy that I find gratitude.
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Sam Cornish Poetry Tribute
JACKIE ROBINSON
the uniform and ball
are white but Jackie is
New Jersey
Harlem separate drinking fountains
empty seats
at the back
of a southern bus
my world is on fire
my world is Sunday
and someday
Jackie in his uniform
White enough to be America
but now Jackie shines
like Louis Armstrong
like a preacher
in the church
he’s the rock
the hidin’ place
the uniform and the ball
and Jackie Robinson Negro
EBONY
My father labored
in the mine his
hands blacker than
his face
face as black
as
coal his hands
darkest
coal dust
my mother
a fair skinned
woman former
schoolteacher
worked at home
read the Bible
and prayed &
I became
a Communist
Amy Guzman on The Frost Place Scholarship
For five days in late June, I trekked to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to attend The Frost Place’s Seminar on Teaching and Poetry, thanks to the generous scholarship provided by CavanKerry Press. It has been one of the best professional development experiences I have ever attended. Not only did I learn new methods for engaging students with poetry, but I also met with like-minded teachers who truly embody the heart and soul of teaching and learning. Both Dawn and Kerrin nurtured a supportive learning environment and encouraged us to continue to use poetry in our classrooms and in our own writing practice. The guest poets and teachers Diana and Joaquin inspired us with their philosophy and methods on teaching and showed the compatibility between developing our own work and developing our students’ work. Overall, my time spent at The Frost Place rekindled my creative spirit and my commitment to showing students how poetry can enrich our lives. Thanks again Frost Place and CavanKerry!
January Gill O’Neil elaborates…
HOODIE
Rewilding
A gray hoodie will not protect my son
from rain, from the New England cold.
I see the partial eclipse of his face
as his head sinks into the half-dark
and shades his eyes. Even in our
quiet suburb with its unlocked doors,
I fear for his safety—the darkest child
on our street in the empire of blocks.
Sometimes I don’t know who he is anymore
traveling the back roads between boy and man.
He strides a deep stride, pounds a basketball
into wet pavement. Will he take his shot
or is he waiting for the open-mouthed
orange rim to take a chance on him? I sing
his name to the night, ask for safe passage
from this borrowed body into the next
and wonder who could mistake him
for anything but good.
Hoodie
When I wrote this poem, I was thinking of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin. My son is at the age where he must be responsible for his own safety. We’ve had “the talk” quite a bit. The world is changing rapidly. Our preconceived notions of civility are being challenged daily. This poem is mother’s wish for “safe passage” as her son moves between worlds.
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Ringaround Arosie (after the sculpture by Eva Hesse) – Harriet Levin
This poem and many others were triggered by the exhibition “Eva Hesse Sculpture,” May 12-September 17, 2006, The Jewish Museum, New York. “Ringaround Arosie” “Ishtar,” “Hang-Up,” “Chain Polymers” “Ink Wash on Cardboard” “Just Before” “Contingent” “Laocoon” “Up the Down Road” “Eighter from Decatur” and “Oomamabooma” are titles of works by Eva Hesse. Some of the poems describe objects in Hesse’s work and others imagine Hesse’s life experiences—particularly her marriage at a young age to another artist and their early divorce, as againt the background of her historical experience. These poems are to quote Berryman, “essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me)…who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about (herself) in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second.” Lucy Lippard’s Eva Hesse, Da Capo Press, 1992, provided useful information along the way. Lastly, this book is in memory of sculptor Brian Wagner who first introduced me to the work of Eva Hesse and lent me all his Eva books that I never had the chance to return.
Ringaround Arosie
You targeted me and forced my extinction,
drew circles around the parts of my body
where you dared to aim: my neck, my wrists,
my breasts. How could I escape your asteroid
come hurtling? Too much of my history
is etched in stone. Like lichen or mica,
you subsumed even my shadow
and sealed over the crevices
where I roamed. You drove long stretches of highway
and read my desires in strip mining,
my sins exposed, determining
where to dig into the sediment’s
repository of old arguments.
Jaw hardened, fist banging down,
you did not say wait or anything else
that broke into words of love,
because you wanted to render
a bee’s hover and extract my DNA,
your artist’s eye trained on the darkest nights,
nothing but a chisel to pick away,
standing on top of that airless promontory,
bending over the rift to find a trace.
Measure my primitive atmosphere.
Preserve my dusky voice under glass.
– Harriet Levin
HAPPY BIRTHDAY & THANKS, WALT!
A few years ago, I was privileged to read at the Something Old, Something New (Jersey) 350th birthday celebration at the Hoboken Historical Museum. Curated by CavanKerry poets, Teresa Carson and Danny Shot, the program included several contemporary poets reading the work of one of New Jersey’s great poetry masters—William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg to name a few.
I was delighted to be assigned Whitman. He’s my personal Great. I’m hard pressed to say what I love more about him—his wildly generous soul or his wildly generous poems. It’s often said that Whitman’s greatest gift to us is his creation of a grand mythical figure whose voice he sings. Loudly and openly. He is Everyman. He is every cell in every body. He is the God Man—and he challenges us to the same.
When I think of all we have inherited from him—and the list is long, the most important to me as a poet and person, is that he gives us permission. Permission as writers, permissions as people. To glory in who we are. Unadulterated, unmasked, unadorned. And we revel in this counsel. As writers we want to be creative, honest, imaginative and original, but we have barriers to that freedom. We also want to attract readers and praise; we want to be good poets, but we’re often held back by what we perceive of as the unseemliness of our experience, our feelings and our motives. We think we have to turn away from who we are in order to create selves that are worthy of this elevated art. Regrettably, we believe poetry is holier than we are, so we must make ourselves worthy to write it.
Whitman debunks that. Poetry is not better than him; it is him. It is his bowels, his brain, his bicycle, his Brooklyn Bridge, his lilacs, wounded soldiers, lovers, trees. Not that he wasn’t as greedy for recognition as the rest of us, but he refuses to relinquish originality –by writing ‘inside’ the lines –to get it. Likewise, he doesn’t aspire to be worthy. He is worthy. While we often think of humility as a desirable trait in the person or poet, Whitman is anything but. Yes, he was vulnerable and often vacillated between approval and rejection of his more successful contemporaries (Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow…) and wanted at least to be counted among them–if not seen as their superior–but he was also steadfast in his commitment to his universe and subject matter–the whole world of what it is to be human. The whole world of what it was to be Whitman.
He takes on sex, heterosexual and homosexual, and writes proudly and abundantly of its pleasures capturing them in the most exquisite language and line. He elaborates on the wildly feral magic of love and wrote generously of it. He glories in the organs of the body as much as the lilies of the field. For him, there is no subject that isn’t appropriate fodder for poetry. In terms of craft, he blows out the more traditional poetry line, stretching it to the end of the page and then some—one wonders how far he’d have carried it if he were not bound by something as trite as paper size. He refuses to allow himself or his readers to take a back seat to life—he’s audacious, grandiose, honest, narcissistic, courageous, hedonistic, spiritual and compassionate without apology; in fact, he glories in his greatness—the greatness we all share as humans. He calls on us to be courageous—to break out of convention, to give ourselves over to our imaginations and our bodies –both so ready to create for us provided we keep dogma and judgment away. As did he. Having known him, my poems have never been the same—the nuns would definitely disapprove. Whitman is our mentor, our Everyman Poet challenging us to strip naked each time we sit down to write —be as big as we are, as raw as we are and can be. I happily bow to his wisdom.
Wherever you are, Walt, I trust you’re having one hilarious, outrageous, glorious day! Happy Birthday, Dear Friend, thanks for all the gifts.
Sarah Sousa elaborates…
You Are Not Grass
The last wild passenger pigeon was named
Buttons because the mother of the boy who shot it,
stuffed the bird and sewed black buttons for eyes.
People with Ekbom Syndrome imagine
they’re infested with mites.
It’s possible the entire Buttons [Read more…]
Invitation to Walt – for Occupy Wall Street – Danny Shot
From Camden come, rise from the dust
fly to Zuccotti Park with your shaggy beard
and your old school hat come see what’s happened
to your home and your beloved democracy.
Let’s grab a beer or eight at McSorley’s
your old haunt, where 19th-century dirt clings
to chandeliers, let’s reminisce and plan
our trek through New York’s teeming streets
before we saunter to the Bowery or the Nuyorican
where exclaimers and exhorters still sling verse
of hope and despair to hungry crowds who
still believe in the power of the word.
We need your sweeping vision, Walt,
to offer our children more than low expectations
of life sat in front of screens or held in gadgets
that promise expression, but offer convention.
Let us not see America through rose-colored
blinders, but as it is, an unfinished kaleidoscopic
cacophony created by imperfect human hands,
beautiful in complexion, ghastly in reflection.
This new century has been cruel and unusual,
the ideology of greed consuming itself in a spasm
of defeat engineered by merchants of fear
and postmillennial prophets of doom.
We need to recognize healthcare
and education as basic human rights,
we need to restore the dignity of work
as well as the dignity of leisure from work.
We need to get off our flabby asses
to dance as if nobody is watching, to howl
to stir shit up, to worry the rich
with a real threat of class warfare.
We need to take back our democracy, from the masters of Wall Street,
banks too big to fail, insurance deniers, education profiteers,
from closet racists, and self-appointed homophobes,
the unholy trinity of greed, corruption, and cruelty.
Walt, give me the courage to not be scared
to offend, to tell the truth which is:
most Republicans are heartless bastards
more willing to sink our elected head of state
to protect the interests of the moneyed
than do what’s right for the greater good.
They are the party that has impeded progress
and sucked the joy out of any forward movement
for all my 54 years and they’ve only gotten more sour,
they scare me with their fascist posturing
while most Democrats are frightened
as usual to betray the welfare of the rich
(Historians of the future will laugh at us).
Yet, we’ve come so far in so many ways,
call it evolutionary progress if you will
though there’s so much work left undone.
We need a revolutionary spirit to unfold.
It’s time for us to dream big again
of democratic vistas and barbaric yawps
of space travel and scientific discovery
where we protect our glorious habitat
and build structures worthy of our dreams.
Imagine America based on empathy and equality
where we lend a hand to those in need
unembarrassed to embrace our ideals.
Walt, we’re here, citizen poets for change
across the United States and we believe,
we believe, call us dreamers, call us fools,
call us the dispossessed, your children lost,
our hopes on hold, left no choice but to stand
our backs against the corporate wall
ready to fight for what we’re owed,
for what we’ve worked, promises bought and sold.
Let your spirit rise, old Walt Whitman
take us with you to another place and time
remind us what is good about ourselves
basic decency that’s been forgotten
May your words guide our daydreams of deliverance
let the hijacked past tumble away
let the dismal present state be but a blip
may the undecided future begin today
let us become undisguised and naked
let us walk the open road . . .
Fore more of Danny’s fabulous work…
Hardwoods – Cory Crouser
Hardwoods
On the east side
Of the clearing
At the ox-bow
On the Sandy
There’s a fir tree
Growing up from
What remains of
An old maple
(The evergreen
Deeply rooted
In the flesh of
That toppled thing).
Take this on faith,
You’d bleed for proof —
A bramble wreath
Obscures the seam.
Those trees with leaves,
All the hardwoods
Nestled amongst
The conifers
Of this valley,
Those we watch turn
And drop their limbs
And sometimes fall,
Those we consult
And lie below
For perspective
On self and time,
Those with soft skins
For us to score
With our titles
So we might see
Ourselves erased,
So we might learn
Our lives amount
To only scars
Slowly fading,
So we might guess
Eternity
By complement,
And salvation,
So we might know
Liberation,
Those trees with leaves,
All the hardwoods
Nestled amongst
The conifers
Of this valley:
Those trees wear crowns.
Louisa May Alcott Visits Mr. Emerson – Judith Sornberger
I imagine you on a May morning
breezing into his study, breathless
from your sprint across the fields.
The great man of letters—your father’s friend,
your friend—neither sighs nor hesitates
as he sets his quill pen on its stand,
pushes back his rocker from the writing table.
Abandoning his Remarkable Men,
his craggy features soften into a field of wildflowers–
smile bright and humble as homely coltsfoot,
eyes fond as the forget-me-nots you tie
in bundles, leave beside his door.
He never mentions these bouquets.
That would wilt the tender green between you.
Rather, he escorts you round his library,
introducing you to his dear friends–
Shakespeare, Carlyle, Wordsworth–
guiding you to Goethe’s Correspondence
with a Child, penned by a woman.
I loved him, too, at fifteen when I met him
on the page—fell for his elegance
of word and syntax, his way of gently
courting my understanding. I dreamed
of his seeing some spark of genius in me
invisible to boys I slow-danced with
at sock hops, their scratchy cheeks smelling
of sweat and Clearasil, their sloppy kisses
recorded in small poems in my journal.
Now I watch you leave his study,
the borrowed correspondence in your hand.
You pause to press the book’s skin to your face,
then read your way home to your own
white desk, your pen, your pages.
For more of Judith’s work: https://cavankerrypress.org/product/practicing-the-world/
Whitman Sings Camden Now – Tina Kelley
Among the women in tank tops, backs arched, slow pacing,
Among the young men riding small wobbling bikes against traffic,
Among the rows of row homes, standing like beggars waiting for money,
Waiting furiously while they fall into gravity,
There must be some comfort.
A cat on the house-dressed lap of the woman at the window, purring,
A child born clean who can live on the milk of her mother,
on donated diapers, and sleep on the bed pushed to the wall.
But little comfort compared to what could be,
Compared to what is, six miles down Admiral Wilson Boulevard,
Where children learn Latin and spurt when their talent’s seen,
Where they play and fall asleep in quiet rooms lined with books,
Where they learn in book-filled rooms, not falling asleep,
Where they are never quoted in the paper as wanting to be
a doctor or lawyer when they grow up,
Because that’s not impossible, not surprising, not poignant.
On a street where half the houses are empty skulls,
The girls don’t see doctors until they are mothers,
And babies lick lead when they taste their fingers
or play in the dirt of the lot next door.
I sing the schools of Camden,
Where the pages of the books are softened and browned,
Where the facts in the books are no longer true,
Where the maps are the waterspots high on the ceiling,
Where the teachers are afraid, live elsewhere, leave early.
I sing the children who outnumber this city
Because they are the quickest, cheapest form of hope.
I sing the songs they might have written
if they’d been born one town over.
And on the Boulevard, I sing
More than billboards of girls with eyepatches
promising to dance on couches,
More than women at bus stops, where they can’t be arrested,
Waiting for men to use their tight-dressed curves,
More than men who walk the bridge from Philly,
without gloves or socks, in search of warm meals.
I sing day care, a movie theater and no discount liquor,
A supermarket, a bank that lends, no go-go,
And a fence down the median, so five more each year
Can live instead of dying for the cheaper sixpack.
For more of Tina’s work: https://cavankerrypress.org/product/abloom-awry/