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

June 24, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Literary Art

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writers and poets of considerable reputation are often free from the burden of contest entries and reading fees, unpublished poets as well as those with short publishing histories face prohibitive and costly expenses just for the chance to get noticed. This breeds resentment and can be fatal to prospects of brilliant-yet- unpublished works of fine literature.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LaurelBooks

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

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

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

Have you noticed

how the laurel dips down

crawls along the ground

to find the sun

like any life or body

that’s known love?

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

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

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

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

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

June 12, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Poetry Explorers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The recitation is all about suspension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 22, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

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

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

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

– Kevin Carey

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

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CANCELED: Women and Work Reading with Cindy Veach and Kate Hanson Foster

March 12, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Join CavanKerry Press reader Cindy Veach with Kate Hanson Foster at the Women and Work Reading Series.

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CavanKerry Press @ AWP

March 4, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Visit our booth & authors! Exhibit Space T2260

Mark your calendars and join us for the following book signings:

Kari L. O’Driscoll – Thursday, March 5th – 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Gray Jacobik – Thursday, March 5th – 1:30pm to 3:00pm

Brent Newsom – Friday, March 6th – 2:00pm to 3:00pm

Cindy Veach – Friday, March 6th – 11:00am to 12:00pm

Sarah Bracey White – Friday, March 6th – 12:30pm to 2:30pm

Judith Sornberger – Saturday, March 7th – 11:00am to 12:00pm

Harriet Levin Millan – Saturday, March 7th – 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Gray Jacobik – Saturday, March 7th – 2:00pm to 3:30pm

Kari L. O’Driscoll and Sarah Bracey White – Saturday, March 7th – 3:30pm to 5:00pm

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Cati Porter participates in OSHER Life Lecture Series reading & discussion, UCR Extension

March 3, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Cati Porter participates in OSHER Life Lecture Series reading & discussion, UCR Extension

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Tina Kelley TedX Maplewood

February 29, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Tina is a journalist, poet, and author who received the Maplewood Literary Award in 2018. A 10-year veteran of The New York Times, and 17 year Maplewood resident, Kelley shared a staff Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for its “Portraits of Grief” feature profiles of victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001. The co-author of “Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope,” Kelley published her fourth book of poetry, “Rise Wildly,” in October.

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Cindy Veach reads at The Lily Salon

February 21, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Cindy Veach reads at The Lily Salon

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Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanities

February 1, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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

January 28, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Register through Eventbrite

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/midday-arts-series-readings-by-andrew-mossin-and-harriet-levin-tickets-85245219747

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.

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Cati Porter reads at the Tuesday Literary Series at the Janet Goeske Center

January 14, 2020 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Cati Porter reads at the Tuesday Literary Series at the Janet Goeske Center

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Pen + Brush Presents Joan Cusack Handler, Ali, Raffel

December 4, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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.

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Cati Porter reads at The Friends of the Murrieta Library

November 19, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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.

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George Kalogeris, Crystal Williams, and Margo Taft Stever at Chapter & Verse Series

November 8, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Margo Taft Stever reading with George Kalogeris and Crystal Williams at the Chapter & Verse Reading Series.

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Joan Cusack Handler Interview | CKP Board Meeting 2019

October 31, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes 1 Comment

CavanKerry Press' Annual Board Retreat was a Great Success!

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

The Future Looks Bright for CavanKerry Press!

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

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

Danny Shot and Tina Kelley Reads at The Newark Arts Festival

October 12, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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!

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CavanKerry Press @ Newark Arts Festival Grand Opening & Street Fair

October 10, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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.

RSVP

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

October 7, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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

Can’t view the video on YouTube?

Click here, to watch the video on their website!

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Cati Porter at Mind & Mill Poetry Night

October 3, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

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!

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

October 1, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

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

Listen to a Poem from His Collection

About the Book

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

About Robert Cording

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

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The Birth of a Press Part 4: Building Our Image

September 18, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Our Logo

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

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

Not for Profit

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

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

Our Board of Directors

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

Fundraising

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Rest of “Birth of a Press”

Buy Our Last Collection of 2019!

Shop CavanKerry Titles

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Sarah Sousa at Stockbridge Coffee and Tea

September 12, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Sarah Sousa reads at Stockbridge Coffee and Tea, 6 Elm Street, Stockbridge, MA

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Without My Asking – Pre-Order Now!

September 7, 2019 By Dimitri Reyes Leave a Comment

Publication Date: October 2019

Save money by pre-ordering today!

About Robert Cording

About the Book

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

August 1, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 3: Strokes of Good Fortune

Hallelujah!

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

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

Our Press Needed a Name

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

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

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

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

It Was a Miracle of Sorts

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

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

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

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

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

Our Name

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

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

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CavanKerry Press Authors Around the Internet!

July 22, 2019 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review for Sweet World– Maureen Seaton- Rhino Poetry

6 Poems- Shira Dentz- Big Other

Cati Porter- The Body at a Loss

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

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

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

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

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

April 4, 2019 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

Part 2: Start Your Own Press

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

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

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

I continued to talk. I continued to dream.

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

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

The Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

January 2, 2019 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

Part 1: No Room at The Inn

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

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

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

Except through contests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Harriet Levin elaborates…

December 18, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

My Water Bottle
Croix de Bouquet, Haiti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary:

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

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

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

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

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Jeanne Marie Beaumont reads “Yet”

November 6, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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January Gill O’Neil elaborates…

October 15, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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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Find a Disability Mentoring Day Near You

October 15, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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Harriet Levin elaborates…

September 4, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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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My Oceanography

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January Gill O’Neil elaborates…

September 4, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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

September 4, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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

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

An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems

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Amy Guzman on The Frost Place Scholarship

August 14, 2018 By CavanKerry Press Leave a Comment

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!

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January Gill O’Neil elaborates…

July 19, 2018 By CavanKerry Press 1 Comment

HOODIE

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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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