Showing posts with label New Jersey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Jersey. Show all posts

Thursday, December 21, 2023

A Toast to Frank O'Hara

Lately, I've been haunted by the ghost of Frank O'Hara.

I found many references to the poet on the website and recent event invites from The Poetry Society of New York. They even sell a Frank O'Hara t-shirt.

Then, last night, I participated in an online workshop, led by New Jersey poet Michael Paul Thomas (you can find information about his future workshops... highly recommended... at his LinkedIn or by following him on Eventbrite).

Out of nowhere, Frank appeared.

Michael read from O'Hara's New York City "Lunch Poems," as he led us through writing and revision exercises. He based the discussion around how we develop a consistent practice in creative work.

"Do we always have to wait for lightning to bolt down our arm to the pen?" he asked, then answered with a description of O'Hara's practice of writing a poem a day during his lunch hours in the city. He simply described the world around him, then leveled it up with a poetic twist.

Michael urged us to write what we saw around us last night. So I did, and I've revised it a bit today.

I offer this poem to you, Frank, in Blogger's best typewriter font. I beg you to accept it.

Now, please stop haunting me.

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A Toast to Frank O'Hara on This Winter’s Solstice 

I’m sitting in a house that would otherwise be abandoned.

It’s my grandparents’ old home,

Which is still oddly filled with warmth

On this cold night in western New Jersey.

 

When I was a boy I would walk to the open field in the side yard

And gaze at the stars: the only source of light,

Save for the glow of the house and the headlights

Of a lone, lost, angry traveler bound for Pennsylvania.

Tonight, that sleepy country road is a four-lane highway.

From the upstairs bedroom window, I see spotlit car dealerships

Displaying comically large American flags across what is now Route 46.

 

The back road used to border acres of farmland.

Now, it provides access to the busy warehouses that replaced the farms,

And to the back entrance of TD Bank, whose garish green signage glows

Past the bones of the barn where Nonno used to keep chickens and a cow.

In the backyard, a cell tower looms over the ghost of a small orchard,

Which Nonna used to tend to make homemade wine.

Now, there’s a holiday-lit brewery among the back-road warehouses.

 

The hour is too late to talk to the Sun. When I look to the heavens,

Now, I am surrounded by ever-changing, earthbound constellations.

The stars have fallen from the sky,

And darkness envelops me from above.


Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Rain Won't Stop Saturday's Paterson Poetry Festival; See You There?


Rain won't dampen the conclusion of the annual Paterson Poetry Festival, scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 21.

I just heard that due to the inclement weather, the venue has been moved from the steps of Court House Plaza to International High School, at 200 Grand St. in Paterson... where there will still be vendors and food trucks and poetry from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

It's a resilient bunch, and Allen Ginsberg would be proud.

You can read more about the festival by following Word Seed Inc. on social media. It's a great organization, led by Talena Lachelle Queen, Paterson's Poet Laureate since 2018.

At last year's event, I met some wonderful people, including poet Dimitri Reyes, representing CavanKerry Press. Since January, I've been trying -- "trying" being the operative word -- to write poems following weekly prompts from him.

Dimitri is encouraging and supportive. I love the music in his poetry and his readings, and I look forward to hearing and meeting more poets on Saturday.

The past two prompts from Dimitri this October have been:

1. "Spend some time thinking about 2 poems and 1 song that you really enjoy. Read the three of them together and see what conversation they're creating. Try your hand and putting these different lines together into one poem."

2. "Read this wonderful essay by Franchesca Melendez about Sami Miranda. Listen to his poem as well. Write a poem about any of the faces illustrated by Miranda."

See my attempts below. Anyone can be a poet!

Kinda. 🙂

See you in Paterson on Saturday?


---------

Annabel Brightside Alone

From childhood’s hour,

I have never been as others were.



I never, I never

understood the destiny

calling me.


This mystery that binds me still.



The sick lullabies

I intoned, reciting the poetry of Poe

to our children.


As if I were a child too.



My all-consuming jealousy,

this demon in my view,

has taken control.


Even now, as I approach my tomb.



Eyes open, seeing the price I paid,

I covet the angels.

They remind me of you.


My darling, my life, my bride.



It started out as a kiss.

How did it end up like this?



---------




Illustration by Sami Miranda

Greetings From Budd Lake

It’s Taco Tuesday at Buccaboo’s Burritos,

where poetry isn’t for sale.


It must be prompted,

summoned from the ordinary.


It must be earned.

So I consider your face:


Your eyes closed,

allowing me to see your pain.


The fluorescent highlights in your golden hair

mocking this red October.


Your exasperated expression

trivializing my attempt at transcendence.


Forgive me, Senora.

Forgive these lunatic scribblings,


freezing time on the margins of this receipt,

conjuring your apotheosis. 

Sunday, May 14, 2023

Haiku at Sandy Hook


Emerald City.
I can see it from Jersey.
There is no wizard.


It's no secret: I love New York's skyline, and I often write haikus about the city: Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2.

The view above is an edited version of what you'd see about 20 miles away from the northernmost point of Sandy Hook Reservation in New Jersey.

In un-filtered real life, you can even pan right to see the Parachute Jump, the iconic, now-dormant ride at Coney Island:


I visited Sandy Hook last weekend with photography friends from Black Glass Gallery.

These next few days are an ideal time to visit for yourself. Sandy Hook is part of Gateway National Recreation Area. If you get there before Memorial Day, there is no entrance fee and no charge for parking. It's a wonderful place to explore, with plenty of room to avoid crowds.


As Friend ChatGPT tells me, the park is named after the Sandy Hook Peninsula, which is a narrow strip of land that extends for several miles into the Atlantic Ocean. One of the main features of the park is the Sandy Hook Lighthouse, built in 1764 and one of the oldest lighthouses in the U.S. Visitors can climb to the top for panoramic views.

Another popular attraction at Sandy Hook is Fort Hancock, is a former military base that was active from the late 1800s until the mid-20th century. Visitors can tour the old barracks, gun batteries, and other historic structures at the fort.

Still, for me, it's the view from this platform, looking about 20 miles to the north, that's the biggest highlight:


I can't help myself. Just yesterday, Google Photos randomly sent me this video compilation of the New York City skyline photos from my photo cloud -- many taken from the back of a NJ Transit bus commuting to or from work. Google randomly chose a great Tears for Fears song as a soundtrack too (and assures me it is not a copyright violation :)

I love New York, even if there is no wizard there.



Sunday, April 30, 2023

This Is the Way Poetry Month Ends


It ended with a howl!

This is a photo taken April 29, 2023, of Talena Lachelle Queen, the poet laureate of Paterson, NJ, reading Allen Ginsberg's virtually unreadable "Howl" at the Paterson Museum, where Ginsberg once read his poetry decades ago.

Although National Poetry Month has ended, "Paterson's Poets: Voices From The Silk City" will remain on exhibit there (at 2 Market St.) through June 24.


As the museum notes: "Since its founding in 1792, Paterson has been home to many poets. Still more have visited Paterson and been enthused by the beauty of the Great Falls or the ingenuity of the city's residents. This exhibit celebrates and honors the poets who were not only inspired by Paterson, but became a part of our community, whether they lived, worked or played here."

On intriguing display features "The Bulldog Poets" of School No. 4, a group founded by ESL teacher Joseph Verilla in 1994. Their motto: "No bull, just dog." According to the exhibit, poets Kamarra Fabor, Leslie Graham, Shernese Myers and La-Chaka Price drew from their experiences with crime, drugs and family struggles, and won acclaim at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996. Earlier this month at a museum event, four members of the group re-created a photo from the '90s. Thanks to Chris Fabor Muhammad of yourcreativeforce.com for letting me re-post it here:



As for me, I'm ending poetry month with another prompted poem (with the prompt as the title), a little longer than usual, although not at all inspired by "Howl." 🙂

---------

What Have You Learned from the Study of Other Languages?

 

I studied Classical Latin, taught by “Father Bone Ass”

at a Catholic university called “Our Lady of the Lake” in French.

My professor was also my dormitory’s rector

charged with the enforcement of “parietals,”

which has nothing, and everything, to do with biology.

 

His name was literally “Banas,” a common word root for “being unbearable”

in the Tagalog dialect in the Filipino language.

Not quite “unbearable,” either.

“Banas” is a mix of sweltering humidity and annoyance

specific to the Austronesian climate.

 

Father Banas had a dry sense of humor.

He of course knew his crude, banal nickname,

although “Bone Ass” is untranslatable in Tagalog.

My professor bore our boorishness with a patient smile.

He taught Catullus, a poet who is untranslatable in English.

 

Which Father Banas also, of course, knew to be true.

 

We struggled in translation.

As an inside joke, he gave our class advice from a modern poet.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko had said that translations are like women:

The more beautiful they are, the less true.

Or Russian words to that effect.

 

What I heard in English studying Classical Latin inspired a love of poetry,

the way Yevtushenko inspired a generation of young Russians

in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War.

I am not a fighter, or a lover.

I am an observer.

 

I watched as Catullus’ poems for Lesbia

sank deeper and deeper into perversity.

The poet had no Latin words for the passion he sought to express.

“Odi et amo” encapsulated a messy entanglement of obsession and desire,

of love that strains against calcification in verse.

 

Of “love” only poets can begin to untangle.

 

And then I wondered, what is “perverse”?

I was born and raised in New Jersey,

on land the Dutch stole from the Lenni Lenape

and named after the Delaware Indian word

meaning “between the mountains and the water.”

 

Once Father Banas sat at my breakfast table

when he saw I was eating alone in a campus dining hall.

He was always kind, and he knew I was homesick,

alone on the shores of St. Mary’s Lake,

missing my life between the mountains and the waters.

 

He told me he missed his brother, a missionary in Bangladesh, “The Land of Bengal.”

The Indo-Aryan suffix “Desh” derives from the Sanskrit word for “land,”

now combined with a geographical, ethnolinguistic and cultural term

referring to the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal.

We spoke of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets.

 

We conspired, “breathing together” about the refuge of art.

 

I last saw Father Banas at his funeral at the grand basilica on the shores of the lake.

A “basilica” is not a “cathedral,” but a church accorded special privileges by the pope.

It houses an “ombrellino,” a silk canopy striped in papal colors of yellow and red,

and a “tintinnabulum,” a bell atop the pole carried in procession on special occasions,

and somewhere within, a basilica also displays the crossed keys symbolic of St. Peter.

 

The funeral of Father Banas, like the future pluperfect of my own,

was not a special occasion, save for the procession of his brother priests.

I remember the reading from the Book of Wisdom:

how the souls of the departed darted about

as sparks through stubble,

 

And how we the living… every one of us, even the poets…

raised our voices in formulaic prayer,

professing the word “thy” three times during the “Our Father,”

invoking the ineffable power of intercession

that “your” does not possess in modern English.

 

This is how I learned that everything simple is complicated.

Words are translations of nuances we universalize and neuter.

Forgive me the length of this poem.

I considered all these words carefully, today,

alone at my breakfast table:

 

in homage to the hallowed life of Father Banas,

in praise of the trespasses of Catullus.


--Bob Varettoni, 4/30/23


---------


PS- The photo of Paterson behind Talena on top of this page is a sight that inspired another poem I once wrote... "Scenic Overlook."


Sunday, October 30, 2022

Poem: 'Roman Holiday'

Pietà, St Peter's Basilica

Michelangelo's Pietà, St Peter's Basilica (Creative Commons)


This month, I was able to attend two poetry festivals close to home, the Paterson Poetry Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark.

I listened to some incredible poets, including (two favorites) Rashad Wright in Paterson and Sandra Cisneros in Newark. Thank you to Talena Lachelle Queen and to the Dodge Foundation for coordinating such wonderful, life-affirming events!

In Paterson, two poets were especially kind and signed books for me: Elijah B. Pringle III and Catherine Doty.

I attended Cat's prompted workshop, where she asked us to think of details of a place we remembered vividly and also of a special hiding place. I combined the two prompts into the poem below. 

Roman Holiday 

When I was a teen,

my uncle led me up stone steps of a forbidden tower

to a parapet, with a panoramic view of St. Peter’s Square.

We were trespassing, and I was afraid of heights.

 

I told him I preferred to see the world with my feet on the ground:

Looking up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling,

Seeing my grandmother feed pigeons in the piazza,

Seeing the cool smooth marble of the Pieta inches from my eyes.

 

When I was a boy, I had seen Mary’s young face from afar,

behind bullet-proof, ceiling-to-floor plexiglass

on a dimly-lit moving sidewalk,

jostled by tourists at the World’s Fair.

 

As a teen, free from my Roman chaperones,

I was Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

I was the only person in the world viewing, in a stolen moment,

what Michelangelo had carved from a single stone.

 

In such dizzying proximity to perfection,

I understood the desire to destroy it.

 

And yet I have lived my life as an innocent man,

never seeking to avenge my younger self.

I am Zacchaeus, and this page is where I hide.

This piece of paper.

This poem.


---------




Thursday, August 25, 2022

Braided Essay*: 'Thunder Road' in 6 Scenes


Are You Scared? Are You Thinking That Maybe You Aren't That Young Anymore?


Scene 1:
The disambiguation page on Wikipedia lists 21 possible references to “Thunder Road.” But as anyone knows who grew up in New Jersey in the decade of the ’70s, there’s really only one. It’s the song recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 1975. A song without a chorus.

Scene 2:
It’s sometime after 8 p.m. on Saturday, October 9, 1976. I am standing right next to one of most unobtainable women on the Notre Dame campus. She barely knows me. We’re in Section 11, Row 7, of the Athletic & Convocation Center. I know these logistics because I still have the ticket stub in 2022, with its faded price of $6.50. More vivid is my memory of fair Rosie from Phoenix, AZ. The goosebumps and raised, wispy hairs on her bare, freckled arms almost graze my face as she raises her hands and we shout in unison, “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right.”

Scene 3:
People magazine has named the actress Julia Roberts the most beautiful woman in the world five times, beginning in 1991 and most recently in 2017.

Scene 4:
In 1972, I leaned in to kiss Bobby Jean on her coral-red lips during a game of chess in her living room in Shrewsbury, NJ, where she’s lived forever. Bobby Jean’s all right; she always fit in. In 1974, I arrived on the Notre Dame campus 725 miles to the west, having never lived outside of New Jersey. I was immature for my young age. I grew a mustache to appear older; I didn’t fit in. By 1975, Bobby Jean and I were an uncoupled sonnet, doomed to be friends. Alone in my dorm room, like a Roy Orbison lyric, I donned corded, freakishly oversized headphones to listen to “Thunder Road” again and again. Eyes closed, haunted by Shakespearean ghosts, I’d imagine driving 725 miles to the east to rescue Bobby Jean from all the losers who pretended to love her. Just like me, I realized by the end of the decade. Just like me.

Scene 5:

In 1974, Bruce Springsteen wrote “Thunder Road” at his living room piano in Long Branch, NJ. His band’s first two albums had made him a critical darling but still an acquired taste outside of rabid fans in New Jersey and pockets of Arizona. In August 1975, a stripped-down arrangement of the song opened the band’s next album, “Born to Run.” By October 1975, Bruce appeared simultaneously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines. In October 1976, he performed before 12,002 fans at the ACC on the Notre Dame campus. Soon thereafter and to this very day, when performing “Thunder Road,” he simply lets the crowd sing the lyrics beginning, “Show a little faith…”

Scene 6:
In 2022, my wife of over 35 years is scanning celebrity news on her iPad after sunset in our living room in Hackensack, NJ. In the spotlight of a table lamp, Mary is sprawled across her favorite chair, her right leg hanging over one of the armrests, like Hyman Roth in 1974’s “The Godfather: Part 2.” “Listen to this,” she laughs. “Julia Roberts was once asked which song lyric described her most accurately, and she chose my favorite line from ‘Thunder Road’: ‘You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right.’” Mary laughs. “Isn’t that the best rock and roll lyric EVER?” she asks rhetorically, then adds that Bruce could only have written “Thunder Road” when he was young, because it’s filled with so much passion and promise. I tell her I disagree, then cross the room. Our eyes meet, and I brush aside a strand of her dyed red hair to steal a kiss. “Show a little faith,” I whisper. “I think you’re more beautiful than Julia Roberts.” Then I take Mary by the hand and turn out the light, revealing an ordinary New Jersey night.

“Baby,” I say, “let’s go for a drive.”

---------

*- As I learned in the personal essay course I wrote this for last week at Project Write Now (it's a great, New Jersey-based organization, and I highly recommend their online courses), a braided essay weaves threads together into a written work that's a cohesive whole. In this case, the prompt was for one paragraph to be simply factual, and the next to be personal. Today is also the anniversary of the day "Born to Run" was released in 1975.

My previous two posts on this site (the "hermit crab" essay posing as a pharmaceutical ad and the poem about prayers) are also based on writing I did for the PWN course.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Showing a Little Faith, Friday Night in Hoboken

St. Matthew Trinity Lutheran Church, Friday night in Hoboken.

"Church buildings never pass judgment. They simply remind us of transcendence amid ordinary life."

The quote above is from my reading Friday night at the Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken.

Now that Google is sentient (and litigious), I should be careful with this post. According to a publishing agreement, I can't repost chapters of the new anthology, "New Jersey Fan Club."

But, in response to friends, I can say I greatly enjoyed reading from my photo essay, "Finding Religion in New Jersey." The people with me in the photo below are especially wonderful and talented, especially editor Kerri Sullivan. Not pictured is Hoboken's mayor, Ravi Bhalla, who was especially gracious to us all on Friday:

You should follow these accounts on Instagram!

Since the theme of my reading involved religion -- or, more accurately, faith -- it was a bit bittersweet to bring up the topic on the evening of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe vs. Wade. So many friends on social media were expressing heartfelt feelings of disillusionment with institutional religion.

With all this in mind, below is an excerpt from what I read -- about my hobby of taking photos of New Jersey churches. In the anthology, this passage is prefaced with the note that churches have "graveyards," while "cemeteries" are burial sites not on church grounds: 

Churches connect us with past generations, and nowhere more so than at a church with an adjoining graveyard. 
In New Jersey, the dead outnumber us. Over 96,000 people are buried in Totowa, where I grew up, a borough with a population of only 11,000. 
Recently I took Mom to visit Dad's gravestone there. "I'm getting tired, Bob," she said to the ground, not to me, for both our names are the same. "I want to go home." 
Everything dies, and our graveyards are haunted with memories.  
Meanwhile, their churches testify that there’s more to life than this, and they affirm our innate belief that love lasts forever.


"New Jersey Fan Club" -- which includes contributions from dozens of writers, photographers, poets and artists -- can be purchased online at Rutgers University Press and elsewhere, or in real life at local bookstores across the state.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Finding Religion in New Jersey

On Friday, June 24, I'll be reading from my chapter in the anthology, "New Jersey Fan Club," published this month by Rutgers University Press.

I'll be joined by several of the authors and editor Kerri Sullivan at Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, beginning 6 p.m. You can reserve a free ticket here, and find more information about the book here.

My chapter is a photo essay called "Finding Religion in New Jersey," and below are the photos I use to tell my story.

Stop by to say hi. Or email me at varettoni@gmail.com with any questions.