Greetings From the Paterson Poetry Festival

Last year at the festival. Great Falls Park was closed this year, due to the government shutdown, so yesterday's "Words Around the World" event was held indoors.

Yesterday, I checked off a literary bucket list item: I read at the Paterson Poetry Festival. The event was "Words Around the World," hosted by Yves-Mary Fontin, a board member of Wordseed, the local organization that organizes the festival.

Yves-Mary Fontin setting up the event's livestream.
Thank you, Radio Tele Xfm, for the screen cap below.

Normally, Words Around the World is held on stage in front of the Paterson Great Falls, a site I love to visit. But, with the shutdown of the federal government, the national historic park was closed, and the event was moved indoors to another site I love to visit, the nearby Paterson Museum.

Yesterday's event -- there's an entire month of October festival activities posted online -- celebrated diverse voices in several languages. This included, among many others, incredibly talented Wordseed poets. You can find them in the bio section of the organization's site, including Paterson's poet laureate, Talena Lachelle Queen.

I gave it my best shot with three poems set in New Jersey, where I've lived my whole life except for a few years in Manhattan and South Bend, Ind. I wore a rugby shirt from McGovern's Tavern in Newark (another favorite site!). The front features the immortal words of humorist Jean Shepherd, "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash," and the back features the Notre Dame Fighting Irish leprechaun.

The poems I read yesterday are set in Paterson, my hometown of New Milford, and the Pine Barrens. Two are updated from previous posts here because I always seem to tinker with my poems to try to keep them alive:

Scenic Overlook at Garret Mountain

This is a dangerous place to stand:

Cliffside in Paterson,

In the descending dusk.

 

In the view past the highway at my feet,

In the horizon of the New York skyline,

I behold a dizzying sight:

 

I see a housefly alight on your thigh.

It's 40 years ago, yet I can clearly see you

Languidly napping in our old bedroom

 

In a high-rise apartment miles away,

Through a window of space and time,

So many years since you left my side.

 

The housefly rubs its hands, obsessed,

Plotting its next move,

Until shooed in a flash

 

By a dismissive twitch of your flesh.

Decades disappear, just as fast,

As cars on Route 80 flee to the west.

 

Like a Dutch sailor, I face to the east.

Blinding, orgastic city lights hide ghosts

That whisper among the vanished trees.

 

I catch my breath on this precipice,

Its wounds, like mine,

Dark and deep.

 

40 years later,

Cliffside in Paterson,

I still watch you while you sleep.

 

---------

 

Things to Do When You’re Invisible

I nurse a shaved ice in a booth at Kailani’s

Behind a cloak of invisibility.

The Korean girl in her summer clothes

Stole the attention of the high school boy behind the counter

After he dutifully took my order, shaped it, imbued it in red,

Preparing the first shaved ice I will ever try.

 

Nobody cares.

I am old, while everything around me is anime and new.

I am an NPC in this game of boy meets girl.

When I was a newbie,

I thought invisibility, the ability to be willful without consequence,

Was the greatest superpower.

 

I know better now.

I tip my iPhone toward my bowl of unfreezing, bleeding ice.

I take its photo, ensuring a focus

On the melting of memory, the mining of the sublime.

This is the superpower I have come to possess:

Ensnaring evanescence.

 

When I take a photo...

Or write a poem...

I activate God Mode.

Not only invisible;

I am invincible.

I can stop time.

---------

Burlington County, 1984 

Driving up the Jersey Turnpike,

Skirting a million acres of acidic, sandy soil.

It’s almost dawn.

 

In the passenger’s seat next to me

Hester closes her eyes, adjusts the halo

Embroidered atop her California Angels cap,

And burrows under my letter jacket with a breathless sigh.

 

Bright Venus and the rising sun combine to accent

The needles of the pines lining the highway,

Casting shadows that flicker and tremble.

Like my desire.

 

I wish I may, I wish I might, now,

Make the sun stand still

Below that distant horizon.

 

Af if my car were a Mason jar.

As if I could punch air holes in the top

And examine this curiosity named Hester

Lazily stretching her butterfly limbs.

 

I would take my car in my hand

And hold the both of us up

To that faint and heavenly light.

 

This tiny version of myself I am trying to preserve

Is me at my best, oblivious in young love…

Blissfully teased by the Hand of Fate:

Tentative knuckles, resting lightly on my thigh.

 

As if, in Hester's lifeline,

I could divine our future together...

As if I weren’t the Jersey Devil in disguise.

Gone Fishin': 3 Poems Until September

August is the month I take a break from posting on social media... much to the relief of my family 🙂

I'll spend time taking photos, writing poems, and rooting for the Mets -- and, most importantly, creating memories with family and friends. I'll get back to other projects and social media posts after Labor Day.

Until then, I'm posting three poems here because so far in 2025 I've been inspired by writing friends, new and old. I love what they've shared, so in return let me share what I love... beginning with a poem written today, based on a "hotter than a matchhead" prompt from the Gotham Writers Workshop, a New York-based group you should check out, offering free Zoom write-ins every Friday.

Here's a snapshot of "Why Devils in Jersey Are So Overfed":

Here's a second poem I recently revised after a photo from five years ago at an immersive VanGogh exhibit randomly popped up on my iPhone's home screen:

Finally, here's an experiment in ekphrastic poetry -- that is, a poem inspired by a work of art in another medium. I recently applied for... and won... a "residency" at the Madison NJ Community Arts Center. (Check out their events calendar!) The center chose 12 poets to participate in The Writing LAB Fall Residency, which this year will focus on writing new work inspired by music.

The length of the residency? A single Sunday afternoon in September. I'm excited about the opportunity, but I'll be sure to pack light!

During a recent open mic at the Puffin Cultural Forum (another group you should check out) in Teaneck NJ, I was captivated by an exhibit of photos and poems presented by ALTE: Getting Old Together. I took a photo of a print on display by Judith Sokoloff, who captured someone in a King Kong suit in Times Square, circa 2023. The leader of the forum's open mic that night, the great Toney Jackson, suggested I write a poem about it.

So I did. And, funny thing, the poem's theme is about getting older too.

King Gone

Once upon a time

I brushed airplanes from my eyes.

I terrorized ordinary men,

protected fair-haired women,

captured the imagination of the young,

while framed in Technicolor:

like the Northern Lights,

the harbor of Rio de Janeiro,

the Grand Canyon,

Mount Everest,

the Great Barrier Reef,

volcanic Paricutin in Mexico,

Victoria Falls.

I was the 8th wonder of the world.

Beyond male,

beyond female,

the link between man and beast,

adult and child,

good and bad,

primitive and civilized,

black and white.

Am I not immortal?

Or is it my fate

day-by-day, year-after-year

to recede into the crowd,

to roam Times Square

as an Instagram curiosity.

A diminishing freak.

Hear my defiant roar.

New York City may try

to swallow me whole,

a miniature version

of my former self.

Yet I refuse to disappear.

Let this poem be a warning:

These words are my transcendence.

I am still to be feared.

Poem: 'Holes' (on the Feast Day of St. Michael Moros)

I didn’t know my wife had a two-drink minimum.

I mean, I should have realized by now. I never remember having only one drink with her. And there we were, early in July at Blackjack Mulligan's bar in Garfield, NJ, where the waitresses wear “I love BJs” t-shirts and they serve authentic pirogies from Piast’s down the street.

I had wolfed down my portion and was ready to leave, when my wife said she would like another glass of wine. So I stared out the window at St. Peter’s Greek Catholic Cemetery, in disrepair, across the street. My friends in the NJ Poetry Circle at The Sanctuary community center in Butler provided a prompt for our writing that week: one word, "holes."

I kept thinking about the prompt. Later, I took my wife by the hand to wander in the cemetery. Still later, I wrote a poem:

Holes 

Across the street from BJ’s Bar, next to Walmart,

on the Feast Day of St. Michael Moros,

the 98th anniversary of his death and entrance into Heaven,

I pass through rusted iron gates on a sweltering day in Garfield, NJ.

A sign reads, “No Dogs Allowed.”

This is St. Peter’s Cemetery, perpetually open since 1895,

where I wander among 2,600 holes in the ground,

2,600 bodies in decay, and not a single soul to be found.

I gather and dispose the litter in my path, 

then brush matted grass from stone to reveal the names of the dead.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

It has been 20 years since my last Confession,

the day my earthly father died.

My sin is this: I lost my faith that day.

I am here to reclaim it among the toppled crosses,

the stone angels worn with age,

the paper flowers blown into haphazard piles.

I linger along the back edges of the grounds,

bounded by the remains of the Saddle River,

with a stained and matted teddy bear on its banks,

before it empties into the Passaic.

For this and all my past sins, I am heartily sorry.

I seek forgiveness from Steven and Mary Seelagy,

a married couple in their late 80s,

who died a month apart in 1989.

I seek forgiveness from Carlos Samuel Cruz,

who died in 2012 at age 65,

“Always in Our Hearts,” but no obituary to be found.

I seek forgiveness from Fernando Gonzalez Sr.,

dead in 1999 soon after his 67th birthday.

I seek forgiveness from Jesse M. Rivera, “Saintly Scholar,”

who died in 2008 at age 18.

A guitar fretboard is impaled next to his grave;

he died in prison, a suicide.

I found Joan Zavinsky’s portrait face down on a trampled path

and returned it to where she was buried in 2001.

She lived to 85; her photo showing her forever young.

Her husband, Joseph, died in 1977. His portrait is fixed and stern.

Then there are more young: Charles Mancuso, age 19, who died in 1932,

Anna Marynak, 3 years old, who died in 1920,

neighboring 1931 graves of Marie Cupo and Anna Kulik, both 1 year old,

near the pristine stone of Michael Moros, 1 day old, July 2-July 3, 1927.

I finger another bead in the pocket of my jeans.

You don’t need to linger at each grave.

I will count the dead for you:

59 names, including generations of entire families…

11 Barnas, 9 Babyaks, 8 Balints,

6 Miskes, 5 Ditinicks,

including all 3 sons who died young,

4 Gburs and 4 Dutkeviches.

All buried here, where my father was born.

I summon these foresaken dead,

with a prayer for each soul

on the 59 raven-black beads of my father’s rosary.

I stay until I stand forgiven before the Lord.

Now I implore Michael Moros, infant saint:

“Restore my faith!

Raise my father to life for just one day,

and I will doubt God’s grace nevermore.”

Poem: 'Teaneck Blues' (for Ulysses Kay)

At the Puffin Cultural Forum's poetry series in Teaneck last month, the township's poet laureate, Scott Pleasants, had just arrived from reading an original poem at a street renaming.

Alicia Avenue between Evergreen Place and Pinewood Place has been temporarily (for 90 days, starting May 23) renamed "Ulysses Kay Way," honoring where Ulysses Kay lived for the last 21 years of his life, "in recognition of his significant contributions and accomplishments in the advancement of 20th century music and musicians."

As Mark Trautman, director of music and administrator at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Essex Fells, wrote on Facebook: "Ulysses Kay was a well know, prize-winning composer of the 20th century. His wife Barbara was a Freedom Rider and led the fight to integrate Englewood Schools in the 1960s. Their remains are buried in the columbarium at St. Paul's Church, 113 Engle St., Englewood."

Inspired by this, I wrote and read a poem at last Friday at June's S.P.E.A.K. (Sharing Poetic Expressions, Art & Knowledge) event hosted by MC and poet Toney Jackson. Toney leads an evening of intimacy, creativity, and positivity, open to aspiring poets and listeners. The next event is July 25.

Here's a recording of me reading this poem.

 Teaneck Blues

(Music: “Tender Thought” on Damien Sneed's album, “Classically Harlem”)

 

This is the summer of composer Ulysses Kay

where there’s a street named in his honor,

for 90 days.

Away from the heart of town,

the double-parked cars on Cedar Lane,

and Bischoff’s closed ice cream shop,

where bow-tied ghosts wear paper hats.

 

This is a mile and a half away,

amid haunted sounds:

rustling trees,

occasional birds,

gravel crunched by tires

in the lot facing his plain house

on Ulysses Kay Way.

 

This is Teaneck, NJ,

in the shadow of New York:

discordant, hesitant, forlorn,

a syncopated bass,

a trace of harmony,

a counter-melody of sadness,

defended by tanks on the lawn of the Armory.

 

This is his spectrum of sound:

a diversity of voices,

reflected in a single tender thought

rendered on a lone piano.

Come, hear the legacy of Ulysses Kay

in the summer of 2025,

where there’s a street named in his honor...

for 90 days.