 welcome. It's so nice to see such infusionism for poetry and at the end of a month of poetry. I'm delighted to see you all here. We're going to read alphabetically by last name and I will do a very brief introduction which will be as follows. This is Charlie Barisch. He's reading first. Please welcome him. We did a mic check before. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Thank you for coming out everybody. And the return poem was beginning when I was doing a film movie. And I'll start off with a baseball poem. My strength is 40 words. It seemed just another minor league stunt like between innings, stack races, and bat tosses where the teams mascot a guy in a crowd suit stomping up the opponent's dugout with oversized clothes and leaning over to square the player with water from his unders. So in the taunting coach, jogged out to sing the national anthem and people rose just as they headed for the off-key Barbershop Quartet in 1994. No one expected his lovely tenor, each syllable pure, unadored, even the highest notes reverberating, strong, and sweet. Later from his coaching box, he said runner after runner, Carini around third, his wood-killing arm conducting the poem, his music echoing through the ballpark. This could be page 34. A man and a woman are lying dead. His leg stretches across her body. His hand is a weight on her breast. In five minutes, they might be making love or they might be asleep. If ten years ago he hadn't turned down a road scholarship to play baseball, he might be living in a tutor cottage where I'd eat. This would have been one of his dreams. If his arm hadn't broken down into minors, he might be in a hotel room trying to sleep, thinking of tomorrow's game. If his boss's wife hadn't gone into labor this morning, two months early, he'd be at a meeting in Chicago. Her husband hadn't left her a year after they married. They hadn't been that party. She'd be watching TV now, and there'd be two or three kids upstairs sleeping. If her father hadn't gotten drunk, hadn't been so insistent that night with her mother in the Chevy, and if her mother had taken her mom's advice and gone to that doctor in Puerto Rico. Each of their lives had been a series of miracles. Now their eyes meet. Each thinks, this is the moment I've lived for. This is impressing my therapist, page 25. Are you supposed to impress us there? Did I ever tell you I had DJed in an oldie show on the radio? I say to marry my fourth therapist of the year. Amazing, she said. I never knew that. The next session, I tell her about the bareback barrel race at one grinding of pinto mare. I've got a blue ribbon, biggest Lord Fonzo Roy's tie. I still have it. In the following weeks, I began to make things up. I caught a home run in the right field grandstand at Yankee stadium. The crowd cheered as if I were Mickey Mouse. I bet you didn't know I wrote a computer program that finds the rational roots of a polynomial equation. I think this really wows her. I once won a pining contest. Charlie, you're incredible. You're my favorite, I ask. You're very special, but you're my the most special. Can't you just pretend? Everyone brings their own unique story, she says. It's time to find a new therapist, I think. This is early spring in Vermont, page eight. There's only one thing to do when your car sinks to its axles in mud. Get out. Close the door. Kneel down and start eating. You will swallow fern seeds and mushroom spores, eggs with millipedes and ladybugs. Soon spring will crawl around inside you. Then get on your bicycle. Healing, page six. We want to heal you, the teenage boy said as I gazed from the 17th century monastery's observation deck across Czech Lutera into the Mediterranean. From what I thought, then realized you'd see me walking with my cane. Five people encircled me. The boy's father introduced his wife, a younger son and daughter. We're from Colorado, the father said. We'd be honored if you'd let us heal you. Do you suffer from MS? No, it's Parkinson's, I said. You're welcome to give it a try. Go ahead. But the hands were already fluttering over my flowered shirt like a flock of birds. The father employed Jesus to free me from affliction, then asked about a Christian. I said, no, Jewish. He shrugged and said, that's okay, you never know. He kindly hugged me. When I entered the gift shop, the mother was buying a little statue of St. Francis surrounded by sparrow. This is the dance, page 60. After my father lifts and pivots her into her chair and wheels her to the kitchen table, soup dribbles down my mother's chin to her bib, trickles on to her clean pressed dress. She says something that no one understands, puts down her spoon and takes out a pen. My father hovering over her once proud cursive, pronouncing each shaky word as it's written. A young woman observes from the counter. Black hair frames her lovely face, brushes her broidered cashmere sweater, lips open and smiling, a photo of my mother in 20. From around the house, he watches at various ages. And a gown throwing rice in a wedding, and flower petal pushers playing softball, dancing at home with my father, his hand on her back, guiding her through the kitchen. This is the Time Water Motel, page one. I wrote this after my honeymoon with Andrea in 1991, the Time Water Motel. When the next Bible is written, or the history of the world, the Garden of Eden will be the Time Water Motel outside Ellsworth, Maine, where the portable sign says, blueberries and lawn ornaments, chocolates and fishing tackle, featuring Ruth and Whippy's kitchen, home of the 495 Lobster Star. Where Whippy with a busty beddy boot, potentially known as Bicep, not a cheap one either. And on his other arm a woman with a snake stirs the lobster pot outside over a softwood fire, and Ruth serves it all in the dining room, with real wood paneling and pictures of Elvis and John Wayne, and paper placemats that tell you wrongly the state bird of Maine is the blue chain. And then gives you the key to number six, where the concrete floor is covered with a thick green carpet, and the glasses are standing clean, and the toilet seat has a ribbon around it, that in the morning you can make love, watch Sesame Street while you get dressed, and give the key back to Ruth, who'll bring you blueberry pancakes, while Whippy gets the fire started, while the sun rises over the ocean, and the state bird, the chickadee, whistles in the pines. Please make sure my children know I've been there, and my children's children. I'm going to read one more. This is from my first book, Dreams of the Presidents, which consists of president's dreams, is one for each president. I'm going to close with a baseball pole from this book. This is William Tav's dream, and it's the Steve. The players like my ceremonial pitch, so when Walter Johnson's arm gives out, he points, beckons me from the stands. I hand my suitcase, suit coat to Helen, remove my tie and cuff links, roll up my sleeves. The nusher opens again, and when I step onto the grass for a moment I'm confused. The crowd roars around me, and I feel weightless, and I'm lifted by an ocean surge. I'm afraid I've gone down with a titanic, but then an urgent chant, big bill, shakes the stadium. I wade to the throng and ascend the mound. Cobba's never seen pitches like mine. The first two raised past him, faster than Barney Oldfield, and he swings over a drop pitch by Hummingbird. Frank very well strikes out a two, and then it's Booker T. Washington's turn, but W.E.B. DuBois's pitch hits, shoves him aside. He glares as I wind up an uncoil like a cobra, and now the pitch buzzes in like an army airplane. He swings, and the ball sails into the sky, but I sprint across the outfield and snag it. Helen comes out of the dugout. I ask her if I can stay and play baseball, but she says no, I have to be president. I throw my glove on the ground and follow her home. I have books to sell in the back, and my new book is to sell, a whole movie, and my previous book is for free. James and the President. While Sarah's doing that, I just want to say a big thanks to Sarah Vee, without which we would not be here, and you would not be able to hear us. So welcome our next reader, Judy Chalma. Let's check and see. As people in the back, you're okay, great. So thank you so much. Thank you to Beth Jacob Synagogue, and to Paul Amcity, and to all of you. My goodness, what a wonderful poetry crowd on the last day of poetry months. So most of my recent writing, especially in my book that's back there, Minnow, grows out of a deep affinity with the natural world, especially in this very particular environment with deep winters and lush temperate forests. So for 50 years, I've kind of considered my yearning to connect that affinity with Jewish liturgical environments, fake trees and gazelles and kind of desert wilderness to be a failure. Until finally in my 70s, I sort of realized that 50 years of yearning to make that connection is the connection. So I have begun to kind of explore the richness of yearning itself within the Jewish traditions and within the sort of era of Jewish history as a member of a Holocaust survivor family, for instance, having been cut off from people in community that are lost to the people and lost to me, lost to story itself, lost in their own stories. And personally within my family, growing up with a father who died when I was a baby, created a very potent yearning that has lasted all these decades. And I'm now old enough to have experienced many personal losses. And we live in a world in which the natural world is experiencing catastrophic loss. So I'm starting to understand or explore yearning as a kind of heart opening to imagination, if nothing else, but also to mystery, to the things that we can't know, can never really reach, and even to love. So that's kind of a long-winded way to introduce the idea that I'm going to, the six poems I'm going to read are sort of focused on yearning. Presence. I saw you the other day, but I didn't speak. Who was I after all? And what would it mean such looking back? Every day I repeat this path, walking along the water. Across the distance, clouds nestled this morning beneath the peaks, and the peaks poof out over the clouds like powder, as if it weren't the gloom or a mist there, but the mountains themselves thinning, becoming transparent. Why does this comfort me? I wouldn't mind my disappearance if it were something like this gentle tempering, boulders, mountains with names, whole ranges softened. Pine needles flipped the path, this one on my foot. Earlier, peach and vermilion streamed across the sky and were gone in minutes. But you know this, once you begin, once you begin, you're never the same. I saw you again and thought of the vastness. A broad-winged heron beats overhead, its long legs mirrored in the trailing reeds below. How many times, how many years can a straggling heart bend and wait? There were stars, there were storms, everything lifted, lugged off. By now you must be far, very far away. How is it? It's been so long since you sent a sign, a word. Here in the sweet smoke, waiting for dark and the distant owl, I'm steeped in thick scent, this sharpness, this stinging owl-ware home, and a peace that I believe, dear one, belongs to you. A concept of the future, dark blue footprints, my way forward disheartening. I was walking the shadows, striping the snow-covered meadow road. I wondered where I was. I could see the residue of the past, storms, trees tipped up at the root, and the in-there woven baskets, arcing up over the pits where once they stood, boulders lifted, clutched impractically high, held beyond life, impossible as love. Skeletal nests trailing wisps once plush in spring, now winter flung, curtains bedding blown off. All the departed, people I miss, and the ones I missed, born too late to know, and bitterly miss that chance of knowing, all clear as birdsong, departure from my father's ghost. They might have lingered, but I breathed and couldn't halt it. How like you they were, lifting silently over the snow, ears turned, I'm sorry, I'm going to start again because I just messed those lines up. I'm pretty to the 7th class 14 and I still must have missed it. They might have lingered, but I breathed and couldn't halt it. How like you they were, lifting silently over the snow, barely visible among the trees, dark coats, ears turned, noses wet and wondering. The young were leaping through the drifts. I'm making this up. How thick, how strong your legs were as we ran. How you looked back with such sorrow. The fallen trees lie about the frozen woods like giant scrolls. Tracks run everywhere between them. A looping script, one tail on top of the other, sense mingled, intention unreadable. Today, this strange still day, each crisscrossed line admits its impossible decision, pointing almost as if to explain how hard it was, why it happened, at last the choice was made to leave so suddenly. Now light spills over the hills and the trees are made uncomfortably bright. Each branch of bold exclamation, its private life revealed, turn here, bends down there, drop everything, all this unmasked in snow, while all around the sharp hooves plunged deep into shadow, hind legs springing forward, the woods so vast, they might at last contain my long buried yearning landscape. On the way to meet each infant grandchild, shift, line of brow, of eyelash, wince of something taking up space in the belly, of cold, of weeping, of dark and of light, of lifting, of swaying and bouncing, lines wrinkled in red, of wanting, of wiping, of ankle fold, of watching and of breathing and watching, of hoping, of padding, of shoulder, of centerline, broken line, of breaking, of trusses and railings, of trembling, of going and going, of gripping, of letting go and speeding, speeding, not looking, just going and banging, reckless and weak, faster and hopelessly hard into love. I'm just smiling. I'm just not without this paint common. Yeah. Tangled, sleepless, a dried out hydrangea ball snaps off and rolls on the wind into the woods, where it lives out the rest of its days untethered from its garden. That is, it finishes decaying, a few more petals breaking off every day, a tear at the edge of this one, a crack there, until gradually it's just a skeleton and then not anything with a name that a casual walker might know. It may not make sense when it comes to decay to think, though, of finishing. The brutal hydrangea continues its process. All my life, I've thought of myself as a being in the world, but was I wrong? I walk in the woods. I try not to break off the trail. Am I of the woods? Am I of the trail? Am I of the world? Could that be what is meant by God's love? Last night, I dreamt I was gradually losing touch. I remembered who and where I was some of the time, only enough to realize some of the time I hadn't. I had been somewhere incomprehensible. My children loved me. I could see that when I was clear, but I was losing them. I was losing everyone I loved. A short way into the woods, I'm trying to imagine love as much of the world as the beings that tumble through it, minute by minute. I think this. Thank you. Our next reader, R.D. Eno, please welcome him. I do not have a book, a loose leaf book. I hope I'll be able to get through all of these. Thank you so much, Nikki. Thank you all for coming. Thank my fellow poets for being here and making such an occasion. We celebrated my father's yaksite on Friday, so I thought it would be appropriate to begin with a poem about my father. Also appropriate because the theme of the poems that I wrote for the CV ran March Arts Marathon this year had, as their overriding theme, displaced persons. My father was served on the judge advocate, general staff, and was partly responsible after the war for looking after the Jewish DPs in the American sector. First poem is called Photo Bomb. In the photograph of his sunset in the late autumn of 45, Berlin, on the edge of what remains of Conex Plus, my father stands in his army great coat and garrison cap in the burnt out wasteland of the tear garden. A few scorched trees clawing at the air, the carcass of the Reichstag getting scavenged. The war has roared past. My father's there to help pick up the pieces of the Jews. He squints into the camera as if trying to glimpse me, not year old. On the other side, but also in the shot behind a concrete wall, I see a young girl crouching down her blonde hair spilling from a black beret. Who, at the moment of the shovers click, lifts her head from hiding and smiles at the camera and me beyond and me beyond as if we were looking just for her a secret that my father shouldn't know. This is my take on the humush in particular accidents. What God said, I speak from stone, I speak from fire, I bring the plague and the flood, placate me with blood. Still I harden hearts and level cities, slay the righteous and their babies. I scream across the universe, unconsumed in my desire, in my loneliness. To whom should I pray from relief from the torment of being myself? What Moses said, I was only one of the people when you plucked me out of the wilderness. Blot then, blot me, and blot the book, blot the memory of what I have seen and cannot bear and cannot tell. I want to be one of the people again. I gave you my blood and now the only remedy for the torment of this unquenchable passion is death. God's love song to Moses. Mouth to mouth, I kiss you dead. I take your breath back to myself. You, I scour the breadth of history to find. I teach you death, oh my beloved. As you taught me love, I like summits. They're not always pleasant. Necessary measures. They found a hole in time scrambled through refugees from the future. It's over up ahead, they told us, as they streamed along the road, dejected and bedraggled. We couldn't send them back. We didn't know how, and they wouldn't go along with us needless to say, so what was left? We might have interrogated them, but who needs to be told there's a cliff when you've just stepped off it? Leave them, some said. Their deserters just rabble. They'll turn into harmless soothsayers, wandering and drift, crisscrossing the highways, begging and babbling to no one who'll listen till they drop dead in a ditch. But on the off chance, these malingerers might stall the progress of the whole campaign. We shot them all. This is the removal. Its specific reference is to the removal of Native Americans from the American Southeast. They emerge from memory one sleeping evening in December, wading through the crusted snow, a family of chalktaws, heaving the weight of women and children, the old and dying on sledges across the crusted snowfield to the river landing, fugitive ghost breath lingering in the frigid twilight. The boatmen waiting beat their hands and swear at the ice flows, the weather, their fucking orders, their freight that shuffles as if in chains to the frozen shore. Silent in the dusk without a sob, they board the bark, solemn as monuments. The boat casts off, leaving behind a wraith-like mist, their vanishing footprints, and the dogs howling in outrage who will not be abandoned, but leap in after them and are swept to their deaths in the stygian currents of forgetfulness. This is my expression of environmental pessimism. I'm sorry to be such a downer after Judy's wonderfully uplifting poems. It's called Bye Bye. Today's spring has returned to an abusive lover. How many promises can I break before earth shuffles me off done forever, turns me into the street and slams the door? Lizards may survive to mourn the manatee, dogs may revert to wolves and multiply. None that remain will grieve vain glorious me, more than I would the hookworm or the tzitzi fly. Done, done forever, I will suffocate on my own breath, drown in my own spew. Where I was, butterflies and clubtails will proliferate, though I'll take some big game with me when I go. Intelligent life? Opposable thumbs? I guess she won't try that again. Let consciousness lift its bigotty head above the mean and in accordance with the horizontal scheme and the law of averages, she'll knock it back again. Take that prodigy and give it a good throttle. Cream rising to the top, shake the damn bottle. How far is too far? How close is close enough? I got up to the edge of the world and couldn't stop. Take me back. But oh, sweet child, she cries. You played with life until it broke. Bye-bye. Sorry about that. Okay, I'm gonna throw this at you. Exodus. This is another DP poem. Out of the ruins we crept, the bookcases toppled the pianos, crushed and unstrung, the entablatures broken, their mottos illegible. It had gone on far longer than earthquakes or plagues, as if the stars had fallen on us, not one by one, but in hail storm of lethal diamonds. Each celestial missile leaving where once a tree, a brook, a child had been a hole in the world for grief to plant a stone. Until nothing abided in us but rage that nothing was left to remember but grief and that a catastrophe had occurred. There was nowhere left but elsewhere, and there we went without books or pianos, without mottos, hearts hard as fists, clenching and unclenching as we marched, wary of the ground we walked on of the scorpions and spiders, pitching our tents in deserts of enmity and spite. Not here, not here cried the crows and the jackals howled, go elsewhere. Elsewhere became our destination, elsewhere we chanted as we marched, elsewhere, elsewhere our hearts hardened to meet the heart and tarts we meet, and when we arrive at elsewhere we will sing like the crows, we will scour at the jackals, we will write scriptures of rage, we will sing like the crows and raise scorpions and spiders, we will blot the stars and build walls of enmity and spite, we will season our bread with tears and caress our children with fists, and we will never forget the catastrophe because elsewhere there is nothing else to remember. And this is a poem that I wrote in the first year of that, for the first Arts Marathon, in which I was dealing mostly with images of asylum, refugees, this is the children and the setting if you will, is the Rio Grande. In the evening dusk, the children emerge like ghosts from shallow graves, they shiver as they set foot to the water's edge, brave and hopeless, as heroes in a battle already lost. Continents behind them heave with the cannibal frenzy of a shark's womb, ahead loom the gridded steplands or the bloated piles of homo humanitas in its latest swoon. Alone, for love abandoned, they dare the rifts in the world, having no choice but pluck, no choice but to inhabit life, to step out on the high wire of untested luck. Listen, you can hear the prayers they dare not utter. It is evening, and the children are crossing the water, so I thought I'd leave you with something a little bit, just a little lighter, the door. Someone set fire to the men's room at Joe's bar, and the only thing remaining when it was all over were these words scratched on a stole door for a good time called this number. The number had burned away, and though you'd see it every time you dumped, no one remembered or ever called. It was just part of Joe's scene, now a waste of ashes and embers. And not only Joe's, but the whole block, the entire city you knew like your mother's face, gone. We built a box for the door so we could carry it with us when we moved on. Nothing was left for us, but at least we can show our kids when their spirits get low and the going goes bad, that there was a city once, and a bar called Joe's, and a good time was once to be had. Thank you. Thank you, R.D. For those of you that don't know, R.D. kept referring to the March Arts Marathon, which is a fun, put up your hands if you either sponsor someone in the marathon or participate in the marathon. So, those of you without your hands up, you have an adventure ahead of you next year in March, and it's a fundraiser for Central Vermont Refugee Action there. So, I would love to do a one-minute break where everyone gets to stand up and wriggle, or bend, or introduce themselves to their neighbor they don't know, and I will time you. We're halfway through, and it's good to move around and dry our tears, or whatever it is. And chatting and telling everyone how wonderful they are and meeting your neighbors is now over. So, you all get to sit down again, and hear three more poets, and then we'll have a question and answer. Judy will make an announcement she just told me about, and we'll nosh a little more. So, Nadal, this one is our next reader. Please welcome her. Thank you all for being here. I'm going to start with a poem from my first book, Drive, and when I thought about reading at the synagogue, I realized that this poem is called Faith. Faith. I need to be closer. I need to be closer. Can you hear me? Let's try that. Faith. The black beans soak to put them up, an act of pure optimism. Tomorrow the cast iron kettle will simmer black water, will foam blue black, but for tonight these closed jewels are a bridge to whatever rises with the light. I'm not saying I sleep easier, that my dreams collecting below the promised aroma of cooking won't chase me up and down the nightmare stairs, nor that the day outside the aura of the pot won't be a dizzying examination of that familiar night'scape. The handful of beans I toss into the water is good as any definition I know of future, now seldom used in my childhood. A time yet to be where I find myself now with a plan for a carrot, stalk of celery, cup of onion, all of which I gather together any time I hunger for blackness, beauty matched by the recollection of that thickness on my tongue, scent of citrus. In an advance of optimism I hold my ingredients at the ready, that I have pushed my cart through the dense aisles of shelved food, that I have picked my way through what is wilted, rejected what is not fresh, my prayer for the days to come, I repeat weekly. Food, not bags and boxes, cellophane and ink. Food, the rattle and heft of the still-hard beans in my palm. A few black beans to eat, to draw my mouth around. This is where I stake my claim. I serve up the soup. Whoever enters will be fortified. In the same breath there is black bean, there is future, there is nightmare, there is a pot on the stove to attend when I wake, and the rest of the poems are from my new book, which came out in December called Traveling Traveling, and I'll start with this, the title poem Traveling Traveling. Oh, it's on page one. There were those let's get lost Sundays in dad's used clunkers, the old's or the caddy, announcing to the neighborhood our travels to distant realms, Jersey or Westchester County. Our late returns home after dinners and diners, or the Catskills Chinese restaurant, owned by two old Yiddish speaking women, kibitzing out back, refilling red and yellow squeeze bottles with duck sauce and hot mustard. At night, holding onto its sides, I traveled on the ship of my mattress, soaring through double windows of the bedroom I shared with my seven years older sister, up through clouds among the stars. How else to fall asleep in a house of contradictions where familial love between us tangled with silence that fogged us in? Postcards arrived in the mail from rich relatives who traveled exotically to Miami Beach and Disneyland. They were the fallen twig from the family tree that up and moved to Israel, only to be swallowed up by the Dead Sea. The Brooklyn triple decker where my Russian grandparents settled with their baker's dozen of kids and their wives, children and husbands, was so close we could hear each other's breath. But mom and dad would forever be the pioneers of traveling. Traveling as family legend would have it after they packed up their lives in a few sorry suitcases and turned their no longer youthful eyes from Brooklyn to move with three kids to the hinterlands of Queens, a horde of relatives staring after them from the border. This is a poem I wrote for my father who was a cantor and he was a cantor most of my life and at 74 he took himself to cantorial school so that he could become an official cantor. So I wrote this poem after he died. My cantor sings no more oh I'm sorry eight. There were all the nights of noise and through the looking glass confusions of sleep that childhood could not surmount and you stalwart sentinel of my dreams my tall broad shoulder dad you were the definition of comfort because when I woke whatever the dream or nightmare it was replaced by your living self there was always more of you the singing talking laughing man you were sentient larger than life two of my girl fingers fit into your wedding ring now time is moving the living you into the past and in waking there is nothing to replace that image that sound sound fades is not infinite as light that reports back in waves to earth from billions of galaxies time after time your voice chanting the door for door from generation to generation will not be heard again memories paltry engine could keep you here that is one definition of nightmare nothing will return you to the world two hawks riverside park 17 in the photograph of the two hawks the male on the higher limb of the london plane tree has a bloodied shred of a bird hanging from its beak while beneath him the female pecks at a rat's carcass splayed across a lower branch of that same tree the rat's thin black tail underscores its transformation the leafless tree stark against a cloudy january sky i've carried death on my back father mother one following the other until i'm bent under the weight of it i remember as i stood by the plane tree the male stared back not eating while the female continued to peck black tail feathers pointing at the camera then seesawing as her head bent down to tear and rise up again to eat time i'm waiting for you you do everything swiftly but death you do slow as a swimmer through mud i walked on from the tree and forgot the dead bird the rat but not the hawks i'm going to read this poem it's in 10 parts and it's called synagogues 54 ma never left the u.s when i tell her where traveling next china india hungry she looks as though i said i bought the moon and stars ma go sit in the synagogues she says it will be as if i'm there too too the first temple stood in jerusalem where the ten tribes of israel prayed until they were banished by never could nether two and the temple raised to the ground it was 587 bce 3 in 1950 in 1945 3000 jews were turned away at every port then welcomed with nothing but their faith to shanghai for many years an elderly chinese gentleman has been the caretaker and guide of the compound we sit in the sanctuary and he tells their story each year he says the children grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those eastern european jews return to the synagogue for a reunion of those three thousand seven families are left gavalt he speaks in combined yiddish chinese hebrew and english with a generous smile and a nod to incongruity four there are 26 jews living in cochin india in a place they call jewtown and it isn't meant as a slur the synagogue is laid out in blue and white tile with colored glass lanterns dangling from the ceiling you can sit on benches along the sides there are services once a year on russia shana and yamkin poor the synagogue in budapest is ornate and broadly lit with shiny wooden pews the many rows held the hundreds of jews who prayed together before march 1944 when the nazis invaded hungary six in an orthodox synagogue in rome the men and women sit machica separate the women protected behind a wall of opaque white muslin they chant the same prayers with the same intensity but this way there are no distractions seven in venice the tiny synagogue sits in one corner of the wall ghetto in a small ancient square it's wooden beams darkened with age the tall locked gate is gone now eight at her table in paris my friend says after 50 years she returned to the synagogue where she was about mitzvah she was the first girl in france to stand at the beema and read that day's portion of the Torah when i walked into the sanctuary she says i felt i'd come home nine god was already there when the baptists bought the synagogue in cambria heights they kept the stained glass windows bright blue stars of david shining on the heads of a new congregation it was the 70s and barely a minion gathered the old jews gone to hashem the young ones wandering the world saturday morning services were long and boring when i was a fidgety kid in queens i remember mostly old men in talasim bobbing from side to side dobbling a few old women in gaudy veiled hats at the tree of life synagogue in pittsburgh it was also a saturday morning october 27th 2018 the kohan opened the ark and the gunman opened fire this is the last poem that i'll read and i was very happy to hear the poem that rd read about god and the do over this is the last poem in the book it's on page 75 and it's called ladies slipper if there were a creator of the universe and if she were to begin again having deemed the first draft if not a failure then in need of serious revision after light cracked its shell opened against the sky water trickled then cascaded from every promontory air breezed over forest tops and oceans when she got down to the minutiae and the architecture of a new be a new being and new knowledge there would be many do overs the apple's reputation resurrected apart from the snake and many successes to repeat in nature and above all she would know the ladies slipper to be among her most perfect designs and from its pale pink swelling sides as they curve inward on their veined way toward a secret secret center she would know it to be the template for that part of a woman's body in which co-exist her pleasure and her pain thank you next radio read up please welcome Andrea gold those are hard acts to follow i'll tell you and i i know at least i know nadelle's and charlie's poems really well really well rd's i only know from the march marathon um i'm gonna start with a few poems that um really are in memory of people in my family the first one is how to make borscht and it's in memory of my father gerald gould weep as you chop more onions than you think you need snip bunches of feathery dill peel parcels of beets until your fingers are red as rubies listen when the soup cries out for more beets more onions another bunch of dill into the soup pot let them simmer all day admire the color inhale the shtetl i'm going to give you a minute to catch up with me sorry the next one i'll do is called forgiveness if it's a longer one like that i didn't collate i just didn't think of it and then i had three piles and they were all mixed up sorry yeah forgiveness my grandmother sewed 20 000 buttonholes by hand at the gotham dress company and pregnant on her wedding day married the boss's nephew three children later weighed down by disappointment and drudgery she exiled my grandfather to the spare bedroom always a gentleman he never complained even when diabetes took his leg even when he left a thousand dollar bill in his coat pocket at the office and it disappeared true story sometimes in my dreams i ride the elevator of my grandparents pot rose scented apartment building soup simmering on every stove radios blaring tommy dorsey yiddish sprinkled into conversations like paprika or kosher salt apron women lean from windows hang laundry on fire escapes or call their children in i wander through long abandoned rooms hunting for something worth keeping and find a cracked teacup brimming with forgiveness bianca's soup this is her recipe for brahm baraka woody check mushrooms foraged each may in the bohemian forest marjoram half inch squares of celeriac carrots parsnips the pungent scent conjuring up the jewish ball 1938 prog where bianca met george white po desuwa gloves to her elbows layered gown of organza and lace satin shoes he filled her dance card with walsas and tangos securing her destiny both of them forgetting the brown shirted men marching in the plaza we read one more that has to do with the holocaust and this is a true story it's called heroines and it's in memory of my cousin leon goldstein is who died a few months ago in granola when mccat usually a quiet dog barked an urgent warning in the middle of the paris night and janette silent as a mime folded her husband into a wooden box only mccat could hear his heart pounding when the nazis arrived smelling of cigarettes and death not finding uncle mendel they marched out heavy boots grinding muddy outlines into the carpet crumpled and contorted my uncle emerged from his temporary coffin finding his wife collapsed on the floor her mind shattered beyond repair like a mirror broken into thousands of glistening shards next poem i'm going to read is called lake bloomer wait till you find it call to take up the brush after reading winston churchill's painting as a pastime george w bush now lives in a state of perpetual technicolor he used to look at the texas sky and call it blue now he sees azure layered with cerulean and ultramarine he never guessed he would find his inner muse lose track of time become one with the paint the linseed oil the palette knife and those impossibly thin black sable brushes wearing his lucky beret and paint splattered smock george chooses indigo to outline his dog's adoring eyes in the tenth painting of the barney series then rearranges his slumbering cat bob into a more captivating pose this is true i actually researched it it's true the next poem i'm going to read is called first marriage for tom too young i donned a cotton islet mexican wedding dress from fred laden's on eighth and bleaker the whole street smelling family of han yoon leather incense and the promise of sex leading us into a marriage that never had a chance i flew across the ocean with my new glass weijian husband to an old flattened edinburgh stone steps smooth and concave from 200 years of weary feet ascending 1971 was the year of eating ancient grains with jopes tears tiny pearls of barley burdened by their name we balanced tubs of yogurt tins of milk single eggs and growing discontent on the kitchen windowsill relieved when the unruly wind didn't scold us by tossing it all down to the patch of grass four stories below but we couldn't stop our burdens from sprouting wings and soaring into the pewter sky like ravens settling into the rugged landscape surrounding us air heavy with the scent of coal and sheep this poem is called second marriage for david 1950 to 2012 that's not the date of the marriage you offered me sushi like an exotic bouquet taught me to sit sasa style on a tatami mat and balance smooth black chopsticks between thumb and forefinger you were cubes of rosy tuna dipped into shiru mixed with green mustard you were hot sake sipped from a small porcelain cup you were jellied fish eggs oranges marigolds glistening like jewels sweet salty slippery you were a shoji screen rice paper framed by a lattice of bamboo hiding your interior spaces you were mysterious as our brief marriage until i read your obituary years later survived by partner brad and the last poem i'm going to read is called spring in three parts one lilacs don their flancy spring dresses seductive as sirens with their purpleness and crazy scent never needing to check themselves in the mirror having no regrets two she's not known for her apples but the old apple tree has a good cry every spring white crepe paper tears raining down on unfurled hostas emerging ferns and forget me not soon disappearing without a trace three careening out of control taking the curves on two wheels spring emboldened no longer mint green or shy leaps dizzily over the precipice strewing tulip petals and dandelion fluff in her wake thank you yeah and i'm the last reader nicky but this is a prose poem as in it's a paragraph dragons the sea can freeze into sludge god's slurry and this has always happened so we find ancient rose petals at the bottom of sea canyons where dragons linger with sharks their frosty attitudes sparkle in thin streams of sunlight they're ready to catch us and keep us and eat us sprinkling us first with powdered ginger root following a chinese recipe oh sorry with powdered ginger or following a chinese recipe flavoring us with ginger root the dragons especially favor chinese food because the dragons say the chinese appreciate them and are never foolish enough to deny the dragon's existence but even the dragons but even the chinese the dragons say don't realize that dragons have gills and can live in marine depths as well as dreams these are antique matters things to be pondered over generations while we worry about a paucity of snow or too much rain or heat the earth's upheavals god leaves the possibility of survival to us as god always has it's one thing to create another to ensure survival keep the world tidy this poem is like so about this moment like my front porch is covered our front porch is covered with like mosses and bits of straw and stuff so you'll understand keep the world tidy raggedy robin's nest perch on our porch rafters poised to provide a home to shelter a family who am I to tidy up the world sweep away unruly wists of robin straw deadhead marigolds and pansies kill mice our cat bats each one teases and toys while the mouse plays dead i pluck up the cat sometimes the mouse scalpers away poised to populate our home when do we protect ourselves and from whom in celebration and this is a poem for angria in celebration the farm dog appears on the hill box snarls teeth bared he rushes in for he rushes forward darts in snaps a ghillie i scream at him ghillie barks at him he bites a ghillie's tail angria steps forward don't get between them i yell but she's not deterred by him coming at us mean as winter by sheer force of character she leads him back up the hill to the farmer then plucks long strands of ghillie's tail from the road mud lays those wisps on the snowbank a shrine to our fright to her success ghillie and i are here to tell you there are heroes in our midst we never know when we are lucky enough to walk alongside one venturious detachment that's those little floaters that we get in our eyes ignore it dr king my doctor king my op ophthalmologist instructs you will get used to it and then you won't see it ignore the skyscrapers of ice dropping into the seas ignore the skin thin polar bear slipping into the steaming sea ignore the tanks that rumble toward us ignore our bathtub that dangles over the lip of our second floor against winter fields my right eye sees my vitrious detachment soar like the shadow of a lost snow goose against spring green i'll see it as my tear drop on the kitchen window and about eyes um april 13th i had an operation on my eyelids so that i could see more and what i discovered was that i could not see anything and i couldn't read for several days so i started writing haiku and dictating them into my phone which was really fun and now i obviously can see a game which is nice and i actually can see a lot so i'm just going to read a few of those haiku and identify them by date because that's when i wrote them so i've been writing one every day in april 13th of april the surgeon tightens my eyelids look the top maple branches 14th of april snow cloak dissolves crocus's rise old knees dance 15th of april honking geese return herald our own future griefs 17th of april black stitches swallowed by puffed eyelids hidden script 19th of april branches bent by winter snow bow to marsh marigolds 22nd of april we circle the village our dogs sniffed for their perfect spots am i 27th of april friends disagree together again on the 27th i got into doing this cradles of clouds rock above the cemetery then blue skies thank you we thought we would have a fairly brief but lively or whatever if answer questions if you have them and you may have noticed our our video person here orca has been filming this so it would help him if the readers could sort of just move some chairs or the chair and sit in front people could ask questions and then we'll have a little nosh hang out and everything so thank you everyone and we'll do that we'll speak up and do it without a mic because six if you don't have any but yes i wonder if we can do a simple one two little words seven sherry's class in your room 13 14 good age 14 good question michelle you had a question were you are you here to the one you read are they the book and then i think so okay they're in the magical the magical yeah yeah i was curious how you decided which poems to read in which order all of us all yeah all of you if you had any if you had to take your talk brought this or um i had done a reading in adamant not that long ago and didn't want to repeat myself too much um and um i also wanted to acknowledge this particular gathering of jewish poets and what could i put together that would be somewhat coherent uh in relation to that well i i chose four poems that related to being jewish and to my jewish experience but really other than that it's really it's just overwhelming deciding what to bring it's almost you know it's just overwhelming i tried to bring not to bring out of season poems because i have you know poems that have to do with the fall in the winter i left those home i had but oh and you know the marriage poems it's just arbitrary really i'm not sure i'm thinking you were going to say greatest kids because they were such wonderful the other ones i'm sure um i knew i wanted to start with prose and end it with haiku and i was reading poems that i recently revised for the marathon so i wanted to hear how they sounded and god tends to come in sometimes that seemed appropriate well a jewish poem a dp poem an asylum poem and the rest were mostly the poems that gave me the most trouble that'll show them well i like judy um sort of thought about my work and what was appropriate to this gathering and what might resonate for other people in the uh in the synagogue so one thing i did was choose poems that i hadn't read publicly Charles you opened up a baseball which was you know April this baseball season yes and from a red sauce fans perspective it's the cruelest month oh can i also say that charlie made this shirt and the fabric he bought in Jerusalem so i thought he should wear it today with he went to israel with his mother i don't know 15 years oh i was admiring that shirt yeah puts us all sartorially to shame any other yes i have a question um what does being a jewish poet mean to each of you how do you see your judeism and your identity as a poet if you identify as a poet yeah i was talking to judeo the question that is the a very deep question thank you for it and i'm sure i won't do it justice and but i could go on and on um and won't it you know all the aspects that make up who we are um royal around you know in the questions that we ask and so you know very deeply identified as jewish one okay here's a way to here's a way to focus at the frame it i'm really really curious about the difference between poetry and prayer um and i the closest i've been able to come to any way of thinking about it is that i i look for poetry in prayer but i don't look for prayer in poetry um in the sense that i think prayer has some really specific goals and poetry uh is more open-ended than that um sometimes i try to write poems about prayer but i'm not drawn to writing to prayer it's just it's really fascinating and um since you asked maybe afterwards i would love to hear your thoughts but while i'm saying this it reminds me that i wanted to say that um it could have been a year ago that michelle clark was in the back there sent out an email saying have you heard about this new hub for jewish poetry called yes you rob you remember that no oh well it was just something you must have come across your you know yeah it's really interesting thing it's not that old and they're they're gathering they have a directory that you know you can go on if you are a jewish poet you know and you can look somebody up and they gather people for readings that are sometimes online and sometimes in person and they're going to have a summer conference um i'm kind of uh excited about it and um it made me think about what it would be like to gather a wider network of jewish poets in vermont so um cool wow what was it called yet sirah it's y etz i are a age which is is one of the varieties of of creativity to say i don't really think of myself as a jewish poet i am jewish and i am a poet but i never really thought of myself as a jewish poet and so there was a little part of me about this gathering that was a little bit you know a little bit uncomfortable not because i mean i relish my jewish culture i do or it's in my poems a lot but i think of my and at the same way i don't think of myself as a woman poet necessarily i think of myself as a poet so it's you know it's sort of narrowing the the the lane rather than well haven't spent haven't spent many years trying to be a hybrish poet no success i realize um that i entered history as a jew i really don't have much to say about that i write into history along with the jewish people and um so i mean a lot of my a lot of what i write as you may have noticed is a struggle with the fact of my being a jew i don't like jewish by the way um and there's nothing ish um so i i i struggle with being a jew and wondering what my responsibilities to and for the jewish people are um i don't think all of my poems have jewish reference but that's that's my answer it's my response a good question well i come up here i come to the question as a comfort which means that there's a lot of common personal jewish history that often people share you know your story of your poem with your story about the big exodus to queens and michelle has written about moving from the laury's side to queens it could as well be both places could be the moon to me on many levels including um sort of recent jewish history um so um i think i imagery will come to me from the liturgy um i certainly think about god a lot actually in one way or another i'm not a very religious person um i think there's as many kinds of jews as there are everyone else in the world and that's where i fit in there so i don't know i'm not adverse to the question i don't i don't have anything more to say about that sorry charlie i wasn't either and um i feel lucky if i write a poem that ends up being about judyism or as a jewish reference but um it's where the muse takes me that is there but i don't really strive to write jewish poems i'm not religious at all but i'm culturally identified very much with being jewish and with my family of you know extended family background and all the people and so i think a lot about the people and my experiences and i take from that and you know oftentimes want to write about something related to my cultural jewish experience but since i've only been writing poetry for 10 years i'm kind of uh basically i'm a i'm a woman who writes poetry and i happen to also be jewish but you know i i get a kick out of bringing in my jewish cultural background to my to my writing yes i don't have as deep question as what's been posed here so far um but i um was very curious about the story in your poem judy that related to andrea about as a heroine um niko niki yeah yes could did you share the story with that it was in the poem the story was the poem andrea and i went for a walk with our dog with only with my dog and i didn't have a dog my dog is a rabble well sir boxard everyone but he's actually sweet but we met another dog who was definitely on the attack and andrea saved our lives and that was wonderful my sheer force of calmness and character yes it's really great that was the story thank you and we haven't walked that road again and we won that tell us which road it's the wrong creation field and playing field oh by the river a great road to walk on unless you happen without a dog thank you you're welcome with um president company excluded do you have a favorite um jewish poet it's amazing how every other poet comes into my head well i love um edward kersh gerald star i was just going to say gerald star yeah um riz payley riz payley at the end it's one of those questions by the way that makes you freeze and not be able to think of anybody but yeah marge piercy charlie your favorite the least level top no they tell things the least level top that is your favorite one of your favorite what am i here yeah i i i've only tried to i've only submitted a few poems ever to be published and i think i had two poems taken by a now defunct publication called the jewish women's quarterly and one of my poems that was in there marge piercy had a poem at the same time and that was my greatest pride in that thing with her being in her company in that journal it's a good time yes over there but why do you think the question is why do you write poetry do you feel feel compelled to do you have fun writing poetry not always not always not always compelled not always fun not always fun always compelled always yes right yeah um that's how they get made home to me is like a it's a box and it must be it's a made thing it doesn't happen naturally it's not really spontaneous it's an object carefully made of words and it should be capacious enough to hold all kinds of understandings and meanings but it must be a carefully made and a beautiful box a beautiful container i i recently um saw a film of root stone's life and she's she her contention was that poems just came through her like a breeze just blew her and i thought she i never had a breeze it was her feet and all in it i mean you know it's work you know i mean it's work it's it's what it's what i do it's my work i'm baron wormser who's another one of my favorite jewish poets and he's a friend also a local person but he said that a poem is an emotional errand and i really resonated with that because the kernel of the beginning of a poem is something you know that maybe you know something happens or you think about something or you think about you know an event that happened the creation of the actual poem is you know a lot of work and revision revision a lot of revision but you know the initial impulse to me is often turns out to be my the two poems i wrote about the first two marriages to me that really helped me have closure about each of those marriages and it honored them in a certain way even though they were very brief and not successful so you know that's how i feel about a lot of the things i write is that it honors a person or a situation or an animal whatever yeah i find writing poetry fun and um and i love coming up in the metaphor i'm saying coming up with which discovers me anyway um let me split up yes it is fun in a way um it's what he's called the fascination of what's difficult so yeah i i concurred with child you mean that it is fun but it is um it can be very punishing fun remember the one having way said about writing said it's easy you just open a vein you remember what dr johnson said about writing what only a fool writes except for money i um have a very difficult time starting to write for some reason just uh it's hard to get going but i love language i love language and so the process of playing with it once once there's something there is really really pleasurable so so let me ask you how do you balance writing with reading oh boy specifically poetry that is a real another one of those gigantic questions oh my gosh uh it's really interesting because sometimes when i'm writing i'm not reading um almost specifically it's not even an intention it's almost like entering a different zone um reading is it's um it gives you so much permission you know i remember when i first started reading poetry i kept saying you mean if you do this you mean you can do this you mean you know and they're all invitations to start so i was startled by how panicked i was where i couldn't see which i knew was temporary um that i couldn't write i i knew i was panicked about not being able to read i was in a huge panic about not being able to read but when i figured out i could write on my phone dictating it was a huge relief and that tells me something about um but very i find writing tremendous fun i find my thinking about myself as a writer very painful so you know you know i i see my faults and they're they're crippling but a lot of it is that despite myself i find out things it's it's discovery for me so and i seriously taken up learning how to paint and that is a whole different thing and i don't i learn a whole bunch of different stuff but i don't learn this stuff i think i think maybe one more question and then we'll um eat talk we have books for sale etc yeah so i don't know but that's the second question for me so if anyone hasn't first no okay it's yours last year june i heard you and adamant when you were pairing up with the asian poet remains you know miss you too yeah that was a wonderful event and i wondered if anybody else uh barring you know this event where you're kind of sort of together but um have you not any collaboration as poets well i i don't know that collaboration but um judy and charlie and i have been writing together since 1988 so we we have a lot of history of helping each other's poems we realize on the page and i've been a poetry group of jesse who started our poetry group eight years ago and we meet once a month and we work a lot with each other and sometimes write a poem together i'm not very good at collaborating but i've also been meeting with them well and then i didn't even know that arlie was a poet until he signed up for the marching arts marathon and i just was running around the house saying bother you have to read this you know my socks so they're like hidden poets here coming out of cabinet it's really good wait wait wait how many people in the audience of a red poetry oh that's sad that's remarkable that's a good place to transition into conversations