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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
A Poet, Covering The News
By Christine Potter
I’m proud to have been one of the joyous protesters cheering for the inflato-frogs on October 18th. There were many delightful things about the massive No Kings protests, but what I liked most was how they managed to be goofy and anarchic while peacefully staying on message. I’ve read estimates north of eight million people on the nation’s streets that Saturday—with no arrests, sea to shining sea! And yet the protests were born of fear for our future, even despair. There’s poetry in that, isn’t there? Poetry often takes the darkest parts of life and spins it into beauty.
It seems fitting that I spoke with a Rockland journalist-turned-poet this month: Brian Kates. After coming to New York from rural Pennsylvania, Brian had a decades-long career at the New York Daily News, and before that served in the Army as an officer in what he calls “spy-vs.-spy” Cold War Berlin. His work with the News Editorial Board on a series of editorials kept Harlem’s Apollo Theatre alive—and won a Pulitzer! He’s taught journalism at Columbia, NYU, CUNY, and Purchase. But for three years, he also spent time “sleeping in doorways, city parks and squalid shelters,” researching The Murder of a Shopping Bag Lady, which the New York Times called “a book in the grand journalistic tradition.” It garnered a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America, and Brian says changed his life “forever.”
And then he read Mary Oliver.
It wasn’t Oliver’s poems that got Kates at first; it was her essays on observing the natural world in Upstream. He says he is still “moved by her willingness to become lost in her surroundings, to find magic in the mundane.” Certainly, time so intensely researching and writing about the unhoused had already formed him as a writer. But Oliver opened the world of poetry for him, as she did for so many of us. Here’s one of Brian’s poems where, like Oliver, he becomes one with his surroundings—not in nature, but in midtown Manhattan—and the two worlds converge.
Madison Square Aubade
A police car screams down Fifth Avenue outofthewayoutoftheway
as Dawn hurls her blazing bomb over the heroic bronze head of
Admiral David Glasgow Farragut: Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Barbara pulls herself from her bench, heaves her feet, swollen like
footballs inside torn galoshes, onto the pavement and pushes her Gristedes
shopping cart toward the old drinking fountain at the corner of the park.
When she was young, Barbara might have raced into the park on roller skates,
stooped to push the small brass button at the fountain’s base and
jammed a finger over the nozzle to aim a jet of water at a girlfriend, giggling.
Yes, Barbara was a girl once, as your mother and your grandma once were,
your sister, your aunt, your cousin, your wife. Perhaps you. Were you a girl once,
playing hop-scotch, jumping rope, dreaming of princesses and unicorns?
The fountain bubbles up a mingy inch. She cups her hand, splashes water on
her face, under her blouse, reaches down into her thrift store slacks. She leans,
slurps like a dog, rubs a crusty finger across her gums.
It tastes of brass. They say fear tastes like brass. Also anger, also failure.
She spits it on the flagstone and rushes to finish before the morning’s workbound
hordes invade, flinging pity and loathing, each waving an invisible eviction notice.
—published in Paterson Literary Review, 2022
An aubade is a morning poem or song, often a Romeo-and-Juliet style lovers-parting-with-the-rising-sun sort of thing. There can be a sense of sorrow at night passing and the new day coming. Barbara, the subject of this poem, seems too numbed by the routine of her life on the street to regret the passing of night into a new day. So the poem’s narrator does it for her, imagining her as a girl roller-skating and playing with the same drinking fountain in which she now must bathe—in public. The poem describes the way her bathing is done matter-of-factly, sharply focusing the reader on how a woman battered by life on the street would feel.
She brushes her teeth with a finger and “it tastes of brass. They say fear tastes like brass. Also anger, also failure.” These are chilling, empathetic lines in a poem that is both accessible and heartfelt—and Kates’ years of journalism show in its clarity. He says, “Newspaper readers shouldn’t be forced to figure out what you’re telling them. Poems reside in a more nebulous universe: ambiguity, obscurity, uncertainty can shape a poem, infuse it with meaning, give it depth. Or, of course, they can make it incomprehensible. That’s the challenge.”
Besides Mary Oliver, Brian admires Tony Hoagland, Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser and Marge Piercy because they are “storyteller poets,” there for everyone to read. I like that term, and I especially agree about Piercy and Kooser! Here’s another of Brian’s poems. I especially enjoy this one because it reminds me that Rockland County, too, began as a place where people farmed.
Fallow
God forbid a dandelion dare show its wooly head or
crabgrass claim an inch of the manicured green half acre
on which this tidy house is set: white siding, red
vinyl shutters, tiny pillared porch. A perfect, sterile box.
A Ford pickup in the driveway, a shiny Chevy in the garage,
a backyard set of swings, a child’s slide, a net for playing badminton.
The neighbor’s house, identical. Next door, the same.
And on and on, like crosses on the graves at Arlington.
Right here is where the farmhouse stood before the fertile fields
were fallowed and carved into the checkerboard on which these forty
houses sit. Its porch looked out to waving wheat and beyond that,
as far as you could see, row on row of green corn, eight feet high if an inch.
A decade before Lincoln took office, strong men with ax and saw
cleared the oak and hickory that owned this land before them, and
straining oxen wrenched the stumps up one by one, then pulled
the plow to carve furrow for the seed.
Here, a century and more of births, baptisms, weddings, infidelities,
divorces; deaths from age, illness, drink, lightning strikes, tractor
rollovers; unfathomable acts of God. Each year, a family picnic with
noisy games of horseshoes, beer and laughter and festering grudges.
And in the barn, sunlight. It streamed through vents and cracks like
searchlights aimed by God; fork-tailed swallows swooped like angels
in the hayloft’s grain-gold motes; incense of age, alfalfa, red clover,
procreation and manure. Cassocked bats prayed in the rafters. And so did I.
—Published in The Banyan Review, Spring 2022
There’s plenty to admire in this one, too! It’s a history of the American landscape before it filled with identical suburban houses, each with its “white siding, red vinyl shutters, tiny pillared porch.” These houses are alike as “crosses on the graves at Arlington.” Wow. Enviable simile. Kates imagines the fields in the development before they were cut into lots, when they were planted with corn. He sees even further back, to the clearing of the land for the field, as oxen pulled up the stumps of felled trees. In the penultimate stanza, he uses Whitman-like lists in the lines about the joys and sorrows of people who lived on this land.
But most lovely, I think, is the poem’s close. There’s another spectacular simile: the sunlight coming in through the barn’s “vents and cracks like searchlights aimed by God.” I love the cassocked bats. And also the poem ending on “I,” its narrator. So often poems start with “I.” Ending on it is a neat trick.
Kates is self-taught as a poet. He says he’s only been writing verse for five years, drawing his inspiration from the poets he reads. He’s an intense believer in revision, but is careful not to sand things down too smoothly. Besides perfecting his own work, he has been selecting the poems displayed on the Sheep Meadows Poetry Walk in Upper Nyack.
Poets who want to be included in that project should email him by November 25th at poemsforriverhook@gmail.com to find out when he’s reading and curating for the collection there. If you hop right on it, you might make the November 10th deadline for the latest round of poetry. Sheep Meadows Poetry Walk is a lovely place to find your work: on a little pedestal beside a path through a beautiful field just uphill from the Hudson River. I think I’ll send him a little something. You should, too.
Here’s an old poem of my own I ran across this week. It originally ran in Roi Fainéant, an online lit mag named after a French term for “lazy king” that can be applied to any incapable ruler. We get fiery sunsets around here in November, so it seemed a good time to bring this one back out.
Opposite, Also The Same
The way a sunset catches your attention when it’s still
a sober grey dam with yellow light spilling over it!
Then something amps up its neon, and so you’ll have
to sift through your too-big purse for your phone and
try to crop out the car window after you grab a picture
of a thing that’s like a bad argument—more and more
intense by the second. Except there’s no disagreement
here. Someone else even stands, holding her phone
sideways and over her head (by now you’ve both parked
your cars and gotten out). Cloud banks—ruby, purple,
then a whole tide of molten gold! I’ve read about an exact
intensity of shaking in earthquakes that makes people
flee the buildings inside which they’d ducked under
tables and into doorways. This is the opposite, but also
the same. We’re all outside saying Whoa, fixated on
something we can’t stop watching or control. Some
of us are even using our phones to call people we love: Go
outside now! Today’s last words, writ in harmless flame.
You never know what’s going to happen! Keep your phones charged up, and I’ll see you in December.
