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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.
STAC’s Teacher/Poet Monica Wendel: Environmental Poetry and Summertime
By Christine Potter
It’s June and schools are letting out. Colleges have already conferred their degrees; high schools soldier on until Regents/final exams. Elementary schools (bless them) are still trying to keep it together, even though there’s a BEE in the room and somebody said “six seven” and…sigh.
Lots of poets are also teachers. I was one once. I remember classes at this time of year. It takes massive amounts of energy to grab attention from trees suddenly in leaf, early summer sunshine, and the first big thunderstorm. Poetry may be one of the few things strong enough for the job, and there’s plenty of poetry at STAC!
St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill offers an English program with a rock-solid creative writing focus. This month’s poet, Monica Wendel, teaches there. I can’t wait to show you her poems, so let’s start with this one, set on Coney Island. Monica once lived in Brooklyn, like this poem’s narrator.
Mermaid Parade
You didn’t want to ride bikes to Coney Island
so I went by myself, rode the straight shot
of Bedford past Prospect Park, past Brooklyn
College, until I hit the waters of Sheepshead Bay,
then turned right and rode toward the bungee-jump
ride I could see hot pink against blue sky.
A new high rise. Mermaids danced along Shore Parkway
holding solo cups and paper fans. Everyone was there
with someone else, everyone but the people selling
Italian ices, and one girl who looked very sad.
I felt alone, pushed one way, then the other in crowds
so thick I couldn’t reach the boardwalk, had to circle
through Shoot the Clown and Hurricane Coaster back
to Brighton Beach, which was freckled with bodies,
not pulsing with them. The ocean was a huge, dark blossom.
A cruise ship powered toward the horizon.
Later, with your face on mine, you said I tasted like the sea,
but did you mean the New York summer smell of life? Like pinto
beans and refried beans and double-dutch rope and Laundromat soap?
Could you love me any other way than this—
dirty as a seagull, thighs worn from peddling
the streets uphill, toward home?
This poem was what I needed to read today. It’s a great big gulp of early summer. I love the imagery: the hot pink bungee-jump ride against the blue of the sky, the beach not “pulsing” but “freckled with bodies,” and how “the ocean was a huge, dark blossom.” That ocean metaphor is my first official Enviable Line this month.
I also love the way the poem as a whole plays with being alone and being with others. The narrator bikes to Coney Island by herself where “everyone was there with someone else.” A crowd tosses her around. The only other single person not there to sell Italian ices “looked very sad.” Solo Cups, the party perennials, are in the hands of the mermaids in the parade. That brand name certainly does its work! Crowds, solitude in a crowd—and then a terrific close with the narrator, “dirty as a seagull,” back home with her partner. It’s put-you-there vivid, really excellent poetry.
The writing program where Monica Wendel teaches is enriched by Signature STAC Chats, a series of public readings and talks hosted by Dr. Heath Bowen, Dean of the School of Arts and Social Sciences. Iain Haley Pollock’s been there, and of course Rockland’s kind and generous poet laureate, Juan Pablo Mobili. Students were able to discuss their impressions of Pollock’s book Ghost, Like a Place, and to share their own poetry with Mobili. Speculative fiction author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, who went to high school in Spring Valley, has also visited and inspired STAC’s student authors. Monica says that meeting working authors helps her students develop their own practices, and learn how to “commit yourself to an art.”
Her own practice varies. She’s got dear friends in a writer’s group she’s both ZOOMed and gathered with live for thirteen years. She loves going to retreats: “Last summer I was an artist in residence at Wildacres Retreat, where I hiked to the empty Blue Ridge Parkway, watched the sunrise, and finished the first draft of a new manuscript. In the past few years, I have also had overwhelmingly positive experiences at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Orion Writers Workshop, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.” Sometimes she writes every day, sometimes not. Monica says she has even given herself stickers for encouragement. That makes me smile—and want to head online to buy some for myself!
Here’s a poem of Monica’s where she plays with the old Dutch word “Kill” for stream or creek. Living as I do on the Kill Von Beaste , it got my attention right away. I admire the turns in this poem, and how it twists around to its close:
English Kills
I’ve been singing in a dead language
about the sun. The children know
it can come back to life; just ask the Israelis
who made up words they couldn’t find
in the Torah—t-shirt, rainbow.
But rainbow must have been there.
Maybe I’m remembering this wrong.
In my dream, I was on a farm,
presenting a PowerPoint.
One slide was a picture of a mother
kneeling by her child, the other a backyard
abutting the Newton Creek. In real life one of
its branches is called English Kills.
Don’t be alarmed:
Kills was only Dutch for something.
Was it stream. Was it water.
They’re all dead now, those early colonists.
My mother is scared of the tunnels
the Gazans are building but I am scared
of any prison, no matter how large,
and must always take the side against the guards.
Call it my stubborn calling. She told me once
that language is a river, not a fish tank.
You can never capture all the words.
English Kills, by the way, is not just the branch of a stream. It’s also the name of a program connecting the arts, ecology, and community along Newton Creek in Brooklyn, a superfund site that was at the time of World War II one of the busiest ports in the US. It had been long used for industrial waste, and even untreated sewage. Now it is being (slowly!) cleaned up.
What’s great about this poem starts with that pun on “Kills.” I love “Don’t be alarmed”. I’m also really intrigued by the opening of the poem, about how Hebrew as it is spoken in Israel includes made-up, modern words for “rainbow” and “t-shirt,” bringing a “dead’ language back to life. The poem’s close links back to fears of tunnels in Gaza—but also of prisons and the moral necessity of not siding with their guards. The line about language being “a river, not a fish tank” is pretty brilliant. There’s a lot going on here!
Monica Wendel says she’s interested in “environmental literature,” which she explains has the natural world at its heart rather than merely serving as a literary setting or framing device. Environmental literature lets the natural world speak for itself. I think “English Kills” qualifies.
Monica’s been published quite a bit: plenty of literary magazines have picked up her work. She’s the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections of poems. She has something interesting to say about the process of getting in print. So often we counsel young writers to stubbornly keep sending their work out after repeated rejection. She thinks that’s poor advice, a practical attitude she got from her parents. In her words, “If audiences aren’t connecting with your work, of course you can keep writing things that are for yourself. But if you want to find an audience, you need to think carefully about your writing and how audiences are responding to it. I don’t just want to write for myself; I want to write something that people can feel moved by. If editors or audiences aren’t interested in my work, that’s a problem I need to fix – that I want to fix.”
And this is why there are writing programs like the one at STAC.
Here’s a prose poem by Monica that I think also qualifies as environmental literature. I love how it mixes dream state with memory, and I love how the waterways around New York City are almost another character in it. Every sentence is another surprise, but somehow the piece also makes me think of the closing lines of The Great Gatsby! Poetry without traditional line breaks challenges some readers, but this non-lineated piece is magical, ends with an important question—and no question mark! (And of course, all the dashes remind me of Dickinson.)
Blue
Billy Joel plays at the diner where the waitresses wear their hair swooped up, swirl whipped cream atop hot cocoa—outside, rain shakes the last red leaves from tree branches and rustles ghosts out of sleep—only two months ago cars lined up to wash in the open fire hydrant, little kids with plastic buckets dammed the gutter—last night, I dreamt that Chris and I rowed through New York Harbor at night, as we did the sea expanded until the harbor became a great lake became an ocean—the waitress stirs creamer into coffee, a single revolution of the spoon—puts it in the bus bin—now it’s the dishwasher’s problem—this rain, will it overflow the system, will sewage drain into the East River—in the bottom silt, divers found the gun used to murder a cop in East Harlem—lights of police boats lined both shores, Bronx and Manhattan—the Narrows, where water whirlpools, sucks boats into ghosts—my father told me how he lent out his hammer to a diver who dropped it near some retaining wall—my father told me that Battery Park shouldn’t be there, the land just fill from subway tunnels—in my dream, the wind, cold, blew across the harbor and I found a blanket and curled under it—I woke, cold, curled under a blanket—in the dream, it was others who were rowing, we weren’t—from the top deck of the ferry ghosts lit candles on shores that pulled away from us like a canal opening its locks—in our wake, kayakers crossed—the waitress stirs the coffee, again—a new spoon—all this, just once—the dream just once, the rain just once, my father sketching blueprints in the basement—we wrapped Christmas presents in the discarded papers—cities planned and never realized—perfect angles—nothing like these shores—shellfish filter the water, still, sewage spills—I woke just this once—I woke to stir coffee to sit in traffic to watch the river turn red with siren lights with brake lights—I woke to remember my father—the tilt of his drafting board—when we were good we were allowed to do our homework there—borrow his pencils—what city floats through this dream—I am beneath the dock—I swim from one harbor to the next—I burn in sun—I burn tongue—I rake up the shark washed on the sand and bury it—rowers cut across the wake—harbor full of ghosts—whose
Wow! I’d love to hear this poem read aloud. What a reading-closer it would be! And I can’t imagine it in standard free verse lines.
Monica is currently at work on a multi-genre collection that will include poems, lyric essays, and stories. She’s searching for an agent. Her book English Kills and Other Poems is for sale here, and also directly from the author at readings. I think you need a copy.
Here’s a poem of mine about being on the air at the campus radio station where I was program director back in the 1970’s. We were in upper Western New York State—and yikes, there was a tornado. I hid under the mixing board. Seemed like it might fit in here. Happy summer and remember to check the weather forecast!
Picking An LP To Play During A Tornado
Spring, 1974
So I needed a one-track side after I read the take-cover
script for anyone listening to the campus FM. Green clouds!
I sent my boyfriend down the hall to a studio with no
outside window. I was twenty-one and always cheered for
the storm. Rooted for the Emergency Broadcast System,
its ten teletype dings, wind thumping a random drum, for
the station manager’s phone call: I heard! Put on Yessongs!
Say “Here’s music to get blown away by!” I rooted for sky
now black above our turntables, for that freakish nightfall
mid-afternoon, the nerve-zap of lightning, the silver silver
silver of rain, then a Niagara of it, then thunder. Thunder!
Seriously, now is no time to be on the quad, I told the mic,
and ducked under the mixing board. Crazy, crazy, this was
crazy, but I was used to men calling me a crazy chick. So
there I was, longing for a someday-job I knew they never
let girls with girlish voices have, especially a crazy chick
who rooted for twisters because she enjoyed the idea of God
pulling up buildings like weeds. My big secret? Faking
things. I quietly hated Yes, and Yessongs, but I played it:
too many notes, floods of notes! Stupid lyrics revolving
over my hiding place. The tornado hit two miles from town.
On the quad, Who-Was-His-Father-Again slouched in
beery mud with his pony-sized dog. He hadn’t listened to
me or anyone else. Didn’t have to then—or ever. The air
was sodden, rank as wet cardboard. What if I were the real
tornado? Someone unlocked the dining hall door: knife
and dish clatter. My boyfriend laughed. Meatloaf for dinner.
originally in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
