Two Excellent Poetry Spaces
By Christine Potter
This month, Grist for the Mill visits two local poetry-friendly spaces and the poets behind them: the poetry walk at Upper Nyack’s River Hook, and Sparkle Bookstore in Sparkill. Since it’s almost fall, and fall is glorious here in Rockland County, let’s go to the outdoor space first. River Hook features a well-curated poetry trail on the grounds of an old estate neighbors once called The Sheep Farm. Sheep grazed its meadow for many years. Now its charming brick manor house is being repurposed as a center for the arts and community enrichment.
River Hook is also known as the Hester Haring Carson Preserve. Its 12-acres have entrances at 626 North Broadway and 611 North Midland Avenue where you can leave your car behind for a poetry-enhanced hike. Ronald Hammond, a haiku poet and author of My Backyard and Beyond, Nature by the Tappan Zee, was present at the Arbor Day, 2022 birth of the path with its seasonally changing verse. He says the River Hook trail “gives visitors a new way to see the natural world, and it has given voice to many poets in the area.” Sheryl LeRoy, President of Friends of River Hook, calls the poems on exhibit there “a bit of a hidden treasure in the meadow.” And Upper Nyack Mayor Karen Tarapata constructed the original posts that held the first round of poems!
Ronald works with local poet Brian Kates to keep the exhibit fresh, Brian dealing with the poets who submit their work, and Ronald with nuts and bolts of fitting poems into the stands River Hook now uses to display them. We’ve covered Brian’s poetry in this column; after a career in journalism that included a Pulitzer, he came across a book of essays by Mary Oliver and found himself beginning to write verse in his seventies.
Brian says River Hook is looking for “Upbeat poems that celebrate nature and the seasons, reflect the ecology and history of the Hudson Valley and help create and embrace community.” A changing panel of local poets he coordinates selects what Ronald places on the stands along the walk—with the authors’ names removed from their work to keep the process fair. At a recent poetry reading, Brian told me that a poem having been published in a literary magazine or anthology is no barrier to it also being accepted at River Hook. That’s kind of huge; few publications/exhibits do that. He’d also like to encourage people who don’t usually send out their poetry to magazines and contests to consider River Hook’s next call for submissions. The reading period for the poetry walk begins in December, and if you’d like more information about submitting, shoot an email here: [email protected].
As a poet/editor myself, I know how curating the work of others can rob you of writing time. I asked Brian how that was going, and he admitted that “I’m a bit of a poetry magpie, and occasionally I read poems that inspire me to write poems on a similar theme. But, on the other hand, I’m not as disciplined a writer as I’d like to be and the time-consuming curation process sometimes provides an excuse not to write.” Here’s a poem he managed to create anyway.
Signs and Wonders
The rotting beech, rooted a just a few yards from my house,
rose like a six-story steeple in the cathedral of trees
at the edge of our woods.
She’d stood a hundred years through sun and snow
drought and flood, housed crows and doves,
was a ladder to the sky for countless kids.
But now she was like a much-loved dog you take
to the vet for a merciful end. I wept as a team of men
with ladders and ropes and saws took her down.
I’ve read that beech trees form families, share food,
aid sick brethren, make sacrifices root to root
to encourage new life.
That spring, the mother stump birthed a half dozen shoots.
Nourished, I like to think, by arboreal aunts and uncles,
they stretched for the blessing of rain and the succor of sun.
It seems to me they are in constant conversation with
each other and with God. When the wind rises, I think
I hear their prayers.
There are plenty of reasons to like this poem! I’ve had this exact experience with an apple tree our arborist said was over a century old. I used to be able to go outside and pick apples to fry up with the pork tenderloin for dinner. I, too, wept when that gnarled, generous thing had to come down. I like the comparison to the dreaded last trip to the vet with a pet. But what I really admire is the turn in the fourth stanza about how beech trees “form families” and “make sacrifices root to root/to encourage new life.” And those last three lines are just lovely.
This plain-spoken poem is also quite musical: all the “ooo” sounds in the words “food,” “root,” and “shoots.” It sounds like mourning. I like the alliteration in “constant conversation,” too. This poem reads out loud really well. It’s a fine elegy for any tree, especially that much-loved beech.
Brian also let us have this short, haiku-like poem:
my grandson’s laughter
woodland
brook
slips
over
rocks
Can’t you hear the brook in those lines? It’s the sound of water and laughter both, so of course the metaphor is dead-on. But what really grabs me is the shape of the poem. Like George Herbert’s famous example of concrete poetry, “Easter Wings,” which is in the shape of angelic wings, Brian’s poem looks like water sliding over rocks in a creek! It works so well you see the water as well as hearing it.
Yet another rainy day? Look no further than Sparkill for first-rate indoor poetry. The Sparkle Bookstore was opened by Donna Miele and her son Armand when they both found themselves ready for change after professional frustrations. Donna had also faced some serious health challenges—and emerged confident. “Doesn’t everyone want a bookstore?” she asks. So with that if-not-now-when attitude, The Sparkle Bookstore at 642 Main St, Sparkill, was born.
Donna had long been an editor and writer who dabbled in poetry, but didn’t really consider herself a poet. She says “Writing poetry came about in my adult life and it was strictly from hanging out with poets. When Anupama Amaran, David E. Bell, and I formed River River Writers Circle some years ago, they were both poets. We hosted a lot of poetry events and a lot of poets came to our writing circles. So I would sometimes try my hand at it. And, yes, when we opened The Sparkle, because of that background, it was a given that we would host poets and poetry events.”
And so she does. The Sparkle Bookstore gives a home to workshops and readings both—and stocks poetry. Prose poet Laurel Peterson and Rockland Poet Laureate Juan Pablo Mobile will be there at the end of September. Events at Sparkle starring Rockland County poets like Mobili, spoken word poet Bryan Roessel, and teacher-poet Rebecca Watkins have inspired Donna’s writing. Now, although she has a prose memoir called Pain Country: Chasing Joy into Lupusland, (Sibylline Press) forthcoming in 2027, she starts the day journaling poems, a practice she started during her recovery to combat morning brain fog. And she’s beginning to send poetry out. Donna took Eclectica Magazine’s Word Challenge this summer, and her resulting poem, “Dear Lupus,” will appear there in October.
Here’s a poem Donna wrote about mermaids.
The Possibility of Mermaids
After Refrain” by Jameson Fitzpatrick
Sirens, selkies, sisters,
have you heard
the snatch of music,
something on the umami air?
Is it sorrow, or does it only
call sorrow forth? Something
long held in, something unshareable.
Or do they praise their heaven,
the vaulted briny swell? Angels,
out-of-sight heralds, guardians,
do they watch over the coral canopy?
Bright fish like butterflies sip its nectar.
The eels hide like sinners.
Or do they praise their heaven,
do they watch over the coral canopy?
Bright fish like butterflies sip its nectar.
The eels hide like sinners.
Listen! The gulls have stopped screaming.
They point their bills into the wind and hunker
under music rising soft and light as the mist.
Undines blue and green, cheeks pillowed on the waves,
sing themselves to sleep, dream of legs.
Shhh, shhh, that’s the trees on the hill above the shoreline
answering the mermaids.
Wow. First of all, this is no beginner’s poem! It’s wildly musical: all the sibilance in the first stanza used to describe a mysterious “snatch of music/something on the umami air.” And then there’s that rhyme-echo with “air” and “unshareable.”
I also like how the first two stanzas are largely questions, and the third stanza an answer. Cool simile with eels that “hide like sinners.” And then music again in the third stanza. “Undines” (water spirits, much like mermaids) is a gorgeous word. And look at (and listen to) the sound of the trees uphill from the shore “answering the mermaids.” Really nice work.
Donna loved e.e. cummings as a teen, especially the line “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” Me too! Who could resist that line—at 14 or 74? She tells me that our local Rockland poets— Mobili, Bryan Roessel, and Rebecca Watkins–are now the most influential to her.
She likes poems with unique, sharp imagery and a hint of mystery about them: “I think I like a poem that makes me wonder a bit, even if it’s devastating. I like a poem that invites me to answer.” “The Possibility of Mermaids” certainly qualifies.
So does a very new poem of hers, one she’s still working on, but has agreed to let us see in progress. Things called bezoars were medieval remedies for all sorts of illnesses and poisons, harvested from the digestive tracts of ruminant animals like goats, and largely made of undigested fiber and hair. Yes, like the hairballs your kitty sometimes leaves on the rug. People with Lupus often have digestive symptoms that feel like that kind of blockage, or less commonly, real ones, made of dietary fiber. By the way, Coca-Cola truly can dissolve a bezoar. Here’s a link from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
How could anyone possibly write a poem about bezoars? Well, like this:
Bezoar
The immune system normally can distinguish “self” from “non-self.”
–“What Is Autoimmunity?”, autoimmune.org
Nightly, I swallow at a lump,
high in my stomach or deep in my throat.
A knot. A gastroesophageal mushroom.
Were I a goat, and this thing a bezoar, some sorcerer
might harvest it, an antidote to most poisons.
Poor joke, this cure, on the survivor. This wiry pill—
ovine hair, gravel, steel wool scraps,
the cracked stone of a peach—magically belly-lodged
until they die of something else.
This stone in my stomach is mine but not me,
yet isn’t it also me? Does it help to deny myself?
Today I tried some gelato, passion creme,
naso-oral euphoria. But it nacred the bezoar,
doubled its size. If this is how an oyster feels,
shuck me! Take this pearl.
Choke. Swallow. Wait for sleep. Wan television light.
Below Deck: Shiny glam seafarers take
champagne with breakfast. With lunch, espresso martinis.
Vodka-sodas at teatime in the spa.
Crazy-spendy wine with dinner that they
cannot possibly taste through the churn of their own
alcoholic overfed phlegm. After midnight,
dessert and brandy in the hot tub.
They do not drown.
They descend in the wee hours,
wake to nine a.m. champagne. Unpoisoned.
Disappointed, I curl around my rock.
Incidentally, tap out:
“How much Coca-Cola does it take to dissolve a bezoar?”
And you will discover that Coca-Cola is good for something.
My body has an identity crisis. I cannot regurgitate myself.
I don’t know how she did it, but despite (and possibly also because of) the “ew”factor, Donna wrote a smart, darkly funny poem. The theme of self and not-self is a good one.
I admire the way the first verse introduces the odd medical history of bezoars, and the idea of them being used to counteract disease and poison. By the way, they weren’t very effective, which the poem notes.
The narrator in the poem wonders if self-denial might help after enjoying some gelato and sensing that her bezoar (or what feels like one) has doubled in size. Great lines here: “If this is how an oyster feels/ shuck me! Take this pearl.” Miserable, she tries to fall asleep watching the TV series Below Deck, on which people stuff themselves with food and drink way too much alcohol, somehow emerging “unpoisoned.”
The close with Coca-Cola and being stuck with a disease that has somehow become who you are (brilliant way of seeing chronic illness) is great. It’s gutsy to hand an editor a poem this new—and rare for a poem this new to be this good.
Poets doing events! Poetry books on the shelves! And a poet-owner! Sparkle Bookstore absolutely qualifies as a first rate space for poetry—and they have wine, too! And snacks.
Here’s a poem from me for September. It originally ran a while back in Thimble Magazine, a good online lit mag run by Nadia Arioli and Agnes Volta.
Someone Always Needs to Explain
Somebody always needs to explain to you
all starlight is dead—often a man who also
must point out each constellation, intoning
all their names: Orion, Aquarius, Taurus
the bull. You know he’s not exactly correct,
but that sequin pleasing you on the horizon?
Time, the speed of light…it could be. So you
stand in a ring of friends somewhere the
sky’s dark enough to feel close, rummaging
for warmth inside your sweatshirt pockets
as the late autumn lawn stiffens under your
sneakers. At least the mosquitoes are gone.
And now you’re remembering a long flight
at night, how each city you passed held out
its long arms of light: shopping centers with
day-bright parking lots, luminous arenas
carpeted in lush grass. And what a rush as
you landed: moving headlights, bridge glitter,
bright boats in dark water, then a drumroll
beneath the wheels: a song of earth’s welcome.
Of course we could be about to blast it all
to nothing. It was nothing before. Dry leaves
rattle in the trees. But tonight someone has
lit a wood fire that makes me think we could
live here forever. Sparks fly up and vanish.
All we know is what shelters us now: night,
morning, the comfort of our old stories and
laughter, the patient wordlessness of the stars.
See you in October!
