Tag: poetry

The Sunday poetry series is back at the South Brunswick Library beginning this week, Sept. 16, at 2 p.m., featuring Gretna Wilkinson. Read the Time Off story on it here.

Here is the release:

Gretna Wilkinson — whose poetry speaks to issues of human suffering, children and love — will be the featured reader on September 16 when South Brunswick’s monthly series of Sunday poetry readings resumes following a summer hiatus.

The program, sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission, in cooperation with the South Brunswick Public Library, starts at 2 p.m. in the Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction.

Born and raised in Guyana, South America, Wilkinson works also address aspects of Guyanese culture. She gives several performances each year and works as a professor in the English Department at County College of Morris in New Jersey. As a Guyanese African American, she specializes in African American Literature and wrote her dissertation on the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in the U.S.A.

Ms. Wilkinson began her teaching career as a missionary teacher in Guyana. She is published in various publications including Poets of New Jersey From Colonial to Contemporary, and Spindrift. A Senior Fellow of the Southern Regional Educational Board, she also teaches creative writing in the Visual and Performing Arts Academy of Red Bank Regional High School.

The Sunday poetry readings will run through May 2008 and also feature:

Oct. 14 — Nancy Scott and Maxine Susman
Nov. 18 — Diane Lockward
Dec. 16 — Sam Friedman
Jan. 20 -– Hank Kalet
Feb. 17 — TBA
March 16 — Jack Wiler
April 20 — TBA
May 18 — TBA

For more information, including directions, contact the South Brunswick Arts Commission at (732) 329-4000, ext 7635, or Hank Kalet at otherhalf@comcast.net.

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Here is another poem tied to 9-11:

CERTAINTIES AND UNCERTAINTIES
(After Attila Jozsef, “To Sit, To Stand, To Kill, To Die”)

To drag this rake across wet leaves,
to scrub the crud from the bottom of this pan,
to wake as sunlight breaks through the gap in the shades,
to worry that all this could burn out, break,
all in the blink of an eye,
to pray that it won’t, that this can continue,
that these loves, this life can live on,
to wait for the telephone’s electronic ring,
to wander in the vast tundra of the mind,
to catch lighting bugs in jars,
to stare in disbelief as jets crash
and the towers crumble,
to know the calendar pages still turn,
to wander the curves of your hips
and the crevices of your soul,
to capture your queen and move on your king,
to reboot your computer after it’s crashed,
to answer nasty e-mails
or just delete them unread,
to forget,
to crest upon you like a wave in your mind,
to leave and never return,
to only know the moment
and guess the future,
to look these uncertainties in the eye
and laugh or cry but
always to keep it going, to get along
in this, this uncertain world of ours.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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I wrote this prose poem for an old friend, Mukul Agarwala, who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. I offer it to commemorate tomorrow’s anniversary.

LOST ONES: SEPT. 11, 2001
— for Mukul Agarwala

The picture on CNN was vaguely familiar, I guess, older, thicker, an adult version of someone I knew once, listed among the missing with thousands of others.

The name was what I remembered, connected to longtime memories, eroded with time, vague like that face on the computer screen.

There was the joke and the smile, something witty in my yearbook, that’s what I remember, the easy way we got along, but no images, nothing concrete beyond the hazy sense of knowledge, the house on Karen Street, the smell of curry permeating.

Your second day on the 94th floor, jet crash, terror attack, the towers came down, bodies lost, some vaporized, thick smoke, extreme heat, so much death.

I talked with your mother, talked with your father, listened to the heavy sighs and sobs, their grief hanging like an aging sunflower, its heavy head too much for its shriveling staff, bending it beyond its breaking point.

I went to synagogue for Rosh Hashana for the first time in nearly two decades, to be a part of a tradition, to remind myself of the temporary nature of our lives here and the vastness of the universe. And I needed to pray — for the hundreds confirmed dead, for the thousands more still missing, for the lost sense of security and safety, for peace, for the hope that the terrible events of Sept. 11 will not breed more bloodshed and violence.

I received an e-mail from someone I knew in high school, someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years or more, someone on the periphery of my life, lost long ago as we cut loose from the past. He’d heard of your disappearance like I had, struck by the photo, by the resemblance to a grainy memory saved in black and white with the others, one among many in a yearbook tucked away somewhere.

It took me a while to find my yearbook, packed in a trunk loaded down with odd mementos and debris of time past, loaded with rusted punk rock buttons, old greeting cards, a denim jacket signed by all of Annie’s friends in Brooklyn.

I e-mailed Andy, hadn’t heard from him in years, old friend, a best friend, lost friend, we grew apart like so many others from that time, wanting to reconnect, knowing that I missed that chance with you.

I’d thought of you over the years, decades now, wondered what you’d made of your life, occasional fleeting thoughts tied to a time past, another life really, thinking of all those people who litter the imagination, the memory, old friends and classmates, teammates and such, the random faces returning periodically like snippets of songs.

We leave too many things unsaid in this life, that’s what I’ve learned, leave too many things for the next day, too often waiting for the right moment, any moment, too content to let events control our lives, until the time passes, old friend, and there is no time left to talk and far too much left to say.

Hank Kalet
26/28:ix:01

The Borzoi Reader Poem-a-Day newsletter today features Laurie Sheck’s piece “The White Unswaying Place.” Sheck is a former professor of mine — she used to teach at Rutgers but is now at the New School — and a fine poet. I highly recommend her books.

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The Blog of South Brunswick
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Startled, hawk circling,
stepping from inside dry heat
into frigid air
that cuts bone-deep, knife-like, sharp,
breath rising like tea-pot steam

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick