poetry – Page 9 – Hank Kalet

Hear the poets

Sunday’s reading at the South Brunswick Library featured a couple of wonderful poets — Cat Doty and Adele Kenny (above), whose work dwelled on memory and family and whose reading styles made it easy for the audience to climb inside their work.

I’ll try and post a clip of Doty, when I can figure out why You Tube is being so tempermental.

Book list: Meditations on change

I recently finished Mark Doty‘s School of the Arts, a wonderful book of poems by a poet who will soon be teaching at Rutgers. (Picture at right from Doty’s Web site, is of a reading in New York in 2006.)

The book is a meditation on change — on the movements of history, on aging, on death. It is a book awash in images of altered architecture, of finality, and full of unanswered questions:

Which is worse, decay or restoration
that turns the past to a model of itself,
out of scale, new materials gleaming?

he writes in the title poem, questioning not just gentrification and preservation efforts — though they are the nominal peg — but our own penchant for myth making, for sentimental revision.

A Celebration of the Arts at MCC

I’m on tonight’s bill, with a lot of great people. It’s sponsored by the Edison Arts Society.

I better decide what I’m going to read.

Plugging a new journal

Middlesex County College has issued a new literary journal that features some truly fine work.

In addition to some exquisite poetry (including four by yours truly), Middlesex: A Literary Journal includes essays, a play, black-and-white artwork and reviews by faculty, alumni and friends of the college.

I attended MCC for a year (’85-’86) to get my grades up after two disastrous (academically) years at Penn State and three years working at jobs I knew I could never spend my life doing.

It was a good year that helped me focus my writing and my thinking, giving me a broad and strong base upon which my two years as a successful Rutgers undergraduate and year as a Rutgers graduate student were built.

So it is gratifying to be a part of this journal — and to feature some of the people involved during the monthly reading series I run at the South Brunswick Library. Among the readers were journal editor Emanuel di Pasquale (pictured reading), along with Steven Barnhart, Daniel Zimmerman, Matthew Spano and myself (photo at the top, from left, Hank Kalet, Steven Barnhart, Emanuel di Pasquale, Matthew Spano and Daniel Zimmerman). More readings are likely to be scheduled and there are plans to distribute the journal to libraries around the state — and for a second edition to come out next year.

To get a copy, e-mail Literary_Journal@middlesexcc.edu. I encourage everyone to pick up a copy and/or contribute.

Tennis Balls (poem for Honey)

tennis ball’s ripped skin
like a tear in the soul

wishing her panting smile
given so freely

could be here right now
that I could toss

the tennis ball
and watch her leap

like Tommie Agee
and snare it from

its downward arc
and wait as she

trots back, tongue
flapping like her tail

the breeze rustling
autumn leaves….

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