Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Terri, Matt, Cyrus, and the Long Island Scene

            Cyrus Chai stands hard by the Bay Shore station of the Long Island Railroad. So much of this island’s life revolves around the railroad that this venue’s location comes as no surprise. Poetry needs its economic lifelines. 
            Bay Shore sits in the middle of the island’s south shore. It’s a near-exurb commuter town and a hub for ferries to Fire Island, a barrier island and summer resort both charming for its lack of car traffic and infamous as the site of Frank O’Hara’s thusly ironic death by beach taxi.
            The wife and husband team of Terri Muuss and Matt Pasca have been staging the Cyrus Chai Reading Series here for the past two years (as of this June 2017 writing). They started the series with a vision, a mission to provide a place for poets to feel safe doing their thing, whatever their thing might be; a place free from hate speech and judgment, and a place to highlight the diversity of their town and proclaim the beauty of diversity in the world. The café’s owner, Cyrus, a man of Bengali heritage, born in Zimbabwe and raised in England, embraces the mission. According to Terri, when the couple met Cyrus, they immediately realized that he shared their vision for the world.
            Terri and Matt make a conscious effort to book pairs of features diverse in both their backgrounds and their aesthetics. One of tonight’s features is Christina Rau, a thirty-something Italian American poet from the western end of the island, whom I know because I live here and because Long Island is the kind of place where a poet will know many of the other poets resident in these two counties with a population of three million (seven-and-a-half million, if we count Brooklyn and Queens as part of the geographical expression). The other feature is Michelle Whitaker, a former Cave Canem Fellow, one of whose poems has appeared in The New Yorker.
            Forty or so people fill the three small adjacent rooms of the café. It is literally standing room only. The rooms’ walls are decorated alternately with painted gray panels, murals on wide planks of wood and exposed brick. The floor is gray tile, and the long coffee bar features clean lines of oak and maple. A brass rack of sorts supports a line of silver pour-over filters. Black-labelled clear glass and pewter cannisters display the line-up of ground global coffee and loose tea blends. Filtered light escapes burlap-veiled circular openings in the rectangular metallic ceiling tiles. The light’s soft beams bathe sheeny natural wood tables. You might call the place warm contemporary, which suits its mission. Terri and Matt make the rounds, she in floral dress, he in tee shirt and jeans. I know from them that the room will likely include current and former students. The couple teach Sunday poetry workshops in this same space, and Matt has taught English at Bay Shore High School for twenty years.
            Terri opens the reading with a quotation beginning “community requires the confession of brokenness.” She then goes on to introduce Christina Rau. Stationed before a mic stand set up in the smallest middle room (All communicate through ample square archways), Rau reads a number of poems to the quiet crowd, who applaud politely after each one. The crowd is indeed diverse, reflecting the town’s demography: 30 percent white, 30 percent black, 30 percent Latino, and ten percent Asian and “other.” Several of the poems feature a “space theme,” as in outer space inflected with feminism and familial relations. After one of these poems, Terri awards a pouch of “astronaut ice cream” to an audience member who answers a question about the Fantastic Four.
            Christina relinquishes the mic to Matt, who comments on the importance of this community, then introduces Michelle Whitaker. She is a young poet, and her poems feature forsaken loves, young men lost to violence, and memories of imperfect family life. She reminds me that we write and share different sorts of experiences at different times of life; and reminds me that Matt and Terri have set out to create a reading that includes poets of all ages, which many readings on Long Island do not. They tend to cater either to youthful spoken word enthusiasts or to people over sixty seeking the comforts of a second family. These dual phenomena recur on local scenes all over the country.  
            Michelle cedes the mic to Terri, who calls for further praise of both poets, then gives them big hugs. A lot of hugging happens here. Terri then announces a break, so the gathered can buy coffee. True to her word, she holds the break to five minutes, and keeps the reading highly structured and schedule. This structure promotes the feeling of safety, of the possibility of creative chaos in a safe space, because, as Matt and Terri claim, adults are no different from children in needing a sense of security. She announces that tonight’s readings should contain “no hate speech, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia,” and urges people to limit themselves to a single poem so that the owner might go home at a decent hour.
            The open mic opens with a science teacher from Bay Shore High School, who reads a poem about students. His poem is erudite and breezy. Matt then announces that there are a number of “almost graduates” from the high school in our midst, including the 2017 Outstanding English Student of the Year, who reads next, a brief story about graduating. The student who follows him, in introducing herself, quotes her Instagram bio: “artist, feminist, Buddhist, revolutionary.” Terri announces the next reader as “the daughter of my heart” and “one of my favorite people in the universe,” who gives her first-ever public reading. This young poet gets through her poem and leaves the stage to receive a hug from Matt, who then announces a “Cyrus regular.” This regular affirms that she’s been coming here for months and has “grown a big love for this place.” Next up is Matt and Terri’s son Rainer, one of their two child prodigies (Presidential trivia experts who have appeared on many morning television shows). The next reader is here on a student visa. She tells the audience how she’s fearing the expiration of that visa, then reads a spare, beautiful poem about the appearance of a vulnerable girl. A middle-aged man wearing a bowler hat, his trademark, apparently, reads another in a series of love poems. Terri’s “Sistah from another Mistah” follows with a more specifically intimate love poem. Another young poet, fresh from a trip to Thailand, reads a poem about a walk in that country’s mountains. In a bizarre turn of events, a man dressed up as “The Captain” of The Captain and Tennille performs a monologue and a poem in the voice of said captain, his Long Island accent troubling the surface of that one-time Beach Boy’s sound. A young woman reads a tribute to her deceased friend, a suicide by leap at twenty. A man equally young, new to the reading, then reads a poem he’s finished just today, from his cell phone, a poem surprisingly intense and skillful in its raw state. A college student back for the summer continues the youthful run with a poem chock full of images combining religious pilgrimage with a version of mass American culture featuring McDonald’s French fries and McChicken. His second poem (He is the only one to break the one-poem-per-poet rule) includes the first profanity of the night, in service of Sisyphus’s desire to challenge Zeus. Another recent high school graduate steers the reading back toward love with a simple poem filled with refrained lament for a lost lover.
            A stalwart of the Long Island scene, Deborah Hauser, whom Terri has announced as a “feminist goddess woman warrior,” next reads a tribute to her long-suffering aunt, a symphony of “brokenness.” Another stalwart follows: Mary Jane Tenerelli, who has co-edited, with Terri, an anthology of New York women’s poetry called Grabbing the Apple. Like Hauser, she is a proficient poet, deft in her use of metaphor and line. Tenerelli gives way to Russ Green, who has himself hosted a Long Island series or two. Green’s life appears to revolve around poetry. I’ve run into him at a half-dozen different series all over the Island. He energetically delivers a poem about a mystery woman in New Orleans, reminding me of his mentor George Wallace, an post-Beat elder of the tight island-wide community.
            After Russ comes “one of our recent Cyrus regulars,” a youngish woman of West Indian descent who reads about her failed marriage. Her piece sounds more like prose than poetry, but it is heartfelt, as most of tonight’s performances have been. Matt then introduces yet another recent high school graduate, who reads a poem about the tribulations of a first-year college student. A young woman whom Terri “has missed greatly and loves fiercely” reads a poem whose subject she claims not to be sure of. It describes a beloved in a series of images both broad and narrow, most of it genuinely gripping. Matt then announces the penultimate reader, the only recent high school graduate to feature here. He reads a self-deprecating love poem and a poem about being black and American in a foreign land.
            The reading nearly over, Matt announces that he and Terri will be staffing a booth at tomorrow’s Bay Shore Arts Festival. The evening’s final open mic-er follows, playing and singing a Radiohead song. Matt mentions that he’s closed many readings here, and I think that Matt and Terri are wise to make sure no well-intentioned member of this poetry community has to chase the vapor trail of a strum and melody. But the true closer is Terri, who thanks everyone for “sharing this space with Matt and me.” She exhorts people to “go out and love each other more.”


                                             Terri Muuss at the Cyrus Chai mic

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