The Little

Winter isn't Rochester, New York's best season, but it doesn't stop its poets from gathering. It's six-thirty p. m. on a Sunday. The temperature is twenty degrees fahrenheit and falling fast, but the Little Theatre Cafe on East Avenue is packed. So packed, in fact, that I have to share a table in the back with a twentyish young woman who, when I ask if I can take the empty seat at her two-top, stops writing furiously in her journal long enough to stare at me with a bewildered expression, and then exceed to the gray-bearded oddball obviously desperate to take a load off. The stage is fifty feet away, but my vantage is good. 

From it the entire poetscape unfolds. A lone jazz musician, Mike Kaupa, plays baby grand with one hand and trumpet with the other, as host Bart White mills about, priming performers and shaking hands. He and poet/painter David Delaney have organized this event, with the support of scene stalwart and bookseller Ken Kelbaugh, stationed near the entrance with present poets' books. Ken's essential bookshop, Before Your Quiet Eyes, sponsored the first in what has become this once-a-season series. That first reading in 2021 was held as a launch of Bart's and Jennifer Maloney's anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film, which the bookstore's press itself published. As Bart writes in tonight's neatly produced, chapbook-sized program (which collects a few of the performers' poems), "At that joyous reading, we discovered what a warm venue the Little Cafe is for poetry." 

"The Little," as locals affectionately call it, occupies ground floor space in the Little Theatre, a multi-screen movie house featuring middle-to-high-brow mainstream and art house fare in the heart of Rochester's arts district, just down the street from the Eastman School of Music, the Contemporary Art Center, and attendant bookshop, music store, shared work spaces, and recently built condos. It is an anchor and a magnet for intellectuals and artists in a city that, in spite of its stark social inequality, has always had more than its share of both. The cafe's espresso machine fires away, as the poets and audience members chat and settle into their seats.

Tonight's program features Rochester native Willa Carroll, a poet and filmmaker who has published two books and many poems and multimedia collaborations in a number of prestigious journals. The program also spotlights, as it always does, a half-dozen or so other poets selected by White and Delaney, this time including Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose, Al Abonado, Jonathan Everitt, Sara Freligh, Alicia Hoffman, Tony Leuzzi and Lytton Smith, all of whom are accomplished writers, and three of whom--Abonado, Freligh and Leuzzi--have, along with tonight's host, featured in my own Finger Lakes Arts Series (an hour south, in the small town of Dansville, New York). Freligh, Hoffman and Leuzzi are ill and absent, I've learned, but tonight's lineup remains formidable. 

To kick things off, one of Bart's partners in the local poetry scene, and a fine poet in her own right, Jennifer Maloney performs a poem concerned with injustices and indignities, especially those that women endure. Her poem, "A List of Holes in My Body," is at once confessional and topical. In it the speaker describes how her "holes" have challenged her family and their expectations and how other holes have ruined or ended lives, as in the case of "a mother / in Minneapolis / with three holes in her head, / a stigmata of holes." This kind of poem, personally revealing and socially aware, usually elicits articulated and gut-sonic responses from audiences, as Maloney's poem does here. 

Carroll's poems reflect her interest in envionmental justice as it relates to societies and individual lives. They are measured, sobering, deft, indebted to personal experience (Her father died from job-related asbestos exposure) and careful research. One of her attempts to navigate the paths between societal calamity and personal vicissitude is a poem whose title is longer than the poem itself:

No Drone, No Fire, No Tremor, No Quake, No Storm.

No Flood, No Heat, No Drought, No Siren, No Scene.

Only our bodies riding a bed

on a river, halfway to the rising

sea, flesh holding

back disaster.

 

Like this one, her other poems are generally weighty. So much so that during the first of two sets, she promises to include a "surrealist poem" in the second set as a kind of comic relief. 

Carroll's work is impressive and well-received, but doesn't achieve the same level of audience engagement as Al Abonado's. Abonado writes more colloquially and humorously, about identity and family, as in his latest book, Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press, 2024), which was selected for the National Poetry Series. This national recognition is recent and, if we can measure merit by not only quality of work but also commitment to the art form, well-deserved. For years Abonado served as Artistic Director of Rochester's premier literary arts center, Writers and Books, and for years has hosted "Flour City Yawp," a local radio program showcasing writers and their work.

The next performer, Lytton Smith, a distinguished poet and translator who teaches at the nearby State University of New York at Geneseo, serves up a few erudite, insightful poems focused often on, as he writes in "Mobius Strip," "how language gathers us." Smith is a Brit who's landed in Western New York, and who has clearly become comfortable among his local literary comrades. When he leaves the stage, he returns to the table he's sharing with Abonado and his wife.

Next comes Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose, who offers up a couple of the evening's more intimate poems, one of which, "My 91-Year-Old Grandmother in the Hospital, Again," includes the charming lines, 

A lifetime ago when she

pointed to the pendant of lights walking across the lawn

showed me how to catch and cup fireflies into the cradle

of our palms, coax them into a canning jar, fasten the cap.

How I turned the glass jar over in my hands, marveled

at the glimmering even a child knows to name miracle. 

But the poem is also dramatic. Death is imminent for the fireflies, so her grandmother reminds her "to do the right thing. To be kind. To return to the sky / what was never mine to keep." And we understand the thrust of a poem well-chosen for a night of poetry among friends. 

The second act of the evening closes with Jonathan Everitt, whose wit and compassion shine through in the few short poems he shares, before he, like the features before him, makes his way to the side of the room, where he shakes hands, accepts praise, and gathers himself to return to the world of mortals we call "audience." Which audience, in this instance, listens as Bart White takes the mic again, to announce that since we have the room until 9 p. m., we'll have an open mic for the other poets (like me) who have come out to listen. 

The fact is that I was on the fence about coming out. Rochester is an hour's drive from my house,

and it is January, and in Western New York a snow squall can threaten a motorist's life any old time a Great Lake pushes it out of its ice-water nest. But I came, because I wanted to get out and listen to some poems and relax, like those patrons of the erstwhile Jackson Sanitorium in Dansville, who joined the staff for nightly skits and musical performances, the live television of the Gilded Age, to edify themselves while whiling away an evening. So I came to be entertained and maybe, as a few of the performers have noted, to be uplifted in the difficult days of the second Trump Era. So, the writing of this entry was unplanned. I came here for pleasure, not on business. Plus, I promised Bart I'd make it, as so many times he's made it down to Dansville for our events. We've shared many excellent poetry moments, and maybe for that reason Bart can't see me just sitting there by myself. He approaches my table, lays a hand on my shoulder, and tells me I need to perform a poem or two. Of course, like the other poets here, I have a few dozen I wouldn't mind sharing, but I choose just one of my own and one of Tony Gloeggler's. I've published Gloeggler's work (in the defunct 2 Bridges Review) and, after a get-together in Queens over pizza and his vinyl collection (which he subsequently gifted me), I've counted him a friend. Tony is an unapologetically narrative poet. His poems are accessible, sincere, keen, and funny.

After Bart reads an archtype of a political poem called "Power" ("The Emperor, / satisfied of their approval / nods and smiles, / turns his thumb / eternally / down.") and David Delaney does an ekphrastic based on one of his own paintings, I get up and read Gloeggler's "Workshop," from his latest collection, Here on Earth (New York Quarterly Books, 2026). The poem begins with the speaker feeling grateful that he gets to teach a workshop and then follows his mind as he digresses to a rancorous Little League coaching incident in which he nearly comes to blows with an irate parent, before returning to the classroom where he thanks a poet for reading his work and tells him, "I'd love to see any revisions." The crowd loves it, so I'm glad I took the time to read from Tony's book (between performances), searching for a poem I couldn't have predicted. 

I end with one of my own, dismount the stage, then say my goodbyes to poets and friends I've known, I realize, for years now, the years since I left one community of poets to connect and join with others, and especially with this one, my latest home crowd. As the crowd disperses, I take my leave, wanting more coffee, wanting popcorn, having to drive back into the frigid night. 

At Wheeler Hill I'm Reminded

On Wheeler Hill I'm Reminded

Wheeler Hill is a hill of course, a hill outside the village of Avoca, in the western foothills of Upstate New York's Southern Tier. It's also the home to the annual Wheeler Hill poetry gathering, hosted by Michael and Carolyn Czarnecki. Since 1986 they have hosted this convocation in front of their off-the-grid house, built by Amish neighbors after the original house on the site burned down. From their perch on the hill, these neighbors are invisible, as is almost any sign or sound of civilization. This is the perfect spot to read poetry and to produce books of it, which Michael has also done since 1986, when he launched Foothills Publishing. Working first with local poet Walt Franklin and then with Carolyn, he has made Foothills a regional institution with a catalog of over 300 books and chapbooks. I've encountered Foothills authors, in fact, almost everywhere I've traveled in the U. S. This is largely because Michael, through his own regular travels, has befriended poets all over the globe, and because his books, many of them hand-stiched, are beautiful. 

For this year's reading (I've attended two previous), I've brought along my canvas camping chair and a clutch of poems for the open mic that will follow two features, because even at a reading on a hill, some cafe conventions persist. Today there are about the same number of audience members (30) as one might expect at a well-attended cafe reading, but the first time I came here, in 2016, there were upwards of 70 people in attendance. From what I understand, attendance has fluctuated, depending on date, weather, social calamity, and publicity. A local network of poets, as always, as elsewhere, helps keep things going. Michael has cultivated it through Foothills and through his 30-year involvement with a reading series in nearby Watkins Glen.

Today the gathered, having eaten some soup and other pot luck dishes set on folding tables on the cleared land in front of Michael and Carolyn's house (itself the inclement weather site and headquarters of Foothills), are settling into their seats on this overcast day, ready to hear and recite verse, and, it seems to me, just as ready to gaze at one another and at the surrounding hills. As they get comfortable, Michael calls the group to order and announces that were it not for Covid and one or two other disasters, this would be the 40th annual Wheeler Hill assembly. A moment later he introduces the day's first feature, Casey Winston, a relatively new poet on the scene, whose first book Foothills has recently published. 

Winston reads a number of discursive poems about motherhood and domestic life. She represents a contrast with the prevailing post-Beat style of other Wheeler Hill readings I've attended. As at those readings, most of the audience here would have been, at one time, young poets living in the afterglow of the Beat Generation. Others here who are currently under fifty (if looks don't deceive) have joined them in their applause for poems they haven't heard and for Michael, himself seventy-five, who's done so much for poets of all ages, as younger poets in the area keep discovering. 

While the crowd skews older and is mostly white, I know, because I know many of the people sitting in this field, that today's poetry will reflect a diversity that matters most. It's the diversity inherent in something Casey Winston says: "We're here, and we're all listening." I'm reminded that from a rural gathering of mature poets in Western New York to a poetry slam for college and high school-age students in Berkeley, what matters is that we've taken the time to slow down and listen and try to connect with people we know and people we don't. If some of us cross over from circle to circle, so much the better. 

Winston then reads a few poems that pay tribute to Michael, centering on eating meals with him. One poem refers to Michael's daily bygone daily practice of eating buckwheat pancakes at the Chat-a-Whyle Restaurant in Bath, New York. As she reads I recall that I almost had the same pleasure of eating buckwheat pancakes with Michael (as we sat apart but in the same dining room of the legendary--in these parts--Maple Tree Inn, but could not eat together as planned because of his previous commitment to a family pancake feast). This is a metaphor for the poetry events that we attend and wish we could have attended, and for the older poets whom we know and whom we don't, who we'll catch or miss, depending on our circumstances in the larger world, which are the circumstances that drive us to poetry in the first place. 

So what will the next feature's, Bart White's, poems remind me of? I've known Bart for several years now, since the Western New York poetry community has become my primary one. Bart has gifted me a series of pencil sketches, scenes from my own reading series, the Finger Lakes Arts Series, at our family cafe in Dansville, New York. Michael introduces Bart, his good friend, as a poet, retired teacher, organizer, and editor. Bart's current editorial project is an anthology of letter poems from poets across the world. Some of these letter poems are addressed to other poets, and some to civilians. Essentially, that's what we're about here, sending our messages to those within the circle and those without. 

Bart reads the first poem with feeling. It's not a personal poem, but an exhortation to "bring your fire" to society's dark times. While his writing and presentation are often serious in tone, they are also, at times, funny, which humor distinguishes Bart and his poetry in the oft-earnest, quasi-Midwestern culture of Western New York. When he reads five haiku, he miscounts them as four, and laughs about his mistake. He then reads poems from two Foothills-published chapbooks. One of these poems reflects on an earlier Wheeler Hill event, another on a camping trip in the Smoky Mountains with his father. The latter poem poignantly echoes Phillip Levine's "You Can Have It." The reading visibly and audibly moves both the crowd and Bart himself. Next come poems about his stay in Oxford, England, during his wife's sabbatical. Listening to these poems, I am reminded also that, for many of us, a little leisure, even the tiniest bit, makes this poetry thing possible. But for others, with or without leisure and privilege, writing poetry is a compulsion, or a necessity, or both. Bart is a talented poet, more talented than most here, but, as I watch the audience follow him, I'm reminded finally that to be here and to take part, you can come as you are, no matter what that is.