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. 

To polite applause after each, Winston reads a number of discursive poems about motherhood and domestic life. She represents a contrast with the prevailing post-Beat style and forward feminist consciousness 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.