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.