Hera Gallery: Rhode Island's Poetry

By BRETT WARNKE

WAKEFIELD—At a small gathering in Hera Gallery, this reporter was fortunate to hear two local poets recite a few samples of their poetry.  But why poetry?  Let’s try an experiment:  Tear off a piece of this newspaper and write down as many advertising slogans as you can.  (Pause).  Now that you have run out of room and wasted the ink of two pens borrowed from your sassy waitress, in a spirit of apology, recite for her three poems you memorized in the last month.  (No takers?)  In here lies the dilemma of the poet.  We are in a noisy and speedy world with little time allotted for reflection.  Yet we can see that the world which sustains us is diminishing the numinous powers of language.  The poet, so ignored and sidelined in American culture (though even Plato said they should be banished from the city), describes the experience of being alive; she listens to our stories and pithily puts the contours of existence into text.     

The first poet, Mary Mueller, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry by New Verse News.  She read her poems in a steady, quiet voice.  Wearing a deep red scarf she recited short poems such as “Minnesota,” about returning (emotionally and perhaps physically) to her home in the Midwest.  In it, we are taken to a darkly familiar place with dead cornstalks standing as “withered sentinels.”  Then, as if by an act of engulfing repression, clouds descend “blanketing the earth in mist/anointing the soil/taking souls back.”  Other poems like “Dionysis in Pawtucket” had a sprightly mood with Mueller’s characteristic lush imagery.  Mueller also read her poem, “Poetry Reading, The Towers, Narragansett” which evoked the same anticipation and wonder from the Gallery reading:

We wait upon the words/like night cats/alert to a twig’s snap/or a stirring of air/as it brushes the ground like silk,/a geisha turning to bow/as she attends the hint of a sigh.  We wait upon the words/to tell us a bedtime story/pure as a lullaby/and grim as the brothers’ tales/that send us off to dream/in sweet awe of night terrors.  We wait upon the words /that make us smile/not knowing where mysterious heat begins or ends/as we carry it from the tower/in a chalice white as a spring orchid/to meet the ocean mist.

            With a presence that could not differ more radically from Mueller’s, Julie Hassett completed the night’s reading.  Hassett alternated between chatty personal stories and poems about the emotional distance in her own large Irish family, as well as divorce, self-discovery, privacy, and motherhood.  In one poem, “Crime Scene” she writes of a friend with cancer:  “Look/You twist your head, display a necklace of tumors/just below your skin, insist that I witness/four round knobs,/popping to the surface, my eyes stopped/by the shock of the thief/snaking his way through your lung,/your lymph nodes, back for a second attack,/four fingertips pressed to your throat/as we both choke.”

            The last evening in the poetry series is March 3 from 6-8 but a project next month will focus on artists drawing about poetry and poets writing about art.  You can access poetry by these writers at www.origamipoems.com and can discover more about events at the gallery at www.heragallery.org/.