Poetic Justice: Celebrating National Poetry Month

BookHampton in East Hampton will celebrate “National Poetry Month” with readings by the poets Eleanor Lerman, Grace Schulman, Carole Stone and Julie Sheehan on Saturday.

According to BookHampton owner Charline Spektor, her mother, Mira J. Spektor, is a poet, so it was an easy decision to celebrate poetry.

“Poetry is a combination of story and music and when it works, simply perfect,” she said during a recent interview.

Laurie Newburger, who helped organize the poetry readings, said most of the poets who are participating have strong connections to the Hamptons. Additionally, she reported that many BookHampton customers enjoy poetry.

Ms. Schulman and Ms. Stone both have homes in Springs. And both have had long, distinguished careers as university professors at Baruch College, the City University of New York and Montclair State University, respectively.

Ms. Schulman was born and raised in New York City and still has a house in Greenwich Village but spends most weekends at her home in Springs. Her mother was also a poet and her mentor was Marianne Moore, a family friend who happened to be one of America’s most famous poets. In fact, Ms. Schulman edited the quintessential “The Poems of Marianne Moore.”

Ms. Schulman has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awards, and was the poetry editor of the esteemed literary magazine “The Nation” for 35 years. During that time, she also managed the “Discovery Nation” poetry prize and in doing so, she personally read more than 1,300 submissions, of 10 poems each, every year.

A busy writer, Ms. Schulman gives poetry tutorials through the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and also teaches at the City University of New York. She published a book of essays on poetry, “Love and Other Adventures,” last year. “Broken Strings” was her last book of poems.

Currently, Ms. Schulman is working on her seventh book of poems. She will read from her new work at BookHampton on Saturday.

“I feel more energized reading new poems,” she explained. “I feel close to the audience and I want to share something that’s new.”

But that doesn’t mean Ms. Schulman won’t throw in some poems about East Hampton, to connect with her audience even more, she said. The Montauk Indians, the gas pumps at the Springs General Store and the footbridge on Pussy’s Pond are all subject matter for her poems. She added that when she sees the bridge in Springs, it’s Monet’s footbridge to her.

“I saw that bridge in a very abstract way,” she said. “I love this country and I love to write about it.”

Like Ms. Schulman, Ms. Stone has had a weekend home in Springs since the 1980s. She said that she frequently mines history when writing poems.

“I seem to be interested in personages,” said Ms. Stone. “I love speaking through historical figures.”

In “Traveling with the Dead,” published in 2007, the poet wrote about the World War II-era personalities, including Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. She also wrote about other historical figures, including Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, and Josephine Baker.

“American Rhapsody” published by the local CavanKerry Press last year, ended with the poem “Edward Hopper: Outside the Frame.” The catalyst for that work was a postcard of Mr. Hopper’s “Bootlegger,” which the poet picked up in the Montclair Art Museum of Art. Prohibition is a subject close to Ms. Stone’s heart, dug up, she said, from her own family’s history in bootlegging. The realist painting shows two men in a boat, rowing to meet a man on shore. She placed her father as the man on shore and her uncle in the boat being chased by the Coast Guard.

“My imagination immediately leaped to putting my family in the poem,” she said.

Ms. Stone’s latest manuscript, “Hurt: The Shadow,” takes off where her last book left off. The entire work in progress takes on the voice of Edward Hopper’s wife, Jo Hopper.

“It’s like I know them. Parts of me are in them. I love speaking through them,” Ms. Stone explained. For me, it’s very interesting and exciting.”

Ms. Stone said she is excited to read with Ms. Sheehan, considering that the poems of both use alcohol as subject matter.

Ms. Sheehan will be reading from her latest, “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise,” published last year. Ms. Sheehan, who is also an actor, enunciates the sound of each letter, squeezing every drop of meaning from the word when she reads her poetry.

A former bartender, she opens “Bar Book” with “Brandy Stinger,” which establishes her “talking cocktails,” Ms. Sheehan reported.

“I imagine the Brandy Stinger as a kind of Anne Richards type. But also because it lays out the major themes in the book: marriage [whether lasting or a ‘quick change,’ she added] and work,” Ms. Sheehan said. “The poem’s set in a bar—one more, and that’s final—which is where the narrator works.”

In the last seven lines of the poem, “Brandy Stinger” tells it all.

“Though I do confess, the ones we wore may have been a little unkind / expecting your foot to assume a triangular formation to which it did not / naturally incline / but they got you where you wanted to go: married / however unstably, but secure, knowing you’d both totter on. / Alright one more, and that’s final. I don’t envy you/ your loose fits, your quick change.”

Ms. Sheehan, a poetry professor at Stony Brook Southampton, recently tasked her master’s students with conceiving a poem that disappears. She described one student who wrote a poem on her neck and then washed it off. Consequently, films of those poem projects will be shown as part of the “Writers Speak” series on May 4 at 7 p.m. at Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton.

Eleanor Lerman, the only one of the four poets reading on Saturday who has never been to East Hampton, has more than just National Poetry Month to celebrate. The poet was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship just last week.

But though she is not an East Ender, Ms. Lerman lives in Long Beach, about an hour outside of Manhattan and she said that she loves living on the beach and watching the surfers go out into the water out all year round, “chasing storms while the rest of us run away.”

On Saturday, Ms. Lerman will read from her last two books, “Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds” and “The Sensual World Re-Emerges.” She will also read from her most famous poem, “Starfish,” which has taken on a life of its own.

“The poem was turned into a movie by grade schoolers, read at weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, commitment ceremonies, pet weddings, you name it,” she said. “That’s one of the truly extraordinary things about poetry—you write something and you have an idea of what you think you’re saying but then the work goes out in the world and starts saying all kinds of different things to different people.”

Though now a renowned poet, Ms. Lerman said she did not appreciate poetry while in grade school.

“I thought poetry was worse than algebra,” she laughed.

It was not until she discovered Leonard Cohen by accident that the world of poetry opened up for her.

“I learned that poetry could be wielded like a weapon and I’ve been sharpening my swords ever since,” she said.

Ms. Lerman said her work focuses on how mysterious life is and what may or may not lie beyond. Her first stanza from “Starfish” is a prime example.

“This is what life does. It lets you walk up to / the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a / stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have / your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman / down beside you at the counter who says, Last night, / the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder, / is this the message, finally, or just another day?”

A free “Celebrate National Poetry Month” reading and panel with poets Eleanor Lerman, Carole Stone, Julie Sheehan and Grace Schulman will be held at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday, April 16, at 5 p.m. For additional information, call 324-4939 or visit bookhampton.com.