SoFloPoJo- A Brief History

Poetry in South Florida - A Look Back

A Brief History of Poetry in South Florida

Some remarks by Marzi Kaplan in the introduction to The South Florida Poetry Institute’s Anniversary Anthology 1976-1986:

   There were a total of 125 charter members of SFPI in 1986 and a mailing list of more than one thousand names. SFPI conducted an annual Seven Lively Arts Festival Poetry Contest and Program. Its poetry readings and workshops at Hollywood Art and Culture Center were attended by most of South Florida’s poets and anticipated the Miami book Fair, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and O, Miami.
   After its first business meeting in 1976, SFPI, Kaplan says, hosted its first Guest Poet reading, Bette Sellers, from Young Harris, Georgia. The evening, she goes on to say, culminated in the signing of of our Charter…
   Hollywood City Officials and members of the Board of the Art and Culture Center offered us a Poetry Browsing Room, an auditorium for poetry readings, a base of operations, a home; Broward Community College , through its Community Service Program, offered to underwrite and advertise our workshops…
   Having taught the first workshop, I was succeeded by gifted poets…Betty Owen, Hannah Kahn, Agnes Homan, Gilbert Maxwell, Dr. Luke Grande, Gloria McArthur, Ed Phillips, and Dr. Ann Peyton.
   Even now as I write this recollection, I remember this night as if it were this night. The air was alive with exaltation and electricity; promises and potential; energy and enthusiasm. The coming together in an alliance of poetry pierced us with pleasure and love.
   As the mind replays the tape of years, the voices and faces of dear friends and gifted poets who have since passed away come clear. Their memories, their poetry serve as blessings for those who followed. Their influence affected us. Their uniqueness can neither be duplicated nor forgotten.

A look back by Barbra Nightingale

In January, 1975, I knew no one connected to poetry. That changed in 1978 when I was working on my bachelor’s degree at Florida International University. I took a poetry writing class at Miami-Dade College, north campus.

I met someone who “adopted” me. Her name was Barbara Holley, the newly elected president of the South Florida Poetry Institute, located in the Art & Culture Center in Hollywood, Florida. She introduced me to a world of poets who gathered to read their work to each other, attended meetings, parties and workshops. They quickly became my best friends. And mentors.

Shortly after joining that group, I joined the Laramore Rader Poetry Group, which was founded by Vivian Laramore Rader, in 1931. She served as Florida’s Poet Laureate from 1931-1975. She died before I knew her, but her devoted friend, Frank Fitzgerald Bush carried on her meetings. To become a member, one had to take Frank’s formal poetry class, held at his home in Miami Lakes.
Mostly, the Rader group consisted of elderly women living in and around Miami. Sometimes we met for lunch at the Howard Johnson’s hotel and restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. I shuttled back and forth between the Rader group and South Florida Poetry Institute, and eventually became president for two terms at SFPI, which at some point merged with another poetry group, Poetry in a Pub, run by Kurt Dressler, editor of the monthly Florida Arts Gazette. The people who attended these groups and readings were the movers and shakers of the South Florida Poetry scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The founders of the SFPI were: Marzi Kaplan and Betty Owen. SFPI started in 1977 and disbanded in the late 1980s. Among their members were: Hannah Kahn, Ron Demaris, Ricardo Pau Llosa, Barbara Holley, Anita Brysman, Alice Lee, Rita and Henry Logan, Peter Hargitai, Richard Skorza, Jim Azar, Lenny DellaRocca, Gary Kay, John Childrey, Mick Cleary, Denis O’Donovan, Cynthia Cahn, Ruth Rapp, Agnes Homan, Herman Gold, Judith Berke, Suzy Fry, Doris Suttin, Fred Witkof, Kurt Dressler, Magi Schwartz, Debbie Babyatsky (Grayson), Hazel Greenfield, Jonathan Rose, Larry Apple, Michael Hettich, Jeffrey Knapp, Lili Bita, Robert Zaller, Larry Rubin, Sylvia Curbello, Dionisio Martinez, Michael O'Mara, and Gianna Russo (who used to drive in from Tampa just for a reading, and camped on my living room floor!) and Mitchell Kaplan, who in 1983, opened Books and Books in Coral Gables.

It was also through Barbara Holley that I attended my first poetry convention—the National Poetry Federation, and in 1980 it happened to be in Orlando, Florida, where I met Richard Eberhardt, Florida’s Poet Laureate, Pat Lieb and Carol Schott.
In the early ‘80s I met Ann White, who taught contemporary poetry, and Shirley Stirnemann who would later take over as president of SFPI. That started me on my yearly pilgrimage to the Suncoast Writer’s Conference at University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg, where I met and invited to South Florida to read poets such as Lola Haskins, Carolyn Forche, Carolyne Wright and Sharon Olds.

In 1982, I started a cable TV show called Poetry & Conversation with Barbara Nightingale. It aired once a week. I went down to the studio in Hollywood to record each show with special guests from the above list of poets, and anyone else that might have been in town willing to be interviewed. Most of the Beta tapes have disappeared, but I managed to convert about a dozen onto DVD. It’s a joy to see and hear these friends and poets, most of whom, sadly, are gone.
Hannah Kahn died in 1998. She was a much loved and revered poet and friend, and a group of us, including Fred and Vivian Witkoff, founded The Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation. Many of the people named here were on the Board of Directors. The Art & Culture Center closed, then moved, and SFPI disbanded. SFPI’s membership shifted to HKPF. Due to behests from some members, HKPF was able to invite prominent poets to South Florida to read and conduct workshops.

Partnering with Miami-Dade College, the Miami Book Fair, Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University, HKPF brought in Gwendolyn Brooks, Marvin Bell, Yehuda Amichai, Carolyn Forche, Maxine Kumin, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, Patricia Smith, Campbell McGrath, Denise Duhamel, Lyn Lifshin, Dana Goia, Albert Goldbarth, Maureen Seaton, Laure-Anne Boselaar, Sapphire, Nick Flynn, Sherman Alexie, Marilyn Nelson, Martin Espada, Alicia Ostriker, Toi Derricote, Jeff McDaniel, Jim Daniels, Lola Haskins, Dorianne Laux, Taylor Mali, Natasha Tretheway, Marilyn Hacker, TS Ellis, and other fine poets.

Eventually, I became HKPF’s president, and through the generosity of Broward College and the Knight Foundation, was able to keep bringing in poets to read at Broward College. In 2016, when I retired from teaching, HKPF closed its doors, but not before endowing the rest of its remaining funds for student scholarships in a creative writing poetry class.
Here it is, 2020, and the poetry scene in South Florida is still going strong: Palm Beach Poetry Festival, O, Miami are flourishing, and the Last Friday Night Poetry Series continues at Books and Books. The friends that I made through poetry, who are still alive and well, are still part of my e-family. We stay in touch sharing lives, poems, and love.

Barbra Nightingale has eight books of poetry, the most recent Alphalexia (2017, Finishing Lines Press), Two Voices, One Past from Yellowjacket Press, and Geometry of Dreams (WordTech). More than 200 poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including The Liberal Media Made Me Do It, City of Big Shoulders, Lummox Press, Through a Distant Lens, Calliope, Calyx, Mississippi Review, The Florida Review, The MacGuffin, Blue Light/Red Light, The Birmingham Review, Barrow Street, and Tigertail: A Florida Annual.

Poems by South Florida poets no longer with us

Jim Azar, Judith Berke, Lili Bita, Michael Earle Carlton, Emma Crobaugh, Lawrence Donovan, Robert Gregory, Barbara Holley, Hannah Kahn, Jeffrey Knapp, Alice Lee, Henry Logan, Denis O'Donovan, Magi Schwartz, Doris Sutton, Ann White, Fred Witkoff

Jim Azar 1956-1998

Arrival: One or Only?

From Azar’s book by the same name

I awoke from the red
scrawling my feckless eyes
unable bludgeonings
infancy again
alone and fearless is sight
without recollection
adrift within illiterate dreams
of a former alive
revived from life or death
dressed to be dressed
arrested, blessed, oppressed
with a rising and falling chest
there is some point
between the two halves
that isn’t in
and isn’t ex
when the lungs are quiet
why it happens
is called the mystery of life
until it is solved
nobody leaves the room

Jim Azar served as an interrogator in the U.S. Army intelligence Corps between 1976 and 1979. He published his only poetry collection Arrival One or Only in 1982. In 1986, he graduated from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., with a bachelor of arts in English literature. He was awarded a scholarship to attend Exter College in Oxford, England, to further his education in English literature.

A word about Jim Azar by Lenny DellaRocca

    Jim Azar was fierce with his criticism and joyous with his praise. I’ll never forget when after a poetry reading where Jim was featured reader (Poetry-In-A-Pub) in the early 1980s, a woman came up to him praising his jubilant and magnetic performance, and asked him what he thought of her poem. I knew what was coming. He told her what thought without sugar-coating a word. She was horrified. Insulted. Deflated. She took back her compliment, and said she hated his poems. Jim shrugged.

   He and I met every Sunday at Lester’s Diner in Fort Lauderdale to critique each other’s poems. “This one is shit,” he’d say, “This one is ok.” One day I called him saying I had an idea. I wanted to start The Electric Chair, a reading in which we’d invite one poet to read, and invite a small, select audience of poets we liked. He loved it. He suggested that we interrogate the poet, hold their feet to the fire, make them justify the poems. He was after all, a former Army Intelligence Officer specializing in interrogation. I told him I didn’t want to be so harsh. I wanted the audience to raise their hands if they had a question after each poem, and have a discussion about the poem, about the poet. Jim finally agreed only because it was my idea. But he tried to get me to do it his way, because after all, the name The Electric Chair had implications.

   Our first reader was Denis O’Donovan. We chose Denis because we knew he was dying of AIDS, and we didn’t how much time he had. Henry Logan was our net reader. Henry left us several years later, dying of a heart attack. And then I asked Jim to read, because he was moving with his family to Maryland. Years later, Jim called me and said he needed a lung transplant. Not long after that his wife, Cindy, called and said he died. Jim was a true friend and a great poet. I miss him.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/188968961/james-g-azar

Judith Berke 1931-2013

The Red Room

re-printed from White Morning with permission by Barbara Nightingale

What Matisse could have done
with this miserable afternoon!
First of all he would blur the couple’s faces.
Then take out other distractions
like flying dishes, bowls, screeches, clocks.
Then he would paint almost everything red:
the walls, the cat, the couple’s hair--
red as an open mouth.
He would move the man to a lake
where he would drop stones--
his face scattering and coming together in the water.
The woman would sigh,
an aura around her
like the infinite scrollwork of trees.
Her face white, and still, and without tears.
A small figure: closed as a Japanese fan.

And yet there would be hope.
The tablecloth alive on the table.
Bishes, clouds, the sky
trembling at the window
as if waiting
for the woman to realize her grace
as she bends there.
For the man to come back--
as sweet in her eyes as the lake.
For the child to wake up
from his dreams of blackness and blood and silence.
For the world to come into this red room
without smashing the delicate glasses.
The sun first
carefully through the pane.
The the man—large and dark in the doorway,
and the cat leaping,
and red suddenly quivering
in the woman’s cheeks.
Like that part of the fire that remains longest.

A word about Judith Berke by Lenny DellaRocca

    Judy was a friend. She used to read her poems to me over the phone. (There was a handful of us on Judy’s call list.)

   One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever had was when she said she loved a poem of mine. That compliment is chiseled in stone, because she never complimented anyone's work unless she meant it. She criticized much of my poetry, too, but with a gentle touch. Once, another friend, Henry Logan, said he and Judy were on the phone for eight hours. It wasn't the only time I'd heard that. I had been on the phone at least two hours with Judy several times. Her phone calls were almost legendary. It was an honor if she called you. I almost fell over the first time she called in 1989. Afterward, I called Barbra Nightingale (she was a closer friend to Judy) and said "Judy Berke called me! We read our poems to each other!" It was a right of poetry passage to get a call from her.

   She stuck out in a crowd, too. Before she barricaded herself behind her Miami Beach condo door, she'd show up at readings in those dark green glasses. She dressed like someone on a black and white cover of Photo Star. (After all, she was an actress once). Judy become a recluse, and I used to call her the Emily Dickinson of Miami Beach. She read so marvelously, too. Her reading voice was magnificent, like her poems, understated, elegant. Judy was South Florida’s Queen of Poetry as far as I was concerned.

Judith Berke was a poet, dancer, artist. actor, puppeteer and pulp maker. She attended Smith College, and studied painting at l’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg. She sang with the Opera Guild of Greater Miami. Her poetry appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many other literary magazines.

Lili Bita 1935-2018

Re-printed with permission by her husband and translator Robert Zaller. This poem first appeared in The Anthology of South Florida Poets in 1987, by the South Florida Poetry Institute

The Whitewashed Bones of Ithaca

My arms strive
for your neck
but the revolving door
slams glass in my palms.
The broken vowels
in my throat
stab, turning
like hunted animals.
The stone soldiers
have taken you off
to hang a medallion on your chest.

Nothing will be the same
when you get back.
Hungry bats will be
fastened to the famished limbs
of trees.
The green grass
will lick the sky.
The clay eagle
Will have flown from your desk.

The sheets emit
an icy vapor.
Columns of glaciers
march beneath my spine.
The clock has folded its fingers
like an emperor ending his audience.

I bite the whitewashed
bones of Ithaca
where we made a bed
when all of the journey
still lay before us.

Kouros

Translated by her husband Robert Zaller

Here, in this cradle, this grave
this scooped-out gully shorn of growth
the great body of the kouros lies.
Fruit trees bend over him
their heavy wealth.
The black-hooded horse
turns the yoke of the well
a clock that tells no time.
Falling apples
the dry cough of birds
the percussion of a waterfall
chime the toneless centuries.
His room is simple, unadorned
as befits a young man’s gravity.
Roofless, so that his gaze
adjusts itself to the infinite,
the glitter and size of the abyssal night.

Unclasping your hand,
I climb the stone steps
to where the naked body
lies like a spent athlete
laureled with victory, avid
for still wilder triumph.

The leg is severed
at the knee
I sink my fingers
deep into the cleft
feeling the hard fracture
of the marble
lovingly I sculpt
the perfect body
the massive stiff shoulders
the mound of the pectorals
the hard clump of sex
winnowing away the centuries
that separate us
sucking welts to the surface
like buried fruit.

Dusk falls in the quarry.
The workers leave their tools,
belt their robes, and walk back to Naxos.

The kouros stays alone, unfinished
and in the hovering dark
I come again
to bruise the chastity of stone
with the hunger of my human flesh.

Lili Bita lived through the Nazi occupation of her native island, Zakynthos, the Greek civil war that followed, and much else. The story is in her memoir, Sister of Darkness (Somerset Hall Press). Author, actress, and pianist, she had a career as a leading lady in Greece. She emigrated to the United States, where she performed widely with her one-woman shows, “The Greek Woman Through the Ages,” “Freedom of Death,” and “Body Light.” She held several academic positions, offered master classes in the art of Greek drama at American universities from coast to coast, and traveled under the auspices of the Greek government as an ambassador of Hellenic culture. The author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and translation, Bita was inducted into the Hellenic Writers’ Association, the oldest and most prestigious literary academy in Greece, in recognition of her lifetime achievement. Bita was born in Zakynthos, Greece.

A Word about Lili Bita by her husband and translator Robert Zaller

Lili had a residence in Calcutta years ago, and her hosts, thinking she should see some of the real life of the city, took her a slum area. She was stunned by what she saw. A crowd had gathered for her, and she understood that she was expected to speak. She said what she could, totally unprepared and still in shock. Afterwards, a woman came up to her and said, “You know, Mother Theresa was here the other day. But you’re much nicer.”

Michael Earl Carlton 1939-2019

Bits and Pieces

Re-printed from The Anthology of South Florida Poets, 1987,
with permission by Blake Carlton

I awoke early that day
to find mother sitting
crosslegged,
like a child,
upon the faded yellow
linoleum floor.
The mad woman tore
small jeweled paper
scraps from magazines.
Within two weeks
she filled four,
almost five,
empty shoeboxes
with tiny fragments.
On my thirtheenth
birthday that year,
mother handed me her
select wedding vase
covered in pasted bits
and pieces of lacquered
jewels. She handed
one minute part
of herself to me
in an empty vessel
of varnished collage.

Emma Crobough 1903-1997

Memory Reflected in Far Sunset

Anthologized in Florida State Poets Association’s Anthology One in 1982. Re-printed with permission from FSPA

The silence is overwhelming
in the sweeping shards of sawgrass
and sprawls of oyster shells scowling,
like teeth torn from skulls of men.

I have touched love
and the branches of orange blossoms
that I held down for her—to reach--
now seem so far away.

The palms that great winds have shaken
are trembling—and my hands, trembling
with collective scars and sorrows
of tides and lemon thorns,
tighten—grasping water, words, comfort--
grasping memory
reflected in the far sunset.

Bruised prayer beads--
hands in pure devotion
rise in pure devotion
rise to the wind-pure heights,

And the gulls are there,
in a frieze of white noon.

Laurence Donovan 1927-2001

Poet

Originally published in Write in Our Midst an Anthology an of South Florida Writers, Selections from the 1992 Program of Miami Book Fair International, Michael Hettich, Editor

Under that face lay another
Staring, eyes through eyes,
Like a fish blinking up
From a silted bottom.

What the deep face knew
Was the high blinding
Of the sun, breath stolen away,
Mouth snarled by hooks.

In those dark waters
Sweet pearls lay locked
In the gloom of their shells,
Muddied in dream, and

While fin and tail swayed
And the fish hung still,
The tall boat’s shadows
Did not come down.

Amid the half-beings
Fanning the waters
The fish’s huge shadow
Grew in the sand.

Under that face the other,
Its eyes in its eyes,
Peered up to the light,
Doubled in darkness.

Laurence Donovan was a poet, artist, and English instructor and professor at the University of Miami from the 1950s through the 1980s.. His poems were published in literary journals across the nation. An avid artist, Donovan was prominent in the Coconut Grove art scene in the 1960s. Donovan also wrote book reviews for the Miami Herald. He was editor of The Carrell, the publication of the Friends of the Libraries.

Read a review by Robert Zaller of Laurence Donovan’s Dog Island in Rain Taxi, in which he talks about, among other things, the Donald Justice introduction to the book.
https://www.raintaxi.com/dog-island-and-other-florida-poems/

Robert Gregory

Instructions for How to Shine & Cry

Originally published in Write in Our Midst an Anthology an of South Florida Writers, Selections from the 1992 Program of Miami Book Fair International, Michael Hettich, Editor

dew on the dreamy North American facades
the music you hear a long way from Earth
the flesh inside the concept
the abstract sunrise, and under the wax on the kitchen floor
the face of a woman stares upward
greasy action, crisp regret
watch an expert wet a floor down
not easy to hold and she still bears the marks of that,
of a struggle for liberation
the kite made a noise, because the wind ran strongly against it
early tears
what can I tell you, sir? the guard said. The nervous dogs
and how they tremble
the bewildered lady in the purple dress
shouts in the empty lobby, excites the dust, and departs
deserted thighs
clear sky above innocent structures
the smell of a new consensus
dirty water slaps concrete in all the old cities at once
she in my arms like a piece of artillery
facts rise in the pathways of the secondary nerves
the redhaired friend, the stabbing finger, the rascal
offering a choice of recent trends in love
asleep in a booth in Burger King
dreaming of endless production,
and secretly grace pours out of the system

Barbara Holley

Katherine Ann Bunker 1812

Anthologized in Florida State Poets Association’s Anthology One in 1982, and originally won the Society Prize by the Poetry Society of Georgia. Re-printed with permission from FSPA, Originally published in Earthwise Literary Calendar, 1982,

I have begun
this sampler with the swallowed
sun; chosen cotton
from the rawhemp scraps
my grandmother leaves
near juniper clumps. Listen
as she pounds the maize. Listen!
There are far-off pestles
pounding the hills; they strike
fear into a warrior’s squaw.

For nine seasons
and a swollen sun I watch;
while the corn bursts
into milk my breasts ripen too.
My brothers dance as the buffalo
run faster, fast
than the pestle drum. And I; I
stitch the seasons on a rough
feed bag, waiting, waiting
for a warrior’s dance to end
parched promises.

___________________________________________

Hannah Kahn 1911-1988

Anthologized in Florida State Poets Association’s Anthology One in 1982, and originally won the Society Prize by the Poetry Society of Georgia. Re-printed with permission from FSPA, and Dan Kahn.

Confrontation

He who chooses tigers makes
A covenant with fear
Trades eiderdown and marigolds
For terror, measures air
Against the momentary thrust,
The crucial undefined
Confrontation in the woods,
The torment in the mind.

He who chooses tigers takes
A pathway marked with blood,
Trades road signs for the unexplored
Jungle where the dead
Inscribed their messages on stone,
Forsook the tender bed.

He who chooses tigers breaks
A crucible of tears,
Trades flesh that yields and bone that finds
Enclosure for the spears
Of cactus and the thorn that draws
Blood from dormant stone.

Born in New York City, Hannah Kahn was poetry editor of The Miami Herald for 15 years. She published more than 400 poems in such places as: American Scholar, Harper’s Magazine, Saturday Review, Southwest Review, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls and Saturday Evening Post.
Her two poetry collections, Eve’s Daughter and Time, Wait were well received and critically acclaimed. Each in turn, SoFloPoJo Associate Editor Barbra Nightingale, and Founder/Co-Publisher Lenny DellaRocca were President of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation, established after MS. Kahn died.

Jeffrey Knapp 1949-2010

Fernando: Life: Time

for Fernando Garcia, Who Died of AIDS

Originally published in Write in Our Midst an Anthology an of South Florida Writers, Selections from the 1992 Program of Miami Book Fair International, Michael Hettich, Editor

My daughter likes to say
That if our cat were a person
She’d be 95 years old!

If you were a cat,
Fernando,
You’d be 250

And if a lemur, 350
And if a platypus, 500
Or a bat, 2,475

But if you were a ray of light,
Fernando,
You’d be 264,410,536,100,000,000 miles

With galaxy between us just the same.

A word about Jeffrey Knapp by Michael Hettich

When my wife and I moved to Miami in 1981, there was a lively and wide-ranging poetry scene here, with regular open-mic poetry readings—at Books & Books, which had just opened, and at many other locations throughout the city, among them the North Miami Art Museum (before it became MOCA), and in restaurants and bars. Jeffrey Knapp was at the center of things then, a young man brimming with wit and intellect, dressed—like his wife Dina—with style, audacious style, which was something none of the other of us young poets could begin to match. With his caustic humor and amazing ability to compose “on the tongue,” Jeffrey’s power at a poetry reading was awesome. He would get up in front of an audience and just start riffing on what he’d eaten that day, what he’d seen in the paper, the run he’d taken that afternoon, and the conversation he’d had with his daughter Ariel the night before, when he’d put her to bed…and then miraculously he’d read a poem that fit exactly into his riff and led seamlessly into another. The poems themselves served almost as props in a performance of living theatre: When he finished reading a poem, he’d toss the page over his shoulder, look out at the audience, and perhaps start talking to someone out there, about their politics or the style of shirt they were wearing that evening—and then he was off again. I hated reading after him! And I think everyone else did too. The light and energy he brought to these performances just made everyone else’s poems—as good as they might be—feel pedestrian and dull. And the poems themselves, those props in his performance, were completely their own, completely his.

Alice Lee

Originally published in The Lyric in 1978, and re-printed in Anthology One by Florida State Poets Association.
Re-printed here with permission from FSPA.

Like Birds of Autumn

They cling to each attenuated day
Like birds of autumn strung on beads of light,
Sloped shoulders nodding necklace heads of gray,
Eyes bright with souls already poised for flight.
They perch in rasping silence by each door,
Their taloned fingers grasping silver wheels,
Or tool themselves along the corridor,
Emitting non-communicative squeals,
But there are times when human voices rise
Above the cloud of aviary drone;
An anxious visitor with careful eyes
Searches for the face most like his own--
Yet hesitates, for fear that he may see
The spectral promise of his destiny.

Henry Logan

Originally published in Write in Our Midst an Anthology an of South Florida Writers, Selections from the 1992 Program of Miami Book Fair International, Michael Hettich, Editor

It’s Very Wide Tonight

The porchlights wink at me like stars,
The fan, unplugged, turns in the wind.
Fronds start rattling like spilled water.
Pine shadows spider the walls.
Waves og hush through high trees.

And then the narrows:

Suddenly no bird calls,
and a storm arrives
out of the bellies of fat clouds.
Erupting deep plosives, they shit
rain in sheets, greying street lights.
Waveslap over windows, raking the roof

till proof and theory are flushed
from the tight brain.
Release of pain
like horses arrived to trample Rome.

My room is sunk in drumming darkness.

His Face

Originally published in Polyphony, an anthology of florida poets, 1989, reprinted here with permission from Editor, Patrick M. Ellingham

Who is this face looking back at me
   when I shave?
I like him better than when he was younger.

The eyebrows have thickened up and curled,
and the curls of the head and beard are
grizzled with white, as if he were signed
   in a fire.
The nose, that used to be straight as a
pencil, has bent a bit, gaining a little
   character.
The broken front tooth is the same as it
has been for years, worn slightly smoother,
and now as I can never get it fixed, since the
rest of the face has grown to be more like
it: farewell, movie star, that dream we’ll
   put in the drawer.

This fellow, who stares back at me from the
mirror, seems wiser and stronger than the
boy I still am. He, at least, is a man. He
   looks as if he has lived,

If there were a mirror for voices, perhaps
he would answer my questions, or at least
throw them back at me changed, so that I
   could answer.

It feels odd to be hiding here, behind him,
so young, so tentative and unformed. His eyes,
with their laugh wrinkles, seem amused when I
   meet them, which I avoid.
He seems interested in my progress, but
   skeptical.

Things have obviously not worked out for him
as he planned, but he no longer cares. He
has seen through his plans, though he still
holds them in affection, like disappointed
   old friends.

Don’t ask him a question of you fear the answer.

The skin around his eyes has grown rougher. The
eyes peer through roughened slits so
brightly, that I am stripped. He could be my
   father.

Denis O’Donovan 1932-1990

Julia Brown

Originally published in Breast of Veal, the second anthology of poets by Poets of the Palm Beaches, 1988. Re-printed with permission from Bruce Weber

When she sings she knows she sings to One,
knows brighter than flesh the shivering of the wings,
whispers into that shell that keeps circling.
The hush grows stronger.
Each sound is rounder than before.

Sense against memory in the brain.
After first surprise a slow delight,
dallying in the mind’s eye behind the eyes,
a mind blinking the laughing.
Each laugh a memory of a laugh.

Each limb a limb of the all,
each line reaching for all the lines,
all converging toward the All together,
a parting only to dance,
to make more of all.
Each line grows out of nature whole.

The play of lines at play forever,
never still, always still
breathing in the surrounding air that dances
while waiting to be filled with airy play.
Each play a play on play itself.

Each square leaves over and turns round.
Round, round, round, green, green, and then again.
The shading hangs there on the wall.
The color of the eye is in the eye.
Each green turns yellow and then brown.

The thought of blood, the black and white blood.
There, on the wall, you can smell it.
Not strewn but spiraling under the surface,
rising silently toward us.
Each white on white and yet…

And Then

Originally published in The Anthology of South Florida Poets, 1988, by the South Florida Poetry Institute

And then I kissed her innocently.
And then I was blown clean out of my seat by the sudden wind.
And then the thirteen merchant brothers beat me up.
And then I was also glad to be back in America I kissed her.
And then she drafted me.
And then I was glad to be in exotic places again.
And then I kissed her innocently.
And then nothing happened.
And then I thought I was home safe.
And then the doctor frowned and scratched his head.
And then I swore I’d never go there again.
And then you know act happened.

Magi Schwartz 1938-2015

re-printed from Pieces of Glass with permission by Barbra Nightingale

Avoir du Pois

Other people's secrets are
buried in my fat. Spicy tales
of John's infedilities are a thick
roll of suasage around my middle.

Corpulent hips pad confessions
of Joan's illegal abortions.
The truth of my brother-in-law's
embezzlement conviction
sizzles like bacon in my gut,
burns and blackens the family name.

Straining between fleshy thighs are
sexual secrets that chafe
my conscience as I walk.

The curious pect at stomach suiet,
eater to find out who gave Helen herpes.
The belly jiggles protection,
jello shakes sweet silence.

I have sworn this fat to secrecy!
It's amazing that the slender stalks
of my legs support this weight.

Gossip heats in my mouth,
smooth and thick as olive oil.
Temptation to tell is a blowtorch.
Someday it will drip down my chin
staining my reputation.

Mint Julep and Sour Mash

re-printed from Pieces of Glass with permission by Barbra Nightingale

All through the bloomin' of my magnolia time,
her impatience pinched, bruisin' adoslescent petals.
Her mint julep voice was frosty enough to curl leaves.

"They don't have to know how smart you are.
Men only like other women to be independent.
Must the know you can take care of yourself?!"

My Momma, Miz Cecelia, danced
across the Mason-Dixon Line
on the waltz notes of a cotillion,
and invented her own Tara.
She was a vine-tender beauty,
like wisteria, trembly and scented.
A coquette who got everything
with candied smiles and honeyed wiles,
while never removing her white gloves,
raising her voice, her eyes, or her veil.
Daily subservience was affirmed
with graciousness and good manners.

I never held with Mama's way of doin'.
When I left with the Yankee carpetbagger,
her voice poured straight bourbon on the air.
Words clinked sharply, like ice cubes.

"My way is best, you'll see."

Time opens and closes like a fan.
In the slow way that hard lessons are learned,

Momma was right.

A word about Magi Schwartz by Barbra Nightingale

Magi Schwartz was a force unto herself. When I first met her, around 1980, she saw herself as my rival. I never knew that till a mutual friend told me something disturbing. Years later, on one of our annual trips to the Suncoast Writer's Conference, I finally asked her about it. She admitted it was true, but "that was before I knew you" she said. She and I got past all that, and became best friends. We did many things together, like running the South Florida Poetry Institute and the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation. There wasn't anything Magi wouldn't do for a friend. You needed something brought to Miami from Hollywood, Magi would do it. You needed something brought to Palm Beach, Magi would do it. She was indefatigable, even while dealing with Leukemia in her later years. I was with her when she died. Magi Schwartz was truly the sister of my heart and both a poetry devotee and a devoted poet. I miss her still, and talk to her in my head all the time.

Doris Sutton

Originally published in The Anthology of South Florida Poets, 1988, by the South Florida Poetry Institute

For Some Men

Looking in the mirror everyday to see
if their mustache grew is the only way
to know they’re still alive
for some men
not for you breathing beside me asleep
in my arms one leg inserted between
my coolness your warmth
balancing out the night
under soft sheets a perfect blanket
a languid moving fan, the open window
letting in the frog’s croak
after a night of rain and bigger pools
to plop around in than the night before.
Stir and turn now back to back
inching closer than you ever thought
you could be comfortable
uncomfortable in the thought
you’d not be touching somewhere
along the entire length of the body
the warmth and fur of you
the coolness and smoothness of me
exchanging heat pumping coolness
embracing fiery electric shocks
stirring dreams.

Ann White

Reflections

Re-printed from The Anthology of South Florida Poets, 1987, with permission from Deborah Eve-Grayson

Do not look at me
as into a mirror;
you will not find
the shape of your features,
color of your eyes,
nor whatever longings you know lie behind
their irises
cast back at you
from mine.

We can reach hands
to one another,
press them
kiss;
exchange tender touch
on cheek: even
with surprised delight
laugh at the same moment:
weep, too.

But we are not twin
nor echo of
each other. Look
to me to share
our separateness,
rejoice in what I am
that you are not,not, while I find
in you
what I can
never be.

Fred Witkoff 1927-2013

I write
both humorous
and religious poems.
Now that I’m older, I can’t
tell which
is which.

The reason angels
can fly is because they take
themselves so lightly.

By definition,
Heart murmur is referred to
as chamber music.

Haiku for You

Fred’s poems are terse.
Although they could be better
They couldn’t be verse.

Begging the Answer

I hunch
spine—starched
smiles etched in pain
my only pleasure supine

My frame curls
a question mark
in space

Damn degenerate disc
I own
owns me
commands sharp blunt
causes me to bow
before my time

Misplaced punctuation
hurls the question:
was I ever
an exclamation (mark)??