Jenifier’s Journal: Poetry from the trenches

April is “Poetry Month.” 

If you shrugged just now, maybe read on a bit. You see, for its size, Shelter Island has a kind of poetry “pedigree,” thanks to our vibrant public library and the programs it offers, such as the weekly Art/Rich Poetry Roundtable on Zoom and, on Friday, April 28 at the library at 7 p.m., the Bliss Morehead Memorial Poetry Reading and Grant Award, which will be presented to Devon Treharne.

The grant was established in 2021 by Mike Zisser in honor of his late wife, the dynamic and inspirational Bliss Morehead who, for a decade, curated poetry readings at the library each April in honor of Poetry Month.

Ironically, since the onslaught of COVID some three years ago, the art of poetry has been exerting a power of its own. In combating their fear and isolation, millions of people have turned to this much misunderstood art form and found comfort and inspiration from reading it, writing it and sharing it.

My dear friend and former Island resident, Mike Rosenwasser, is a perfect example of a poet writing from the trenches. As his Facebook friends already know, Mike has written and posted an original poem every day since the pandemic began. I made him give me a phone interview last week. I asked first about the initial inspiration for such a project:

“My inspiration for the concept was the result of playing with the title from the novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I thought maybe I could do ‘Poems in the Time of the Coronavirus,’ but I didn’t think it would last for three years and counting. I’d written poetry all my life, but in a haphazard way — I’d go through periods of writing a lot and then years without writing a damn thing. I’d certainly never written every day, but somehow I thought this would give me a chance to come to grips with COVID and how it has basically turned our lives upside down, sideways, backwards and under water. COVID took everything we knew and made it unknowable, so we had to enter into a new version of reality, one in which regular human connection was suddenly so limited. I wanted to chronicle how I felt through it and hopefully, by posting it on Facebook, reach enough people who would say, ‘Yeah, that resonates with me.’ It was not only a way to deal with how it was affecting my life, but it also gave me a way to evolve. It was like therapy — I could take all the baggage that was in my head and stick it out there at 6 o’clock every morning.  Sometimes I was up at 3 a.m. with all these ideas and I could still post them. It was very therapeutic in a lot of ways.” 

I then asked him what, in his experience, seemed to be the most frequent misconception people have about poetry?

“That’s hard to say — a lot of people pigeon-hole it. They think it’s ‘The sky is blue, I’m happy too,’ but for me it isn’t just one art form — it has so many iterations. For instance, I like to take one theme and express it in six or seven different styles. I was very inspired when the musical ‘Hamilton’ came out. It opened me up to exploring internal rhymes for a couple of months, playing with language, being whimsical. I feel free now to explore everything, not just traditional topics.  It’s even another way to write a memoir.

“And, of course, COVID happened at a time when my granddaughter was very young. My wife and I already watched her a few days a week pre-COVID to help out her hardworking parents. Not only is she a source of incredible inspiration, but she’s been a window, a mirror, of how COVID has affected kids of her age, dealing with things that we didn’t have to go through. I think they may have been hurt in ways that probably won’t surface until they get older. The entire education system got messed up, and we don’t yet how that will affect them going forward. On the positive side, kids are very resilient, though not every kid has had the connection, the ‘life-line’ we’ve been able to give her.  She’s one of the lucky ones, and so are we.”

To all of us who, in the past few years, have found poetry to be a life-line in the trenches, a means of connection to ourselves and others, here are the last several lines of Mike’s poem, “Silence,” which is being published this month by the on-line literary magazine, The Front Porch Review:

The silence./The freedom from the noises/that fill the air with urgency/and anguish/The silence./And the thought of you silent,/at peace/flashes in me./Silent./At peace.