Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor
Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com
DENISE LA NEVE writes both poetry and fiction. Three of her poems were published in the anthology Beyond the Rift: Poets of the Palisades (2010, Poet’s Press, http://www.poetspress.org), for which she was also an editor. Other work has appeared in the annual Red Wheelbarrow, Sensations Magazine, and the Istanbul Literary Review. Her short story ‘Whoru’ won the prize for best fiction in a fiction contest sponsored by Sensations Magazine (2007). Denise co-hosts the acclaimed NORTH JERSEY LITERARY SERIES in Teaneck, NJ. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook based on her childhood summers in Citers, France, and is one of 5 editors of a major new poetry anthology to be published by the Poet’s Press in early 2016.
PAUL NASH is a naturalist, writer and editor whose published works include poetry and narrative fiction, as well as scientific and historical articles. He conducts research at the American Museum of Natural History on ancient organisms preserved in amber and sedimentary rock. With his wife, Denise, he hosts the monthly NORTH JERSEY LITERARY SERIES (founded in 1997). He was a contributing poet and editor for the anthology Beyond the Rift: Poets of the Palisades (2010, Poet’s Press, http://www.poetspress.org), and has also been published in and an editor for various literary journals. He is currently on the Board of Directors of The Poets’ Press. Paul has collected ancient amber on scientific expeditions to India, Northern Alaska, and the Dolomites of northern Italy, as well as during excursions to the feathered dinosaur beds of Liaoning China, the Isle of Wight, and the amber fields of Lebanon. He is past President of the New York Paleontological Society.
OCTOBER 8, 2015 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2015, 12:32 AM
BY KELLY NICHOLAIDES
STAFF WRITER |
SOUTH BERGENITE
The Red Wheelbarrow 8 is the latest poetry book of the Rutherford group whose namesake alludes to William Carlos Williams’ infamous poem, and the book does not disappoint, chock full of imagery and free verse. Featured poet Don Zirilli notes that his contributions are the result of an evolution of his style beginning with several early influences.
PHOTO COURTESY/DON ZIRILLI
Don Zirilli is the featured poet in the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow poetry group’s eighth edition now available.
“I fell in love with poetry in high school or earlier, the poetry of Shakespeare, Yeats, Donne and others. The music of those poets got stuck in my head, and I felt a need to write my own, like when a song gets stuck in your head and only singing it will get it out,” Zirilli says. “In high school, however, my poetry sounded like jingles. It was truly awful. Slowly, I found the right music for my words. I guess it was the right combination of difficult and rewarding to make it truly addictive.”
PHOTO COURTESY/RWP
The Red Wheelbarrow 8 is available on lulu.com. Poetry readings are held monthly, and more information can be found at https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets.
A Healthcare IT manager, Zirilli holds a Bachelor of Arts in both Computer Science and English Literature. His hobbies are poetry, art and photography, all of which he cannot live without, he notes.
His approach to writing poetry is not to fuss over quantity or content.
“I only write if I have something to write. I’ll see something, or hear something, or a certain phrase will occur to me. The poem starts there,” Zirilli shares. “I might start right away or I might wait months before I start writing it down and expanding it. The seed, if it’s any good, will create more words until the poem is done. I rarely plan the poem. I just let it write itself out.”
To foster creativity and allow it to grow takes time.
“The trick is overcoming the blank page, which sits there like a terrible abyss. The seed image or phrase might not be the beginning of the poem, but I’ll usually put that down first just to get rid of that blank page. Often, I’ll write longhand first. A first draft might be fast, under an hour, if I don’t get stuck,” Zirilli reveals. “Then typing it into the computer becomes the first revision. After the first revision, it gets hard to revise, hard to get back into the poem again, but I’ve found that sometimes I’m able to revise old poems because I’ve mostly forgotten writing them, so I bring fresh eyes to them.”
Zirilli’s contributions to the poetry book include around 15 pages of poetry as well as a 10-page literary analysis of Williams’ work. Influenced by Yeats as much as Williams, he notes that the two use imagery differently — the Irishman who used rhyming couplets in stanzas, and the free verse poet — yet in somewhat similar poems.
“This is the man who said the poem is a machine, and sometimes you can take a machine apart and can never put it back together again,” Zirilli writes.
“I think it’s fair to say it’s a warning about [not against] editing, but it can even happen while you’re writing the poem for the first time. It’s like you’re trying to get back to the original feeling that inspired the poem, but that original feeling was wordless, and if you obsess too much about recreating it you can lose the poem, have no words left to speak it,” Zirilli explains.
His biggest poetic influences were Shakespeare and the Beatles. Of the 18 poems Zirilli contributed in the book, he writes about topics such as growing up drawn into nature, northern New Jersey malls and floods, Kanye West, and more, with imagery throughout including a butcher whose hands are covered in blood, grasshoppers staring through windows, a trip to Target and his observations there, a willow tree’s death — the latter of which is personified well. “You fell only when you were ready/I missed the crash/the noise, the squirrel trauma./You missed the fence,/the garage, fell harmlessly/after all your looming,/ a piteous serpent, a bark-bellied corpse,” he writes in Broken Tree.
Lovely metaphors and similes are throughout the stanzas filled with vivid imagination and images strung together randomly and as well as carefully thought out.
The revival of poetry in Rutherford, Williams’ home town, began when poet John J. Trause, along with Jane Fisher, director of the Rutherford Public Library, founded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative of Southern Bergen County. Trause ran monthly readings at the Williams Center, featuring poets from the tri-state area as well as further afield. The group meets on the first Wednesday of each month for free workshops at borough hall, and is open to all. Monthly readings are held at GainVille Café.
Don Zirilli lives in Sussex County with his wife Colleen, two dogs, three cats and a fish.
Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets will launch the gorgeous 8th edition of their yearly publication, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, at readings at GainVille Café Friday, Sept. 25 (with musical guest Corina Bartra), and at the Williams Center Wednesday, Oct. 7. Both events are in Rutherford and start at 7 PM.
The book, pronounced the best of the eight in the series by editor Jim Klein, features a stunning cover by Don Zirilli and the poetry and prose of 40 area writers who have either participated in the RWP’s long-running weekly poetry workshop or who have read their work at the Williams Center or GainVille Café in the past year.
Interior drawings have been supplied by poet and artist Melanie Klein. Claudia Serea provided the cover design. John Barrale and Mark Fogarty are managing editors of the book.
The overall theme of the book again is Dr. Williams’ observation that the epic is the local fully realized. Many of the writers in the volume adhere to Williams’ groundbreaking poetic philosophy of writing about the everyday in vibrant, “live” language.
This year’s featured poet is also Don Zirilli. He is a New Jersey poet and publisher who is the owner of not one but two wheelbarrows. Don has also contributed four short essays on the work of Dr. Williams to the book.
The revival of poetry in Rutherford, Dr. Williams’ home town, began when poet John J. Trause, along with Jane Fisher, director of the Rutherford Public Library, founded the Williams Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative of Southern Bergen County. From 2006 through 2012, Trause ran the monthly readings at the Williams Center, featuring poets from the tri-state area as well as from further afield. This First Wednesday series now is run by the “Gang of Five” (Claudia Serea, John Barrale, Don Zirilli, Zorida Mohammed and Anton Yakovlev). Mark Fogarty curates the monthly reading series at GainVille, which started in 2009.
The RWP weekly poetry workshop at Rutherford Borough Hall, now in its ninth year, is run by Jim Klein, the leader of the Red Wheelbarrow Poets. It is free and open to all local poets.
The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café on Friday, September 25 to celebrate the publication of The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow 8. Featured musician will be Afro-Peruvian jazz pioneer CORINA BARTRA, while the poetry feature will be poets who are in the anthology, reading from RRWB 8.
GAINVILLE CAFE, 17 Ames Ave., Rutherford.
7 PM. $7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert.
(201) 507-1800.
MARK FOGARTY PO BOX 1691 RUTHERFORD, NJ 07070
markfogarty54@yahoo.com
Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor
Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com
MARK FOGARTY believes, like Shelley, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He is a poet, musician, and journalist from Rutherford, NJ. He is the managing editor of The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow and emcees the monthly poetry/music reading at GainVille Café, also in Rutherford. He has read his poetry extensively in New York and New Jersey and has had poetry in more than 20 publications. He is the author of five books of poetry from White Chickens Press: Myshkin’s Blues, Peninsula, Phantom Engineer, Sun Nets, and Continuum: The Jaco Poems.
from In Memory of Thomas Ortiz
This high pueblo is isinglass,
the water in the cistern freezes near the sky.
In the clouded ice you can see down a thousand years,
the padres, conquistadores, spirits of the dead.
The dead stay close, the wind tugs them,
they funnel down through rings
and collect in the kiva
on Catholic holy days.
St. Stephen winces but lets them through.
The bishop won’t like it but he’s not here.
Down a thousand years he remembers
how rain washed out the trail
and the stranded ones on top leapt to their death.
Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor
Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com
Geraldine Green is a freelance creative writing tutor, mentor and published poet. She lives in Ulverston on the Furness Peninsula Cumbria, UK, where she was born. Her latest collection Salt Road was published in 2013 by Indigo Dreams. Geraldine is writer-in-residence at Swarthmoor Hall and a guest tutor at the Hall and also at Brantwood Coniston. In September 2011 she gained a PhD in creative writing titled: An Exploration of Identity and Environment through Poetry from Lancaster University. A frequent visitor to North America, she has a two-week poetry tour planned for August 2015 where she will read at a variety of venues in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Geraldine blogs at geraldinegreensaltroad.blogspot.co.uk.
from Salt Road into the Bay
I walk out into wind,
salt & flat-caked mud
baked white in the sun,
tread among samphire,
spiked as yet unplumped
shoots of bright green
small pockets of prayer
parcels of ozone and ask:
are you really samphire,
that bright jewel of
Shakespeare?
Picked, plucked,
remembered from Lear?
The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café on Thursday, July 30 to begin its seventh year with the poetry of RON BREMNER along with featured musician BRENDAN FOGARTY.
Ron’s work has appeared in the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow anthology, International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Irish piper Brendan will be making a second encore for the group at GAINVILLE CAFE, 17 Ames Ave., Rutherford.
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Bring-Your-A-Game open mic will follow, with generous reading times.
17 Ames Ave., 7 PM
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert
(201) 507-1800
Note switch of days this month to Thursday!
The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café in Rutherford, NJ on Friday, June 26 for its six-year anniversary! There will be cake!
Our special musical feature will be Rutherford bass maestro PETE McCULLOUGH doing a solo bass recital. Pete’s just back from a nationwide tour with Streetlight Manifesto and he’s all warmed up and ready to go.
Our special featured poet will be BOB MURKEN, a member of the Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ writing workshop, who has been published in our anthology and elsewhere.
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Bring-Your-A-Game open mic will follow, with generous reading times.
17 Ames Ave., 7 PM.
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert.
(201) 507-1800.
Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor
Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com
DOUGLAS GOETSCH is the author of seven volumes of poems, most recently Nameless Boy (2015, Orchises Press). His writing has appeared in many of the leading journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, The Southern Review and Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the Donald Murray prize for non-fiction writing. He resides in New York City, is a renowned writing teacher, and is the founding editor of Jane Street Press. Visit him at www.douglasgoetsch.com
from Joe’s Tax
Are we ever more innocent than when doing taxes?
I’m not talking about how we rob the country
by deducting the case of Alpo we bought on Take
Your Dog To Work day, but just the helpless look on our faces, the week-end in early spring
we’re hunkered down at a desk or kitchen table
strewn with receipts and instructions
from a government so much bigger than us,
hovering in space like a circle of priests…
The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café in Rutherford, NJ on Friday, June 5 for the launch of MARK FOGARTY’s two new books of poetry: Sun Nets and Continuum: The Jaco Poems. Sun Nets are short poems that catch the light, while Continuum collects a series of a dozen poems about bass legend Jaco Pastorius.
Our musical feature will be Irish piper BRENDAN FOGARTY.
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Bring-Your-A-Game open mic will follow, with generous reading times.
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert.
17 Ames Ave., 7 PM.
(201) 507-1800
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets 
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