Rick Kearns, Harrisburg’s poet laureate, left, speaks with Nancy Mendes of the Historical Society of Dauphin County’s Board of Trustees after Friday’s poetry reading in city hall.
On Friday, at 20 or so minutes to noon, Rick Kearns, Harrisburg’s new poet laureate, sat in the city hall atrium and talked about jazz.
Since 2010, Kearns has performed with a Lancaster-based jazz ensemble, the Con Alma Quartet, whose renditions of established jazz tunes—Ron Carter’s “Little Waltz,” Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green”—he threads with readings of his poems. The poem-song matchup is determined in advance, but the pacing is improvisational, with the result that Kearns’ voice fits in like just another instrument, seamless and responsive.
“It’s stimulating, scary, maddening, and a lot of fun,” Kearns said. “It keeps me on my toes. And we have a CD!”
Kearns wore a black corduroy sports jacket, black corduroy slacks, and a blue button-down shirt, open at the collar. He has exactly the sort of voice (smoky, slow-going) you would want telling you, over, say, a seventh chord on electric guitar, that the “moon wants a good red wine and a woman who can dance.”
Friday’s event was the second of Mayor Papenfuse’s “brown bag cultural programs,” which city hall will host on the first and third Friday of each month “to help promote the arts in Harrisburg and help connect citizens with the government center.” Within a few minutes, the atrium would fill up with 20 or so observers. For the moment, though, Kearns sat in a sea of empty chairs and reflected on “Aurelio’s Vengeance, Puerto Rico, 1901,” one of the poems cited in the mayor’s press release earlier that week.
“That one was about Puerto Rico right after the Spanish-American War, after America had sort of taken Puerto Rico,” he said. “It was very much based on the historical record.” Years ago, Kearns, who is of Puerto Rican and European descent, spent several days in Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, in New York, going through Puerto Rican newspapers from around the turn of the century. There he encountered stories about a “rash of suspicious fires” in the estates that had been abandoned by the Spanish-Creole gentry after the war.
“The rumor was that the guys working there had torched them, taking vengeance,” he said. The poem imagines one such arsonist, “early in the morning in the wet bushes,” waiting to “torch the grand old house”:
These are
the flames of hell
you bastard you won’t
be back to enslave my family any
more nunca
jamás
nunca
jamás
“Hey hey hey, brother!” Kearns said suddenly. J. Clark Nicholson, the artistic director of the Gamut Theatre Group, had arrived. Lenwood Sloan, the newly appointed director of arts, culture and tourism, followed close behind, greeting the pair warmly. They chatted for a moment, and then Sloan took center stage.
“Greetings to you all. We are gonna get started,” he said. The mayor arrived, slipping into an open seat in the front row, and Sloan, spotting him, welcomed him as “a literary man in his own right.” There were no brown bags in evidence yet, excepting one sandwich in butcher paper. Sloan took a moment to point out the various art exhibits close at hand: a display of “150 years of recreation,” including an old Atari console; a four-part mural, conceived by students at John Harris High, depicting Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Nelson Mandela.
He also indicated a folding table, piled with wooden contraptions and labeled “FREE BIRDHOUSES.” “We’ve been graced by these bird cages,” Sloan said, “and I’d ask you each to take one as an omen that spring is coming.” Then, with a nod to the Con Alma Quartet—“If we were in another place, there would be a saxophone behind him”—he introduced Kearns.
Kearns began with a series of poems about Harrisburg. They visited North 6th Street (“hip hop swagger” on a “cool summer night”), a mambo dance on Allison Hill, and—in the obligatory light-hearted antipathy towards commuters—crows in Midtown defecating on state workers’ cars. In one poem, a long and compassionate tribute to an elderly couple Uptown, he reflected on “old-time Harrisburg”: the wife’s “crime watch through cigarette haze” on her porch, her husband “inconsolable” after her death, and his own death leaving behind $35,000 in credit card debt.
He continued with more tributes, to his Puerto Rican grandfather, to his mother, and to Martin Luther King. Papenfuse and his wife, who had slipped in, too, with the mayor’s lunch in tow, sat side by side in identical poses: legs crossed at the ankles, cupping take-out coffee.
“I don’t have a concept of time, so—how’m I doing?” Kearns said.
“Please keep reading,” Sloan said from the back of the house.
At the end of the reading, Kearns took a few questions. Nicholson, from Gamut, asked if he could talk about “the rich ground that Harrisburg is for so many poets.”
Kearns, nodding, credited Harrisburg’s “rich history.” “There was always music. That much I know. And my understanding is there were poets showing up off and on through our history.” By the time he became aware of it, Kearns said, he was running into poets “all over the place.” “There’s always been something about this town. There is an energy, there’s an artistic energy here.”
Joyce Davis, the mayor’s director of communications, asked if Kearns could discuss his vision for the role of poet laureate, especially in connecting with young people.
“There’s a couple things I’d like to do,” Kearns said. “And one is to help develop writing and poetry workshops in the city, one based in the Latino community, one based in the African-American community, open to everybody. And I think one of the great joys for me as a writer, as a person, as a community member, is being able to give young people that opportunity, to develop an artistic skill.”
“We have time for one more question,” Sloan said. “Yes ma’am.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a question,” said a woman towards the back. “But I do have to thank you. Here I am on a Friday, in the middle of meetings, and phone calls, and text messages, and I didn’t expect for something to touch my heart. And I think I need to go home and write something for my mother.”
“Good! Great! I’m very glad to hear that,” Kearns said, as the room burst into applause.
“Can I borrow your words,” Sloan said. “Here, in the middle of the afternoon, with phone calls, and messages, and work, we can stop in the atrium of the city, in the center of government, for something to touch our hearts.”
He then asked Kearns to read a final poem. Kearns thought for a moment, then read “The Body of My Isla,” about protests he’d participated in against a military testing site on Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico:
5 million translucent tree frogs
singing as they must
aiming their love at the
murderous F-18s dropping
bombs and dripping poison
on Vieques, residential bombing site.
When he finished, there was another round of applause, and then members of the audience stepped forward to greet the poet, or to walk off with what Sloan, reminding them, called a “piece of spring”—a wooden birdhouse in a plastic bag.
To read “Verse Across Cultures,” TheBurg’s Q & A with Kearns, featured in this month’s issue, click here. You can listen to Kearns and the Con Alma Quartet at their SoundCloud page.
