Richard Jeffrey Newman

I don’t par­tic­u­larly like the title, “Poets Gather in Exile, in Queens,” because I cer­tainly don’t think of myself, as a writer or in any other way, as liv­ing in exile because I make my home in Queens, NY, but I like the arti­cle very much.

It’s funny how these things hap­pen. I took over Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val and its First Tues­days read­ing series in June of this year and started host­ing the series in Sep­tem­ber. K C Trom­mer was our first reader and it was a lovely evening, most espe­cially because we got some nice press cov­er­age on DNAinfo. Paul DeBenedetto, the reporter who wrote that story, was so taken with the evening that he did a pro­file of one of the poets who read, Nor­man Stock, whose first book of poems, Buy­ing Break­fast for My Kamikaze Pilot, won the 1994 Pere­grine Smith Poetry Series. (Norman’s sec­ond book is called Pick­led Dreams Naked.) John Leland of The New York Times read DeBenedetto’s pro­file of Stock and con­tacted me to see if there might be a story about a devel­op­ing com­mu­nity of writer’s in Queens. John came down to our Octo­ber read­ing, at which Lloyd Rob­son was the fea­tured reader, met some of the writ­ers who attended, and “Poets Gather in Exile” was the result.

What I like best about the arti­cle is the way it cap­tures the sense of a build­ing and bur­geon­ing com­mu­nity of writ­ers, which is, for me, the most impor­tant func­tion that First Tues­days can serve:

For Mr. Goodrich and Ms. [Honor] Mol­loy, the exiles from Brook­lyn, the monthly read­ing could not com­pen­sate for what they had lost — what they had moved to New York to be a part of. Ms. Mol­loy used to spend free hours toil­ing in the Brook­lyn Writ­ers Space; wher­ever she walked there were other writ­ers, who would tell her about their read­ings and offer to come to hers. “I feel like an expa­tri­ate,” she said, “like I lost my country.”

And yet.

Was it really so inju­ri­ous for a writer to be away from what Mr. Goodrich called the “designer organic tapi­oca shops” or “hip­sters with double-wide strollers”? In two months, they had found a good wine shop, a dry cleaner, a gro­cery. They had run into a newly arrived actor they knew; another day they ran into the poet K C Trom­mer, with whom Ms. Mol­loy used to work at Simon & Schus­ter and who was also a new­comer to the neigh­bor­hood. They had met Mr. Feld­stein, who told them about the read­ing series.

“It all starts to fall together,” Mr. Goodrich said.

I also – I can’t help it – like the pic­ture that Michael Kirby Smith got of me:

I hope you’ll go read the whole piece, and I hope you’ll come to next month’s read­ing, with Luis H. Fran­cia, on Novem­ber 13^th.