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Slam at the Benton: “tops of trees”

by Jillian Cundari (2017)

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tops of trees
by Jillian Cundari

today for the first time in a long time I saw the tops of trees.
I rolled to a near stop in drive at the top of the hill
to see the trees and farms

rising in heaps and the bubbling people, pushing through the top
like a bulb
from tulip.

I thought of Mom. the plastic tarp white by weather, the kind you see on afternoon       drives, was

covering something and it was held down by tires.

Thought it was the bodies
of dead farm things.

I aimed the wheels between the jaundice, just before we go
full yellow

I thought about the pile, after that until I called Mom and she told me
she had a pneumonia and I lay on my back crying, flecks of mascara in pools of me

ousted
by a hose, rolling onto the pillow, the corners of aged glass on starch

it was a yellow afternoon too. I consider who I love most in the world

drooling from the trees
like the final pitter-patter of
rain ever.

watching again, I see how air purples out from between the smallest spaces like

sweat between fingers in a peace sign
until it turns fevers up blue and falls back into the hill, dancing like
wonderful

with bitten grass and biting animal

I pity that purple, sucked and bruised and tapped like maple,
Snacked on
by bark and the eyes of the looker

The gas is so thin now that I can’t help but
see myself, in my mothers’ old horned-rims,
lubricated by the oil

of my too-small nose

Told her to try and cough up the mucus until finally it happened and I
rewound the small intestine like yarn around my wrist, collecting and collecting
and collecting until I command the inside and she can’t unravel anymore

~

Jillian Cundari reading her poem, “tops of trees” for the Long River Review’s 2017 Reading Series: Slam at the Benton.

Ben Schultz – Videography (Filming and Editing)
Nicholas DiBenedetto – Interviews
Brandon Marquis – Interviews
Mairead Loschi – Podcast Audio

~

Meet the Poet: Jillian Cundari 

Prior to the reading, Poetry Editor Nicholas DiBenedetto and Creative Nonfiction Panelist Brandon Marquis sat down with Jill to talk about her work and her writing process.

Nicholas DiBenedetto: Tell us a bit about yourself: who you are, your writing, etc.

Jillian Cundari: Well, I’m Jill, I’m graduating this May, I major in English and Human Rights, and… I only really write when I’m feeling very sad or very scattered. That’s when my best writing happens, I would say. I usually write early in the morning as well. That’s when I’m fresh.

ND: Do you think you use writing as a coping mechanism?

JC: Oh, absolutely. I feel like it gives you a chemical burst in your brain and… it pieces together all the confusion that I have, every day.

ND: Do you get any kind of a similar burst when you’re showing your work to other people or performing it for other people? Or is it just the burst of writing and getting it all out?

JC: Well, I feel like when I’m reading my work out loud honestly I’m like, (shudders) Am I gonna mess up? What will they think? Yeah I think it’s definitely a rush to put yourself out there in a different kind of way.

Brandon Marquis: What’s special about early morning? You said you do best poetry in the morning; what’s special about that?

JC: I feel like I write in the early morning because it’s before I care about anything, and I feel like when I’m trying too hard or I’m caring… whatever I’m writing, it’s not authentic.

ND: Where do you think you draw the line between being honest with yourself and with being a craftsman in terms of your writing and crafting a poem? How do you navigate that gray area?

JC: Well I would say that when I write—just in general—it’s more of a free association. I’m not really thinking while I’m writing; my fingers are kind of doing it and then I’m like Oh, this is what’s kind of coming out. And so, it really just depends on how I’m feeling, the level of craft and the level of pure emotion that’s coming into my poems. I would say that I tend to more air on the side of craft, in that I’ll go back and I’ll be like Well, this isn’t right for some reason. It’s usually because I’m not being fully honest with myself or with what I’m trying to do with the poem. I feel like emotions sometimes come after, at least in the way they end up in the poem.

BM: This is just a really broad question; do you have any funny stories or little tidbits about writing? Just any funny little scenario, or even just like a small thing that’s important to as you define your craft?

JC: I don’t know about funny; I feel like my poems are never really funny. That’s not really your question, but I feel like, for me… Bruce (Cohen) said something to me that stuck with me; he said Write better poems and I was like Ah, cryptic, but kind of helpful: when you know there’s something that’s not quite right, but maybe you can’t say to yourself This is bad, and sometimes someone says it to you, you’re like Oh, I’ll just write better poems and sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.

ND: What are some of your biggest inspirations? It could be personal stories, people in the writing community you look up to, or just reasons for why you’re writing.

JC: I feel like the moments I’m most inspired to write are when I’ve been outside and when I’ve been looking around. For me, writing is about being receptive to what’s around you, and so, I feel like my better work comes from when I’ve been around my family and when I’ve been outside. And usually I think it’s a pretty common trope in my poems to have, like nature mixed with family.

~

Jillian Cundari is an eighth semester English and Human Rights double major, and is a member of the Honors Program. After graduation this May, she hopes to return to UConn to earn her Master of Public Administration and Master of Social Work degrees.

Jill is the recipient of the 2017 Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize, Third Place. More of her work is forthcoming in the 2017 issue of the Long River Review.

Slam at the Benton: “Splinter People”

by Kelly Stoldt (2017)

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Splinter People
by Kelly Stoldt

My mother has announced her worry
That living in a single dorm room is bad for me.
She asks if I’ve been socializing
If I’ve made friends
Leaves out “since the last time.”
I tell her I’ve gotten really close with my mattress
(It goes by many names and I tell her they’re all really nice)

When I make friends, I like to give them some warning.
And by that I mean
I have a tendency to attract splinter people
Who wedge themselves into my skull.
Become tweezers.
Remove themselves.
Until I am left with hole in my head.

See I fall in love the same way I used to sleep at night
Grinding my teeth so loudly my mother could hear it in the next room
I have only ever known how to be restless
To clench my jaw even on the quietest of nights
No matter how many times I’m told that the sun will rise in the morning
I will hold my breath until the sky is on fire
And then some
In case I am the one who has to put it out.

The longest I’ve gone without sleeping is 76 hours.
It’s the most routine thing I do
To wake up on the floor of my room
Dressed for yesterday.

Some days I will look at people like I’ve never seen them before
Or maybe like I am seeing them for the first time
(There is a difference).

Showers are a kind of loving yourself I am not familiar with.
And by that I mean
I really love showers
But they make me hate myself
So I stand there under steaming hot water until I forget where my bones begin.

On cold days, I am always the warmest body in the room.
I don’t know how to hold onto heat the way I’m supposed to
But I know it draws people closer to me
And I like that.

I like to confuse the past with the present
And by that I mean
Most days I disgust myself.
Most days I don’t know if I am disgusted with myself
Or the parts of him left inside me.
Most days I don’t know if it is me or the parts of him left inside me
Who is disgusted with myself.
But I do know that people are meeting Matt over and over again
When I open my mouth and everyone I’ve ever known comes pouring out.

I tell them
“Don’t feel guilty when you become what I fear most
It has more to do with what you could be than what you are”
I am always confusing time that way
Friends are just the passage of time for me
And I should probably stop looking for ghosts in everyone I meet
It’s less that I’m seeing them for the first time
And more that I’m seeing someone who I never thought I would again.

Mom wants to know if I’m isolating myself.
I tell her I am never alone
I’ve got all these ghosts living with me
Why would I ever need more?

~

Kelly Stoldt reading her poem, “Splinter People” for the Long River Review’s 2017 Reading Series: Slam at the Benton.

Ben Schultz – Videography (Filming and Editing)
Nicholas DiBenedetto – Interviews
Mairead Loschi – Podcast Audio

~

Meet the Poet: Kelly Stoldt

Prior to the reading, Poetry Editor Nicholas DiBenedetto sat down with Kelly to talk about her writing, and slam poetry in a time of political turbulence.

Nicholas DiBenedetto: Tell us a bit about yourself: who you are, your writing, and why you write poetry.

Kelly Stoldt: Well, I’m a Psychology major, and I really got interested in poetry because I found it was a really good outlet to connect with people. So rather than—especially because I want to be a therapist—trying to take things so scientifically, relating to somebody by sharing my own experience seemed to be the most effective way to help them get through things. And opening up my own experiences, especially in the mental health community, seemed to make people a lot more comfortable.

I got into poetry probably my sophomore year of high school, and I started reading and performing my junior year. I never really had a mentor, which a lot of people in performance poetry seem to, so I taught myself off of Youtube videos from Button Poetry, and it’s been something that I actually transferred to UConn to perform.

ND: Could you talk a bit more about not having a mentor? And, going off of that, do you have any poetic idols or people that you look up to or emulate in terms of the performance aspect of poetry?

KS: Most people within the poetry community that I’ve experienced—meaning spoken word or slam poetry—they had a professor, a teacher in high school, took classes, or a coach that got them into performance poetry, and that’s how they found themselves there, whereas I’ve had to seek out spaces for me to do performance. I taught myself namely off of Sarah Kay videos—she’s pretty well known—but I’ve definitely branched out, and now my coach, his name is Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, he’s on campus coaching a few of us; he’s a really well known poet on Button Poetry as well.

ND: Is he a professor or is he someone a bit more established?

KS: He’s very established. He also writes for MTV, so he’s just a really good essayist and poet. But, right now he goes to universities and does a lot of performances, reads there, he has a book that just came out, and he works with UConn specifically because he lives in the area. I know he did a lecture at Yale about poetry, so he’s very well established and I’m very lucky to work with him.

ND: I know that you’re involved with Poetic Release and the slam poets that have this community on campus; when you think about your peers in the community, what do you think you learn from them in comparison to someone who’s more established like Hanif? Do you think it’s a different way of learning about writing and expressing yourself through poetry with the two, or do you think they overlap?

KS: It does overlap a little bit, but my peers definitely contribute to my poetry in a way that I learn a lot more outside of specifically just writing. Being a slam poet means that you’re generally in a very activist space because it’s meant for people who aren’t able to speak most of the time. It’s supposed to give a voice to a lot of marginalized groups. A lot of my peers are from various marginalized groups that I may or may not be in. I get a lot of help from them educating me so that I can use my outlet of poetry, or I’ll help them use their outlet of poetry to better articulate what they’re trying to speak and teach people about, or they’ll even correct me when I do something that’s offensive or possibly not really my area to talk about. So we support each other a whole lot, but also remain educators to each other, because we can’t know everything as poets.

ND: Given the current climate we live in, where a lot of marginalized groups might feel more threatened or uneasy just in the environment we live in, do you think it’s important to have poetry and people writing as a kind of outlet for that? Do you think it should be more of a call to action? Do you think poetry is itself a political act?

KS: I think being a poet—specifically a slam poet—is a radical act in this political climate. A lot of the viral Youtube videos from Button Poetry are about marginalized experiences. It’s a way of teaching people who are in privileged groups who’ll watch these videos and compelling them, because it’s taking them to the experience rather than giving them a lecture with statistics and whatnot. Hearing those personal accounts are really effective at educating people and getting them more involved and aware of what’s going on, because some people have no awareness of what is going on in the political climate. To get up on stage and voice your experience in that way and be very vulnerable is a political act. Signing your experience away like that for other people’s consumption is something that is very hard to do at times, but it’s really important and it provides a lot of empowerment to a lot of people.

ND: I guess as a final word: if there was anything you wanted to say to a prospective writer or a prospective slam poet, maybe someone who might be struggling with mental health issues and be interested in using poetry or slam poetry as an outlet for that, what would you say to them?

KS: I would say that all art is important. Whether or not you write it, and then a week later you hate it and think it’s awful, at one point it was really important to you to express. Some writing is meant to be shared, some writing isn’t. But keep writing, because the more that you write and that you accumulate about your experience, sometimes it means that you can shift things together to make one new piece or sometimes it just means that it needs to be put away and looked back again later. Writing is a really important outlet to be able to work through things, whether it’s personal, political, or to be shared with a large room of people, it’s really important to your own self-discovery. My own best writing always comes from something that I’m discovering about myself while I’m writing it. Just constantly writing is probably the best way that I make progress as a writer. There’s no way to really learn without continuing to do the art, and making progress in that way is probably the biggest stepping stone on the way to becoming an ‘established’ writer.

~

Kelly Stoldt is a psychology major as well as a performance poet affiliated with Poetic Release.  She’s been writing poetry for four years, loves music, and watching the UConn women’s basketball team.  She used to play on a quidditch team and is well known for her easily recognizable Kim Possible ringtone to go along with her red hair.

Slam at the Benton: “The Anthem”

by Mary Kozan (2017)

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The Anthem
by Mary Kozan

i.
The bungalow colony was in its heydey. Blondes unfurled
Their legs on plastic deck chairs, laughing like advertisements
Over bottles of Coca-Cola. Their children pissed in the pool and shrieked
With joy. Tits sagged in one-piece floral bathing suits.

My grandmother (then, in the throes of beauty) waded in the shallow end, her arms suspended
Over the water like a marionette.
“Don’t splash me!” she mouthed around her Marlboro.

(They removed a lump from her neck last month. She’s not doing well.)

I never knew why they called her Cookie. Perhaps, in the bungalow days, she was warm enough
For the name. The last time I saw her, she hugged me with blue eyes open and staring
Over my shoulder, glimmering in chill metallic eyeshadow.

ii.
America, embodied:

On summer weekends, men emancipated themselves from grey New York City apartments in a mass migration up the countryside. They drove to the Catskills where their wives and children waited, trunks rattling with stashed scotch and Chopin. What a celebration! Mink coats wore red-lipped ladies on Saturday nights in the casino. They toasted (staining the rim of their glasses pink) to freedom, to Irwin in his mansion across the street, to Rosie, the black cook—she makes the best ribs, you know—and to three foot long challos. The food arrived at midnight: bagels and lox, an egg salad plate. A man steps down from the wooden stage in the front of the room. “Sing some more, Al Sedlitz,” they cry. “Sing the anthem.” He obliges, warbling along to his ukulele—

…to kozan’s colony.
oh you’ll be so happy here at kozan’s colony
all i need is one hot toddy and of course a little potty
oh it’s great to be with the family at kozan’s colony.
yessiree, yessiree. yessiree

They became white, here in the Jewish Alps, the Borscht Belt of the United States!
Slather me between two slices of rye—I want to die between the molars of my rabbi.

iii.
Across from the bungalows, there is a cemetery filled with entropy. Sixty years ago, the bones beneath my feet plucked the cacophony of the Saturday night cocktails from the air. Hungering, they fill their hollows with sound, stuffing noise in their coffins like a magpies hoard.

Standing in the boneyard with my father, I can hear the mausoleum reverberate with that music, echoing across the stillness of generations like a scratchy record:

…you’ll be so happy here at kozan’s colony.
she has teeth so white and pearly.

Are her teeth still grinning beneath my feet? We peer down at the headstone:

K O Z A N
FRANK                                            ANNA
September 15, 1899-                          July 17, 1897-
March 1, 1980                             October 6, 1983

On top of the grave, stones are stacked in a cairn.
My father places another rock on top of the grave, his chin crumpling.
“I don’t know why we do rocks.”
He does. So do I.

The thirsty bones snatched words from my throat. Silent, we departed.

iv.
My father stands at the back of the room, listening to the show. It’s two in the morning.

it’s so great to be here at kozan’s colony
oh you’ll be so happy here at kozan’s colony
now the season it is ending and the curtain is descending
oh its great to be with the family at kozan’s colony 
yessiree, yessiree
yessiree, yessiree…

He’s waiting to clean the tables, his eyes puffed with stupor. He doesn’t mind (at least, not yet); when he walks back home, the stars will be waiting for him, bright and clear in the Catskills.

v.
Later, when my grandfather offers my father the colony, he will say no.

~

Mary Kozan reading her poem, “The Anthem” for the Long River Review’s 2017 Reading Series: Slam at the Benton.

Ben Schultz – Videography (Filming and Editing)
Nicholas DiBenedetto – Interviews
Brandon Marquis – Interviews
Mairead Loschi – Podcast Audio

~

Meet the Poet: Mary Kozan

Prior to the reading, Poetry Editor Nicholas DiBenedetto and Creative Nonfiction Panelist Brandon Marquis sat down with Mary to talk about her work and some of her influences.

Brandon Marquis: Alright, so, just giving your name, introduce yourself.

Mary Kozan: Hi! I’m Mary Kozan. I’m a junior at UConn, and I write poetry for fun.

Nicholas DiBenedetto: Tell us a bit about what you like to write about, and why you write it.

MK: A lot of my writing is going through my memories, so I write a lot about my family. When I was growing up my parents had a garden, and that was a big part of my life; I would always have to work out there and I’d complain about it a lot, but it kinda became a part of me. So, I write about kinda nature and gardening.

BM: What in that garden was special to you growing up?

MK: Oh (chuckles) it was a lot of hard work, and I didn’t really enjoy doing it, but it was something that I had to do. My mom really loves it, and I think, after a while, I kinda started to enjoy it too, even though like, I hate bugs. Like I have this giant fear of bees and everything that flies around, but through the process of living with the garden, which was not a place that I really enjoyed, I started growing to appreciate it and knowing what it meant to my family.

ND: What do you think draws you to poetry, as opposed to more of a prose-type of writing style?

MK: I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know how to write plot. With poetry, I feel like you can get really precise, like if you use really specific imagery or verbs or something. I’d rather just concentrate on the meanings of small, individual words than try and construct a whole story. Because you can have the same characterization and stuff, but in a much smaller, more precise way.

ND: Like each individual word choice becomes that much more crucial in a poem, just because it’s a much smaller space.

MK: Yeah! Yeah.

ND: Who, or what, are some of your biggest inspirations when you write? It could be like another writer you look up to, it could be a personal figure, or anything.

MK: That’s a tough question. I think… I don’t know if this is really answering the question, but I have a lot of people that I look up to. Especially as someone who’s English and Secondary Ed, I feel like I have a lot of the classics and a lot of these famous poets in my head, and I think a lot of it is actually, rather than looking up to them, I’m trying to find where I fit in with them. So like, maybe pulling on some of Elizabeth Bishop’s imagery, but also finding my voice, which sounds super cheesy.

BM: So, say that I’m not into poetry, or I haven’t written poetry and I really want to try it. What advice would you have for me?

MK: Just start writing. Write about what you think is interesting. That can be really intimidating, especially if you’ve never written creatively before; like where do you even start? I had this project in high school, it was kind of a ‘Why I Write’ project, and I think that was the thing that kind of started the creative writing for me. And what made me start getting creative again was really exploring why do people write in general, what matters to me and what ideas do I want to explore in my writing? So, just find what matters to you.

~

Mary Kozan is a junior pursuing a dual degree in English and English Secondary Education, because writing isn’t going to pay for the amount of cats she aspires to own.