With the most prominent lineup of poets in its seven-year history, the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation expands its beloved Sunday afternoon Poetry Barbecue next weekend with two Saturday workshops, one on the mainland for teenage poets, and one beachside for adults.
Rancher and poet Sean Sexton, who has organized the poetry readings since the beginning, has dubbed this year’s theme Madam, I’m Adam: The Male Dilemma.
With promises of beer, bluegrass, barbecue and warm weather, Sexton has managed to lure nationally-known poets for a pittance of an honorarium. They include former warrior Brian Turner, professional roofer Kenneth Hart and Tony Hoagland, a professor of poetry known for a collection titled “What Narcissism Means to Me.”
The annual feast for the soul and stomach takes place off the Wabasso Causeway on the grounds of the Environmental Learning Center, where the late poet Laura Riding Jackson’s cracker-style house was relocated from the rural north county, with the foundation’s help.
Last year, Sexton’s theme was Three Daughters of Eve, and included readings by three prominent women poets, Laurel Blossom, Alice Friman and Sydney Wade.
Now, the daughters of Eve are letting the men take over. Sexton isn’t sure how each poet will reveal his male dilemma – or even if he has one. For Sexton, the enigma is entitlement. “It’s a man’s world,” he explains. “I sort of feel mankind has set things up to run roughshod over everything. If you have to deal with being the male, I consider it a dilemma. We have a high level of responsibility with regard to the world. We’ve got a leg up on everything, though a lot of people consider that a golden opportunity.”
Of those responsibilities, few arenas could be more male-dominated than war. Brian Turner is a poet and essayist whose 2014 memoir of war, “My Life as a Foreign Country,” was praised as “stunning” by the New York Times’ Jen Percy, herself a journalist of war and winner of a Pushcart Prize.
“A triumph of form and content,” she wrote, and called it “a praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function in beautifully in non-fiction writing.” Written in 132 vignettes of varying length, the book travels with Turner from youth to war and home again. “Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present,” Percy wrote.
With a master’s in fine arts degree, Turner lived in South Korea for seven years before joining the U.S. Army. He served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Brigade and later in Iraq in 2003 when he was a team leader with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, second infantry division. His time there inspired his first book of poems, “Here, Bullet.”
Many of his poems were written from the field as if he were “an embedded poet,” he noted in a blog post. He wrote them quickly, in just a couple of days, in the event his own time would be cut short, he wrote.
Sexton met Tony Hoagland at the Miami Book Fair two years ago, introducing himself by giving him a copy of his own book of poetry, “Blood Writing.”
Hoagland’s 2003 collection of poems, “What Narcissism Means to Me,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection focused on the self – specifically, as Emily Nussbaum noted in the Times, “a prickly grandiose American masculine self,” and quoting one phrase of the poet’s, “a government called Tony Hoagland.” Along with two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry.
“Tony is dealing with the existential dilemma of being a human first and second, being a man,” says Sexton. “I love it. I feel like he’s wide open. He’s putting it out there and he’s not afraid to say anything. He’s a Walt Whitman figure to me, in a way.”
Hoagland has described himself as obsessed with the connection of personal life to cultural life, specifically “21st century first-world consumer culture.”
“Life obliges us to be uncomfortable, and to form new stances,” he told Eric Farwell, writing for The Rumpus, an online literary magazine. Farwell noted that Hoagland’s fame includes a place on Judd Apatow’s “I Found this Funny” collection. And that a copy of his book “What Narcissism Means to Me” has a cameo in the movie “Drinking Buddies.”
Hoagland was interviewed by PBS’ Jeffrey Brown in 2013. He made a point relevant to the whole barbecue cowboy poet and even slam poet effort to defeminize poetry’s image among the masses, or at least to make it gender neutral.
“The misimpression that many people have, the misapprehension that poetry is something that they’re not clever enough for or that poetry belongs to high culture or that it’s so sensitive and emotional in nature that it’s impractical in the real world, that it has nothing to do with mechanics or science or money or money or making a living,” Hoagland told Brown. “The first illusion that any poet has to dispel is that poetries is for sissies … when in fact American poetry is one of the great populist bodies of culture in the world.”
Kenneth Hart works with his family’s roofing business in Long Valley, New Jersey, while teaching writing at New York University. He spends his summers in Alaska, and is the poetry editor of The Florida Review.
Sexton considers him a protégé of Hoagland. “Some of the Tony stuff is going on with Ken,” Sexton says. “I feel like Ken is wide open, finding out who he is out there in the world through his relationships with women and relationships with strange places and other cultures.”
Hart’s poem “Keep America Beautiful” was read on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” In 2007, he was co-winner of the Allen Ginsberg Award, the same year he won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry for his book “Uh Oh Time.”
Anhinga is the same imprint that published Sexton’s “Blood Writing.”
Hart will be leading a free poetry workshop next Saturday, April 1, for teenage writers. Participants in the 1 p.m. workshop will read their poems at the Sunday event. Like the barbecue, the workshop takes place at the Environmental Learning Center. A sign-up form is on the foundation’s website.
And Saturday morning, across the bridge on the barrier island a workshop for adults takes place at the Indian River Shores Community Center. It will be led by Steve Bradbury, a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. His published works include “Feelings Above Sea Level: Prose Poems from the Chinese of Shang Qin” and “Poems from the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Ming.” His translation of Hsia Yu’s “Salsa” was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk prize. The workshop is from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and the cost is $45.
Sunday, April 2, the readings get underway at 3 p.m. with the high school poets; the trio of professionals begins around 4 p.m. The barbecue and bluegrass follow at around 5 p.m. Tickets are $25.