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The Local Lens: A Guide to Philadelphia Poets


The City of Philadelphia is currently looking for a new Poet Laureate, following the end of current poet laureate Frank Sherlock’s term. Duties of the Poet Laureate include mentoring young poets, a couple of official readings and community-service work. This week, I’ll use this space to discuss some of Philly’s most revered poets.

Sherlock succeeded Sonia Sanchez, the city’s first poet laureate, who had an exceptional ability to work with mainstream audiences through the city’s Mural Arts Project. In 2011, the 77-year-old Sanchez was named the city’s first poet laureate by Mayor Michael Nutter in a ceremony at City Hall.

Born in Alabama in 1934 as Wilsonia Benita Driver, Sanchez graduated from New York’s Hunter College after moving to Harlem as a young girl. Well known as an activist for racial equality, Sanchez began her years as a teacher at San Francisco State in 1965. Sanchez joined the Nation of Islam in 1972 because of then burgeoning views on Black separatism but left in 1975 because of that group’s views on women’s rights. She has had more than 12 published volumes of poetry, include “Morning Haiku” (2010) and “Does Your House Have Lions?” (1995).

Since her appointment, Sanchez has appeared at many poetry readings throughout the city, along with other local poets who have begun to establish national reputations, like Philadelphia’s CAConrad. Conrad writes that his childhood consisted of “selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift,” and continues to stun audiences with his word missiles. The award winning poet is the author of many books and chapbooks, including “Deviant Propulsion,” “The Book of Frank,” “Advanced Elvis Course,” and “(end-begin w/chants),” a collaboration with Sherlock. With poem titles like “I Still Have Keys to the Apartment,” “Bran Muffins Have Nothing to Do With it! So There!” and “Leaving the Only Bed in America That Keeps Me Satisfied,” Conrad’s irreverent style might not go over at the city’s Union League but his cult following is symbolic of poetry’s status in the city.

Attending a CAConrad reading can be an unforgettable experience. Part stand up comic, part slam theater experience, Conrad dazzles with over-sized rhinestone glasses, feathers or even bathtub recitations. He, like so many other new Philadelphia poets, is cantankerously unique and sports some sort of physical signature like a big hat, a monocle or the wearing of several scarves. These styles have given poetry an urban  mystique.  

A poet’s signature look is an apt description that can be applied to Lamont Steptoe, who grew up in Pittsburgh and found his wings as a poet while serving in the Republic of South Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. For years, Steptoe could be seen walking around town in decorate army fatigues and heavy back gear as if the gritty streets of the city were the jungles of Indo-China. Assigned to the 25th Infantry at Cu Chi, the accomplished poet, photographer and founder of Whirlwind Press has published many volumes of poetry, including “Crimson River” and “American Morning/Mourning.” Conrad and Steptoe could be a future Philadelphia Poet Laureates, despite Steptoe’s antiwar polemic.

Another great Philadelphia poet is the Rev. John P. McNamee, Pastor Emeritus of Saint Malachy Church in North Philadelphia. Fr. McNamee was ordained a priest by Cardinal John Francis O’Hara in 1959 and has spent most of his priesthood serving the poor and disadvantaged. An award winning poet, his books, “Clay Vessels” and “Endurance — The Rhythm of Faith,” have been popular spiritual bestsellers. His autobiography, “Diary of a City Priest,” won the Catholic Press Association Book Award and was made into a movie for television starring actor David Morse in 2001. An international speaker, Fr. McNamee received a Doctor of Humanities honorary degree from Villanova University in 2001. In 2006, he published “Donegal Suite,” a collection of contemplative and mystical poems which derives from a summer of solitude he spent in Northern Ireland. The second half of the book concentrates more on the pathos of daily life in Philadelphia.

While the poems of a priest might not ideally represent the City of Philadelphia, a secular poet like Leonard Gontarek could. Gontarek is the recipient of five Pushcart Prize nominations but his insurance salesman look means that he probably wouldn’t be recognized as a poet in the street, at least if one is going by the “uniform” of younger urban poets which tends towards affectation, such as the arrangement of neck scarves. While the poetic uniform is usually relegated to the young — consider prose writer George Lippard’s flamboyant dress — other poets seem happier to blend with the scenery much the same way that Walt Whitman, who dressed as if he was a farmer, blended in with his Camden townsfolk.

Jim Cory is another poet who doesn’t go out of his way to “look” like a poet. He is the author of a number of books and editor of the 1997 Black Sparrow Press edition of James Broughton’s poems, “Packing Up For Paradise.” Cory believes that poetry can be different things to different people at different times. He once told me about when he first stumbled on ”The Mentor Book of Major American Poets” on the paperback rack at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Connecticut.

“It was sacred text,” Cory said. “It explained everything. I still have it. Five years later it was all about the Beats and Bohemian rebellion. Fast forward ten years and a lot of what I was writing was gay poetry. In my 60s, I write in different modes to satisfy different ends. Short poems appeal because of the challenge of getting something complicated into seven lines, cut-ups and collage because they’re fun and with any luck can be fun for the reader too.”  He also believes that it is important for poets to take “not their poetry but poetry in the broad sense — more seriously than they take themselves.”  

Perhaps Philadelphia’s most famous modern poet was the 1973-1974 Poet Laureate of the United States, Daniel Hoffman. Hoffman’s poetry is almost always just a little sad but it is also noted for its joy in the small things of life. As he once told an interviewer, “Even when a poet writes about something negative the fact that he puts it into a form controls it, makes it positive.” The author of more than 25 books moved to Philadelphia in 1948 with his wife, the poet Elizabeth MacFarland. At this time the city was on the verge of a rebirth, just a few years before architect Vincent Kling and City Planner Edmund Bacon would change the face of downtown Philadelphia. It was also the era of Mayor Richardson Dilworth, the first Democratic mayor after decades of “corrupt and contented” Republican politics. Change was in the air and Hoffman, feeling the pulse, felt no leftover homesickness for New York City, which he once labeled “a city that cannibalizes its own past.” Hoffman, who in school had been a classmate of poet Allen Ginsberg, went on to teach English and poetry at the University of Pennsylvania. By all accounts, he became a good teacher yet admitted that he’d be the first to castigate a student if he heard that the student did not read poetry by other poets because of the fear of influence. Blunt to a fault, Hoffman said that he wouldn’t want students like this in his class, even though he expressed sensitivity towards the pitfalls of being a 17 year old beginning poet, for whom all poetry generally means, “my love affair.” Young poets of this caliber, Hoffman explains, all write “the same verbal spaghetti without any control or form,” all the more reason to make them “read good poetry.” One teaching method he used to cure the “my love affair” view of poetry was to copy out police reports and have the students choose one and then write a poem about why the culprit was arrested. This exercise was important, he says, to get the students “out of themselves.”

French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s line, “You must change your life,” set the tone for Philadelphia’s Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore. Born in 1940 in Oakland, California, Moore’s first book of poems, “Dawn Visions,” was published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This was the Beat era, when Ginsberg’s “Howl,” also published by City Lights, was changing the poetic landscape. In 1972, Moore followed up with another City Lights volume, “Burnt Heart/Ode to the War Dead,” about the human carnage in Vietnam. In the late 1960s he founded and directed The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in Berkeley, California, and later presented two major productions, “The Walls Are Running Blood” and “Bliss Apocalypse.” Moore was a self-described Zen Buddhist at the time, whose normal routine was to get up early every morning, “sit zazen, smoke a joint, do half an hour of yoga, then read the Mathnawi of Rumi, the long mystical poem of that great Persian Sufi of the thirteenth century.”

Moore’s life changed when he converted to Sufism in 1970, riding a wave of spiritual self transformation that affected other writers and poets in the Bay area, most notably Eugene Rose, an atheist and Marxist whose devotion to Nietzcshe nearly drove him mad before he read the writings of the Desert Fathers. Rose, who would go on to become an Orthodox priest and co-founder of Holy Trinity monastery near Redding, California, is now considered by many to be a future saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. As for Moore, his spiritual transformation inspired him to travel to Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria. He returned to California where he would publish “The Desert is the Only Way Out.”

In many ways, Philadelphia would prove to be Moore’s desert, although he did not become a Philadelphian until 1990. While living in Philadelphia, Moore published ”The Ramadan Sonnets” (Jusoor/City Lights) and ”The Blind Beekeeper” (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press). San Francisco poet, playwright and novelist Michael McClure has written that Moore’s poems are like Frank O’Hara’s, in that “there are no boundaries or limits to possible subject matter,” and where “imagination runs rampant and it glides.”  

Moore is not a poet of empty things and ideas but aspects of the spiritual as the divine seem to invade every word he writes. He was viewed as legendary in the California of the 1960s, in part because he was able to be “spiritual” without losing his sense of humor. He is the spiritual poet with a comedic wink.  

Moore works with Larry Robin at Philadelphia’s Moonstone Arts Center where he helps coordinate Moonstone’s annual Poetry Ink readings of 100 Poets. In 2011, 2012 and 2014 he was awarded the Nazim Hikmet Prize for Poetry and in 2013 he won an American Book Award.

In this age of ongoing dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, the Virgin Mary is mentioned some thirty-four times in the Koran. The sacred person concept is not lost on Moore, who writes in “Five Short Meditations: on the Virgin Mary:

I saw Mary board a bus at Broad and State
her head covered and her face radiant

small and held within herself
careful and preoccupied

a heaven seeming to be wrapped around her
her cheeks red her lips dry her eyes lowered

interior moisture her preferred cloister
the bus passengers sudden ghosts before her

her shoes small and tattered
her hands carrying a book

If any had spoken to her she might have become lost

If she had spoken to anyone
they might have become saved

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