Jersey Boys in All Four Seasons: New Books by BJ Ward and Joe Weil

287 was the long road to the newspaper plant
   my black-handed father would ride beneath
the weight of a night sky.
   A father who works the night shift
knows that weight, how it accumulates from within
   when his mistakes and debt
begin to press on his children and wife.
   And so went his life --

If the stars spelled out something real,
   they might spell the equation
that my father never mastered --
   the news that just ran through his hands
and what slid there left a black residue
   of the world's doings, pressed knowledge
that read like misaligned tea leaves in his hardening palms,
   and in his life line and heart line and other lines
that would normally speak a fortune,
   the night just accumulated itself --
the little sky he would spread over us
   when the world redelivered him in the morning.

…The Star-Ledger in Jackleg Opera by BJ Ward, Asbury, NJ

To be all by yourself in a diner, to stare into the coffee cup and watch the milk disperse, to hear your own spoon scraping the bottom of the cup…Poetry is nowhere near as beautiful as the sound of that spoon.  That's why I keep writing it - ambition.

…Ars Poetica from Nine Diner Poems in The Great Grandmother Light by Joe Weil, Elizabeth, NJ

The two beautiful new collections by BJ Ward and Joe Weil elevate the commonplace, writers running their hands lovingly along the banisters of our experience here in New Jersey.

   Ward's high school poem The Fury, in which "good boys do bad things just not to be good," pretty much spells it out for those of us who were never quite "sprung from cages on Highway 9" or 18 or 17, the compliant kids who became practical adults.  We all get ushered back into the building by some Cerberus after our brief flings.  To Ward, Shakespeare is a waiter in a lonely diner, waiting for his shift to end; a writer with a chthonic grin (I had to look it up for my own sake so I figured, well…); and the cause of a celebratory dance with a teacher.  There are lots of classrooms, roads, diners, highways and factories in Ward's observations, places where loss is contemplated, where knowledge grabs students, and the mundane threatens to grab us all.  Like Billy Collins, he contemplates having sex with Emily Dickinson, while his wife, in the poem, parries that fantasy with some literal drum-banging by Robert Bly.  Lots of allusions there, all of them rolling around with good humor.  (Who knew Wild Nights - Wild Nights! could be such a call to arms?)

   When Joe Weil was a teenager, he ate four new potatoes with butter and pepper and salt off the blade of his Swiss army knife, and read William Carlos Williams in the early morning hours, alone, in his kitchen in Elizabeth.  He fooled around with the tattered linoleum on the floor (Do kids even know what that is today?) and was perfectly content.  Now, Weil is encouraged, comforted, and energized by the "pleasing sound of a vacuum releasing" as he opens a jar of pickles - the sound, the smell, the quiet, the aloneness temporarily warding off "the next ho hum" "at three in the morning, when everything is merciless" "against the scarred linoleum."  Would Williams demand so much of plums?  In this collection, Weil walks through such a series of devastating losses that he becomes unused to "things that stay," retaining his confidence in the commonplace, the small things that make the big ones less scary.  So much depends on them.

So, look, while everybody else at the beach, around the pool, or in your living room is transfixed by their eye-phones (bad pun,) take this chance to read and re-read some of these poems in which you will find yourself, your dad, your wife, a waitress, or some other real people.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen