Brooklyn poets remember

“She wrote poetry, she published, she was read, and then she died.” 

Former Brooklyn poet laureate D. Nurkse spoke those words as an introduction to the poet Enid Dame. Nurkse was one of seven poets who read in the Othmer library last month to a packed room. Each poet selected poems from the Center for Brooklyn History’s library and archives collections and read them in conversation with their own poetry and reflections. Nurkse, in his words on Dame, was reflecting a theme that recurred through the event: how people are remembered and forgotten and how language can be used to resurrect and memorialize. The historical poets read included major names like Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore, on whom CBH holds some materials, but most were less well-known poets, who are, as a group, well-represented in our collections. These included professional poets like Enid Dame, Stanley Nelson, and Mikhail Naimy. Even deeper dives were the selections from Brooklyn teen poets and the incarcerated poets writing in the Tenacious zine. Between each poet, I read a short introduction to the CBH materials from which the poets selected their pieces. Below are versions of those introductions, extensively revised and in some cases expanded with descriptions of the reading. 

Poet Dina Abdulhadi led the night with a poem from Lebanese-American poet Mikhail Naimy (1889—1998). The poem, “Comrade!” (Originally “Ahki”, sometimes translated as “my Brother”), was written near the end of the first World War, during which thousands of Lebanese died of famine. “Comrade!” speaks with deep anguish about wounded and scarred Arab soldiers returning to a homeland that is as filled with the dead as the battlefields they left. Naimy would later read “Comrade!” to a gathering of Arab immigrants in Brooklyn at the insistence of poet Nasib Arida.¹ Abdulhadi spoke of the way that some people are forced to use “elevated language” to make their suffering valid in the eyes of others and of how poetry is often used in this way. She paired “Comrade!” with her poem “How We Talk About Safety, April 2018”, connecting the struggle of Lebanese famine to a Black teen fatally shot in 2018 and to the struggles of Palestinians over the decades and today.

“Comrade!” was reprinted in 1959 in The Caravan, a Brooklyn-based paper devoted to the Arab-American community which covered local, national, and international affairs. The editor’s note explains the World War I context but not the reason they chose to reprint it so many years and wars later. It could have been as a bulwark against forgetting the famine, or a response to an event that readers in 1959 would have understood implicitly. Rather than presenting a history of the war, the editors chose a poem for greatest impact.

CBH holds The Caravan in our Local Newspapers on Microfilm collection, which consists of eighty nine neighborhood and Brooklyn-wide newspapers covering the years 1835 to 1999. The Caravan ran from 1953 to 1961. According to the finding aid:

“The Caravan provides news coverage of business, politics, education, community events, clubs and organizations, arts, culture, sports, religion, and entertainment. Within the Arab-American community, particular attention is paid to the Syrian and Lebanese populations. Birth announcements, wedding announcements, and obituaries all appear regularly. A section called "Servicemen" news also regularly appears. Poetry, in Arabic and translated into English, regularly appears. A section called "Oriental Dishes" is also regularly published and features recipes of Middle Eastern cuisine. A column about dating and courtship in the Arab-American community entitled "Of Girls and Boys" also regularly appears. Advertisements and photographs appear throughout.”

The Caravan was the creation of George S. Debs, who was also founder of its publisher, the Arab American Business Service Bureau at 172-174 Hoyt Street in Boerum Hill. Born in Egypt, he graduated from the American University in Beirut, Lebanon and was a founder of the Syrian American Democratic Alliance.

George Debs’ death in 1961 made national news and led to the closure of The Caravan, despite efforts of his son Bill and the community to save the paper. From my initial research, I could not find much more information about George or his newspaper. The story of the Brooklyn Syrian and Lebanese community, and of The Caravan is one of many local histories that has still not been told in a substantial way. There are library and archival materials available at CBH that will help a future researcher tell that story.

Morgan Boyle selected the poet Marianne Moore, a poet of such stature that I was loath to introduce her to a room of history and poetry lovers. Marianne Moore is one of America’s most renowned poets and Brooklyn lays partial claim to her. She was born in Missouri in 1887 and attended Bryn Mawr college in Pennsylvania. In 1918 Moore and her mother moved to New York, where she published her first books. They moved to 260 Cumberland Street in Fort Greene in 1929, where Moore would live for thirty-six years before returning to Manhattan. "Brooklyn,” she said, “has given me pleasure, has helped educate me; has afforded me, in fact, the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive”.² In 1951, during her time in Brooklyn, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems won her the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award. Boyle’s two selected poems, “Critics and Connoisseurs” and “No Swan So Fine” both appear in that collection. Morgan Boyle and Marianne Moore have at least one thing in common: Boyle is a librarian at the New York Public Library, where Marianne Moore worked as a clerk in the 1920s. The largest repository of Marianne Moore’s papers is held at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, a collection founded as a private library and now a subsidiary of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Though CBH has no major collection of Moore materials, we hold some early editions of her books in our library, and records of her dealings in Brooklyn throughout our archives. Across multiple collections, we have a small number of photographs, letters, and ephemera relating especially to her life here.

 

Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro chose to read a poem from the anthology, This Beautiful Name is mine, an anthology whose origins connected to two other of the reading poets.

This Beautiful Name is mine is the published result of Brooklyn Public Library's 1997 workshops, Writing with Rhythm. The Writing with Rhythm workshops were funded by the office of the Brooklyn Borough President at the time, Howard Golden, who also created the position of Brooklyn poet laureate in 1979.³ Brooklyn Public Library has a long history of hosting poetry events; for example, we have photographs in our collection from 1974 showing a BPL event at which poet Saundra (or “S. Pearl”) Sharp reads to children in front of the Bookmobile. In 2001, another of the nights’ readers, Andrew Colarusso, participated in BPL’s My Brooklyn competition, to which he submitted a winning poem. I think his childhood poem might be in the unprocessed BPL institutional archive, but I was unfortunately unable to find it for the reading.

The Writing with Rhythm workshops occurred at eight different library branches. The culmination of the workshops was a reading at the Cortelyou library. The Brooklyn Poet Laureate at the time, D. Nurkse, read alongside six teenagers and three other professional poets.

Camacho-Tenreiro also read from the zine Tenacious: Art & Writings by Women in Prison. As the finding aid says, “the Tenacious project is spearheaded by prison abolitionist, prolific writer, speaker, and activist, Victoria Law”, and the box set was produced by the local arts nonprofit Booklyn. It includes poetry from poets across the United States. Natiba Guy Clement, CBH’s Assistant Director, spearheaded the acquisition of this box set because of its Brooklyn origins, as well as its research value for studying the personal experiences of people impacted by mass incarceration. The zine is full of poetry; another instance of elevated language being used, as Abdulhadi said, to demand recognition of people’s humanity.

Andrew Colarusso, previously mentioned as a childhood winner of a BPL poetry contest, chose his poem from the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church records. The Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church (LAPC) was originally organized as the Park Presbyterian Church in the eleventh ward of Brooklyn in 1857, in what is now known as the Fort Greene neighborhood. In 1862, the congregation completed their church building at Lafayette Avenue and South Oxford Street where it remains to this day. Just last year, they completed major restorations on the church. I had the chance to take a tour and see the 1890s stained glass Tiffany window and the 1975 Mighty Cloud of Witnesses mural.

The LAPC materials at CBH range from 1816 to 2011 and are held in forty-five boxes. According to the finding aid:

“These records include church bulletins, publications, scrapbooks, membership and vital records, financial records, annual reports, building and property records, clippings, and photographs. The files also document specific aspects of the church, including its pastors; the Session; its choir, organ, and music program; Elders and administrators; missionary work (in Korea, Kentucky, and locally in Brooklyn); its Christian education program; various church groups; and LAPC members' roles in World War I and World War II.”

The LAPC collection is full of poetry. Multiple pastors wrote poetry, ranging from the religious to the deeply personal. I love this collection for how thoroughly it documents the tradition of poetry in Brooklyn through multiple generations of pastors. Colarusso, in an act of poetic perverseness, chose to read a sermon, rather than a poem from the collection. 

While working on an upcoming poetry research guide, I discovered many books of poetry in our collection from authors outside Brooklyn, many from further east on Long Island. Materials from Long Island, outside of Brooklyn, are for the most part out of our collecting scope. However, at the Center for Brooklyn History we are the inheritors of the collections of the Brooklyn Historical Society, which was founded and known for most of its life as the Long Island Historical Society. For much of Brooklyn’s existence until its consolidation as a borough with the City of New York in 1898, it was deeply culturally and politically associated with greater Long Island. After 1898, our identity grew so much closer with the other boroughs of the city, and so much further from Long Island, that people are often surprised when they ask me “when did Brooklyn stop being a part of Long Island?” and I answer “It still is”.

Jess Greenbaum represented Brooklyn’s split identity between the nineteenth century and Long Island and the twentieth century and New York City by reading the work of William Cullen Bryant, the great poet, journalist, and newspaper editor. Bryant was born in Massachusetts in 1794, lived and worked for many years in Manhattan, and moved to Roslyn Harbor, Long Island, in 1843, where he lived until his death in 1878. He is a significant poet of early American literature and was massively popular in his time. CBH has around forty books by or about Bryant, including many early editions from the 19th century. A search in our digitized Brooklyn Daily Eagle shows frequent reporting on Bryant and his activities in the area.

Jason Koo chose an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s evergreen poem, Leaves of Grass. As with Marianne Moore, I did not particularly want to introduce Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is one of the most influential poets of American literature, and one of Brooklyn’s favorite sons. He was born in Huntington, Long Island, in 1819 and moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was eleven. He worked at major Brooklyn institutions, including as a young boy at the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library—a forerunner to the Brooklyn Museum—and was later an editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.

The Library of Congress is the major archival repository of Whitman papers. As with Marianne Moore, CBH has no significant collection of Whitman materials. We have many Whitman books, including early editions like an 1856 copy of Leaves of Grass with a photograph of Whitman. I am sorry to say that the signature is apparently a forgery, though there is a second signature in the book that might be a forgery but also...might not be. A posthumous book that stands out to me is The gathering of the forces : editorials, essays, literary and dramatic reviews and other material written by Walt Whitman as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846 and 1847, which was co-edited by John Black. Black was a Brooklyn-raised Scottish-American poet, Eagle editor, WWI veteran, Whitman scholar, and the founder of the Joyce Kilmer post of the American Legion. There is plenty about Black in The Eagle, but no major biography that I could find.

Most of CBH’s archival materials relating to Whitman tell the story of his influence on Brooklyn via the many people and organizations that have paid him tribute over the decades. We also have a solid collection of Whitman studies materials. Of note is the only known copy of the 1953 NYU dissertation, Walt Whitman's attitude toward the Negro, by Brooklynite Osceola L. Fletcher.

Enid Dame (1963–2003) may be less known than Whitman or Moore, but she is certainly known. The book Broken land : poems of Brooklyn is dedicated to her, and features several of her poems, including the one read by D. Nurkse. She was a feminist Jewish writer, editor, and teacher, and was one of several poets considered for Poet Laureate of Brooklyn in 1995 after Norman Rosten’s death. That honor instead went to D. Nurkse. Aside from her anthologized works, CBH does not hold her materials, but the broader Brooklyn Public Library catalog has two of her books. Despite this omission in our collection, her influence on the Brooklyn literary community is demonstrated in the dedication of Broken land, the “first [book] to focus exclusively on verse that celebrates Brooklyn”. D. Nurkse furthered this influence by reading her work to a new generation of poetry lovers in the Othmer.

Nurkse also read the work of Brooklyn native Stanley Nelson, born 1933. He is a prolific writer, received the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award, and authored 19 volumes of poetry. His poetry often pays homage to Brooklyn while also telling his personal stories. CBH has many of Nelson’s books in our collection.

Miller Oberman was slated to read last at the event, but was unfortunately unable to make it. He chose a poem from the Rioghan Kirchner civil rights in Brooklyn collection. Rioghan Kirchner was a white, British member of Brooklyn Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the local chapter of the national civil rights organization that was founded in Chicago in 1942. From the finding aid:

“The Brooklyn chapter was founded in 1960 by Dr. Robert Palmer, Marjorie Leeds, and a group of other local community activists specifically to address living conditions in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant: poor quality housing, inadequate garbage collection, inferior schools, and high unemployment. From 1960-1964, members of Brooklyn CORE led local demonstrations to desegregate housing, integrate public schools, create jobs, and improve sanitation services in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The organization was one of the most dynamic civil rights groups in New York City at the time.”

One of the series in the collection is a full facsimile run of Black News, published by The East. Tayo Giwa and Cynthia Gordy Giwa recently brought The East back into focus with their 2022 documentary, The Sun Rises in The East. The East was a community education and arts organization in Brooklyn, focused on black nationalism. From the finding aid:

“Black News was a semi-monthly newsletter produced in Bedford-Stuyvesant from 1969 to 1984. The photocopied publication was created and distributed entirely by volunteers. According to its first issue, it was "a community publication" and "it was formed in order to encourage a new awareness and involvement among our people." With articles on police brutality, racist government policies, corrupt politicians, health and medicine, and the "P.O.W. Forum"—a series on Black people in prisons—as well as poetry and artwork, Black News worked to fulfill its mission to "agitate, educate, [and] organize."

Black News was also full of poetry. One way to navigate its poetry is via a card catalog written by Rioghan Kirchner. In addition to donating facsimiles of Black News, Kirchner was a beloved volunteer at the local history room at the Central Library, and she extensively indexed people and topics in Black News, including individual poems. Before scanning and digital searches existed, card catalogs were the best way to navigate newspaper collections. Black News is not available digitally; Kirchner’s labor was an act of love that promotes the continued memory of The East and Black News.

If this varied and diverse selection of historical Brooklyn poetry is of interest, please stay tuned for an upcoming poetry research guide that will cover these poets and more.

 

¹ Boullata, Issa J. “Mikhail Naimy: Poet of Meditative Vision.” Journal of Arabic Literature 24, no. 2 (1993): 173–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4183302.

² Moore, Marianne. 1961. A Marianne Moore Reader. Viking.

³ Rohde, David. 1997. “Poet Putting Words into Action.” The New York Times, April 20, 1997, New York. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/20/nyregion/poet-putting-words-into-action.html.