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Journal of New Jersey Poets – 2006

2006

Annual

Christopher Mote

As Journal of New Jersey Poets quietly celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, something curious remains about the manner in which poets write about the Garden State. More than a locale but less than a state of mind, New Jersey is evinced in its most dignified sense: fond and often dryly ironical memories of family gatherings, wooded communities, and The Shore, The Shore, The Shore.

As Journal of New Jersey Poets quietly celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, something curious remains about the manner in which poets write about the Garden State. More than a locale but less than a state of mind, New Jersey is evinced in its most dignified sense: fond and often dryly ironical memories of family gatherings, wooded communities, and The Shore, The Shore, The Shore. (And, okay, a small dose of Coney Island.) The language is concrete, not something one gets lost in, but even a simple line, such as, “We aren’t a town and we like it this way,” can feel like a ground-level philosophy exercise. While the nostalgia is surely overdone, it does at least resist a reactionary air. Poets like Gilda Kreuter know too well that immigrants are the lifeblood of the old neighborhoods, and her poem, “Yesterdays Become Todays,” shows a continuity from past to present. Even in the nature pieces, there are surprises. Tina Kelley longs to hear the marbled murrelet in the woods of a national park, but the only birds are the familiar thrushes “like a grandmother’s hairnet dotted with beads, / all just barely touching over the forest, just within hello contact, / the way my sleeping foot brushes against my lover’s for reassurance, / a sparse, wide communion in acres of trees older than the printed word.” Journal of NJ Poets is similar: the reader searches hard for something new and unfamiliar, but is nevertheless reminded of the charm of the commonplace along the way.

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