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Lynne Viti, faculty emerita at Wellesley College, is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Baltimore Girls (2017) and The Glamorganshire Bible (2018) both from Finishing Line Press, and two microchapbooks, Punting (2017) and Hollyhocks (forthcoming, 2019), both from Origami Poems Project. Her work has appeared most recently in The Baltimore Sun, Gargoyles (forthcoming 2019), Constellations, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review and The Little Patuxent Review. She blogs at stillinschool.wordpress.com. Find her on Twitter @LynneViti.

At the Foghorn Folk Club, 1964

Lynne Viti

Tall awkward boy, a transplant from Oregon,

always carried a beat-up paperback copy

of On the Road, strap-hanging on the # 3 bus

asks me, You like poetry? I nod,

he tells me, go hear this cat read his stuff.

Black dude, he’s real, man. Get there

before the show, before the folksingers,

down on West 22nd Street, you dig?

I want to roll my eyes at this farm kid from the west

who thinks he’s cool but I take note:

The Foghorn—I check the listings in the Baltimore Sun,

below the flicks, above the Gayety Burlesque ad.

I tell my mother I’m going to a poetry reading,

as if in a college lecture hall, on a schoolnight.

I’m the youngest there. People sit around

Drinking beer or spiked cider—

A young man, bespectacled, dressed in brown corduroys,

crewneck sweater, steps onto the stage,

cheers and foot stomping greet him—he’s here to be heard

by the faithful. He recites his poems, declaims them.

I’ve never heard a poet, not in real life—the nuns

have played records of Dylan Thomas, of Eliot

in English class but nothing like this, a real

poet, not a dead white one—standing so near

I could shake his hand—he is mesmerizing,

he looks at us through thick eyeglasses,

he speaks in the vernacular.

I came for his poetry, and when he was done

I went home to make curfew. I didn’t

come for the guitars and banjos,

the mandolins and Woody Guthrie tunes.

I came for Sam Cornish. I came for the poetry.

— Lynne Viti

This poem is dedicated to the memory of the late Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. Photo by Claire McCullough.

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