Langhorne Peace Center hosts poetry reading to celebrate release of Pennsylvania poetry anthology

Bucks County breeds fine poets.

At the Langhorne Peace Center on June 7, two Bucks County poets were among the many who celebrated the release of “Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania,” published this May by the Pennsylvania State University Press. The poets, who were all published in the anthology, shared stories of Pennsylvania during the reading of their poetry. 

One of the poets in the anthology, Joseph Chelius, lives in Fairless Hills. Chelius learned his love for poetry on a trip with his kids to the Levittown Library. There, he’d browse the poetry section and find poets from the Bucks County area. He then discovered the Bucks County Poet Laureate Contest, and began to apply to it. Soon enough, he became the 2000 Bucks County Poet Laureate.

“I thought, wow, what a discovery. That opened me up to this whole network of poets in the Bucks County area,” Chelius said. “I've made so many poetry friends just in this area.”

Before he would drive to his job as an editorial director in the healthcare communications industry, he’d rise early in the morning to write short fiction and poetry. 

At the event, he read his poem “Halfball,” which has a Philadelphian backstory. For the first twelve years of his life, he lived in Southwest Philadelphia, where the pimple ball was an essential tool for games like stick ball, wire ball, and box ball. When the ball would get torn, kids would cut it in half and call it a half ball. A broomstick functioned as a bat.

“The games were very inventive, but they were all sort of confined to that neighborhood that we lived in–the narrow streets and not having really a lot of places to go,” Chelius said. “You sort of train yourself to be attentive to the things around you, to ordinary life and places you live.

You don't have to go far to really come up with ideas for things.”

Another poet from Bucks County featured in the anthology was Southampton’s Lynn Levin. Levin teaches English and creative writing at Drexel University and has passions for poetry and short-story writing, earning the title of 1999 Bucks County Poet Laureate.

“Bucks County has an extraordinarily rich poetry community,” Levin said, mentioning the Bucks County Community College (BCCC) Wordsmiths Reading Series and the Arts and Cultural Council of Bucks County, along with the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program. She also paid respect to the late Christopher Bursk, who taught at BCCC where he ran the Poet Laureate program in which he inspired many people. 

“The regional aspect of poetry means a great deal to me,” Levin said. “I also love the greenery of Pennsylvania. I feel the peacefulness of the area, the neighborliness of the area, and that it is so friendly to poets.”

To a crowd clasping onto their anthologies, Levin read her poem “Sleepless Johnston,”–a classic crime ballad poem about Norman Johnston, a man who escaped from a penitentiary in central Pennsylvania in 1999. The “Philadelphia Inquire” showed him on the front page day after day and covered the search for quite a long time, garnering interest from the PA public.

“Because he escaped from jail and was successful for about 18 days, running around through Pennsylvania and hiding and evading the cops, he became kind of an anti-hero,” Levin said. “People would say ‘Oh, I saw him.’ They were like these imaginary sightings, like Elvis sightings.”

Daniel Donaghy, an English professor at Eastern Connecticut State University and originally from Philadelphia, read “What Cement is Made Of”. It is a poem about travelling to work with his brother-in-law, a truck dispatcher for an aggregate plant in Bucks County, which was an experience that has since stuck with him.

“Pennsylvania is the geography of my heart,” Donaghy. “More specifically, the geography of my heart would be 19125, which is in Philadelphia.”

Another Philadelphia native, Leonard Kress, read his poem “Bridesburg”. He grew up in Bridesburg, a Philadelphia neighborhood, which he felt had a unique quality because I-95 ran right through it, cutting part of it off from the rest of the city. 

“There's a little bit of an old-world quality to it. At least, it never lost that when I was writing this poem,” Kress said.

Another poet and lifelong Philadelphian, Vernita Hall, writes about the city quite a bit. She is the author of “Where William Walked: Poems about Philadelphia and its People of Color, and the Hitchhiking Robot Learns about Philadelphians”, another book of poems. She also serves on the Poetry Review board for “Philadelphia Stories”. The poem she read is titled, “Winter Melon Soup,” which is about attending her Chinese American best friend’s mother’s funeral where she learned a lot about her life and heritage.  

Another poet, J.C. Todd was introduced to Pennsylvania later on, when she attended Duquesne University of Pittsburgh in the 1960’s. She has lived in Philadelphia for over thirty years, and the poem she read takes place in the city, titled “At the Polish-American Festival, Penn’s Landing”.  In the poem, she describes her experience about seeing a boat nearly tipping on the Delaware River while remembering the recent election, at the time, of Lech Walesa as president of Poland. 

“This poem is about tipping points,” Todd said.

Bucks County is in the heart of many local poets, and it materializes in their writing.