New Haven Independent

They weren’t disappointed. Poetry fans sat on tires and folding chairs and even the oil-stained floor in rapt attention as local poet Binnie Klein recited several of her works. The poet stood in front of barrels of used engine oil and a grey sedan up on a lift for repair.

Aquila Motors was one of several unexpected venues for verse on Wednesday night, part of a “poetry crawl” organized by two Westville-based organizations.

Click on the play arrow in the video at the top of the story to sample some of the stanzas.

Starting at 7 p.m. with a wine tasting at Westville Wines, the crawl was a peripatetic poetry revue. Participants traveled as a group, stopping at six local businesses to hear 20-minute readings by several local poets, including Binnie Klein (pictured).

The event was organized jointly by the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) and the New Haven Review, two groups with overlapping missions. For WVRA, an organization dedicated to economic and cultural development in Westville, the event served to introduce potential customers to local businesses and to showcase local poets. For the New Haven Review, a volunteer-run literary journal, the crawl was a way to add poetry to Westville’s burgeoning visual art and music scene.

The poets started crawling at Westville Wines, the liquor store that opened last summer on Whalley Avenue. Bookended by brief remarks from the New Haven Review’s Bennett Lovett-Graff and WVRA’s Chris Heitmann (pictured, left and right respectively), Alice-Anne Harwood kicked off the tour with a number of poems based on stories from her grandmother.

From there, the tour moved two doors up Whalley, to Lyric Hall, an antique store and restoration business run by John Cavaliere, who was celebrating his 44th birthday on Wednesday. Southern Connecticut University senior Brianna Marron gave her first-ever poetry reading in the dimly lit front room, crowded with old paintings and ornate antique furniture.

The next stop was the Jennifer Jane Gallery, a block away, on West Rock Avenue. Poet and professor Dana Sonnenschein was the only reader of the night who responded directly to her unusual performance space. Standing in front of Jennifer Jane’s photographs Sonnenschein read several poems about the surrealist photographer Man Ray.

The most popular venue was the fourth stop, Aquila Motors, which was selected for the tour by WVRA director Heitmann. All of the poets wanted to be the one to read there, he said, but Binnie Klein was the first one to call dibs during the scheduling process.

In addition to poems, Klein read from her forthcoming book, Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind, about her entrance into the world of boxing at middle age.

Picking up her purse from the concrete floor after her reading, Klein expressed her pleasure at being able to read poetry in a car mechanic. “This was so awesome!” she gushed. The poet noted that the garage had a “skudgy down-to-earth-ness. Which is very cool.”

Tom Aquila, who inherited the garage from his father, was also pleased with the event, as was his wife, Maurna Aquila (both at left in photo).

“It was nice,” Maurna said. “It gave us an opportunity to be part of the artistic side.”

Tom acknowledged that he had not initially thought of his garage as an appropriate venue for poems. “When I first heard it, I did a double-take,” he said.

But the mechanic quickly came around as he thought about the idea. Tom said he saw it as an opportunity to meet people. “We’re trying to be a part of the community,” he said.

In preparation for the reading, the Aquilas swept the garage and put out a plastic platter of crudite on one of the garage’s work tables.

“I was impressed,” Tom said of Klein’s reading. “Her poems were good. Her stories were good.”

“I was very impressed,” Maurna agreed.

However, the Aquilas said they were not yet ready to convert their garage into a late-night poetry cafe.

After Aquila Motors, the tour traveled to Authentics Beauty Salon, where audience members sat in hair-drying chairs while Bennett Lovett-Graff read the poems of Charlotte Courier, a Guilford poet who was not able to make it on Wednesday.

The final stop on the poetry crawl was the Westville Frame Shop, where local middle school teacher Dennis Wilson read several recent poems. One was so fresh that it included up-to-the-minute stanzas mentioning Jennifer Jane and Aquila Motors. Wearing his Boston Red Sox sweatshirt, Wilson also read a poem honoring the recent steal of home plate by fleet-footed BoSox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury.

“I thought it went great,” said WVRA Director Chris Heitmann, at the end of the night. “I think it’s great exposure… All of these businesses are representative of the village and what a village is.” Heitmann said that he hopes to organize another poetry crawl in the future, featuring other Westville businesses.

Gabriel Desilva, WVRA’s president and the owner of the Westville Frame Shop, was happy to see people that he didn’t recognize on the crawl. “That’s exactly what we want,” he said. “New faces.”

“Hopefully we’re creating little ambassadors for Westville village,” Heitmann said.

Lovett-Graff, also excited about the success of the evening, was eying the next horizon. “I would love to do poetry crawls in different neighborhoods,” he said. “Westville’s easy.”

Lovett-Graff said that there are many, non-overlapping circles of literary activity in New Haven that he would like to see linked up. “What I’d like to do is bring these different groups together,” he said.

His sentiments nearly echoed those of local poet Baub Bidon, who recently lamented the segregation of New Haven’s spoken-word poetry scene.