New Haven Independent

The Vietnam vet wowed an audience of some 20 riders — all wearing helmets — who arrived at the Vietnam Memorial on New Haven’s first-ever Poetry on Wheels bicycle tour Sunday afternoon. Garry reached the riders with a heart-breaking lyric based on his experience in a graves registration unit.

It was the third of six stops for poetry lovers in a ten-mile loop organized by Elm City Cycling. The ride was one of several free bicycle tours that have become a popular feature of the city’s annual Arts & Ideas Festival.

The idea was for poets to greet the arriving riders (such as the lyrically dressed Brian Tang and Paul Hammer) at each station with sweet stanzas, pantoums, and refreshing refrains.

At the first stop, Atticus Bookstore, Bob Franco proved that there might not be much money in poetry, but at least there were baguettes.

Franco — he’s a sailor, so his favorite verse is John Masefield’s “Seafarer” — and the other riders went into the Chabasso-owned bakery and cafe’ and picked a poem off the shelf to read.

Lisa Sundwall, who was riding with her brother and dad, selected a collection of Hafiz, a Sufi poet, because her yoga instructor had recited it to her the previous week.

“I was really looking for my favorite, Edgar Allan Poe,” she said, “but there was Hafiz, right on the shelf, and it’s so beautiful:” She read a poem called “I Have Learned So Much,” which begins:

I have learned so much from God I can no longer
Call myself a Christian, Jew, man or woman

The truth has shared so much of itself with me
That I can no longer call myself

A man, woman, angel, or even pure soul

When an Atticus manager gave Franco, the Sundwalls, and every rider a loaf of the staff of life, they were fortified to pedal up to the little park on Chapel and Day to hear Elsie Cofield.

There they were greeted by the AIDS treatment pioneer (pictured with tour organizers Bill Kurtz and Lisa Anamasi). She read an untitled work about an 11-year-old patient who died of the disease in 1991. “Too many struggles, too much strife,” it begins, “Too many troubles for one little life.”

Cofield is putting together a collection of her work, much of it a chronicle of her community work with her late husband, Rev. Curtis Cofield.

Which brought the tour to Allan Garry. After he returned home from Vietnam, he began a career as a poet, with many publications, and readings (although none before to a captive audience of cyclists).

In 1981 that career all came to a halt. “It was PTSD,” he said “and I wasn’t even aware of it.” Garry said he’d lost the ability to access the sources of his writing. He said he couldn’t tolerate the expectation of his audience.

Then he sought help. The Veterans Administration staff in West Haven, where he’s been an outpatient for 13 years, saved his life, he said.

Garry read one poem called “Gathering Shells” about being among those who first encounter the dead of battle. It concludes this way:

… We took you in at the found and lost of war,
Picked your pockets for the treasure of your names,
Scavenged for the proof of you;
Craving exquisite recollection, we settled for identity
And, not knowing what to mourn
We mourned not knowing.
We mourned ourselves.

What percentage of the poems ever written deal with death? The evidence of the first Poetry on Wheels tour was: quite a few. Or perhaps it was just the choice of venues.

The next station was Grove Street Cemetery, where fewer than four writers read on the living side of the fence.

Other readers included (left to right) Lisa Siedlarz, Rafael Kosek, and Kateri Kosek, and the tour concluded with stops at East Rock and Edgerton Parks,

Oh, and what do poets call rain?

Bill Kurtz posed the question as the heavens opened yet again. Answer: Liquid sunshine.

Kurtz said the idea for Poetry on Wheels came from the festival’s Favorite Poem Project. For other bike tours and complete schedule info, click here.