Rooftop Poetry Club - Jerome Joseph Gentes

Jerome Joseph Gentes

Bio:
Jerome Joseph Gentes is an American Indian from the Gros Ventre and Lakota tribes who was born and raised in Northern California. He received his undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied writing with Maxine Hong Kingston and Peter Dale Scott and taught playwriting. In 1992 he moved to New York City to attend the Graduate Program in Writing at Columbia University, where he studied literary forms and modes from American Indian oral traditions to avant-garde screenwriting. He also launched and curated the reading series “Virtuous Reality” and received his M.F.A. in 1995 with a concentration in Nonfiction. Since then he has written for publications including The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Sightings, Out, Bandicoot, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Byzantium, and Fourteen Hills. He has participated in the “Moments of the Muse” and Dixon Place reading series in New York City, and in 1999 received a Fiction Residency from the Vermont Studio Center. Between writing projects he assists the Lockport City Ballet with grantwriting. He is currently working on his first book, reviews nonfiction for Publishers Weekly, and is a Teaching Artist with the Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Poems:

Poem
Based on the words in a pair of sentences from
“To My Dear Children” by Anne Bradstreet, c. 1612-1672

Take vanity. Me, a free
And carnal youth of fourteen,
Set in my affliction, my sickness,
I had my supplication: To be more,
as that I hold up to. My follies?
From and of the heart. Of who?
Or which? With most I grew
and communed, and from about fifteen,
sitting on the made bed, high, loose,
I often found God: long, but fit of heart.

Sonnet
Written in Response to the Ageless Epicurean Question:

My favorite food? Good Christ! What to select
from the abundant meals I’ve had to date!
Late summer’s ripe tomatoes, served on a plate
with salt and olive oil? Nothing’s more delect-
able than that. Perhaps white truffles are,
shaved over hot linguine, poached duck egg
to garnish. Roasted springtime lamb—the leg,
of course. Mother-of-pearl spoonsful of caviar
on New Year’s Eve. Maybe fresh Fourme d’Ambert
with currants. Any shellfish. Better yet,
a briny oyster with sauce mignonette,
small Apalachilcolas being preferred.
I love them all yet just as often, seized
for time and money, dine at Mickey Ds.

Poem
Based On a Recipe From The Gentleman’s Companion, Vol. II

Being an Exotic Drinking Book; or
Around the World with Jigger, Flask and Beaker*:
THE SAIGON SPECIAL, another odd drink
From the capital of French Indochine
And dating from the distant year nineteen-
Twenty-five, when the good old Resolute
Stopped there. Friends undertook to fly their plane—
A celery crate with an Evinrude
And an electric fan—upriver to
The marvelous ruins at Angkor Wat
As near as might be sane. Then motor back
Through Pnom Penh—imagine the place, Pnom Penh—
To Bangkok and meet ship again at Pak
Nam. The plane sputtered, died and finally came
To rest on the River Saigon, no chance Of walking home.
We find the drink much
Like a Jerusalem-Between-the-Sheets
With a bit of egg white, yet slightly sweet.