Poet of Witness: Rick Kearns

Approachable Musician & Poet is Easy to Find on a Friday Night

This is a story that needs to begin in the kitchen. Not just any kitchen, but one that’s as warm and comfortable as a favorite sweater or jacket. Not one that’s part of a fancy Harrisburg restaurant either. The kitchen you need to visualize is more inviting –and inspiring – than that, and it happens to be in the home of Rick Kearns, a writer whose first love was music, and a musician whose first calling was to serve as a beacon for a regular Friday-night gathering of some of the most talented and eclectic bohemians you’ll find in Central PA.

Yes, in The Kitchen. Inside a cozy townhouse on 5th Street. It’s where wine and words and Flamenco vibes have been flowing for over 30 years, and the necessary stepping off point for any story about one of the most notable n of Harrisburg’s famous The Paper Sword poetry group, and the capitol city’s longest-serving Poet Laureate. But stepping off points can also require a step (or two) back.

MANY INFLUENCES, ONE MUSE

Though a successful, widely published poet, Kearns first motivation was to be a musician, and hence was heavily influenced by his grandfathers, one American, the other Puerto Rican.

“My Grandpa Kearns and my Abuelo Morales were remarkable guys, who were very different in certain ways,” he recalls fondly, “but one thing they both had in common was music. They were both musicians. And, when we’d go down to Puerto Rico, especially during Christmas time, there is a tradition called Parranda, which involves groups of people coming together to play music in front of a friend’s house. And Puerto Rican Christmas music, right, is with guitars and bongos, and all little kinds of hand percussion and stuff – and singing. So, I grew up seeing my grandfather and my uncles playing music.”

For Kearns, a love of music would soon co-mingle with a sprouting love for poetry. “As I started reading, I became influenced by a number of writers,” he explains. “I’d say it was, maybe, by the time I was in the 6th or 7th grade I started noticing poetry. And it just (snaps his fingers) hit me. I said, ‘I like this.’”

Kearns other literary influences would come from James Joyce (“the first writer that set me ablaze,” he maintains); Beat writers like Allen Ginsburg, Michael McClure, and Diane di Prima; African-America authors like Ralph Ellison (“‘Invisible Man’ just knocked me out!”); and also Puerto Rican poets who were writing in English, including Martín Espada, Sandra Maria Esteves, and Magdalena Gómez. But it was his exposure to the culture of the radical 60’s that truly ignited his own storytelling style. “I was beginning to appreciate some of the music coming out of the 60’s, and I already knew some things about the Black Panthers, and I was beginning to hear about radical Puerto Rican organizations, including the Young Lords, who were similar to the Black Panthers. And that was inspiring me and getting me more and more curious.” That curiosity would lead to studying early 20thcentrury radical Spanish writers like Miguel Hernández and Federico García-Lorca, both of whom had to deal with the rise of their country’s brutal authoritarian regime. Garcia-Lorca was captured by the military and executed; Hernández died in prison.

“That there were poets and writers who were ending up either in jail or dead because of what they were doing, or what they were saying. I came to understand that what I was doing, even in my small way, had a larger meaning. And that’s part of what’s propelled me all along, was that even though I’ve written poems about …for instance, a tree? You know what I mean? I’ve written love poems, I’ve written goofy poems, but on a regular basis I’m writing about people and situations that are not in the mainstream.”

When you ask about Kearns’ love poems, his wife’s name leaps off the tip of his tongue without hesitation, saying “Ziza’s certainly my muse. And I think my love for her or our love for each other has fueled maybe everything, you know, about me. And certainly she has been an influence on me, as a person as well as a writer.” Married since 1989, one of his favorite “Ziza” poems (below) was written during their courtship days in 1987.

If you ask about Kearns’ “out of the mainstream” poetry, he proudly points out that his very first book, “A Street of Knives,” published in 1993, featured poems largely focusing on people outside the mainstream. “About the homeless in Harrisburg, specifically,” he asserts.

Kearns continues, “Those were the kinds of stories, along with stories about Puerto Ricans and Latinos, up here and on the island, and people of color, and working people, working class folks … they have been the subjects of many of my poems, because I feel so strongly about those stories, about those situations. For many of us in this category of ‘poetry of witness,’ we’ve all been in that situation where we thought ‘well, if I don’t do it, who’s gonna do it.’ That’s another aspect of it.” through the door covered in light, call me safado, descarado my smile, is a mirror.

I love you.

MANY MEANINGS OF ‘NATIVE’

The word “native” can have varying degrees of meaning, especially for Kearns. A native of Harrisburg, Kearns attended local Catholic schools and is a graduate of Bishop McDevitt High School. His mother, a native of Puerto Rico and professor of Spanish and Spanish literature, and his father, a prominent attorney and big fan of reading and history, instilled both a love of literature and inquisitiveness about heritage in Kearns at an early age. Not only would he eventually enter the academic arena himself, currently serving as an Adjunct Professor of English at HACC, where he is also Faculty Advisor to the student literary arts magazine, The Copper Quill, and a facilitator for the Wildwood Writer’s Festival, but his long-time romance with journalism would lead him to investigate the Taino culture of his mother’s homeland.

“On my Puerto Rican grandfather’s side of the family, we have indigenous heritage,” he says, “and that was also something I was interested in, and I wrote about as a journalist.” Citing a recent scientific study that shows that well over 60 percent of all Puerto Ricans had indigenous mitochondrial DNA –contradicting the normal historical narrative – Kearns details how he “started learning and becoming connected to people state-side, mostly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who were interested in Taino heritage.”

Kearns journalistic background blended well with his “poetry of witness” style of storytelling, and one of his most scathing pieces was a poem published by Indian Country Today Media Network, for whom he had been serving as a correspondent – a piece, which satirically attacked the misguided notion of “native” in the megaflop 2013 movie, “The Lone Ranger,” starring Johnny Depp.

“I found out that Johnny heard about my poem,” mentions Kearns with amusement.

“And he wasn’t happy.”

The Drone Ranger Explains Manifest Destiny OK, OK

I think I get it now a little kid, a little white kid dressed as The Lone Ranger is drawn to the wax figure of the Ranger’s sidekick Tonto who comes alive to tell the epic tale of a folk hero, a white folk hero in cahoots with an Indian man with mystical powers Yes, an Indian man who mystically becomes a wax figure in a museum. Uh, huh, Heroic, yes, yes, heroic man who grunts one syllable replies dressed as well, dressed as how a multi-millionaire actor playing the role of the crafty Indian thinks it should be played to show dignity, yes, the dignity of assisting a white man in a cotillion masquerade mask fight greed?

Hundreds of millions of dollars of special effects to highlight a white man in a cotillion mask and an LSD version of an Indian fighting greed.

Fighting the greedy railroad scammer who would disenfranchise millions of white settlers who were called by destiny person to person unlimited minutes

Destiny manifest in their brutally effective war machines and centers of learning where they learn how to explain the rights of white people to take Indian land kill Indian people and attempt to erase Indian culture.

Hi yo Silver! Away!

Up in the air up in the sky it’s a bird it’s a plane

No it’s the Drone Ranger rides again off to fight the violent Al Qaeda but somehow historical memory banks not included in this app the ones where women and children are running for their lives at Wounded Knee as women and children are running for their lives in Pakistan, Afghanistan and now maybe Pine Ridge, Watts, Vieques?

The Drone Ranger is there to explain the humane war machine that is his destiny manifest in its ability to kill without brave soldiers dying while maneuvering the killing joystick of advanced technology that helps us create billion dollar images of how we honor our enemies by immortalizing them in wax after we take their land take their oil take their children.

Up, up and away

Hi yo Halliburton!

The Drone Ranger rides again!

Rick Kearns 2013

Harrisburg Poet Laureate Gene Hosey in the 1980’s, and whose membership over two decades included notables like the late poets Jack Veasey and Tom Bickman, iconic poetry host Marty Esworthy (profiled in Harrisburg Magazine, April 2022), and, in the early 90’s, Kearns. The group’s reach can sort of be likened to the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, because it almost feels like on any given day, at any local poetry reading (including, or especially, The Blacklisted Poets readings at HMAC on Thursday evenings), almost any arbitrarily selected poet could be connected, in some remote way, to The Paper Sword.

“The Paper Sword had an influence on Marty, and the other people that Marty influenced, so that most of the reading series, maybe with the exception of Nate [Gadsden]’s, are descendants of The Paper Sword. I would refer to them as spawn of The Sword. (he laughs) And yeah, I think it influenced a lot of poets. And I’m real happy about participating there and helping make things happen there.”

He continues, “And that’s another tangent that I want to mention: Harrisburg has always had a poetry scene. And there is a creative ferment here. It’s in poetry, it’s in theater, it’s in music, the visual arts. And I’m not sure if it’s the river, or being at the crossroads, or whatever, but this town, for all its ups and downs, has always had an arts scene. There have always been writers or artists of some kind coming out of here.”

“TWO DOLLARS & A POEM WILL BUY YOU A SMALL SODA”

At the forefront of the local arts scene, serving as Harrisburg Poet Laureate since 2014, Kearns has not only earned himself entry in the National Database of Latino Poets Laureate but has served as a mentor to countless writers in Central PA, offering up sage, cautionary tidbits like the one quoted above. “There is a point 0001 percent of poets in this country that make enough money to survive because of their work,” he says, recalling how, at an early age he learned that poets and musicians have to do other things to make a living. “That’s just how it is. The vast majority of poets, and I would argue other kinds of writers, too, are also academics.”

Six Degrees Of The Paper Sword

There is a certain reverence that’s still held for The Paper Sword, an influential poetry group co-founded by Tom Gianelli and former

As Poet Laureate, Kearns has been invited to read in various places, both inside and outside Harrisburg, and humbly proclaims “I’ve sort of represented the city in that sense”; but also feels he has some unfinished business, desiring to further coalesce – and elevate – poets and writers in the local Latino community. “I’d love to find a way to make that happen,” he says.

As both a poet and musician, he has merged the two art forms masterfully, in live and lively performances, and on CD. “Maybe one of the best, if not the best thing I’ve ever done as a poet,” he says, “is a collaboration [around 2010] with these four really remarkable jazz musicians. It was called Rick Kearns and the Con Alma Quartet. And we did a bunch of gigs for about 4 years, and we recorded a CD in 2013, which was pretty nice. I’m real proud of that work.”

Kearns recalls one of the earliest gigs he had with Con Alma with humor. “Patrick Murphy [horns and percussion] said to me ‘hey Rick, why don’t you come over and read a couple of poems at the [Pride of the Susquehanna] riverboat. And I said, ‘sure, we’ll give it a shot … but do you think it’s a good setting?’ And he says, ‘well, by the time you’d be reading, most of the people there are pretty drunk. So, it’s the ideal audience. Even if they got pissed off, what are they gonna do? They can barely make it to the stage. (laughs) So, I inflicted a few poems on them. And we all enjoyed it.”

Over the years, Kearns has had other collaborations with musicians, especially late guitar virtuoso Paco; and his poetry has traveled across the globe, with pieces being published in Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Ireland. But he is far from finished with his artistic pursuits.

In addition to his goal of “putting together a solid book deal,” he is looking forward to the publication of a series of tiny chapbooks, including one (close to being released at press time) titled “Reflections on the Life of T. Morris Chester, Abolitionist, Freedom Fighter, Genius.” Says Kearns about the project, done in conjunction with the Commonwealth Monument Project and the Dauphin County Library System: “It’s about this amazing African American man from Harrisburg that did so many things that, once you get a handle on his story, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is ‘why don’t I know about this?’ Because this black man that came out in the 19th century, he was brilliant, he was amazing, and he’s from Harrisburg.”

Perpetually ambitious, Kearns continues: “I still want to create some video oral histories … and at least one documentary. I’d like to get into doing some filming. Some real basic filming. That, and getting better at guitar. Those are the two for this last, I don’t know how many years. (laughs).”

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE KITCHEN

Out of necessity, any story about Kearns must come full circle, and end – you’ve guessed it– back in The Kitchen on 5th Street. But there truly is no end in sight to the Friday night gatherings that have reached “institution” status during the 3+ decades since the popular music and poetry salon had its humble beginnings.

“Paco and I started jamming, just the two of us, you know it was guitar and percussion, in 1992,” Kearns recalls. “And it was just the two of us for a while before he brought me into Danzante, which was the group with Camille Erice and a bunch of dancers, and I became their percussionist, and we also had a singer … and as a result of me being in that group, those dancers started showing up. And, as word got out that there were dancers here, that started bringing people, along with people who knew about Paco. Because Paco was a phenomenal musician. So, the word started getting out that Paco was here, and these dancers were here and that there was sort of a ‘scene’ here. And that’s how it blossomed into a ‘happening.’”

Favorite ‘happening’ moments are recalled with affection, including:

-The performance of a zambra with Paco. “A very Arabic, sort of North African style Flamenco piece. And I played this big frame drum, and there was one night there when we did that piece here and we had two dancers, and it was just … it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Just that particular night. And the music was just right in the pocket.” -A Petenera performed with singer Tanya Ortiz. “It was just one of those moments that was almost perfect. I mean, her voice was so powerful, it was chilling.”

And the memories continue to be made. “There was just in the last year,” says Kearns enthusiastically, “there was one night where it was – and I wrote a poem that sort of touches on this, and it’s called ‘In The Pocket,’ and that’s a jazz phrase that jazz players use to describe when the music is just right … you know, everything has come together, and everybody’s moving together, and it is a feeling that is … well, it’s impossible to describe.

Also hard to describe: how proud Grandpa Kearns and Abuelo Morales must be looking down from the heavens.

In The Pocket

There is that moment when I find the right rhythm for a gypsy jazz or flamenco piece and the feeling of being one with other musicians moving together through sound and space in sync like wheels, cogs or not just cogs in a great machine, a clock maybe but we are in the pocket the jazz guys say. There is nothing like it. We are in the sound outside of ourselves and deeply inside at the same time. Traveling together in the sound machine beyond the seen and creating this energy with people who have become family is something I want to put into words but there are no words for that feeling. But I try anyway.

To discover more about Kearns’ poetry and music, visit www.rickearns.com