'Heart's Core' writer takes center stage at Midtown Reader

Journey deep into the South, gather gems from Florida’s underground rivers, explore experiences too complex for simple surface telling in "Heart’s Core" (Finishing Line Press, 2023). The new poetry book by Joann Gardner, FSU emerita professor, examines concepts of belonging and identity in her far-flung European and U.S. North-South immersions.

Enroute she discovers a forbear, Cosam Emir, a New Hampshire newspaperman who came south to combat symptoms of consumption. He married a Jewish woman, Sarah Evelina, from Charleston, both of them misunderstood and ostracized for their choices.

Gardner will launch "Heart’s Core" at Midtown Reader, 1123 Thomasville Road, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26.

“Literature advances the cause of civilization,” says Cosam, and we trust it does, especially in Gardner’s fully imagined, lovingly named and re-created world.

In the lead poem, “Cosam’s Journey,” her ancestor plies rivers of pain clogged with dead branches. Hearts are wooden or rock-like, and life is ambiguous, desire suspended in wet muck. We notice the switch from third to first person — "life assuage me” — how it hints at the poet herself seeking relief, enlightenment and healing.

Gardner’s free-verse narrative style dispenses with meter and rhyme in favor of resonance, humor, and perfect pitch. She refuses to tie these poems up neatly, but leaves them unresolved — the reader breathless, suspended, wanting more. Every page is drenched in detail, imagery, emotion, search, and discovery.

For a fuller understanding, I called Gardner, who divides time between Tallahassee and her summer home in Maine. “I gravitate to the alienated, the silent mothers, those whose stories are not told, and I try to give them voice,” she said.

Likewise, her poetry program for at-risk youth, Runaway with Words, co-founded with Janet Heller at Florida State University, did just that. Working with Florida’s abused and abandoned teenagers was viewed by some as “inappropriate,” but for Gardner and the kids she served, it was important work.

“There’s a reason you go to these places. These dismissed young people need a place in the world; they deserve to be heard,” Gardner said.

For 15 years she was hooked. She and Heller partnered with Anhinga Press to publish a workbook and an anthology. After Heller left, Gardner and Rick Campbell, Anhinga’s then-Director, wrote national grants to take the program to shelters and detention centers in Utah, Oregon, and California, often ending in a performance or publication.

“It changed the participants from being victims to being authorities. They taught me a lot about honesty in writing, about the explosive power of emotion simply put,” Gardner said.

Concerning her travels, Gardner said, “Your sense of belonging shifts and your consciousness shifts with you. You’re not the same person anymore. When I came [from Maine] to teach at Florida State, there was nothing more foreign to me in terms of culture and geography.”

But she discovered in her mother’s genealogy that Cosam Emir Bartlett had served as Intendant (Mayor) of Apalachicola and founding editor of the Tallahassee Star. “Suddenly, the past and the present converged. He was an outsider in the fractious years leading up to the Civil War and drew fire for his political beliefs.”

“Where does the pain go, the weight that sits on the brow and heart?” Gardner asks in “Music.” “Has it left with…the sudden sense that I cannot change the world?”

“I insisted on getting out of Maine,” Gardner said on the phone. “I lived in Paris, London, and York (England) and took on a bohemian lifestyle. It involved hunger, loneliness, and alienation. With all that travel, you get used to being exposed and unprotected — or at least learn how to accept it.”

“Anyone as they grow older becomes more complex,” Gardner said on the phone. “You need to reach beyond the familiar and safe in order to grow.” This she does convincingly, embracing a global view, unbounded by one culture, one family, one place in time. Gardner is working on two new books of poetry, one already shortlisted with a press and in revision.

Gardner’s poems have appeared in such journals as Tampa Review, South Carolina Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review and Louisiana Literature. Her chapbook "La Florida" won the Weldon Kees Prize and "The Deaf Island" won the 2018 chapbook prize from the Poetry Society of America.

Faith Eidse, Ph.D., is a double medal winner from Florida Authors and Publishers Association as well as winner of FSU’s Kingsbury Award for her memoir, "Deeper than African Soil." She is a member of Tallahassee Writers Association.

If you go

What: Launch of "Heart’s Core" by Joann Gardner

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26

Where: Midtown Reader, 1123 Thomasville Road

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee writer mines 'Hearts Core' poetry at Midtown Reader