UNTITLED
by Cathleen Schandelmeier
TREASURE
in stick disguise
No one knows this
JOY
in Snow man hat
and looney tune shoes
is MY HEART
dancing and singing
songs of magical sticks in breath you can see!
My heart outside
my body
inside a lot of joy . . .
. . . my little boy.
Listen up, sun!Listen up, moon! Listen up, wind, sand and stars and all those mortals who might gather on Lake Michigan’s magic shore! Cathleen Schandelmeier has a poem for you.
And you. And you. . . .
All summer long. Or, at least every Friday at twilight. Under a small stand of willow trees at the North Avenue Beach.
“With the clouds playing peek-a-boo with the moon, the skyline twinkling back at the stars and the lake moving and breathing like a living creature, the beach has something to say,” says this beach poet. “The beach is a perfect place to be doing this. It begs for poetry.”
“Doing this” means a poetry reading. A poetry open, mind you. Anyone can enter. And everyone is welcome. If poems are songs from the soul, then let the music begin, she says. Which it will, this Friday.
Schandelmeier has been hosting poetry readings on the beach for seven years. Once a casual underground gathering, it is now sanctioned, approved of, and even encouraged by the Chicago Park District–an official “happening” on the city’s biggest and most popular beach.
Not a ’60s style hippie happening, but a gathering of families with kids, with poets and poet wannabes, for accountants who like rhyme, for nurses who like to hear gentle voices, for retired Wobblies, unemployed steelworkers, for all of those who like to hear words at play.
“I am the only poet host who does poetry on the beach in Chicago,” says Schandelmeier, “or as far as I know, in the world.”
She didn’t begin on the beach. She ended up on the beach and there she has stayed.
“I was hosting a poetry reading at a cafe/bar on Sheffield Avenue,” says Schandelmeier, 36. “I walked in with a bunch of poets–I had a featured reader too–and we discovered they were rehabbing the place. They knew we were coming and they never said anything. I had poets booked and the place was closed. We had nowhere to go. We were standing on the sidewalk wondering what to do when someone suggested that we go to the beach. I thought that was a great idea. We agreed to all meet at the chess pavilion and it ended up being a journey of the soul. That was seven years ago.
“We started meeting once a week at the chess pavilion, but the chess players got ticked off. I guess people standing up reading their poetry disturbed their playing. They said with us around they couldn’t concentrate. So, gentle poets that we are, we moved over under the willow trees.”
Schandelmeier did not begin as a poet, although she says she was writing poetry in high school. She was a child who loved to escape into fantasy–her parents had divorced when she was 2, her mother died when she was 4–and it was words–poems and fairy tales–that provided the stairs to climb into another world.
From `Weirdo’ to poet
She lived with her grandparents and went to Catholic school. “The kids at school called me `Weirdo,’ that was my nickname,” she says. “Maybe I was. I was always telling them stories. At the age of 8 I was going around leaving wills in hidden places. Wills saying, `If I die, I want my belongings to go to. . . .’ I guess because my mother died so suddenly and left no will, I thought I might die suddenly too so I wanted people to know what to do with my little treasures.
“The nuns at school were great to me. The nuns who everyone else dreaded. They took such good care of me . . . this sort of orphaned child. I used to love to go to the convent. Those visits gave me sustenance. The nuns told me all the stories of the saints. . . . I loved the spiritual aspect of them . . . they were romantic. The saints were dead, my mother was dead. I guess those stories made my mother a saint in my head.”
The little girl the other kids called “Weirdo” grew up and went to college. She began to write plays. She wrote one for children called “Barney the Cat.” Then, nine months pregnant, she delivered a child that died.
“I lost my baby and after that I couldn’t hold on to a thought long enough to write a play,” she says. “But I also couldn’t stop writing either. All that came out was poetry. A male friend of mine invited me to the Green Mill for a poetry reading. I never saw that man again, but that night opened up a door. I knew I wanted to be a poet.”
Several years later, she met the man she was to marry at a poetry reading. By then, she’d been doing her beach poetry thing. The wedding was the typical bohemian experience–very inexpensive, very public, very different and very loose.
“We got married on the 4th of July at the North Avenue Beach,” she says. “We were married by a comedian–Aaron Freeman, he was a Protestant then. And we did it right on top of the `Do Not Dive’ sign.”
Schandelmeier says she probably should have heeded the sign, for the marriage did not last long.
“He was not who I thought he was,” she says. “He was a con man. I married a con man and when I found out, I was already pregnant and I told him not to come home again and then I stood on the street alone and sobbed and resolved from then on to do it alone.”
She has written another play, again for children, called “Sandy and the Circus.” It is, she says, “a Cinderella story, but in the end there is no Prince Charming. Sort of like my life.”
Every summer she literally takes it to the streets–street festivals, that is. And the children flock around.
But basically, a poet she is. A believer that words can exorcise human sadness and cleanse anew the soul. Lift the spirit and make the humor in our hearts get up and dance.
Her 5-year-old son, Vincent, who goes with her to her beach poetry readings, is an aficionado.
“He was suckled on poetry,” she says. “He has his favorite poems that he says over and over again.”
Before she goes to sleep, when she wakes up, on the el, in the back of a bus, whenever there is a quiet moment, Cathleen Schandelmeier writes her poetry.
The trials of this modern world
She is no 19th Century, delicate, reclusive female scribe. She has a computer, a modem, a fax machine, a beeper, an answering machine and talents that also make her a top-notch secretary. She likes poetry as performance. She is gregarious and generous with her enthusiasm. She is bohemian in her attitude toward material things but old-fashioned when it comes to tradition. She goes to mass every Sunday. She adored her grandmother. She still misses her mother. She loved the mystery of the nuns.
Being a poet in Chicago, or anywhere, is not a sexy lot. To get together and read poems, your own poems out loud, is not something touted by television or newspapers and it does not pay. It is not loud, or obscene, or shocking or violent. There are no strobes. Or press conferences. No poets are on any expressway billboards. There are no PR spokesmen for poets. No bodyguards.
But poets have been around since man invented language. Since the human ear became attuned to more than just grunts and groans. Wherever there has been a community of man, there has always been a poet.
So again this summer, on the North Avenue beach, under the willows, every Friday night at 7, there will be poetry–good and bad–for anyone and everyone to hear.
Cathleen Schandelmeier will be your hostess. It will begin at twilight and go on until it is done . . . unless, of course, it becomes 11 p.m. The magic hour when the lakefront closes down.
Schandelmeier has a poem about that too.
“I remember one night the cops came around and we were still there and they were shouting through the loudspeakers over and over again, `The lake is closed!’ I thought, how can you do that? You can’t close down Lake Michigan. You can kick people out, but you can’t close the lake. So I wrote a poem and read it the next time we met at the beach. It goes like this:
“Squint in the sun dusk-baked sigh cop cars drive on by as darkness comes and nighttime looms: `THE LAKE IS CLOSED!’ Oh yeah? says whom?
“Does it freeze-frame like a picture show? Get frozen under feet of snow? Do they take some plastic and seal it up? Pull the plug and drain it off?
“Oh–Close the lake and the seven seas! Sop up the whales and dolphins pee. Do only I wonder why? `THE LAKE IS CLOSED!’
“The cops are high.”
See. Poetry will be alive in Chicago this summer. And it’s got a sense of humor.
