Brooklyn Flea

Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop is a unique enterprise. In fact, we're pretty confident that the Brooklyn Flea might be the only market around where shoppers can purchase poetry books alongside vintage dresses and lobster rolls.

Poets Jared White and Farrah Field came together through the MFA program at Columbia about 10 years ago and have been a couple ever since. They live in Dumbo and host a monthly multimedia event called Yardmeter Editions that will soon relocate to East Williamsburg after a two-year run in Boerum Hill. (They're also getting married in September—hooray and congrats!) Berl's Poetry Shop is named after Jared's grandfather Berl, "a man who loved Walt Whitman and who was an inspiring entrepreneur in his own right," says Jared, "so it seemed a very fitting homage to name our shop after him."

What inspires a couple to set up a booth at a flea market and sell poetry? Jared explains that it was "the incredible proliferation of limited-edition, hand-sewn (often even hand-printed) chapbooks as a medium of poetry that we've been discovering and participating in over the years." By joining the Flea family and avoiding the challenges of NYC brick-and-mortar real estate, Berl's was able to "cut right to the fun parts of book-selling: building an inventory, getting to know presses around the country, meeting customers, being out there in the community, sharing our passion." Jared says that the Flea has been rewarding on a number of levels: "We love the ongoing evolution of our booth, our friendships with other vendors and the opportunity to bring poetry off the shelf and into a space where it is unexpected, where it can bump up against the homemade and the handcrafted in all its incarnations."

Fleagoers' reactions to a poetry booth is part of the fun. "We've loved the wide range of shoppers we meet at the Flea: people buying birthday presents for parents and friends, curious readers, artists excited about poetry book arts, poets from Europe (even one or two whose poetry we actually had on our table!). We love how sometimes someone will come up who hasn't thought about poetry in a while and can rekindle their love for reading poems by exploring our table." They carry some fun and quirky poetry accoutrements as well, like Farrah's hand-knitted fingerless "poetry mitts" that are perfect for outdoor poetry reading and repurposed wool-sweater book covers.

And now, in a Featured Vendor first, Farrah and Jared submitted original writings for this post. So without further ado:

A COOL CUSTOMER RECEIVES THE AUTOPSY REPORT
by Farrah Field

We were watching two naked kids play on the beach, throwing themselves from a dune, running under an umbrella. The boy threw sand into the girl's face. He said he didn't mean to hurt her. My husband gave me a set of watercolor pencils for Christmas that year. I measured his head. Do you know the difference between grieving and mourning, I asked? He closed his book and opened his mouth, but I said, Not a damn thing.

Art for one eye
by Jared White

Floats between magnets

Based on a science of

Sway from leg to leg

The more I think the more I get it

If we go away they'll go away

But then I realized it was a hat

With a feather in the brim

That would never conduct electricity

Not even lightning turning the ground to glass

All this time

Thinking it was a boy holding a falcon

Sheer nerve and casual beauty

Passionate as in passive

Precious as in press