The Brothers Quatrone by Rich Quatrone

THE BROTHERS QUATRONE

They attack us, this I know.
They don’t understand.
This I know, too.
And in some instances they are right to criticize us.
For we have committed our wrongs.
But there is more to us than how we failed or who we hurt.
There are our voices!
Left not only for them but for all of posterity.
It will be up to them, perhaps, and more so, up to Fate.
But we have spoken!
“Just say what’s on your mind” was your dictum when I asked
all those years ago about how to write poetry.
And so I have.
And so you have.
Not many do this, you know.
So many, almost everyone, are quiet!
They simply shut up.
They close up.
They rage inside themselves.
Or weep inside themselves
But we have not.
I certainly have not.
And oh how easy it is to condemn.
How vulnerable we are, how vulnerable I am.
How stupid and gross and obscene I have been.
Perhaps not you, I really don’t know.
But how glorious we have been.
The things we have said!
In tandem, even though apart.
We sang together.
A perfect harmony.
How beautiful it has been, all these many years.
And for whom did we sing, my dear brother?
Why, we have sung for everyone.
It’s as simple and as outrageous and as holy as that.
We have sung for everyone.

Rich Quatrone

RICH QUATRONE is a poet and playwright living in Spring Lake, NJ. He was educated at Rutgers College and Mason Gross School of the Arts, both at Rutgers University. He and Lorraine Quatrone founded PASSAIC REVIEW in 1979, inspired by Lunch magazine and the groundswell of poetry that was then in the Passaic-Rutherford area. Other mags to come out of that period were Footwork and Lips. Footwork became the current Paterson Literary Review, headed up by Maria Mazziota Gillan. Quatrone introduced Gillan to the poetry world by having her read at Passaic High School, publishing her first efforts in PR, and by having her interviewed on EYES OF THE ANGELS, the cable television poetry show, produced by Paul Juscyk and Rich Quatrone. Gillan turned her back on those who endorsed her and has made some kind of mark on the poetry world.

Rich eventually left north Jersey and the life and wife he loved there. Much of this was brought about by a rigged prosecution of Rich as a home instructor in Passaic and Lyndhurst. Some people knew the truth and encouraged him to fight the bastards who set him up, but Rich knew he’d been tried and convicted in the Herald News by people like reporter Steve Marlowe, so he accepted a very, very unjust plea bargain. This is a decision he has regretted often in his life, since he allowed the State to strip him and his family of every cent they possessed. He has never really recovered from the financial poverty. He received an expungement in 2006.

After the infamy of September 11, Rich began an all-out, six year campaign of reading hard-hitting poems, poems to educate, poems to connect personal love and world love, at the Java Hut, which later became the diluted Coffee Blue, in Belmar, NJ. During these six intense years, Rich founded CHILDREN OF SEPTEMBER 11, along with Timo Scott, as a guerrilla theater group taking on social issues often left unaddressed by too many others. Online Rich resurrected (actually the third incarnation) of Passaic Review, following the original magazine, then Passaic Review Millennium Editions. The new PASSAIC REVIEW EZINE, published some 1600 online issues, covering every conceivable part of Rich’s political, social, and personal imaginative landscape. Joined in this effort were scores of poets, including Bob Quatrone and Amiri Baraka. Rich kept the Ezine going until he abandoned it after the invasion of Iraq. Rich felt the country was no longer worth the risk involved in speaking so honestly publicly.

Rich is also the producer of PLAYWRIGHTS ON THE RISE at Lakewood’s historic Strand Theater. He’s done this series into, now, its seventh year under his helm. This is a staged reading series of new plays from predominantly new playwrights. Rich has two sons, John and Eric, both poets, musicians, and athletes. Their band THE LYRIQS is on the rise.

Rich Quatrone

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