J. Barrett Wolf: Caviar For The Mind

On Dad's scooter, 1958 Freeport, NY

This evening’s featured reader has traveled, performed or conducted workshops over the last quarter-century in locales as diverse as The Limestone Dusty Poetry Festival in Hunstville, Alabama and the pubs on the Scottish isle of Arran. 

In Dublin he also studied with Eavan Boland and Theo Dorgan at the Irish Writer's Center and found the opportunity to merge his enthusiasm for poetry with motorcycling in Cape Cod, where he began touring and performing each August as part of the Highway Poets Motorcycle Club, operated by the International Association of Published Bikers (find out more about this dual fascination in Jose JoeGo Gouveia, Rubber Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology, published by Archer Books in 2008 to which Wolf contributed and in this profile from 2016). 

Wolf’s own collection, Stark Raving Calm appeared in 2011 through Boone’s Dock Press and was followed by the e-book collection, The Moon is Always In Transit (Amazon Kindle, 2012).

When he moved to Stamford in the 1990s, Wolf worked at the Ferguson Library and was elected president of the Loft Artists’ Association in his first year. In 1994, he was one of just eight poets for a coveted slot on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts 'Touring Artist' roster and, as a resident, performed regularly as half of the bilingual, English/Spanish poetry duo "Café con Leche" with PA’s own noted Dominican poet/poetry therapist Marianela Medrano. You can find selected poems in both English and Spanish at his homepage, jbarrettwolf.com, divided into the categories of Place, Romance and the Road. 

The only artist to receive a United Cultural Fund (UCF) grant in 2012 by the Broome County Arts Council of Binghamton, New York, Wolf used it to  produce the reading series “Here & There: Poets from Near and Far”, a five-reading series pairing area poets with counterparts from the greater Northeastern United States, including, locally, Jessica Dubey, Joe Weil and Nicole Santalucia and, among those representing the Northeast, Adeke Rose, Ryk McIntyre and Sean Thomas Dougherty of Batlimore, Maryland, Providence, Rhode Island and Erie, Pennsylvania, respectively. 

While Wolf's poetry has been described by one peer as “caviar for the mind”, its live delivery by the writer is just as rich and involving. His reading of "Courting the Librarian" features pointed gestures, expressive eyebrow movement and inviting, 180-degree audience contact:

J. Barrett Wolf currently lives and writes in Binghamton in his home state of New York, where he ha hosted the poetry open mic program at the now-defunct RiverRead Books, a local independent bookstore, for close to six years.