As part of the 2022-2024 Poet Laureate Dr. Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s recent poetry initiative, Catskilled Poetry for Healing, Joseph Sullivan and Nicol Sikorski unveiled their duel poem, “FAQs, A Segue Poem” at Western Sullivan Public Library - Delaware Free Branch in Callicoon on Saturday, April 6. 

Joe and Nicol’s poem focuses on the kinds of reckoning that one experiences in recovery and is the only collaborative effort out of the 14 works to be unveiled onto a plaque and installed throughout the county. 

“As you can see, it’s called FAQ’s a Segue Poem,” Kennedy-Nolle said, “and what that is, is really a literary duet. That’s the idea behind it. [A Segue Poem] can be a poem, as in this case, or a series of poems or an entire book that is produced by two people writing together.”

Kennedy-Nolle said that a Segue Poem is basically like a give and take as the two people are taking turns, each using some aspect of what has come before from the other person. 

Funded by an American Academy of Poets Laureate Fellowship and made possible by the Mellon Foundation, the Catskilled Poetry for Healing project aims to address the county’s mental health and substance use crisis through writing poetry as a therapeutic tool to self-empower individuals and their families affected by this crisis.

Kennedy-Nolle said that the story about this Segue is a bit amusing.

“It started out in a moment of slump,” she said. “We were just sort of stumped as a group as no one was writing. There was always something happening that was interfering and delaying things.”

Kennedy-Nolle noted that she brought in Marvin Bell and Bill Stafford’s book, “Segues” and shared a couple of the back-and-forth accounts from the pair. Then she said that she put everybody into pairs for a collaborative exercise and Joe and Nicol hit the ground running with it. 

“Joe has a kind word for everyone,” Kennedy-Nolle said, “and indeed mentors many in his life in so many ways. He is a sensitive soul, deeply attuned to others’ feelings in this world as well as his own shortcomings and struggles. In that sense, he is an unflinching critic of himself as this poem reflects.”

“Nicol more than matches him in goodwill,” Kennedy-Nolle said. “She too dazzles with a radiant smile, an incredibly giving and optimistic nature and is highly confident.”

Kennedy-Nolle said that she mistook Nicol for a counselor and that in many ways, both she and Joe are both counselors.

“They are natural born leaders and together they make quite a team,” she said. “Their poem of sincere honesty and hope reflects their joint synergistic energy and sheer joy at this life. FAQs from this slightly cynical title reflect the struggles of critical self-reflections a person in recovery must engage in. Especially the heartbreaking last line, plaintively asking if the world could be a kinder world to the speakers.”

Nicol said that the process of putting their two brain powers together for the poem turned out to be very challenging. She said that she and Sullivan both have strong opinions and can be very stubborn at times. 

“So finding out what works and what doesn’t was an interesting process,” Sikorski said. 

“I think it was good to have the strength of opinion in both of us,” said Sullivan, “because as soon as one of us put something down, we were very adamant about helping shape it to fit the poem better. And I feel that it was a good sequence due to the fact that we were both a bit critical of what we were putting on the paper.”

The pair also had different stories in the poem and took turns reading their parts and that was one of the bigger challenges to read them together in a meaningful way. 

Two more of the plaques were unveiled on Saturday, one at the Jeffersonville Branch of the Western Sullivan Public Library and the other at the Tusten-Cochecton Branch.