Cape May’s first poet laureate Sylvia Baer has deep connections to Cape May MAC
“For me, MAC and the City of Cape May are very intertwined,” said Sylvia Baer, Cape May’s newly appointed official Poet Laureate, and the daughter of Fred and Sarita Kuhner.
She is deeply part of MAC (now known as Cape May MAC), with a connection that goes back to the origin of the organization in 1970. Sylvia’s father, Fred Kuhner, is Cape May MAC’s founding president, who created the organization with Bruce Minnix and others. When the Kuhners moved to Cape May full-time from New York City in 1969, Sylvia’s father had immediately immersed himself in the community, helped create MAC, and saved the Physick Estate from demolition with the rest of the organization’s founders, among other achievements that included establishing a successful business here.
Sylvia inherited that commitment to the organization.
“We had just recently moved to Cape May from New York City. It was quite a shock to my mother; my father was much more of a joiner. He didn’t need credit and he really was not one of those people who needed to have his name on things. He just wanted to do the right thing,” she said.
Her parents met in Uruguay, and she spent childhood years there surrounded by extended family members. Fred was an entrepreneur, following and creating business opportunities as they arose, and so the family moved regularly. When the family moved to the United States, Sylvia found herself suddenly no longer surrounded by extended family. Once they arrived in Cape May, and her father threw himself into the pulse of the community, Sylvia’s connection to and love of Cape May blossomed, as did her imagination and her love for words.
“By doing that — by being involved in so many different things in Cape May — what he did was, he created for me a hometown, something I had never really had,” she said.
“He was a very big believer in understanding and preserving history so that future generations could examine it, think about it, and live in it for a while,” she said. “To take what was useful for the growth of a community or a person or a country — and what was not useful to have as a reference or reminder of what has gone before.”
He was realistic about present day needs, as Director Emeritus Michael Zuckerman has noted, yet he was a visionary, producing two of the organization’s long-running events, Victorian Week and the Cape May Music Festival, while Sarita had the idea to open a tearoom in the Carriage House.
“Fred was determined that MAC was going to be run on sound business principles,” said Zuckerman. “Living within our means was something that he was insistent on. Over the decades, he was heavily engaged with MAC all the way until his death in 1999. Fred was a champion of bringing good business practices to bear and coming up with business plans with a very strong entrepreneurial bent.”
of the Victorian Fashion Show during MAC’s
Victorian Week in 1982.
Fred handed down his belief in the importance of historic preservation to his daughter and Sylvia has been a fervent financial supporter of Cape May MAC with her husband, John, and the rest of her family ever since, continuing the family’s special commitments over the years to the Cape May Music Festival, to legacy funds and to special projects. They even created the Sarita and Fred Kuhner Garden in view of the Carriage House and Vintage Restaurant, to both honor their parents and beautify an area at the Emlen Physick Estate that was in need of beautifying. Sylvia and family are some of the organization’s oldest friends.
In March, Cape May City announced that Sylvia would be Cape May’s first official Poet Laureate.
As a Ph.D. and professor of literature at Rowan University, for Sylvia, language, poetry and words are of utmost importance. She is well known for her “Poet-Tree” in front of her Cape May home on Michigan Avenue, a tradition she and John started in which she hangs poems from branches for passers-by to take and keep and contribute to.
Now, as the city’s first official Poet Laureate, she aims to bring poetry and the arts to the forefront of Cape May’s community, planning programs that combine music, poetry, and more.
She wants to work with places like the Nature Center to do programs where participants can look at and write about different objects from nature, such as shells, live critters or pinecones.
“It’s incumbent upon all of us to keep doing and creating things that bring positive energies and a kindness into the world,” she said. “This is what we can all do.”
She plans to bring free seminars to space at 600 Park Boulevard in West Cape May that combine writing and visual art.
“‘Ekphrasis’ is when you connect a piece of art and a work of writing together,” she said. “You sit in front of a painting and generally you’re guided — but you don’t have to be — you’re guided to look at a painting and write about it. I want to bring in local artists’ work and have folks come in and guide them to see in different ways — find different focusses for looking at this painting — because I think that’s enriching for both the artist that created the artwork, and the writer.”
“I can come up with 20 million ideas before breakfast,” she said, “so I have all kinds of things I want to do. … A lot of people feel cowed by it (poetry), even averse to it, and part of my mission is to make people enriched and empowered. Poetry is a way to do that.”
