It has not escaped my notice that the community in which I reside is bursting with artistic enterprise. The Village of Kenmore, historically and currently, is home to a panoply of people who spend their hours, leisure and otherwise, in pursuit of the Arts (the capitalized kind). While it doesn’t seem to be the place to strike it rich in the entertainment business (that would be Los Angeles or Vegas or someplace), it is home to a remarkable collection of painters, poets, actors, singers, blues bands, high school musical types preparing to major in theater, and others who look and live the way you do until it’s show time. Then, Kenmore seems to become the equivalent of Paris’ 14th arrondissement.

Consider the work of Geoffrey Gatza, poet and poetry entrepreneur. He has recently resuscitated the art of the epic poem with a work than spans four books, and they’re all about Kenmore. Yes, all about Kenmore. In Book One of “Kenmore: Poem Unlimited” he offers one poem per street --- the first chapter is entitled “Tremaine Avenue”, the second “Delaware Avenue”, the third “Deerhurst Park Boulevard” and so on for 105 chapters --- and if you think this column of mine is a weekly love letter to my hometown, you should see his stuff.

Gatza is a person who grew up thinking life in Kenmore was stifling and dreamed of getting out, like the hero in most Springsteen songs. He saw some of the world, saw action with the Marines in Operation Desert Storm, and now he’s back and thrilled to be here.

“I was looking for the adventure that this town seeks to avoid,” he writes. “It took me a long time to understand how great this community is. It is a well-run municipality that makes me wonder why other towns do not have the same operation in place.”

Not everyone in Kenmore is a professional wordslinger, but if that sentiment makes sense to you, you have a new spokesman, and he’s an artist who uses the long-form poem as his palette.

In America, home is not where you live, it’s where you’re from. There exists a reflective country song (not to be confused with an epic poem) about fleeing the nest entitled “Down Home”, containing the couplet “When I was a boy I couldn’t wait to leave this place/ Now I want to see my children raised/ Down home.” Gatza, a man who used to be from where he lives now, seems to comprehend that feeling. Walking down the same streets he bicycled as a boy, his perspective may not be unique, but it is indeed compelling.

He radiates enthusiasm when he explains his public school education in Kenmore, and his work radiates an appreciation of the details that make a hometown to call your own so rewarding. In his case, he’s a returning runaway, a wandering son with an homage that goes on for marathon lengths. The Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith once said that writing is easy: you just open a vein and bleed. If that is to be believed, there is plenty of blood on display in “Kenmore: Poem Unlimited”.

The thick second book in the series is of “photopoems”, purporting to be artistic photographs but actually a nearly comprehensive exhibit of a day in the life of Kenmore. The busses on Delaware Avenue, the school with the “gymteria” sign on the wall ---- it is a startlingly inclusive selection of pictures. Wait until the Chamber of Commerce gets a look at this.

The third volume is a scrapbook of memories and scraps of the poet’s life, and the fourth is “a mirror image of the first volume” but in one-word bursts. The volumes fuse to depict one man’s relationship with one place; like his subject, the result is grand and modest at the same time. And yes, a Kenmore guy came up with this.

In the true fashion of 21st century Art, the capitalized kind, all this is available on the Internet, for free, at www.geoffreygatza.com/kenmore/htm. The downloads tend to take halfway to forever because of the mass of the work, but the scale simply reinforces how much there is to say, and to depict, in the story.

It is an ambitious project, but any artist, in any medium, seems to understand the nature of ambition. The oboe virtuoso in Kenmore Middle School and the professional poet both know the rigors of their art, regardless of their dexterity or level of development. That a tiny place like Kenmore keeps pumping out practitioners is just another of this community’s marvels.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears Fridays in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.