Zounds!, September 19

at the NightSky Cafe in Schenectady, with our host, Shaun Baxter (substituting for the substitute host, Liz King, who had been scheduled to host for Shaun Baxter -- or something to that effect). And the scheduled featured poet, the whirling dervish of mid-Hudson Valley (& beyond) poetry, Robert Milby was stuck somewhere else with car trouble.

Shaun shared William Carlos Williams' "El Hombre" & later did his much-parodied "This is just to say..."

Pierre, who had been here before, returned with more rhymes, "The Bus" & "The Witness" (about UFOs), & he squeezed another in at the very end of the night.

Dan Wilcox -- hey, that's me! -- read "Starting the Wine" (it's here on the Blog site) & "Taschlich."

Alan Catlin has been bouncing off the work of the Rices, Anne & Stan. She's the vampire novel writer & he's a poet & painter: "Anne's Doll" & "Self-Portrait with Two Hell's Angels Taking Christ Down with a Mule" (based on one of Stan's paintings).

Carol Graser read only one poem, "Speech Development" from her book that I keep telling you to buy The Wild Twist of Their Stems (www.foothillspublishing.com). Would have liked to hear another, as always.

I don't know if he invented this term, but it's a good one: "prosti-tots", a species found especially prevalent in mall food courts, as described in Matt Galleta's "Look He Says."

Josh McIntyre's work is short & pithy: "No Hurry" (snow) and the back-to-childhood poem I like, "A Musing."

Tom slipped in & out like a ghost in a hoody, did a hip-hop piece on war & one on his dreams from a journal, "Madness & Dreams."

Our host, Shaun Baxter, read one of my favorites by him, now "slightly revised," "A Bookstore in Colony," and one about Autumn, "Last Call."

It's the third Wednesday of each month, NightSky Cafe on Union St. in Schenectady, 7:30 PM, usually a featured poet, always an open mic.