Third Thursday Poetry Night, August 15

The second poetry event of a very eventful poetry day & a warm, steamy night at the Social Justice Center for the open mic & the featured poet, Sarah Giragosian, but lots of cool poets in the house, a couple I’d seen just a few hours before at the Altamont Fair. The night's Muse was the recently gone poet, professor, activist Harry Staley, in whose honor I read his poem “Chalk It” trying to channel his past, energetic performances. Then on to the start of the open mic.

First up, to honor another recently gone artist, Aretha Franklin, was D. Alexander Holiday who read Nikki Giovanni’s “Poem for Aretha.” Joe Krausman read from his poems about surgery, this about needing a specialist, not a writer. Jan Tranmontano was back in town, all too briefly, from Southern Florida, read a work-in-progress, “Solar Eclipse Totality” about her mother in a nursing home. Cicada read her “first city poem” read 1st in Denver with a punk band, an energetic celebration of urban life. Alan Catlin read a horror-movie styled poem, containing a prompt somewhere, beginning “We are planting the baby-heads by moonlight…”

I’ve enjoyed seeing & hearing Sarah Giragosian read at places like the Rensselearville Poetry Month event, but became a fan after reading Queer Fish (Dream Horse Press, 2017), filled with richly descriptive images of creatures, some you’ve barely heard of, to explore love, gender & relationships. She began with poems from from Queer Fish (which she characterized as “a queer bestiary”), starting with “Lullaby for Cat,” “Eros” (expanding the erotic beyond the human), “All at Sea” talked about our responsibility for our ecological impact, another on a similar theme “When the Horseshoe Crab Grieves,” & “The Fish Beneath the Portuguese Man of War.” Then on to a few new poems from The Death Spiral forthcoming in 2020 from Black Lawrence Press, including “The Second Moon Colony Won’t Fail,” a poem to climate refugees, the Yupik, indigenous people of Alaska, then the title poem using the free-falling of eagles as a metaphor, & “Nina” for another great American singer, Nina Simone.

After a break, we continued with the open mic — I record the audio of each of these sessions at the SJC, rather than take notes as I do at most other readings, but when I sat down to write this Blog I discovered that I for some reason the rest of the open mic was not recorded. I have the sign-up sheet so I do know who read, but other than a fragmented, vague memory I do not have the kind of information about who read what (including myself) that I had for the first half. I will give each poet equal treatment & just list who read. My apologies, not only to the poets, but to the grad students of the future who are writing their dissertations on the poets & poems of the Albany poetry scene for this incomplete rendering.

The poets who read, marvelously I might add (!), were:
Dan Wilcox
Jackie Craven
Caroline Bardwell
Bob Sharkey
Mary Ann Murray
Slay! the Dragon (who had read at Poetic Vibe on Monday as “formerly known as Kid Flash”)
Therese Broderick
Frank S. Robinson
Screamer
Elizabeth

Take my word for it, it was Greaaaat!

Recorded or not, the Third Thursday Poetry Night takes place each (that’s right) third Thursday of the month, not affected by any national holidays, at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY at 7:30PM — your donation helps pay the featured poet, supports poetry events in the area, & supports the work of the Social Justice Center. & bring a poem for the open mic.