Third Thursday Poetry Night, December 16

Before we even began we began with someone wandering in from the street to improv a love poem, then to wander back out into the night -- life in the big city.

& then time for the annual visit from Sanity Clause with presents for all the bad poets who read in the open mic. But first I read Enid Dame's "Holiday Poem" to invoke the true spirit of the season -- a great poet gone from us too soon.

First up was Jason Crane with a poem he dedicated to me, called "Prophecy" invoking Ornette Coleman (& which he presented to me framed as an Xmas present (thanks, Jason!). Julie Lomoe's poem was "Entropia," whom she called the goddess of disorder; one of the minority of women in the audience to get to have the fun of sitting on Sanity Clause's lap.

Josh McIntyre read a short poem, "Rattle & Hum," with "the impossible is always near." Beatriz Loyola brought us the gift of multi-lingual poetry, reading "Discontinuidad" by Ulalume Gonzalez, a Mexican poet originally from Uruguay, watching a bird, & wolf in winter; Beatriz alternated reading a stanza in melifluous Spanish with the English translation. Alan Casline's poem "In & Out of Dutch" also brought in Winter images. Barry Goldman hadn't been around for a while & was back with more Winter sights, of crows in the city, "The Wind Weaving the Minds of Crows."

Tonight's featured poet, Ed Rinaldi, brought out his poems he has been writing since June, when he left Facebook & started using Google-chat to text his poems to others. Many of these seem longer than the poems he had brought out earlier in the year to open mics. He began with a poem titled with a word he made up, the surreal "Doppleganglitis," then on to the equally surreal cultural commentary with "Listening in the Wind for the Zombie Vanguard." He followed his "inner-beatnik" with the "Scratchy Epic 45 Pause with Cigarette & Beer," one image-thought following another, then a tender poem about his son beating him in whiffle ball. A poem on marriage & relationships had a long title that faded into the poem itself, just like his images & word clusters, as did the word play of "Hallowed Eves." He ended with what he called an "inner-hippy poem," "Chasing Butterflies in the Basil" (not the kind of herb you would expect a hippy to be romping through). Even the featured poet got to sit on Sanity Clause's lap, tell what a bad boy he has been, then get a gift of a poetry journal.

After the break, I continued with new poem from November, "Fast & Slow" based on an art & poetry exhibit at Sage College, with pictures created by children in Ha Noi. Alan Catlin said he was channeling the 1960's with a poem about John Lennon & the Beatles "It Was 40 Years Ago Today," based on a story told by a NYC cop about guarding the Fab 4 during their NY visit. Don Levy read "Meeting Ginsberg" from his series of memoir-poems centered around the QE2. Bob Sharkey's "Names" was a funny crescendoing string of the names he has been called throughout his life. Moses Kash III tried to sell the last copy of one of his many self-made collections, for the bargain price of $25. or $50. or whatever he could get, then shared with us one of the poems from the book, "I'm Just a Black Man." Sylvia Barnard was further down the list than usual; she read the seasonal poem on "The Messiah" (& claimed she started teaching Latin so long that when she started it wasn't a dead language).

Daniel Nester did the "annoying thing" (his words) & read from his laptop, "Bob & Tom's Fish Fry" composed from sentence-combining sheets like those he uses with his students, a rambling autobiography; he was also one of the most enthusiastic & inappropriate lap-sitters. Avery Stemple read from Carl Solomon's book, in honor of the movie "Howl" being shown in Albany. Bless was our "ultimate" (i.e., last) poet, with his poem, "Complacency," which he "flow-wrote," so by the time he finished it it was memorized, seeing his old streets in New York.

Check my Flickr! site for more photos of all the bad poets on the lap on Sanity Clause.