Live from the Living Room, February 12

A small group gathered beneath the living room to listen to the featured poet, Andy Fogle, & to share some of our poems.

Andy Fogle is new on the poetry scene here, a high-school teacher with 2 young children, he's just now finding the time to get to some of the local venues. He read an interesting mix of mostly short older & newer poems, beginning with a short piece citing the Latin poet Horace, about his son in his early months. "Witness the Self-Protection" was an old experiment combining the sonnet with a villanelle. Another experiment was "Song of the Out of Body Child," while "Dusty" was also an old poem, a portrait of someone he knew. He read selections from a "nostalgic" sequence of short poems, "Thinking of Virginia & New York," then a couple of more experiments playing with language, "Excommunicated" & "Mostly from an Earth Science Worksheet on Depressions." Some of his poems were barely phrases, or brief images, like American haiku, including a series that were N+ experiments on one of his very short poems. He ended with a poem about Washington, DC, "Four Questions Plus Jurisdiction." It was edifying for us that Andy, before reading his experimental poems, would describe his technique or method, so that we could get a sense of what the experiment was about, & it was a pleasant way to get introduced to this interesting new voice on the local scene.

Andy's poems about Virginia made for a nice segue for Sylvia Barnard to her new poem "Dusky Sally" from a visit to Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello, Virginia, then to a related poem about an old local black community, "Rapp Road Community."

I followed with an old (1992?) piece about the Olympics, "Pindar" then a very new poem "Peacocks in the Driveway."

Our host Don Levy read a poem, published in the latest issue of the Price Center's newsletter, by Taylor Keith, a local high-school student, then his own poem "Hunger Games" about a homophobic Mormon hunger-striker.

Live from the Living Room, is an open mic with a featured poet each 2nd Wednesday of the month at the Pride Center of the Capital Region, 332 Hudson Ave., Albany, NY (downstairs), sign-up at 7:00PM, feature at 7:30PM, followed by open mic.