2nd Sunday @ 2, June 14

The last session of the season until September, the end of our 5th year doing this open mic. Nancy Klepsch & I are pleased so many wonderful local writers have shown up at this monthly reading & we expect to continue after a break for July & August.

Jay Renzi was the first to read, 2 older pieces he said, “Stone,” & “For Our Own Sake” in which he quotes a snippet from from the Frank Norris novel The Octopus: A Story of California, published in 1901. I followed with 2 recent, short poems “The Confusion of the Attic” & “Contra Li Bai.” Bob Sharkey reprised his nostalgic poetry/prose piece “Book-Lover” with references to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”, & then e.e. cummings’ sonnet “pity this busy monster,manunkind”.

William Robert Foltin read from his self-published chapbook a couple poems written in Junes past, “Tuesday Now Means Artist” & a description of a red-haired woman “Red Summer.”  Karen Fabiane read a stream-of-consciousness portrait, one she said she hadn’t read in a long time, “Someone Laughed,” then the poem "Anymore Half-Remembered” from her Bright Hills Press chapbook Dancing Bears.

Jamey Stevenson apologized for reading from his phone, but these days lots of poets do it, a poem titled “Campsite Rule” an extended metaphor in short line rhymes, then a poem about walking late at night “Not a Soul.” Sally Rhoades began with a couple pages from a prose memoir of her mother where she takes her children to be baptized, then a poem with a conversation with “A Full Moon.”

My co-host Nancy Klepsch read a poem “In Faith of a Writing Prompt” full of smells & colors, from a workshop with Bernadette Mayer, then a piece on mushrooms but against the gentrification of Troy (NY) in the form of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Howard Kogan ended our Spring afternoon with a poem inspired by novels he was reading this Winter.

We are taking the Summer off but expect to be back here at the Arts Center on River St. in Troy in September for our 6th season of an open mic for poetry & prose on the 2nd Sunday of each month at 2 PM. Come read with us.