2nd Sunday @ 2, October 8

Today we were upstairs in the “Dance Studio” with barely enough chairs, & Nancy’s sound system from home, & plenty of writers for Poetry + Prose. Nancy Klepsch & I did our tag-team hosting.

Bob Sharkey gets the annual anthology Best American Poetry every year & every year writes a cento using lines that grab him from different poems, this year a sonnet-cento “Window,” then a piece pondering the lost languages “Things Lost.” Kate Laity read the opening from a novel about murder in Academe, something to do with Dead Idiots (?). Peggy LeGee read a string of notes on memories “Kindergarten of the Mind” with a reference to herself as “the tranny Christ.”

Kathy Smith read a meditation on names inspired by a roomful of Kathies, “Dear Walt Whitman My Name is Kathy.” Mike Conner began with o(ther) (p)eople’s (p)oetry, an ekphrastic poem, then one of his own, a moving, heartfelt piece about a relative dying “Life Mountain.” Dan Curley read a poem about a road trip gone bad “Abilene,” the one based on a conversation with a friend “Discovery.”

Nancy Klepsch a fanciful list “29 Questions.” Howard Kogan’s poem “Auto Bio” contained the line “life has no back space…” Nancy Dunlop read tale of a storm while on a sailboat with her father “A Mast Broke,” then another storm poem, this about a neighbor’s downed tree “Morning Joe.” & somewhere in there I read but have no idea what poem(s) it was — glad there were so many other good, memorable poems here today.

2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose is at the Arts Center on River St. in Troy, NY, at 2PM on the 2nd Sunday of the month (just to be redundant again).