Poets Speak Loud!, September 25

This is one of the more high-energy open mics with host Mary Panza keeping order with her verbal horse-whip.

Sylvia Barnard was up first, as she likes to be, with a work-in-progress still in cursive she said, then a cluster of haiku from June, graduations & Schroon Lake. I followed with my recent poem on the “great American eclipse” then an earlier piece on aging, for my friend Sylvain Nagler, “September Song.” Bob Sharkey read a couple of memoir poems, “Long Ago” from the Viet Nam war era, then “St. Patrick’s Day.” Nancy Dunlop read 2 more pieces from her series about patients in 4 Winds, “The Knock Out” & “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Tonight’s featured reader was poet Karen Schoemer in a Moby Dick tee-shirt. Her poems are built on rich, vivid images, flowing one to another, such as “Close Watching is a Form of Being” which begins with the burning of a henhouse; in “Park Event 6/10/17” the images are from a catering gig, another piece referenced the writer Italo Calvino. Other poems were “Former Location of the C.H. Evans Brewery,” the 2nd person “Carrying Crumbs to the Nest,” then a piece about a confrontation in a tavern. There was sex in the background of the poem titled “Old Mortality,” & she ended with a recent piece “Nostrom.” McGeary’s was great setting for these poems.

Back to the open mic, Don Levy read “#CoffeeHouseReads” about Bookstagram the book community on Instagram, then a poem in which 2 men, one young, the other old, talk about gay history. Brooke Kolcow was the featured reader here back in June, tonight she performed “Prayer” about imperfections, then read an excerpt from a manuscript “Take My Bones to Make Your Bread.” Joe Krausman’s first poem “All Trumped Up” was in the form of a monologue by a liar, & “Panacea” looked at the everyday as the end of the world. Karen Fabiane was the last reader & began with “Editorial” an old piece like a fractured conversation on a first date, & then “Begone” from her chapbook Seeing You Again.

It’s always a show at Poets Speak Loud!, with food, drink, great service, even the sound of the flushing toilet like an obbligato to the words of the poets -- each last Monday of the month, at McGeary’s on Sheridan Square in Albany, NY, 7:30PM, $5.00 or whatever.