Albany WordFest — A Night of Features, April 16

This was the only one of the week-long WordFest that I would get to, since I spent the rest of the week in DC for the semi-annual Split This Rock Poetry Festival. But this was a great way to start the week, with a cross-section of local writers here at the Hudson River Coffee House. Brian Dorn was our gracious host.

Not all the readers had arrived yet, but it was time to start. Harvey Havel read from his just released novel Mr. Big, a sports thriller about an injured football player & corruption in the NFL.

Joe Krausman read a string of short, sometimes rhyming, often funny poems, many on the theme of aging, such as “Losing It” (on forgetting), & “I Got Arythmia.” Some of his poems were inspired by stories in the newspapers, others by as ordinary things as bacon & eggs, or walking down the canyons of New York City streets. In “Picture at the Shaker Museum” he ponders the irony of the cult’s religious rules being the demise of the cult itself, & the poem “Limitations” was about the dilemma of making choices.

Danielle Pouliot was the one poet here tonight that I hadn’t heard read previously. She began with a tour-de-force “Punctuation-a-thon” then the buzzing “Barehanded Beekeeping.” For some reason she felt it necessary to say that her poem “What I Was Taught as a Girl Growing Up” was “not feminism” while it depicted the experience of many young girls growing up confronted by a patriarchal society.

This is exactly the topic that Liv McKee works so well on. By way of intro she sang her way into her anthem of poetry, then jumped into poems from her self-published/DIY chapbooks, poems full of women with honey dripping from their teeth, childhood memories in a synagogue, a trip to Palestine, Stormy Daniels & sex workers. Sprinkled in & about were haiku on sex & politics, a poem on sexual assault, & she ended with her satirical “Letter to the Hippy Man…”. She can be somewhat preachy but she gets her message across.

Speaking of which, some have called Poetyc Visionz “the Preacher of Positivity.” His first piece was an homage to Prince, & to performers & their audiences. Then on to familiar pieces such as his “9th cloud” piece & the 7 chakras. He puts himself out as as one of those personal development motivational speakers, spinning off images from pop etymologies, weaving in black history & apparent African proverbs. He also spun in a few haiku. He ended with a new piece on dreams & reality & the Disney super-hero myth of Watanga.

& WordFest was off & running. A Night of Features occurs even when it is not WordFest (or National Poetry Month) on an irregular basis at the Hudson River Coffee House on Quail St., in Albany, NY.