2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, May 13

This week we got bounced upstairs but it doesn’t matter, the words still flow up. Nancy Klepsch & I play tag-team hosts here at the Arts Center each month.

& I ended up first on the open mic sign-up, & read 2 new pieces, “Buttons Not Bombs,” & a poem-joke dedicated to Peggy LeGee “A Traney Story.” Rena Ehrlich adds an international flavor, like vodka, to the readings here with her translations of Russian poets, today it was Evgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Here is What’s Happening” (translated by Andrey Kneller), & her own translation of “April” by Bulat Okudzhava. Mike Conner likes to read his seasonal poems, & appropriately enough his first was “May First,” then the descriptive “Summer Calls.”

Harvey Havel is often in the audience at open mics, but rarely reads; today he read the first 4 pages of a new novel of a love story for a crack addict told by an upper-class hockey player. Karen Fabiane’s first piece was titled “Navigating the Space Bar” then another portrait of a woman at a bar “Corner Spot.” Peggy LeGee read her newest chapbook Enter the Shopping Kart Man (Transgirl Press 2018) in the continuing graphics art saga of Moochie the Dumpster Kat (art & lettering by Raymond Lowell).

Co-host Nancy Klepsch wrote a poem this morning celebrating the color “Green” & tried it out.  Jil Hanifan started with the short “Poem in the Overcast” then a piece on urban sounds “Presences.” Bob Sharkey read 2 poems inspired by entries in the recent Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest, “Siege” about the Battle of Malawi in the Philippines in May 2017, then a Cento titled “We Are Delivered by Wonder” composed of lines of poems from entries in the contest. Christian Ortega has just moved to Troy from the mid-Hudson area & read from his book Red Poems (Hispanic Paradox Press, 2014) the poems “My Name & Yours” & “Miami.”

Each 2nd Sunday @ 2 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region we gather for a wide-open literary open mic of poetry & prose — bring your pages to read, free & open to the public.