Third Thursday Poetry Night, June 20

Surprise! The locks had been changed & we were locked out when I arrived to set up for our monthly open mic. The sad part was that the locks at the Social Justice Center had been vandalized at the beginning of the month just prior to a gathering to discuss the history of the Stonewall Riots as part of Pride Month events. I had not heard about it but found it out about it later this night from the SJC’s Facebook page. Now, as I waited for folks to arrive so I could explain that we were locked out, the owner of the restaurant next door, Lazeez, came out & we talked of the weather & of locks. When there were about 5 or 6 of us gathered he offered to let us have our reading in his downstairs banquet room. Bad things, like the vandalizing of the locks, happen often & are frequently on the 6 o’clock news or in the newspapers, but it has been my experience that good things are happening all the time, usually unnoticed, such as this spontaneous offer to use this space next door. I like to say this is what makes America great!

Once gathered I invoked the Muse, finally not a local gone poet, but one who had left us back in 2017, the Russian poet & activist Irina Ratushinskaya (1954 - 2017), reading section #14 from Beyond the Limit, written in 1983 - 1984 while she was in a labor camp in Russia due to the offense, among many things, of “authorship of poetry, documents in defense of human rights…”

The first open mic poet up (I hadn’t bothered to set up the amp & mic) was Tom Bonville who read “The Trouble with Sleeping the Night” pondering what his neighbors are doing in the middle of the night (while he is up). Joe Krausman read “Limits” about the paradox of having one thing & therefore not another. Doug Holiday read a poem by the new Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a piece for Audre Lord, “Anchorage.”

John Allen described what he was going to read as “I have no idea where it came from,” a piece titled “For When She Owns the Place,” sounding like a dream love poem. Jessica Rae was on a visit back in Albany, read a political poem based on Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” titled “Real Free, Happy Hour, the Boys at North Woods Lodge” playing on “democracy.” I read my reaction to one of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s concerts during their recent American Music Festival series “Argus String Quartet.”

Tonight’s featured poet, Richard Levine, was non-plussed by the odd turn of events here, but did modify his planned reading as the moment moved him, or so he said. He began with a poem about weeding in his garden “Believe This” hearing the birds say that. “Field Bandage” was a grim poem from his service in Viet Nam, as was “Yankee Street” about returning home from service, both from his early book A Language Full of Wars and Songs; another such poem, one of my favorites that he read, was “Graceland,” from Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018) about seeing a buddy from Viet Nam, he thinks, at Elvis’ house. “At our Door” is an eco-poem pondering what lies before us, while “Epiphany” celebrates the ordinariness in our lives. A poem for a fellow teacher, “Picket Fences,” explores the racism we still find around us; “Late Hour” is from a father’s perspective, waiting for a teenager to come home. He ended with a mix of nostalgia & thoughts on aging (aren’t they the same thing?) “Girls Dream of Toads, Too.” Richard Levine’s most recent book is his Selected Poems (FurtureCycle Press, 2019) which brings together poems from 5 poetry books, a good way to get a sense of the range of his poetic work.

We hope to return to the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY next third Thursday, but are ever so grateful for our friends at Lazeez, 35 Central Ave. for giving us a place for our reading tonight. Please support the people who support us.