Time & Space Limited - Gretchen Primack & Randall Horton, June 7

Time & Space Limited is a not-for-profit arts organization serving the City of Hudson & the Hudson River Valley Region with original theater productions and performances, music, art exhibitions, multi-media productions, independent and documentary films, Live HD Simulcasts, youth projects, and special events. Might I also add poetry readings, which brought me there this night. The poetry events are coordinated by poet Karen Schoemer, who also manages the mini bookstore in the cafe space.

Gretchen Primack read exclusively from her new book of poems Visiting Days (Willow Books, 2019) which she described as mostly persona poems in dramatic monologues by imagined characters set in an imaginary prison, but based on her own experience of teaching in New York State Prisons. The poems are short, only a few spilling over to a 2nd page. While “imagined” the stories & the characters are all too real & have their sources in the lives of real men (& women - a couple poems she read were about women visiting the incarcerated).

Randall Horton, who knows from personal experience what it is to be incarcerated, served as editor for Gretchen’s book. He studied at UAlbany, was once featured in Poets in the Park, & has read in the NYS Writers Institute series. His books include The Definition of Place (Main Street Rag, 2006), The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (Main Street Rag, 2009), others, including Hook: A Memoir (Augury Books, 2015). Tonight he read from 3 sections of a new manuscript “#289128 Property of the State,” of the Department of Corrections, Maryland. The pieces were a cascade of the language of incarceration, often like notes in broken phrases, riffing off other writers who had been incarcerated, such as the late South African writer/activist Dennis Brutus, made all the more poignant based on his having been there.

The reading was followed by a short Q&A, which Randall characterized as “approaching the same topic from a different point of view.”

It was an intense, moving & eye-opening reading from both poets. I don’t know what other readings are being planned in this important art space, but I hope there are others in the future as a venue to draw in poets & others who love good writing. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.