Third Thursday Poetry Night, July 18

I’ve got the new keys & we were back in the Social Justice Center for the open mic & our featured poet, Dan Curley. It was a hot & steamy night with only a handful of poets for the open mic, so I granted license to read 2 poems. But first I invoked the Muse, still working on my backlog of gone famous poets, tonight it was John Ashbery (1927 - 2017) & I read his poem “The Ice-Cream Wars” from Houseboat Days (1977). I also quoted him on poetry & writing,

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

On to the open mic. Resident classicist Sylvia Barnard was first & read from Open Mic: The Albany Anthology (Hudson Valley Writers Guild, 1994), “Gallows Hill,” then her “best classics poem” titled “Helen” (read in honor of our featured poet, also a classicist). Alan Catlin was next to read from a new chapbook of political poems at the publisher “Detainee Refugee Camp USA” & “The Room in Which the Detainees’ Belongings Are Stored;” he said that the poems were topical but both written over 30 years ago.

Bob Sharkey has been doing a workshop with poet Bernadette Mayer for 3 years & read an untitled piece in the manner of John Ashbery, a running list of details about garbage, then “Imagining Companion” similarly perplexing. Joe Krausman read — surprise! — 2 poems about growing old, “Ode to Arthritis” & needing a “medi-lover,” then another of the same ilk. I concluded the open mic with my latest addition to my series “True Stories of the Trump Era” “What Makes America Great #33” about what happened at last month’s Third Thursday, the kindness of the neighbors at Lazeez, then “Buttons Not Bombs” to match my tee-shirt that said “Boobs Not Bombs.”

The featured poet was Dan Curley who teaches classics at Skidmore College & who has been showing up on occasion at poetry open mics. He read from a forthcoming collection Conditional Future Perfect, beginning with “The Art Historian’s Revenge” a conversation on a plane, then another poem beginning on a plane “Mannerist Modern.” In “The Night We Ran the Blockade” the poet imagined the folks who didn’t leave when the Great Sacandaga Lake was created.  Friends from Finland inspired the poem “The Star Wars” on the strangeness of language, while “The Chronicles of Yolanda” was about trying to impress a girl in 7th grade with book reports. The complex summaries of “3 Nouvellas” seem that they were more fascinating than the planned stories could be. “Shoveling My Driveway with You” is a poem for his daughter (also a poet, who was in the audience) with a nod to a poem by Frank O’Hara. “Letters to Portinari” was occasioned by a visit to her grave (she was Dante's Beatrice) in the church Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi in Florence & going through letters written to by tourists, the poem written in Dante’s terza rima. He ended with a poem to his wife about whom he said "she is not of this century," struggling with the internet, “Nothing New Under the Sun.” The book should be out in the Fall & I am looking forward to revisiting these poems & discovering others.

Every third Thursday we are at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY at 7:30PM for an open mic for poets, with a featured poet from near or far — your donation helps support poetry events & the work of the Social Justice Center.