Third Thursday Poetry Night, September 19

Still Summer weather for our Third Thursday Poetry Night & it, seems, the tour bus got lost. But our featured poet was here & a hard-core group of open mic poets. But first I invoked the Muse, tonight Nicanor Parra (1914 - 2018) & read excerpts from his poem “Letters from the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair” that contains the memorable line “Fucking is a literary act.”

My black pen wrote green when Mark W. Ó Brien signed up second for the open mic (but since no one signed up for the #1 slot second became first); he read from his just-published chapbook of Haibun from FootHills Publishing My Childhood Appropriated “My #Dadfession” & the recently written “Old School” a conversation with his father about the math of ancestry.

D. Alexander Holiday read from the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1901 - 1989) “Old Lem” & then Charles Bukowski’s raucous “Poetry Readings.” The lone woman poet on the list was Mary Ann Murray who started with the short “When things break…” then the un-characteristic long poem “Over the Line” about an open mic in Kingston.

Tom Bonville read about a former 6th grade student of his who wrote poetry on the back of bingo cards that were always something interesting about the people who played bingo. Joe Krausman took on a hip-hop style & turned his cap around then read his poem about “Apartment Hunting.” I put a cap on the open mic portion of the night with a recent poem “Prussian Blue.”

The featured poet, Brett Petersen, has read at various open mic venues in the area, & I have been intrigued by his rambling, intricate poems that harken back to the Surrealists’ automatic writing, his “500 Words from the Gospel of Brett Petersen” was a great, & outrageous, example. “Broken Glass Tastes to Me Like Ripples on a Pond” was a more of the same thing, but shorter. A little bit lighter, but in the same free-wheeling style, was “The Entity I Saw in the Woods at Sacandaga.” Others had titles such as “Shedding a Tear for Decoherence,” “Memories from a Lifetime Down the Beach” (childhood memories), & “Truth Boneless in Misery’s Corner Store,” all done in the same random word mix style like an adolescent John Ashbery mainlining espresso. Look for his new book coming out in January.

At some point in the night I realized that every reader in the open mic had been a feature at some point here for the Third Thursday Poetry Night.

Come join us each third Thursday at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY at 7:30PM — your generous donation helps pay the featured poet, supports other poetry events in the area, & the work of the Social Justice Center.