St. Rocco’s Reading for the Dis-possessed, November 23

A movable feast, this iteration of St. Rocco’s was crammed in to Urban Aftermath, a used book store with a graveyard for office supplies & a child’s treasure box of abandoned toys, on Hamilton St. in Albany, but then if you have a poetry reading it should be in a small place so that it looks crowded, while the same 15 or 20 people in the Times Union Center would look like no one showed up.

The reading was introduced by a rambling Douglas (“don’t call me Doug”) Rothschild, who was then interrupted by a phone call on a laundromat issue (of course, this being a series named after the patron saint of laundromats).  Alexis Bhagat introduced the individual readers, a poet & 2 novelists.

First up was local poet Ellen Rook. She began with a dream poem beginning “My dreams are like student poetry…” then to a poem addressing Persephone, & one responding to an X.J. Kennedy poem (& the famous Duchamp painting) “Nudes Descending a Staircase No. 2.” A more grim poem was titled “Necrology for Your Post-Apocalyptic Life” that used text from a police report about her brother-in-law’s murder. Others were the ironic “Immigrant Prayer,” a neighborhood poem “Center Square Oblivion,” followed by an imaginative take on the language of an eye diagnosis, & a poem about her brother “Things That Are Strange about Kevin.” She ended, in a way back where she began, with the poem “Unreliable” which she described as “kind of a disclaimer” filled with things & images in great detail, the opposite of “student poetry” & what made her reading so enjoyable.

The St. Rocco series is known for bringing in out-of-town writers. Such were the 2 remaining readers who each read from a novel-in-progress.

Bethany Ides read from her laptop an excerpt of what she described as “may or may not be a novel” (my notes don’t include a title). It was a dreamlike fantasy, apparently set in a hospital with a woman character Donna & a male character Donne, & filled with dialogue & clever, or attempts at clever, banter, sort of like an intellectual TV sit-com script.

Marianne Shaneen’s novel-in-progress Homing was more appealing, a work of what is now called “speculative fiction” (i.e., academic science-fiction). She said the novel includes writing from the point of view of non-human-persons, including not only animals, but also plants, even a stone. However the Prologue section she read from did not include any of that, instead was narrated by a woman on a plane, wondering about “aircraft/animal conflict” that brings down aircraft, & a recollection of seeing a whale in the Gowanus Canal in New York City, a pondering “I” describing what she sees, reporting on history.

The best way to find out where/when the next St. Rocco’s reading will be is to find them on Facebook where you can sign up to get their emails; also, when they send me an email about an event, I will bounce it to the Poetry Motel Foundation email list.