Poetry Night at Caffè Lena, August 5

As with (nearly) everything there are the pluses & minuses to this COVID-19 pandemic, poetry readings/open mics no exception. For example, I miss the personal contacts, the informal, private chatting at in-person open mics, but on the other hand, folks who have moved & no longer living local to the reading can attend Zoom open mics & share their work. The Poetry Night at Caffè Lena has been continuing with a splendid array of local writers actually reading on the stage of Caffè Lena, but the various & fascinating poets in the open mic are no longer there, & then again the reading runs just about an hour (during which time I don’t have to wear shoes, or even pants), but I don’t have a reason to come to Saratoga Springs (not sure whether that is a plus or minus). 

Carol Graser is still our host & keeps the reading going very fast, which is streamed & recorded on YouTube, which I under stand is better for sound quality than Zoom. 

First up this night was Marilyn McCabe who is a Caffè Lena favorite who has a string of books I admire. She began with poems from her new chapbook Being Many Seeds, which won the 2020 Grayson Books chapbook contest. Each poem is included in several forms, the original, & manipulations of the texts such as erasures, that address our relationship to the Earth. Also each poem includes a quote from a special favorite of mine who has informed my thinking, the French Jesuit philosopher/theologian & paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) — you can bet I’ve bought this chapbook. Science continued as a theme in her reading, including a poem about sitting in a traffic jam & thinking about Schrodinger’s cat, a poem titled “On a Night of Weary Walking,” & an old piece she began with singing a snippet of “Deep River.” 

Elizabeth K Gordon, known on the Slam circuit as Elizag, showed off her new haircut, then launched into the celebratory “On Receiving My First Social Security Check,” then on to a poem about visiting Celia in hospice, what she doesn’t remember & the music she does remember. She read a couple pieces from her still-current collection, Love Cohoes (2014), “The Clotheslines of Cohoes” (inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s “America”), & “This Yes” in her invented form the “cohonna.” She ended with 3 new ones, “Milk for the Tear-Gassed Eyes,” “Guinness to Fertilize Xmas Trees,” &, looking forward, “When We Come Together Again.” 

I often refer to D. Alexander Holiday as my racial consciousness Jiminy Cricket & he certainly was that tonight with the works that he read from other black writers & from his own body of work. He began with Dudley Randall’s (1914 - 2000) chilling “Ballad of Birmingham“ all-to-poignant for today. Then on to

his own work, “We Are Gathered Here Today” from his 2003 book Letters to Osama, “Rest In Peace” (for Amadou Diallo) from I Use To Fall Down (2001), & “The Apologia” from Kith & Kin: A Klannish Klownish Tragik Komedy (2017). He included to my delight his performance of Dudley Randall’s dialogue “Booker T. and W.E.B.” then ended with an add-on, also done from memory, “On Seeing Two Brown Boys in a Catholic Church” by Frank Horne (1899 - 1974). 

I do miss the open mic poets, but with only 3 poets who kept to their time this reading, while giving us some marvelous poetry, it was also mercifully short. 

[I forgot to “take pictures” this night — even with online readings I try to take screen shots. But I wandered through “the world’s largest collection of photos of unknown poets” to find photos I’d taken of each of this night’s poets when they’ve read at Caffè Lena in the past.]