2nd Tuesday Bennington, October 13

 Back to Bennington without even leaving home, our host in his own home Charlie Rossiter. As is the custom here we did 2 rounds, 1 piece in each.

Charlie put me on 1st, & I read a new piece in the first round the political, bragging poem “Radical-Left Maniac.” Barbara Sarvis took advantage of the Zoom technology & used the screen-sharing feature to display Edward Hopper’s painting “Office in a Small City” while she read her ekphrastic poem that was actually about 2 paintings.

Charlie Rossiter read “The Night I Slept in the Leaves” a study of "doing something out of the ordinary" from his book from FootHills Publishing The Night we Danced with the Raelettes. Mark Ó Brien read one of his “spontaneous sonnets” about believing in Satan & belief in general, if you can believe that.

Julie Lomoe’s first round piece was written as a possible op-ed for the Albany Times Union, a personal memoir about the local company Regeneron, recently in the news as the source of an experimental drug used to treat President Trump’s bout of COVID-19.  Jack Rossiter-Munley on guitar, did some nice picking as he covered a Bruce Springsteen piece.

In the second round, I read for the season a pastiche of the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Lane” my tribute to baseball “October Land” from my chapbook Baseball Poems (A.P.D., 2019). Barbara Sarvis followed with the family memoir of her Italian aunts titled “Sunday at Aunt Rose’s.”

In his 2nd round Charlie was accompanied by Jack on guitar & they did Charlie’s version/re-write of a song by Willie Dixon (that Bo Diddly covered) “You Can’t Judge a Book by its Cover” but in Charlie’s version the tag line is “you can’t judge a neighbor by looking at his color.” Mark’s second piece was pulled from his Blog Telluricvoices & was about his older brother’s tree-fort, & on death.

Julie Lomoe read a poem written last weekend, yet another memoir piece about her sub-dural hematoma, “Halloween Lights” that she recently read at the 2nd Sunday open mic in Troy.

There was a brief discussion about writing, about painting & the art/work of selling paintings. & then we all drove home, or at least left Zoom until the next event.