Writers Mic, August 11

This open mic, now on Zoom, is the granddaughter of the open mic formerly at Schenectady venues, Arthur’s Market & C.R.E.A.T.E. Space. The host is poet Jackie Craven. Tonight there were only a handful of poets reading, but with poetry, as with sex, you don’t have to have a lot for it to be good, even memorable.

I read 1st with my own “personal” experience of the bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Japan, an in-utero poem “August 1945,” then a brand new piece only days old referencing the Space Pen (remember them?) “Technology.”

David Graham has been a regular here (wherever that is on Zoom) tonight read a “new-ish” poem inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” David’s poem titled “Lament for K-Mart,” then what he called “a really old poem” a translation of a poem by Su Tung Po (also known as Su Shih, 1037 - 1101) “On the Birth of his Son.”

Susan Jewell said she has been “preoccupied with laundry,” read her poem “Now that the Children Have Grown” about her father putting up a clothes line, written in response to an image in Rattle magazine in its ongoing ekphrastic contest.

Our host, Jackie Craven, said she has been doing surreal writing, where times of the day are personas or characters in the poem as in the one she read, “3PM” with the intriguing line “we are replicas too” — anything/anyone can be a persona.

It’s too bad this went by so quickly, since anyone, anywhere can attend via Zoom. It’s on the 2nd Wednesday of the month, 7:30PM Eastern time. Find the link on the Writers Mic Facebook page & join us to share your poems.