Next Year’s Words: A New Paltz Reading Forum, March 16

I’ve added this to my regular monthly poetry events to attend & am glad to be “there”. Susan Chute is the host with Tim Brennan handling the open mic logistics. Susan began with a quote from T.S. Eliot “Little Giddings,” then on to her characteristically enthusiastic introductions, like a breathless poem built with quotes from other poets, which also characterized her elaborate intros of each featured poet, informed by her extensive reading of their work — always impressive. Tonight’s event, like the others I have attended, was well attended on Zoom.

There were 3 featured poets interspersed with open mic readers. The 1st of the features was Saida Agostini who read mostly from her forthcoming Let the Dead In, but started with a new piece, a brief sermon on how to speak of love, on her grandmother’s death. There were poems for her great-grannie from Guyana, to her mother (“I Write of my Mother in the Book of Joy”), on tracing her history (“Notes on Archiving Erasures”), & on her interrogation of Guyanese myths & stories (“The Mermaid Speaks”). Then there were the wild & tender sex/love poems “2 Fat Black Women are Making Love” & “Let the World Be Like My Pussy.”

Ken Holland was the first of the open mic poets of the evening reading a poem titled “All I’ll Never Know.” 

Nathan McClain was the 2nd featured reader of the evening. He began with a poem from a new sequence “Because of History” about working in a community garden plot. He also read poems from his 2017 book Scale, including a meditation on history & race “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in fact many of his poems sounded like meditations, such as the poem “The World is Full” from a forthcoming book The World is Filled.

On to the next round of open mic poets Betty McDonald read in honor of her father, a shop keeper, “Oysters.” Ken Chute who is Susan’s cousin read a descriptive piece, “For a Moment,” about seeing a man with a fish on a bus. Rafael Kosek read “The Fragile New House” on the war wondering are there new ways to suffer?

The final featured reader was Tina Barry, whose work I’ve heard before & have her books Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016), & Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019), & she was a featured poet in 2016 at the Third Thursday Poetry Night that I host in Albany, NY. Tonight she said that her “poems begin with stories,” & began with a sestina titled “Another Server Calls me Young Lady.” She read a cluster of poems about her 96 year-old mother, others, then read some of the prose poems from Beautiful Raft which tells a fictionalized story of Marc Chagall & his partner Virginia Haggard when in the mid-1940s they were living in High Falls, NY, very close to where Tina & her husband live now.

To end the evening there were a few more open mic poets. Roberta Gould read a piece titled “Dear Fish” in which, she said, “everything is fact, no metaphors.” It being the day before St. Patrick’s Day I read my poem “The Sheila-na-Gig.” Joanie HF Zosike read a poem about her mother, who died in January, “The Gloria.”  Susan Chute’s recent poem “The Invasion” was about Russia’s war on Ukraine, which included a line “of course the books will bury us” which reminded me of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, in which he includes the story of Miss Sasaki who “in the first moment of the atomic age … was crushed by books.”

This series now on Zoom has become one of my favorite poetry events. You can find out more information about it, the featured readers, & sign up for the mailing list to get links to the readings on Facebook.