Calling All Poets Series, May 6

I started this Blog back in 2007 to document the poetry readings I had been attending in the greater Albany/Capital Region area for years & had been recording in a variety of spiral notebooks & on film. The move to a digital platform also caused me to up-grade to a digital camera to be able to post photos on the Blog. The onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic & the use of Zoom, or other online platforms, created more changes in how I attended & documented poetry events. The purpose of the Blogs, from the beginning, has been to establish an archive of the many literary events in this poetry/spoken word/reading rich area. Of late I have provided links in my Blogs to other sources, including YouTube channels, poets’ webpages, etc. for a broader view to what is out there.

For some events, such as the Caffe Lena Poetry Night, only the featured reader, not the open mic, is live-streamed, but the the link is available ever-after online. Some Zoom readings are recorded, but the link is not shared, & some, like CAPS, the link is available on their website &/or Facebook or other social media. 

Since the folks at CAPS have shared their link to this reading I am including the link below, & will simply summarize the event from my notes. You can see the entire reading by following the link.

The hosts were Mike Jurkovic & Greg Correll. The reading began with the 3 featured poets.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera: Poems Texas Review Press (2021) winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize, and the chapbook Visionware, published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She explained that “tortillera” means a female maker of tortillas & is Cuban slang for a Lesbian. Her poems were largely about her Cuban immigrant family.

Mary Panza was the 2nd featured poet to read & is well-know (notorious?) in the Albany poetry scene since it began in 1988. She included in her reading a COVID poem &, of course, poems about growing up in South Troy, NY.

The 3rd featured reader was William Seaton who read a variety of poems, including love poems, descriptive pieces, some translations from the ancient Chinese poets, & a sound poem playing on the music of the syllables, like something out of the Dadaists he is so fond of.

Following the featured readers there was a string of 18 open mic poets, including myself. There was an announced time-limit of 5 minutes which many of the readers took to mean a time frame to be filled, rather than a maximum time not to exceed, thus instead of reading 1 or 2 compelling poems, they filled their time with a mish-mash of whatever poems were in their reach.

You can find the link to the entire 2 hours, plus at the CAPS Facebook page. You can also find information about the variety of regular occurring readings & open mics falling under the CAPS banner at their website.