Third Thursday Poetry Night: Jan Tramontano, November 17

Things are looking good at the Social Justice Center: the ceiling is up, but there is still more work to be done. Tonight’s featured poet was Jan Tramontano whose new book The Me I Was With You was published by Finishing Line Press late last year. 

Before we got to the poets here, I invoked the night’s muse, the gone poet Wendy Battin (1953 - 2015). I had met Wendy briefly at a poetry festival in Connecticut in June 2009 & my notes indicate I was impressed by the poems I heard. I heard 6 years later that she had died, but could only find a few of her poems online. In September of this year I was browsing in Dogtown Books inn Gloucester & discovered a posthumously published book collecting her poems, some of her essays, & essays & photos about her by folks who knew her. Tonight I read her poem “At Tanglewood” to bless our night of poetry.

Rachel Baum just started writing poetry about 2 years ago, & responding to the poem by Wendy Battin that I just read, read her own poem “Summer Concert,” descriptive & meditative. Joe Krausman (once called "a flinty elf") is habitually here & tonight read a poem in the persona of a wife of a gambler, in rhyme. Sylvia Barnard is another habitual reader here on the third Thursday, read a recently written poem, “First Snow,” as it looked at 3AM, also in rhyme. 

Jan Tramontano reminded me that she & I first met when I ran the Third Thursday Poetry Night at Cafe Web on Madison Ave. back in the late 1990s. A few years ago she & her husband Ron moved to Florida, but recently they moved back to this area & we are all the better for it. She began with poems from her most recent poetry collection, The Me I Was With You (Finishing Line Press, 2021), starting with the self-portrait, “Woman in a Poppy Dress,” then to a memoir of her father, “Undertow,” then one about her mother in the nursing home, “Solar Eclipse,” & “My Mother’s Silk Scarf.” 

Jan talked briefly about her novel re-titled We’ve Come Undone (formerly What Love Becomes), & her legal struggles with the original publisher, then read a short segment from the main character’s Blog, about the poetic form Landay used by women in Afghanistan & Pakistan (see  I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Then on to a bouquet of new poems, “The Guiding Light,” a childhood memory of her immigrant grandmother watching the soap opera; “Mimosas At the Open Air Cafe,” memories of her father; a couple poems about her recently deceased mother, “Without Her,” & “What Do We Know About Grief?” She finished with poems about herself, “Grandma’s twins: Early Days,” pondering their birth & their future; a list poem, after attending an art class “What I Learned in Art Class;” & “Home,” comparing hearing frogs croak in Florida to bird songs back here in the northeast where she is back home.

After a short break for Jan to sell & sign books, we returned to the open mic & I read my poem for Wendy Battin, “A Ghost,” inspired by her poems in Wendy Battin: on the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters Series, 2020). Another frequent reader here is Josh-the-Poet who tonight read a new poem titled “Unexpected Love” which is really already inside of you. Marylou Streznewski (who will be the featured poet in March, 2023) talked about the recent Autumn, & likes October, read the richly descriptive “A Day In October,” dreaming in color. 

Sara Wiest was our last reader of the night, & she read part of a many-year project of poems about Demeter & Persephone “Demeter in Autumn.” 

Join us each Third Thursday of the month at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY at 7:30PM for a featured reader & an open mic for the rest of us, your generous donation supports the featured reader, poetry events in the area, & the fine work of the Social Justice Center.