2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, January 8

Back in Troy at Collar City Mushrooms for poetry on a Sunday afternoon, no snow storm this time. It was a short sign-up list as far as number of poets, but no shortage of good poems.

I was the solo host this month & started off the list with a couple of poems written in the past year, “I Have Some Masks” modeled on Joy Harjo’s poem “She Had Some Horses,” then one about an encounter in Saratoga “The Rescue.”

Alexander Perez has been busy making the rounds of the local open mics & apparently has been busy sending poems out since he read poems published recently, from Ouch “Cicadas” & one titled “Forestlings” that also included cicadas, then from a British zine, Lit 202, a descriptive poem titled “In the Town Square.”

Tom Bonville read a poem inspired by an encounter at a book signing, “Her Next Poem.”

Avery Stempel is the proprietor here at Collar City Mushrooms & showed off a new publication, Amongst the Mushrooms, an anthology of poems by local poets, & performed one of his as a chant in the “voice” of a mushroom, “When Will Prototaxites Return?” then another titled “Violet in the Forest” about another mushroom.

Tim Verhaegen regaled us with more of his hilarious tales, this one still being workshopped with his group, titled “Transcendentalish,” was an exercise inspired by Tom Corrado’s work of random lines, leaping from image to image, starting with Catherine di Medici, to her dwarfs, to dogs, on to more contemporary images, & pondering of the past — phew!

Tom Corrado finished out the afternoon showing us how he does it with one of his “screen dumps,” this number 699(!), a typical example of what was the model for Tim’s piece. Tom gave me the latest of his chapbooks of these screen dumps, this numbers 601 to 650, thus not including the one he just read.

This is a monthly gathering of writers at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 2nd Ave., Troy on the 2nd Sunday of each month at 2:00PM — you can even buy mushrooms for dinner if you need them, as well as read your work to an attentive audience of writers. Free.