Third Thursday Poetry Night, December 15

at the Albany Social Justice Center, where the new ceiling is up & the space is returning to its own urban storefront self. Our featured reader this night was fiction writer & poet Lâle Davidson. Each December I read “Holiday Poet” by Enid Dame (1943 - 2003) & thus she becomes our Muse for the evening. & each December Sanity Clause visits to give a gift of poetry to all the bad boys & girls who read (or not) in the open mic.

But before Lâle Davidson took the mic, we started off with some open mic poets. First on the list was Caitlin Conlon, who had taken my flyer at the Invocation of the Muse open mic earlier in the month at Lark Hall; she showed up tonight to read her poem of memory “Cluttered Intimacy.” Alexander Perez, new to the scene but very busy, read “Underground Man,” a persona poem, eating mossy words, living on solitude. Ellen White Rook will be the featured poet in April, & tonight read “Kissing Time” built around the iconic photo of the end of World War II, now our wars never end, but we can have a celebration each year of the last, & first, kiss. Sierra DeMulder also picked up my flyer at Lark Hall, came here tonight to read a poem about grief & anger over the loss of a pregnancy. 

Lâle Davidson reading at the
8th Step Coffee House, March, 1991

I have photos of our featured reader, Lâle Davidson, from the early 1990s at such poetry events like the Readings Against the End of the World, & when she was in performance groups like the Snickering Witches. Now she teaches creative writing at SUNY Adirondack. She has a new novel out Against the Grain (Emperor Books, 2022), described as “an environmental novel with a mystical twist,” based on actual events in the redwood forests of northern California in the 1990s.  She read a couple of excerpts from that, including one section from the point of view of the trees, using Sanskrit as the basis for the trees’ chant-like language. She also read from the opening pages of her first novel Blue Woman Burning (Emperor Books, 2021), then a short piece of surrealistic fiction, “Price Chopper Resurrected,” from her book of short stories & flash fiction, Strange Appetites (Red Penguin Books, 2021). Poetic prose richly imagined. 

Melissa Anderson read a seasonal piece inspired by Xmas music she listened to growing up, “Remembering Holidays at My Childhood Home, an Interlude for I’ll Be Home for Christmas” combining singing with spoken word. Sally Rhoades has a long history of sitting on Sanity Clause’s lap, this year there is an extra chair; tonight she read a piece written for a theater application, imagining being on an island among the trees. Josh-the-Poet has become a regular here, as well as elsewhere, & tonight read a new poem about women’s empowerment “Scared Girl with Strong Heart.” Liz Grisaru had recently had some of her poems published on the HVWG website; here she read “Improvisation on Reading Breton” (with the intervention of a cat), inspired by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto.

Kate Crofton first joined us when I was hosting an event called The Holy Local before the SJC re-opened after the pandemic & structural repairs; the poem she read tonight was “The Driest Month,” a sensuous contemplation of drinking mint tea in a bath, & remembering her Grandmother. — And that was it for 2022, glad to have been back here for the entire year.

Join us each third Thursday of the month at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY, 7:30PM for a feature reading by a local or regional writer & and bring a poem for the open mic.