Caffè Lena Poetry Open Mic, December 6

Back for the poetry at Caffe Lena, especially for the featured poet, James Schlett, but also for the wonderful experience of hearing & seeing the poets of the North Country (& beyond). Our 20-year host, Carol Graser, started us off with a poem by titled “Bats” by Lynn Unger, the flying kind, not baseball. 

Then on to the featured poet James Schlett, whose reading was live-streamed (preserved for all-time on YouTube). James is not only a veteran of the poetry open scene in Saratoga Springs & Albany, but also the historian & author of A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (Cornell University Press, 2015). Tonight he read from his 1st book of poems, children & bubbles: Haiku on Fatherhood (Red Moon Press, 2023), & discussed his Haiku practice. You can find a video of his reading at the Caffe Lena YouTube site.

Luna Brooke was here for the 1st time, read a poem titled “Dream” that she wrote at age 18, a defiant manifesto & love poem, then read her version written 10 year later, re-titled “New Dream,” a re-write using her previous lines & phrases, a stunning exercise in re-evaluation & re-writing. David Graham said he has been reading Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions, read his answer, “A Charm that Might Work,” to Neruda’s question about November; then read another poem “Elegy for My Father.”

Rumara Jewett read her prose poem, “Christmas,” a memoir of her grandmother’s balsam fir with real candles. Gail, who had first read here for the 20th anniversary celebration, read this night a poem asking “Whom Am I?” then one about the glory & solace of music, “Unfolding My Potential.” Melissa Anderson’s poem titled “Four Years Later I Return to the Scene of the Crime,” about blooming as a young woman, seeing the ghost of who she once was in the Bronx, a poem on changing, from memories on memory.

At that point Carol called for a break, & when we returned she read a poem of memory, “On the 6th Floor of the VA Medical Center.” Leslie Sittner read a poem about her dog being happy to go for walk, “The Joy Place.” Then it was my turn to read & in response to James’ reading of Haiku, I read my linked pieces, “Buddhist Haiku” then my commentary on the form, “The Haiku Haiku.”

Elaine Kenyon, who had read yesterday in Albany at the Poetic License - Albany exhibit, moved me by reading the opening poem, ”It’s not about us…” from the book-length poem Divine Madness (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012) by Paul Pines (1941 - 2018), who had read here at Caffè Lena; later Elaine explained to me that she had been a student of Paul’s in 1997 at SUNY Adirondack & he had encouraged her to write poems, to become the poet she is today.

I hadn’t seen R.A. (Ron) Pavoldi reading in some time; his poem tonight was “FR 232” (Fire Road) a descriptive piece of Maine, & of a gone lobsterman. E.R. Vogel read a poem “to the pretty bartender down the street” that began “I want to write poems about your tattoos…” 

Justin Mitchell read a Haiku that led into “Crystal Castles” a poem with a Xmas witch, then a tropical description “Oh Those Flowers.”

Carol told the story of a time a number of years ago that a poet did a tedious performance piece in which he smashed a TV, which was plugged in at the time. James Schlett was there that night & eventually stopped the destruction by yelling out, “That’s enough — we GET IT!” — which earned James the nickname “the enforcer.”

Rodney Parrott began with a poem about seagulls flying into the wind in Oregon, which is also done by seagulls here on the Atlantic coast, then a long, discursive piece on what the poem could be. Joanne Cronin finished out the night with a piece titled “Lace,” then one about a tapestry at The Cloisters Museum, “The Unicorn Crossing the Stream.

This long-running open mic, always with a featured poet (or 2), continues on into its 2nd 20 years, each 1st Wednesday of the month at the historic Caffè Lena, 47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs, NY starting at 7:00PM, $5.00 — bring a couple poems for the open mic!