Third Thursday Poetry Night, February 15

On a post-Valentines night there was a small, but intense group of poets gathered for the open mic & to listen to our featured poet Kathleen Ann Smith. But 1st I invoked the Muse for the night, sadly the recently gone North Country poet Stuart Bartow. Stu had been a featured poet here in October, 2017 & has published a number of poetry collections including Reasons to Hate the Sky (Word Tech Editions, 2008), & Green Midnight (Dos Madres Press, 2018) among others. I read from his Haiku collection one branch (Red Moon Press, 2019) the Haibun “Fable” that I had read recently to the ocean at Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester, MA, to mark his passing, to which I had appended my Haiku (to Stu):

does it matter to

read poems of a dead poet in

bed or at the beach?

Then on to the open mic, with Philomena Moriarty up first, with poems relating to her practice as a therapist, “Baggage” about the stuff from the past, quoting James Baldwin, then her newest poem “My Mind is Looking for a Problem.”

David Gonsalves confessed that “I don’t know what it is yet” to describe his humorous piece about trying to write what he thought might be a sonnet but ended up too long.

Elaine Kenyon was back this month to read the 2 poems she should have read last month, Stu Bartow’s poem “Lust” from his collection Green Midnight, then her piece “Inspired by 'Lust',” her poem imagining visiting him, but now he is gone, a tender poem of appreciation.

In honor of Valentines Day, I read a couple old love/lust poems, “On a Poem by e.e. cummings” (with a dash of Robert Desnos), then a shorter piece “Gods.”

The night’s featured poet Kathleen Anne Smith read from her book Let the Stones Grow Soft (The Troy Book Makers, 2023). Many of her poems were looks back to earlier time, not so much as nostalgia but to contemplate the images & lessons of the past. She began with a poem titled “What the Old Lady found in the Shoebox,” the a poem where her cat interrupts her painting, & she remembers an old lover (“Green Tee”), & the sad love poem “Sargasso Sea, Sunset.” Then a series of melancholy poems on lost loves, “Among the Leftover Women,” “After our divorce, at our nephew’s wedding, I’ve lost the notebook …” the title serving as first line of the poem, “To Heathcliff, on Finding your Photograph, after Half a Century,” “Before and After the End,” & the vividly descriptive “I Revisit My Childhood Home with an Imagined Grandchild.” She ended with a couple of poems with a more recent focus, “Midnight, after the October Hurricane,” & “2021, Remembered in December” taking stock of the year. There are plenty more of her poems in Let the Stones Grow Soft to savor over time.

This reading series that always includes an open mic, as well as a local or regional featured poet, takes place each third Thursday of the month at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY, starting at 7:30PM. Your donation helps support poetry programming in Albany & the work of the Social Justice Center.