Third Thursday Poetry Night, June 19

A Summer (almost) evening with full list of open mic poets, even a surprise preview of Poets in the Park, & the featured poet, Rhonda Rosenheck. But first one must invoke the muse. In recognition of the day being Juneteenth, the Muse was the recently gone American poet, Nikki Giovanni (1943 - 2024), I read her poem “Knoxville, Tennessee” from her book Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment.

First up on the open mic list, where she likes to be, was Sylvia Barnard who read a descriptive poem that began “Now it is raining again…” Tracy Thompson was here for the first time with a poem written in 2024 “Those Mother-fucking Founding Fathers,” a angry rant filled with statistics on the population that those mother-fucking fathers founded for. Elaine Kenyon has been working a project of responses to Stuart Bartow’s poems from his book Green Midnight, she read Stu’s poem “Hearts,” then her poem that riffed on images of drowning & a funeral pyre in his poem.

Tom Bonville read a poem about when he was 9 years old, “Reality,” about writing an excuse for school with his immigrant mother. S. L. Maurice read the title poem from his recently re-released book, Vibrant Sounds, Colors in Motion, a poem of memory & dreams. 

Rhonda Rosenheck was the night’s featured poet, who began with 3 short ones: “On Notice,” next an exercise in form (an American Cinquan), & “Paths.” Then on to more strident, political pieces all written during Trump’s first tern, “Harvest Moon” a critique of Trump, “Beware the Eager Prophet,” “Offer Me Gods” which is a “golden shovel” from a line in Rumi, then a poem in response to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” that she read first, then her response titled “The Nothing-New Colossus.” She ended with what she described as a kind of a concrete poem on the page, with different fonts, styles, titled “I Will,” a tour-de-force on grammar on the tenses of “to be;” a friend had pointed out that reading only the bolded words would work as a poem in itself which she read as a separate poem, sort of a coda.

After a brief break, we returned to finish the open mic list, which I started off with “Acrostic Jazz,” a tribute to jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. 

A great surprise of the evening was the poet Jessica Femiani, who will be reading this year in Poets in the Park on July 26; tonight she read a new poem titled “A Recording of Now.” Austin Houston had read in Poets in the Park in 2020; tonight he read “If I I Truly Listened” (to the Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder). Edie Abrams read a poem about her cats Lillie & Petey.

David Gonsalves read “Secret” a love poem list of kisses. Nathan Smith said that his introspective poem “One Foot in the Stars” was "in the spirit of the recent rains." Our final poet, Malik, was here for the first time (always a welcome event) & read a political piece, “Free the World.”

The Third Thursday Poetry Night takes place monthly at the Social Justice Center in Albany, NY, 7:30PM, with a featured reader & an open mic for community writers — your donation supports poetry events in Albany & the work of the Social Justice Center.