Paper Moon Poetry Reading & Open Mic, August 14

I’ve been meaning to get to this place when it was on 4th Street in Troy but it was always closed when I happened to be in Troy. Now it has moved to 6 Brunswick Road, still in Troy. It is a bookstore whose specialty of the house are zines. I’ve published poetry chapbooks since the early 1990s under the imprint A.P.D. (A Party Downtown, All Poets Die, etc.) so I’m very happy to see the return of these gritty ephemera.

This was one of their regular open mic nights, with a featured poet, tonight the longtime poetry trouble-maker & Vice President of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, Mary Panza. Of course I brought some of my own poems to read in the open mic. Eric, who introduced himself as “the idiot in charge,” was the host. 

Mary Panza has been around in the local poetry scene since Tom Nattell poured gasoline on a spark with the QE2 poetry open mic. But she surprised me by reading my poem “Where Were the Professors?” printed as a broadside in 1988. Then she dug as equally deep into her own zine history, including selections from her collaborations with Gina Grega, including Hair Buffet (with cover photo by me!), & Komic Kunts, both from Hair Pie X Press. But she left room for recent poems, “Unbridled,” & “Rules from my Mother’s Kitchen.” She ended with the brief ball cutter, “Hey Dipshit” also from a collaboration with Grega, Bite Me.

In the open mic, Isaiah, read about a memory of the smell of iron & motor oil, & a piece titled (ironically?) “Unspoken.” I followed with a couple pieces from my chapbook Coyote: Poems of Suburban Living (A.P.D., 2015). Samuel Maurice recited from memory 2 poems, “Ariadne” & “What You See” (which he said was “against confessionals”) from his recently reissued book Vibrant Sounds, Colors in Motion (Deadman’s Press Ink).

Melissa Anderson read 2 anti-war pieces in response to “internet ephemera,” one with the intriguing line “Hell, & where is the hand-basket?” Anna Boughtwood read 2 short pieces, “Emergency Contact” & the colorfully titled “My Attachment Style is Cranberry.” Graydon Bush talked about reading “regression fantasies” & read a piece in that vein on the heat death of the Solar System,”The Young Master.”

Juni began with a piece titled “Pill Bottle Pavement,” then a piece in the form of a letter, an autistic person’s response to RFK. Caitlin (or Kaitlin?, I didn’t get a look at the signup sheet for her spelling), read from a hardbound blank book an intricate rant against someone based on sounds & word play. Julian Power began with a piece titled “Reading Comprehension” about how he never learned to read but does knows music, specifically Franz List.

Nancy Klepsch, the host of 2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, read the satirical piece “The Women from Long Island, The Queer Version” published in Trailer Park Quarterly, then “Pizza.” Gripp said he had driven over from Bennington, read about an encounter with a guy outside a bar, & another playing on the term “cold readings.” Eric, our host, was back to read as the last reader, a poem about being a writer, “Fuck Me in the Face I’m Charles Bukowski,” then a long stream of consciousness on art & experiencing emotions.

Paper Moon, 6 Brunswick Rd., Troy hosts poetry open mics every 2nd & 4th Thursday of the month, 6:00pm sign-up, 7:00pm start.