Primary Day in Albany, June 25

This is a day that has been anticipated by many in New York State, but also by me — & my mail carriers. 

Since the “primary season” started up I have received 41 fliers in the mail or left on my door step; the height of the stack is 1/2”, total weight is 1lb. Forty-one is probably not a huge number by some standards, but 1 from each candidate would be enough. When they first began arriving I thought cynically that I would determine for whom I would vote by the number of flyers I received — the candidates with the most flyers would get my votes, sort of like voting itself. But despite what some who know me would say, I’m not that cynical.

I am in the 106 Assembly district; my (former) representative for that district (& neighbor), Pat Fahy, is now running for a Senate seat & the field then is wide-open. There are 6 candidates running for that seat, & 5 of them sent me flyers (I got none from Jack Flynn). Gabriella Romero wins the prize for sending me the most flyers (10), with Dustin Reidy following with 9. The others were Ginnie Farrell & Andrew Joyce, both sent me 5 flyers each; Owusu Anane sent 4, he also has the distinction of sending the largest flyer (8 1/2” x 14”). Most flyers were from all candidates for all offices were 6” x 11”. Romero had the most unusual flyer, one she sent early on that was a color-by-numbers of wildflowers of New York, which I think I’ll save for some Wintry day when I’m unable to get out.

As for candidates for other offices, Lee Kindlon for District Attorney sent 3 flyers, while David Soares sent only 1, which as I said earlier should be enough. There are 3 openings for Albany County Family Court, Judge Ricja Rice sent 2 flyers & Jeff Jamison sent 2; I didn’t hear from the other candidates.

Electioneering is one of many things that make America great already. But enough is enough (or, too much).  So I guess it's time to toss them (except for the Romera color-by-numbers) in the re-cycling bin & clear off my kitchen table. And wait for the election flyers for November.

Buddhist Ruminations by Diane di Prima

I first encountered a poem by Diane di Prima (along with the beat-chic sexy photo of her at a poetry reading sitting on top of a piano) in th quintessential Beat text edited by Elias Wilentz, photographs by Fred McDarrah, The Beat Scene (Corinth Books, 1960) sometime in the mid-1960s. It has been in my library wherever I’ve moved in my life. Over the years I’ve accumulated many of her books, including her great pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Beatnik (Traveller’s Companion/Olympia Press, 1969), & her stunning series Revolutionary Letters (Last Gasp of San Franciso, 2007 & City Lights, 1971 - 1980), as well as a couple of her Selected Poems.

In October, 2010 I saw her read at the Charles Olson Centennial Celebration & was able to get my own photos of her (not sitting on a piano). 

Recently Shivastan Publishing issued a beautiful hard-bound edition printed on hand-made paper in India of a bouquet of di Prima’s Buddhist themed poems, Buddhist Ruminations. The book contains 60+ pages, 20 poems, an introduction by poet Anne Waldman, & many old woodcuts of Buddhas, & other illustrations. It even smells great.

I love di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which you can find at City Lights Books. Jason Crane has been posting his reading of the Letters at his podcast A Brief Chat.  I would much prefer to hear her read her poems, but I have not found more than a handful of recordings of di Prima herself reading the Letters which is very disappointing (she read, among other works, some of the Letters at the Olson Celebration noted above), but you can buy the book (or get it from your local library) & read them yourself. 

For Shivastan Publishing chapbooks & broadsides visit the website or contact Shiv Mirabito at woodstock108@hotmail.com. You can also find it by visiting the Shivastan Bookshop & Art Gallery, 6 SGT Richard Quinn Dr./Hillcrest Ave., Woodstock, NY — the orange cabin in back.

A Bad Year for Poets: Good Riddance 2018

Recently I saw on TV one of those end-of-year lists of “those we have lost in 2018” — mostly celebrities I didn’t know: “hairdressers” who never did my hair, chefs who never cooked for me, musicians I never listened to, TV “stars” I never watched, names I never even heard before. One can’t know everyone, can one? A few names I knew, among them those I hope are rotting in Hell: Billy Graham, George H.W. Bush, etc.

But I am also sad to mourn true stars like singer & civil rights activist Aretha Franklin — which brings me to the plethora of poets who passed on this year, more than in 2017 it seems, some internationally know, many US poet, but all too many local poets died who had graced the open mics & poetry readings we attend.

Sam Hamill, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, March 2012

Among the international/national poets who died were: Ursula Le Guin, Nicanor Parra, Colette Inez, Lucie Brock-Broido, Sam Hamill, Donald Hall, Tony Hoagland, & Ntozake Shange.

The “local” poets who have gone to that poetry reading in the sky include not only those who lived in the Capital Region, but also poets who have read here, including at the Third Thursday Poetry Night, Poets in the Park, or have other connections to this region, &, of course, some of these are also poets of “national” or “international” repetition. These include:

John Abbuhl, physician & founder of the Pine Hollow Arboretum
Jill Hays, a Vermont poet whom I met at John Montague’s poetry workshop at the Writers Institute
Gerrit Lansing, Gloucester poet who was born in Troy, NY & was a mentor to many young poets
Jackie Sheeler, NYC poet who read at the Third Thursday Poetry Night in February 2011
Anne Marfey, activist & author of Shake Hands Touch Hearts
Paul Pines, whom I first met when he owned the jazz club Tin Palace on the corner of Bowery & 2nd St. NYC, a prolific poet who read at many venues here, & was also the driving force behind the annual Lake George Jazz Weekend

Harry Staley, Cafe Web, 1998

Harry Staley, beloved professor at SUNY Albany, peace activist, & poet
Jay Wenk, World War II veteran, active with Veterans For Peace, read in Poets in the Park, a fixture at open mics in Woodstock
Donald Lev, who, with his wife Enid Dame, published Home Planet News for many years, & was a eminence in the Woodstock/Kingston poetry scene
Jim Flosdorf, poet, photographer & conservationist/naturalist
Brio Burgess, poet, performance artist
Millie DiBlasi, poet, pianist, host of poetry venues such as “Full Moon Poets” at Mother Earth Cafe
Donald Faulkner, former director of the New York State Writers Institute
Ken Denberg, poet, past director of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, & publisher of Snail’s Pace Review

Let’s hope that 2019 will be a little kinder — but then, aren’t we all “Future Dead Poets of America”?

Keep writing.

Karl Gluck/Altan Ogniedov (1964 - 2016)

Albany Art Gallery, 2/26/93

That great open mic poetry reading in the sky is getting mighty crowded. I was saddened to hear of the death of Karl D. Gluck, who also wrote as Altan Ogniedov. Karl was an active member of the Albany, NY poetry scene in the very earliest days of the late 1980s, when he was a student a the University at Albany studying Russian language & literature. I used to greet him with the faux Russian I had learned from the Marx Brothers, “Pissanya.”

He was one of the editors of Open Mic: The Albany Anthology (Hudson Valley Writers Guild, 1994) which included 2 of his poems, “So What We All Wear Black” & “Untitled: for Kevin Factor & Mary Ann Murray.” I have a fat file of many poems & correspondence dating from 1988, including a poem he read at the QE2 in Albany (10/22/88) then crumpled up & threw it on the floor. I retrieved it, & others that he gave the same treatment to at other open mics. At a Halloween open mic at the QE2 in 1989 he stripped to his long underwear & a Mayakovsky tee shirt, then to just his underpants, to read a poem about being an exhibitionist; the picture of him in his long underwear was the one used in Open Mic & also appears on my Flickr! site.

Later on he gave me copies of his poems, including an early typed version of Phantasmagoria, with “Altan Ogniedov” as the author. A later version was photocopied, dated 1990, with author(s) as Karl D. Gluck “with Altan Ogniedov.” Eventually this was published as a more conventional poetry chapbook in 1993, by R.E.M. Press with the author as Altan Ogniedgov. In the earliest typed version there was an author’s bio stating Ogniedov was born in Russia in 1964. In the 1993 book version there is this note:

Altan Ogniedov is the alter ego of Karl D. Gluck.
Alton Ogniedov was born after Mr. Gluck’s disastrous love affair and subsequent failed engagement to a certain woman who resides in Moscow. It was this experience that brought about the poems in Phantasmagoria.
Mr. Ogniedov occasionally makes his presence known in Mr. Gluck’s life, forcing him to break into tears at work (as a translator for Russian immigrants and social workers) and other inopportune moments, as well as occasionally writing a poem in Russian for Mr. Gluck who, by the way, has entirely recovered from the “Moscow Incident.”

Albany Art Gallery, 12/7/89

He was the featured reader at the Albany Art Gallery series on Jefferson St., run by Don Levy, in December 1989 & he included in the reading 2 poems in Russian, with English translations, that he gave as hand-outs. His poems were melancholy, angst-ridden (he was in his mid-20s after all), but spiced with sardonic humor & often with references to Russian literature.

In 1991 he self-published a small chapbook of 8 poems, Brooklyn: Brutal Poems from Exile by Altan Ogniedov. Around 1990, after finishing at UAlbany he moved to Brooklyn, but was a frequent visitor to Albany & the poetry readings here. We exchanged a number of letters at that time as he struggled to make his mark on the New York scene. We met & went to a couple readings in the City on my visits there for my job. The most recent poems I have from him are from 2002, after he had married. He & his wife Lan had a daughter, Vivian, then divorced.  In October 2002 he returned to Albany for “7-Year Itch,” a reunion reading at Valentines (the QE2 gone by then) with many of his old friends.

It only seems just that I should end this brief tribute with a poem by Karl (or Altan as he would have it). This is the introductory poem from Phantasmagoria.

Statement of Purpose

I am a poet.

I write.

Poems.

I know nothing

of computers —

never take the easy

way out.

I am a poet.

I write.

Poems.

By hand.

In Gothic Blackletter.

On stone.

By candlelight.

Blindfolded.

I am a fraud.

I scribble in margins

of library books.

In pen.

I avoid bill collectors

and keep my good name

with close collegues

who always have something

“new” to say.

Voice activated IBM’s.

Late at night,

after a hard day

of selling matchsticks

or pencils

from a cup

on street corners

in the rain

I write.

Poems.

By hand.

In Gothic Blackletter.

On stone.

By candlelight.

Blindfolded.

And I have

this stolen slogan:

Quality, not quantity.

We chisel a name

for ourselves

the old-fashioned way:

one crack

at a time.

Hey Karl, Pissanya!

Metroland’s Reader’s Poll Best Local Poet 2015

I was out of town when the results of Metroland’s Reader Poll was announced & the tokens given out*.  Congratulations to Brian Dorn, Mary Panza, Jay Renzi & Elizabeth Gordon, all poets who read out regularly in the local poetry scene.

Usually this category attracts only a small number of votes (one only needs 3 votes to win 1st place, 2 votes for 2nd & 1 vote for 3rd), but there must have been a huge turnout this year. Mary Panza comes from big Italian family & knows everyone in South Troy, as well as has having many customers/clients who conceivably would vote for her (& I note that she also ended up in the category “Best Local Celebrity You’d Like to Date”). In order to beat her votes Brian Dorn must’ve gotten everyone in Saratoga County to vote for him, & maybe he has big family too. In addition I know personally that a number of votes were cast for poets RM Engelhardt & for Gary Murrow, both of whom have been on the “Best Local Poet” list in past years (I mean if you can’t figure out how to stuff the ballot box you haven’t lived in Albany long enough yet). How many other local poets just didn’t make the cut? We’ll never know.

Metroland states that “more than 3,500 readers returned our print and online surveys” so I guess you can say that after all these years Metroland is finally catching on.

Congratulations to all the winners in all the categories, from Best Pizza, to Best Punk Band, to Best Poet. Keep at it. I hear that next year Metroland is doubling the prizes.


* As my father said about awards, “That & a token will get you on the bus.”

Chris Funkhouser, Nedd Ludd & Me

Chris Funkhouser at the QE2, August 1992

I read with interest this entry by Chris Funkhouser, “In audio practice VII: Albany O!” about his early years in Albany. I remember Chris as an innovative & engaging performer of poetry at Albany venues such as the QE2 & the Boulevard Bookstore. In this piece he mentions the issue of The Little Magazine put out in 1995 as a CD-ROM, & how now, in 2014, “Unfortunately, the disc does not function on today’s 64 bit Windows systems, which means [it] is unplayable as originally designed.”

I don’t often get to say “I told you so” but …

In response to the publication of the CR-ROM Little Magazine, I wrote an article, an “op-ed piece,” that was published in the Times-Union on December 30, 1995. In my article I wrote about the (early) computers/word-processors that I used at work & my home computer (an Apple II-E), & how I had a book of poetry on my shelf that was published in Albany in 1904, how easy it was to read the book, but how impossible it was for me to “read” the CD-ROM Little Magazine. I wrote:

I even have a book of poems published in 1824. I don’t need any special equipment to read it. I doubt that in 2024 anyone who still owns a copy of the CD-ROM [Little Magazine] will still be able to read or “interact” with it, given the current rate at which such formats are being replaced by “more advanced” versions.

It seems one didn’t have to wait that long for the CD-ROM to become unreadable.

To be fair, at that time only about 3% of Americans had ever used the “World Wide Web” (aka Internet), while now Internet access is ubiquitous. But also, the original T-U article on the CD-ROM quoted one of the editors of the Little Magazine as saying “the days of reading a pocket-sized volume of poetry down by the river side” are coming to an end, & that hasn’t happened either.

I had also sent this article (by real-mail) pseudonymously as “Nedd Ludd” to a variety of literary & arts publications & it was picked up by FYI, the print newsletter of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

When the Times-Union accepted my piece for publication (I used my real name because they require that & I also knew some of the staff there) they asked me for a short poem which they printed in a box with the article. This is notable because the Times-Union has a policy of not printing poems. Still yet another strike for Poetic Terrorism.

A Valentine for Valentines

There will be in the coming weeks, no doubt, media tributes to the rock club Valentines on Albany's New Scotland Ave. I feel a need to offer my own private homage to this location before it moves across town & creates a new history on Central Ave. For me, an aging urban poet on the outside edge of punk, it has been a poetry & music playground, the turned-out sister one turned to after the demise of the QE2. I'm certain that the word/guitar&drums/alcohol energy will continue, as it always has, from here to there. So this is not an elegy, but just a portal to some of my images of what so many of us experienced at this club. I just want to say how much fun I've had on New Scotland Ave. & how much I look forward to doing it again on Central Ave.

You can check out my reports from poetry events at Valentines over the years, including (especially) the Nitty Gritty Slams, here at my Blog by entering a search for Valentines. Just nose around, you'll find some interesting stuff.

I've also created a special set of images on my Flickr! site that includes pictures from my pre-digital film days & the open mics there (pre-Slam) under various auspices & poetry hosts & even some music events. Not to mention the archiving of the texts lost on the bathroom walls. You can also find more shots of poetry events at Valentines by entering the tag "valentines" in the Flickr! search window.

But, as the old saying goes, "If you remember Valentines, you weren't there."

Prompts? Or …

I'm not sure when it started, this fascination with what are now being called "prompts" for writing poems, particularly for these exercises in writing a poem each day in certain months of the year (which is another subject). Most poetry workshops I've been in, including one's I've led myself, have used some topic or subject or prod to get folks to focus on writing, to get away from the search for the grand theme. Sometimes it's the artwork in a gallery or museum, or a list of words, or a stack of postcards or photographs. It works, & we usually surprise ourselves with what we come up with. Visual artists do it all the time -- you take a painting class & there is a nude model, or a still life set up for you, or you're on a hillside somewhere & told to paint what & how you see it. But then, wise painters mostly leave those exercises stacked against a wall, while we poets in this Age of the Blog, feel compelled to post our efforts online, still wet & screaming. But then again, the reality is that most people don't read those Blogs anyway.

Full disclosure, I've written daily during the poem-a-day months of November (& April), even published a chapbook in 2011 of a selection of the poems written during November 2010 (Poeming the Prompt). But few of the other poems written then have seen the light of day, & even fewer have been revealed in what could only be characterized as strange light. I recognize the usefulness of such exercises, for some people more than others, like the way I keep a poetry workbook & a pocket notebook, & always, of course, a pen. 

Then again, there are some poets locally & online whose work I admire & read regularly who use the prompts to write good poems on themes & topics they deal with all the time.  The prompts just point them in directions they may not have taken, or revive images & ideas lurking beneath the surface (or tucked away in notebooks).  So I guess what makes me uncomfortable about prompts are when I read those poems that never would have been written (& never should have to have been read) had it not been for some twit with a big idea & a website, & marketed for someone sitting around a split-level in East-by-Jesus wondering, "what am I ever going to write about?"

These thoughts were prompted (there's that word again) by reading a list of poetry prompts on a wonderful new Blog devoted to a planned print journal, Up the River, & written by my friend Jill Crammond.  One of her suggestions was to "Write a poem inspired by a headline." Now I've written many poems, mostly political, but some humorous or philosophical or outrageous (i.e., "The Lady Bishop"), in response to reading a news story (or TV news, e.g. "Baghdad/Albany"), but I would not have ever characterized the sources of these poems as "prompts." It was just that -- a news story, a source, an inspiration, I was reacting to something out there in the world that had moved me & then wrote about it. Why is it necessary to tell someone that headlines (i.e., the world around you) is a good source of inspiration for poems?  You either get it or you don't; I mean, the kind of people you have to tell that to probably wouldn't write poems anyway.  When I write a poem about something I read in the morning paper, it is not a trick to wake up the Muse, it is a kick-in-the-ass to me the poet from the Real World. Does one need a prompt when your lover walks out the door? When a child dies?  When a storm hits (think of the boatload of Katrina poems, the stack of World Trade Center poems)?

I agree that artists shouldn't just sit around waiting for that random kick-in-the-ass, but perhaps instead what we poets must do is to train our eyes to see these so-called "prompts" in the everyday world, to become aware of the wealth of inspiration around us daily, to learn to see with what someone has called "haiku eyes." If we do that then when the frog jumps we know that it means a lot more than just a splash in a pond. We take out our notebooks, our pens & write.