Albany Book Festival, September 17

Phew! 21 literary events spread out from 10:30AM through 4:40PM — panel discussions, conversations with authors, featured authors, “open mics,” even a “tribute,” including a local author marketplace & exhibitors filling 2 locations, even children’s literary activities spread throughout the Campus Center complex of the University at Albany Uptown Campus. How much can an aging, mortal bibliophile local poet attend? As much as I could, including schmoozing & wandering through the great hall of exhibitors, & generally hanging out.

This was the 5th annual event, & I’d missed a few, so I’d made a commitment to myself to be there throughout the day. Like I said, “Phew!”

I started off the morning with “Conversation with Robert Pinsky & Robert Boyers,” around Pinksy’s new book Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, a memoir of growing up in Long Branch New Jersey, a work which he described as about the anti-intellectualism of American culture. As a conversation it leapt & weaved between a variety of topics & themes. At one point Pinsky described improvisation as America’s great gift to the art world, starting with the improvisation inherent in jazz music, inspiring improvisation in writing & the visual arts. Touching on culture in general he said that culture is appropriation, that culture, citing James Baldwin, is every child’s birthright.

Asked about his teaching poetry, he said that 1 thing he asks students to do is to make their own anthology of poems they have liked, not to be graded, but to be used for discussions about poetry. He also suggests to his students (& others, like us) to look up literary journals for the year of your birth to see who the poets were that were being published then.

📚

I skipped the next round of panels to wander the vast Campus Center Ballroom filled with tables of authors & their books & the browsing public, & I couldn’t walk but 10 feet before talking to someone, either book sellers, or other browsers — it was like “Walmart on the weekend.” I came away with 4 books from writer friends, Across the River Jordan: The Journey to Bring My Son Home, a memoir by Holly Planells McKenna; Murder in the Gilded City, novel by Angela Kaufman; One Branch, Haiku by Stuart Bartow; & a lovingly hand-stitched Edge, eco-poems by Barbara Ungar.

📚

I spent the rest of afternoon interlude before the final panel at — surprise! — “Open Mic Readings,” both held at The Orb Stage on the ground level of the Campus Center.

Alex

First it was the Albany Student Open Mic Reading, featuring students from ARCH the undergrad online literary journal & from the Young Writer’s Project program. The co-hosts were Sarah Rucker & Eric Turner. I hung out with Jil Hanifan, much like we used to hang out at the QE2 when she was a student here herself, now Jil is a faculty advisor to these young writers. There were 15 readers, a variety of topics, but, of course, a number of love/relationship poems, descriptive pieces, even a sestina. Troy read a stunning introspective prose piece about being in the Army, built around a psychiatric interview. Juan’s piece “I Used to Believe” was a rap rant complete with stylized Slam gestures, & Alex’s tender piece “The Letter I Never Sent to my Mom” I remember hearing at a recent open mic in the community.

📚

Christy O’Callaghan-Leue, editor of Barzakh Magazine, introduced the Capital Region Poetry Workshop group that began with support of the NYS Writers Institute. Each of the readers introduced the next reader, beginning with Elizabeth Grisau who said she likes rhyme & meter, even included a Sestina in the poems she read, &, among others, a poem with a great title “A Guide to Parisian Elevators.

Caroline Grondahl began with a poem like a letter, & one on a topic familiar to lots of students, “A Poem About Credit Card Debt,” & a cluster of others. One of Melissa Hurt’s poems, “Dissonance in New York” was in the voice of a woman in a Hopper painting.

Jonathan Lloyd was the most animated performer of the lot, with a fairy tale of dragons, & the humor of “The Truth About My Underwear” & “The Man in the Saliva Suit.” Marilyn Paarlberg began with a sound poem composed of funny words, a couple poems on the sacred in the ordinary, & poems about things owned by her grandmother & by her mother.

Unlike others in this group, Ellen White Rook has been at the occasional open mic in the area; she also had a poem/letter, & a poem on Demeter, titled “After Harvest” & I was worried when she read her poem titled “Musica Humana” (the sounds of the human body), but it was a tender piece about her husband snoring — he was in the audience & seemed to take it well. 

Sue Whitaker’s poem “Dying in Pet Smart” was about going to the pet store with her mother before she died, also some descriptive nature poems, such as “Yoga Light” about a river & how things change (do I sense the influence of Mary Oliver among a number of these poets?). Gary Maggio, who was the original creator of this group, read just one poem, “Time Out” on the dead.

The group meets twice monthly & is now managed by Marilyn Paarlbert & Ellen White Rook.

📚

The final event of the night was the Hunter S. Thompson Tribute & it was quite a show. The panel consisted of Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, the Presidential Historian at CNN, &, as the literary executor of the Hunter S. Thompson estate, editor of two books of HST’s letters; William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist & the founder & executive director of the NYS Writers Institute, Kennedy’s friendship with HST began in the 1950s when Kennedy was running a new English-language newspaper in Puerto Rico & HST applied for a job there (he didn’t get it); & Garry Trudeau, the creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, & one of his best-loved characters is “Uncle Duke,” an unauthorized caricature of Gonzo journalist HST. It was a spirited exchange among 3 literate raconteurs, moderated by Mark Koplik, NYSWI Assistant Director.

The conversation was full of anecdotes, some quite outrageous, particularly about what HST would've like to do to Garry Trudeau, for example HST once sent sent thru the mail a package containing used toilet paper to Trudeau, because of the cartoon character "Uncle Duke." Trudeau said that he first encountered HST’s work when he read HST's book on the Hells Angels for a college class, didn’t like it, but he became a huge fan later on, & later HST told an interviewer he had “made peace” with “Uncle Duke.

Douglas Brinkley commented on how well read HST was, on the popularity of his work now, & Brinkley compared the “acerbic wit” in HST’s work to the demeanor one sees frequently on social media today.

William Kennedy described HST as soft spoken in person, & very smart, & talked of his long friendship with him. There is an hysterical account by Kennedy, "A Box of Books: An Exchange, on Matters Literary and Postal, with Hunter S. Thompson" in Bootlegger of the Soul: The Literary Legacy of William Kennedy, edited by Suzanne Lance & Paul Grondahl (State University of New York Press, 2018). As part of the event they showed a brief clip of a conversation between HST & Kennedy from June 13, 2018, which one can find on YouTube. Kennedy said the whole Gonzo approach to writing & life was something new in the world. 

Someone pointed out that this was the first time these 3 writers were on the same stage together.

& I guess this is what this annual event has become, not just a gathering of community & academic poets & writers, but the celebration of everyone who loves literature, books or just a good tale. See you there next year.

Tom Nattell Memorial Open Mic, January 25, 2021

Tom Nattell, Chicago's O'Hare Airport, 1998

Tom Nattell started the poetry open mic at the QE2 in Albany in March 1988 & he is considered by many to be the “grandfather” of the busy poetry scene here. He died of cancer in the early morning hours of January 31, 2005. That evening, which was the last Monday of January, he had been invited to be the featured poet at a new open mic series, Poets Speak Loud!, at the Lark Tavern on Madison Ave., a series that continued up to 2020 when COVID-19 shut us down. This year the annual commemoration of his life took place on Zoom, which ironically made it possible to for many folks, including Tom’s family, who no longer live in Albany, to attend.

I started off the open mic with a reading of a short elegy for Tom “Theology 101,” then on to the open mic.

The first of the open mic readers was Noah Nattell, Tom’s son, who now lives in California, he read poems by Tom, beginning with “Juniper” (Noah’s daughter’s middle name), & “South End” which Tom liked to do as the first poem when the 3 Guys from Albany did poetry workshops in schools.

Bob Sharkey, a frequent Zoomer read a cento composed of lines from local & international poets “Jailed by the Squealing Laughter,” from entries to the international poetry contest he runs each year.

Charlie Rossiter, fellow member of 3 Guy from Albany, debuted a new performance piece inspired by the type of poems Tom would create, “Ode to a Cake Cover” that becomes a gong.

Sally Rhoades, who had been in the Park & was the one who tossed the beret up to the Robert Burns statue, talked about her first meeting Tom at the QE2, then read a poem just written about Joe Biden, “Tears Welled Up,” from watching the Inauguration.

Kathy Zaleski, who had read at the QE2 in the early days, has since moved to Philadelphia, & it was good to hear her read, & she said hasn’t read out since Albany; she read 2 poems she wrote in the Summer, dated not titled, from June 15, 2020, at Washington Square in Philadelphia, a swirl of free-association images, like what I remember her reading in the past back in Albany & Schenectady open mics. 

After some “fiddiddleing around” (an actual expression my mother would use) I eventually got the video & the sound playing for a segment from the 3 Guys from Albany performance of our “Dead Artists Program” recorded on October 9, 1996 at what was then the Rensselaer County Council of the Arts in Troy, 3 tribute pieces Tom wrote, one each for Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa & Franz Kline. Thanks to Charlie & to Jack Rossiter-Munley for making this possible.

Mary Ann Murray is another poet who had been around in the early days of the QE2 when she was a student at SUNY, & is now back in upstate New York; she read an homage that she had meant to read at an earlier memorial, “What I Remember of Tom Nattell,” which led us to a discussion of “what would Tom say…?”

Curt Nehring-Bliss was also around in the early years, left the Albany area in the mid-90s &  is now in the Finger Lakes, read some thoughts he’d written about discovering the QE2 open mic, how Tom’s presence put him at ease, a tender remembrance.

I met Barbara Sarvis via Zoom at Charlie Rossiter’s 2nd Tuesday open mic & was glad she joined even though she had never met Tom, she read a new piece, an activist poem, “Open Your Window, the 5 Senses of Poverty.”

Cheryl Rice certainly was around in Albany in the early poetry scene; she read from her chapbook Moses Parts the Tulips (A.P.D. 2013) “Cranes (for Tom Nattell)” & “Reading at the Q, Memorial Day,” celebrating Albany, the QE2, & Tom.

Christopher Ethan Burton said that this was his 1st Zoom meeting, he began with “A House of Bedlam” a grim description of prison, in terms of the historical Bedlam, then from his recently published chapbook Once Upon a Time in America he read the title poem.

Nancy Klepsch worked with Tom early on particularly with the Poets Action Against AIDS, she read “Letter from a Live Teacher to a Dead Teacher” looking back from this pandemic to a friend who died of AIDS, & “You Know My Mother Was From Corona” (in Queens NY, that is) also written in this pandemic.

Jan Tramontano is still in Florida, & told how she got to know Tom through the NYS Museum education program, Time Tunnel, where Noah & Jan’s daughter went, he then encouraged her to read at the Cafe Web open mic; her poem “For Tom” from her chapbook Woman Sitting in a Cafe and other poems of Paris (JMT Press, 2008) where the birds she hears, & the young couple she sees reminds her  of Tom.

Tim Verhaegen, who does a periodic open mic on Zoom talked about how he went to an AIDS open mic where he first met Tom; tonight he read his poem, ”How I Write a Poem,” a funny stream-of-consciousness about writing this poem with the voices arguing in his head -- as someone said, “a classic Tim poem.”

& then it was time for the finale, I read my poem “Chasing Tom” as I do each year, but now, with the wonders of Zoom I was able to show some pictures of Tom, not as smoothly as I had hoped but something we couldn’t do at the in-person open mic memorials in the past.

Noah wandered his house in California with Tom's artwork on the walls, such as his drawing/poster of Rhinoceros, his poem based on the Eugene Ionesco play. It was like a party ending where people drifted off, we waved, & smiled & hoped for hugs, until the next open mic somewhere, here or there on cyberspace. &, as Tom would say, "May the Muse be with you."

Bennington Area Arts Council 2nd Tuesday Open Mic & Mary Oliver Celebration, January 14

Trying something new this monthly open mic started last month with a tribute to Emily Dickinson & based on that success this night the tribute was to Mary Oliver. Apparently it worked as a few folks showed up for that reason & not to read in the open mic. The host is Charlie Rossiter who also hosts the poetry podcast Poetry Spoken Here. He began with one of Mary Oliver’s poems “When Death Comes.”

I had driven over for the event & read a couple of new poems “The Phrasing Must Change” inspired by a Rumi poem with the same title, then “Red Boots,” & “Reading Mary Oliver While Masturbating” which samples lines from many of her poems.

One of the regulars here, Laura Ellzey read Mary Oliver’s “Watering the Stones,” then one of her own “Intimacies with You is Heart to Heart.” Another regular, Kenn Ashe read Mary Oliver’s “The Moths” & “The Angels,” then his own, “My Knowledge of Now…”

Bridgit Elder read from a series of little poems written on 3x5 cards about being out in the Winter woods. Our host Charlie Rossiter read “Don’t Make that Resolution” which had appeared recently in the Bennington Banner, then another titled “Concerning the Muse,” then Mary Oliver’s “The Poet with His Face in His Hands.”

Charlie offered us a 2nd go-around, so I read my poem “for Peter” to the late Gloucester writer, Peter Anastas. Laura read about painting, knitting, doodling, “The Beauty of Mindlessness.” Kenn read about an encounter with himself one night, then sang his song “Getting Too Old to be Young.” Charlie read “Sometimes There is a Glimpse” originally written for Mark O’Brien’s Haibun project.

One of the folks who had shown up because of their interest in Mary Oliver, Ellen, grew inspired to come come up & recite a short poem “Ah Ha!” which was our reaction to this surprise ending.

But not quite yet, at the very last minute Walt Klinger showed up & read a divorce poem, “So Glad (that you’re not my Valentine).” & that was it.

This open mic — for anything, not just poetry, but all acoustic, no amplification — takes place at the Tap House, 309 County Rd., Bennington, VT, on the 2nd Tuesday of each month, 7:15PM.