2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, October 8

Autumn in the mushrooms & poems — Nancy Klepsch & I are the hosts for this monthly series — no feature, just a friendly open mic.

I was first up on the open mic list with 2 somewhat related poems (you’ll have to ask me): “The Phrasing Must Change” &, for Halloween, “Witches in the Attic.” 

David Gonsalves’ 2 poems were built on images, “Ember Watch” & Autumn Invocation.”

Bob Sharkey read a poem that he had read at the first open Caffè Lena poetry open mic in July 2003, his poem titled “Names” about the war dead, then leapt forward to a Cento on his favorite poems from this year’s Best American Poetry, an annual tradition, this year’s Cento titled “American Blue Song …”

Over the years Sally Rhoades has made her Aunt Polly (now deceased) a part of our community through Sally’s tender memoir pieces, today on the anniversary of her death a poem about taking the things from her house, “Dissembling.”

Rhonda Rosenheck has been busy organizing workshops & peer groups; she read a couple of poems written recently, a list poem “Not Opposites,” & one written this morning a catalog of (unorganized) stuff in her house, similar to Sally's poem.

My co-host, Nancy Klepsch started with an elegy for a friend “Dear Erick,” then a poem that proclaimed “Queer Magic.”

Julie Lomoe added to her TMI pieces (i.e., dead pets, rats in her bed in her youth in NYC, etc.) with a long, chronological essay titled “Proud to Be a Bra-less Octogenarian.” 

Naomi Bindman read her daughter Ellen’s poem (which became a song) “Grounded,” then picked up a guitar herself to sing about the liberation of running into unreality “Night Leafing.”

Avery Stempel, who opens up this space each month for poetry among the mushrooms, read a poem about this City, Troy, “As a City Grows.” Speaking of growing, whether a City or mushrooms, Avery announced a GoFundMe effort to raise money to buy this building, to continue to farm his mushrooms & foster poetry thru providing an open mic outlet for the poets of Troy & beyond to try out their work. Give if you can.

So for now the 2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose continues each month here at Collar City Mushrooms, 333 Second Ave., Troy, NY — 2 poems or 5 minutes max. of prose. & you can buy mushrooms to bring home.

 

Caffè Lena Poetry Open Mic, October 4

Seems like I was just here, as I was, for the 20th Anniversary for the Poetry Open Mic, just a little over a week ago. We were back this night for the next 20 years.

Our host, as always, Carol Graser, began with a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil titled “Baked Goods.” 

Then on to the featured reader, tonight Ellen Rook whose book Suspended was recently published by Cathexis Northwest Press. She began with what she described as one of the 1st poems she had published, about getting lost going home with her mother. She went on to read a half dozen of poems from Suspended, sprinkled in with a few others. But if you want the full experience of her reading, which I recommend, you can find it on the Caffè Lena YouTube channel.

The open mic is not live-streamed & therefore not available on YouTube, so you are just going to have to trust me on from here on. Also, please note that since I was not able to get a copy of the sign-up sheet I can’t verify the correct spelling of the names of the readers that I am not familiar with.

First on the open mic list was Mary Anne Rockwell with one of her own, “Conundrum” then one by Denise Duhamel “Anti-Christ.” 

Jackie Craven read from a series of “survivalist prose poems, “The Predatory Chain” & “Window Treatment.” Mark Clitch(?) read a rhyming piece from his laptop “Seashore.” Rachel Baum shared a poem titled “Look Down at Coyotes with Me” saying she had been attacked by a dog back in May, then a poem based on a train ride to NYC “Waiting for Fog to Lift.” David Graham read a magic poem “Ask the Wind if It’s Weary.”

Dawn Marar read a moving piece, “The Man Stitches,”  he stitches her heart with his voice. Justin Mitchell was reading in public for the first time ever! a piece in rhyme “Permanent Change,” & the descriptive “Fall Morning.” Jean Ungar was another 1st timer (i.e., virgin) with a couple of rhyming pieces, “The Eyes of Winter” & “Ancient Forest.” I jumped the gun on Halloween with my poems “The Witches in the Attic” (for an anniversary of sorts) & “This is Not Trick or Treat.”

Mark G. finished off the night with a funny Haiku, his first ever written, from high school, then a piece on the extinct Dodo bird, “What Do a Bird Do?,” then snuck in another Haiku before he was dragged off the stage.

It’s been happening here at Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs for 20 years now, so the odds are pretty good you will find us here next month on the 1st Wednesday, with a featured poet at 7:00PM (sharp!), followed by an open mic — sign up for the open mic at 6:30PM — $5.00 (cheap!). 

Salon Salvage, September 30

Apparently this was #13 (!) in this monthly series in Troy at Weathered Wood on Second Street. It is coordinated & hosted by Matthew Klane & Amie Zimmerman, who split the duties for the intros. This night, 3 poets & a filmmaker. 

The first reader was Jennifer Nelson who read from her book Harm Eden (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), with poems mostly on political themes, “Disband the Police” complete with quotes & attributions, followed by “I Hope to Be an Unsettler” noting that today in Canada is “National Day of Reconciliation” with first peoples. Other poems were titled “Don’t Kill Yourself,” “The Belief” & “Laws” (for a friend, an academic & singer).

Stephanie Cawley, from Philadelphia, read just one poem titled “To the Lighthouse” (& yes there was a reference somewhere along the line to Virginia Woolf), like a letter to a friend (“you”) about their infatuation, feelings, desires, & plenty of sex, the lines sounding stacked up, like the way she read it. If I still smoked I would have needed a cigarette afterwards.

Alina Pleskova, who was also from Philadelphia, but was born in Russia, has read in Albany in August at The Linda (see my Blog). As at that earlier reading, she read from her recent book from Deep Vellum Press Toska. Many of her poems are long, discursive, grammatical. “Take Care” mixed robots, immigration, eco-issues, with “take care” as a sign-off. Her poem “Meanwhile,” according to her, had been referenced in Stephanie Cawley’s poem (I guess I missed it), but the similarities are the obsessive talking about themselves in both of their poems. The other poems she read were “Sacred Bath Bomb” &, as she said, the only love poem in the book, “Elusive Black Hole Pair.” 

The final piece of the night was film titled Decantation, by Kalpana Subramanian, a melange of sounds of water flowing, the sea, wind, images of the sea, hands under water, even of a box of film leader, as well as old film clips, images of military operations, hands, the sound of a sitar. Somewhat like a poem built on a string of images that the reader is tasked with finding the links, if one is looking for what we used to call “meaning.”

This series continues on the last Saturday of the month at Weathered Wood, 13 Second Street, Troy, NY — find Salon Salvage on Facebook — come for the poetry, get ideas for unique home & garden decor. 

20th Anniversary of Caffè Lena Poetry Part 2: Featured Poets, September 23

After the conclusion of the open mic portion of the 20th anniversary celebration, there was a long enough break for me to have dinner nearby at Hattie’s with the always lovely & talented Mary & Sally. Then back into Caffè Lena for the featured poets. 

A land acknowledgement & blessing was made by the new Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate, Joe Bruchac, with his native flute, Joe no stranger to the Caffè Lena stage, both as a featured reader & as a participant in the open mic.

Barbara Ungar, poet & professor, introduced the first reader, Sarah Giragosian, with remarks that included a reference to the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962), about whom not much is heard these days. Sarah began with a couple of new poems, “Found at Large” & “Gift of Ammonite.” Then poems from Queer Fish (Dream Horse Press, 2017),  “The Fish Beneath the Portuguese Man of War,” “All at Sea,” & “The Decorator Crab"), eco-poems, some in the persona of the fish. & from The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) the chilling title poem, then “Mammoth Resurrection,” & “Wasps Nest.” Sarah has read her work here at Caffè Lena previously. I cherish her books & always look forward to a next one.

The next reader, whose work I was not familiar with, Roger Wyze Smith, was introduced by Nancy White, who is the President of The Word Works, which is publishing soon Smith’s new book Radiation Machine Gun. The poems he read from the book were a blending of poetry & memoir read in a spoken word style, included a conversation with his daughter about cancer & racism & death, another on radiation therapy, & a conversation with his father who had died earlier this year. He included a new piece titled “Black Mirrors,” then one about a snowman titled “Random Evening in January” from his 2015 book Chambers of a Beating Heart.

The final reader of the evening was Martín Espada, whom I had seen read in the past a couple of times at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C. He was introduced by activist, poet, professor Victorio Reyes Asili, who described Espada as a Boriqua poet & a poet of hope. Espada read largely from Floaters (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021) which was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize & the National Book Award in 2021. The title poem is a grim piece in which he proclaims the names of immigrants who had drowned trying to get to the USA; the tender “Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window” is a sonnet to his wife when they married; “Flan” evokes the the blackout in NYC & is for his friend the poet Jack Agüeros; & poems for his father, the documentary photographer Frank Espada (1930 - 2014), “Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn” & “Letter to my Father.” In addition he read a tribute to the late Roberto Clemente “Big Bird Died for your Sins,” a new poem “The City Wears a Coat to Bed,” & “Love Song of the One-Eyed Fish.” His delivery was bardic as befits his topics, his deep, sonorous voice adding to his presence.

The Caffè Lena Poetry Night continues to regularly draw in poets for the open mic, & the local & regional poets that Carol Graser invites as features attest to the rich variety of the poetic voice in this area, so that bodes well for this event to continue on for many more years. As for the last 20 years, it was a job well done.

The Caffè Lena Poetry Night continues on the 1st Wednesday of the month, at 47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs, 7:00PM, doors open for sign-up for the open mic at 6:30.

20th Anniversary of Caffè Lena Poetry Part 1: the Open Mic, September 23

Carol Graser, the forever host 

It was all day at Caffè Lena to celebrate 20 years of the Poetry Open Mic, with a 4-hour open mic from 2:00PM to 6:00PM, followed by a reading at 8:00PM by Sarah Giragosian, Roger Wyze Smith & Martin Espada. For a bit of the history of how poetry got here & how host Carol Graser got it started see my previous Blog Caffè Lena: A Look Back 20 Years (& Beyond)  Also, I’ve attached an image of my notes from the first poetry open mic that was held on the 1st Wednesday of September, 2003, a schedule that continues to this day.

My notes from 9/3/03

The sign-up sheet for the day’s event was managed online by the techies at the Hudson Valley Writers Guild website which meant I could prepare myself for taking notes by printing it out; on the other hand, the program listed the first name & initial of last name only. But I’ve been in this movie before (a Bob Dylan reference) & know that such marathon lists change all the through the event, & know the players enough to be able to guess correctly their last names. At the end there were 40 actual readers, broken up by welcome breaks.

Among the readers this day were those who had been at that first “test” reading back in July, 2003, including the coordinator of this series all these years Carol Graser, the host for today Mary Panza, & Albany poets Don Levy, Bob Sharkey, & Me (Dan Wilcox).

Other readers included past featured readers or regular readers at the open mic Rachel Baum, Brian Dorn, Lin M., Judith Prest, Michael C., Lucyna Prostko, Marea Gordett, Wendy Daniels, Betsy Lynch, Kristen Day, Jay Rogoff, Suzanne Rancourt, Rumara Jewett, Jackie Craven, Jan Tramontano, Leslie Neustadt, Sally Rhoades, Susan Oringel, Susan Kress, Elaine Kenyon, Lee A. Gooden, Kathleen McCoy, Matthew Klane, Shira Dentz, Katrinka Moore, Tracy Thompson, Todd Fabozzi, Dawn Marar, Rhonda Rosenheck, & Margot Malia Lynch Steiner.

Gail - "1st time on stage"

& it wouldn’t be a true Caffè Lena open mic without some first-timers (i.e., “virgins”), including Kimberly F., Linda S., Rebecca, Justin Dazzle, Russell Z. (“I’m brand new here”), & Gail (“1st time on stage”) — which is what any open mic event is all about.

The Caffè Lena Poetry Open Mic continues each 1st Wednesday of the month at Caffè Lena, 47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs, NY, with a featured poet at 7:00PM, followed by the open mic for community poets, $5.00 admission.

Third Thursday Poetry Night, September 21

Susan Comninos was the featured poet with a half-dozen of our regular attendees on the open mic list. This night’s Muse was not so much a literary poet but a poet of social justice, Archie, as he was known in the community with his homemade sign, “Stand Against Racism,” who recently went to that eternal peace vigil in the sky on August 14. During the open mic I read my poem “Communion of Saints” the most recent line added being, 

“Veteran Saint Archie, whose one name was enough, may our stands against racism erase it from our streets.”

First on the sign-up list was David Gonsalves, his first poem about being surrounded by the magic of what’s around him, then one titled “Ghost Song.” 

Ellen Rook had been the featured poet here back in April where she read from her just published book Suspended (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2023); this night she read a poem from an epistolary poetry project she had joined “Visiting Hours” about going to a nursing home which so often raises such deep thoughts.

Tom Bonville was here again with a poem that contained some writing advice, “Don’t Stop,” then a piece titled “River Eternal” about where the water comes from & the meaning it gives to our lives.

Sylvia Barnard is often first on the list but tonight ended further down the list; she read a piece from a recent trip to England with her daughter to the shrine for the English Saint Thomas of Canterbury (Thomas à Beckett).

Sadly at this point the batteries in my recorder went dead & Joan Goodman’s reading of 2 pieces went off into the night, as did the recording of my poem, & those of the featured reader. But as for the featured reader I had her book to consult.

Susan Comninos was the night’s featured reader & read largely from her recently published collection of poems Out of Nowhere (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) including the litany “Our Father, Our King,” the news-inspired poem of nudists at the Louvre “Naked Admission: a fantasy,” what she described as a "failed" ghazal “Creed: a still life” and the meditative “Commitment.” Having published her first book she has begun to work on the next & shared with us a quartern, a French form divided into, of course, 4 parts, her poem titled “A Body Breaks Up With Its Woman.” 

We gather each third Thursday of the month at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany, NY at 7:30PM for a poetry open mic with a featured reader -- your $5.00 donation (more or less) supports poetry events & the work of the SJC.

Baseball & Beyond, September 17

As the notice said, “… poems about deep space, the exit velocity of home runs leaving the stratosphere, neutron all-stars, and who knows what else,” a poetry reading at the Guilderland Public Library by Louise Grieco, Mikhail Horowitz & Tim Wiles on a Sunday afternoon. 

Tim Wiles is the Director of the Guilderland Public Library, once worked at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, & has been known to don an old-time baseball uniform to recite “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer. Mikhail Horowitz has a long history of mixing baseball with poetry & humor from his 1978 City Lights Books Big League Poets, up thru the 2019 Ancient Baseball (Alte Books), art-history & baseball humor. Louise Grieco had poems included in Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (SIU Press, 2002) edited by Tim Wiles, & High Fives: 50 Cinquains (Alte Books, 2022) in collaboration with Mikhail Horowitz.

For this day’s reading, each of the poets alternated poems thru baseball poems, then on to poems about the cosmos. Leading off was Louise Grieco with “It Ain’t Over,” then a planetary take on the old baseball refrain “Tinker to Evers to Chance” (from a 1910 poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”), Louise’s poem titled, “Saturn to Venus to Mars” (after all, there are 9 planets!). Other poems that she read were “Jeter in the Air,” “A Baseball Elegy,” “Lines to [or too?] Short” (about the diminutive short-stop Phil Rizzuto), “Ash” (baseball bats & their future), & a pair of poems exploring exploding stars & the formation of gold. 

I had first met Mikhail Horowitz at a Readings Against the End of the World in the late 1980s, then would often cross paths with him at readings in Woodstock & elsewhere in the mid-Hudson. His work is infused with a mix of humor, eruption & whimsy. He began with a prose poem “Pearly Babe” imagining Babe Ruth in Heaven — & Outer Space; then on to thoughts about “Baseball in the 22nd Century,” & he, too, with a reference “Tinker to Evers to Chance” somehow working in Seinfeld, & a piece titled “All that Remains of Josh Gibson” (a star of baseball’s Negro League). A poem titled “Summer Sonnet” was followed a “spell acrostic" on the name "Ty Cobb." Then into deep Space to the constellations “Winter Night,” & poems on black holes. Later he teamed up with Louise for a duo of poems on the creation of the Universe, her poem was titled “Divine Comedy,” his the diagrammatic “The Rube Goldberg Theory of the Creation of the Universe.”

Tim Wiles began with a poem he had just written this morning, “After St. Edna” (i.e., Edna St. Vincent Millay), a baseball poem of remembrance, then a sprightly word play “12 Ways of Looking at Baseball, then “Overheard at Doubleday Field,” on to a baseball Haiku about pitcher Don Sutton. His poem “Why Baseball is Like Your Father” is one of those poems you want to hear again, then another poem set in Cooperstown, “Early Evening in Doubleday Field."

For those of you interested in baseball poems, I suggest that you visit the Blog Baseball Bard maybe even send them one of your own baseball poems.

To cap off the afternoon, Louise Grieco & Mikhail Horowitz read from their collaborative chapbook High Fives: 50 Cinquains (Alte Books, 2022). The cinquain had its origins in Medieval French poetry, but in the early 20th Century the poet Adelaide Crapsey created an American cinquain of 5 lines, 22 syllables. Both poets read 3 cinquains each, Louise’s had titles, “Past Time” (on baseball), “Star Exchange,” & “December 31, 2020.” Mikhail’s were untitled, one on black holes, another references the famous Basho Haiku (frog jumping into a pond), & deer run over by a Rabbit. All great fun & profundity.

For this interested in the conjunction of baseball & poetry, see my previous Blog on this year's National Baseball Poetry Festival that was held in Wooster, MA.