Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, March 9th, 2024 at 2pm
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Ethan Sirotko
Janet Kaplan

Poets Ethan Sirotko and Janet Kaplan will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets in person and streamed via Zoom on Saturday, March 9th, 2024 at 2pm(eastern).

WPS meetings are held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month.

Woodstock Library
5 Library Lane, Woodstock, NY 12498
(845)679-2213
www.woodstock.org

The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike. Thank you.

The reading will be hosted by poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.

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Features:

Ethan Sirotko - Ethan Sirotko was born and braised in the Bronx. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of SUNY Binghamton and attended Boston College Law School. He has written several books of poetry (Aching In The Nebulae; and Searching For The Butterfly); plays (The Bachelor Party; An Even Three; and The Last Act); screenplays (Real Escape; etc); flip-books (Love/War; and Seriously/Humor Me) and a book of short stories (Distant Selves). He studied acting at HB Studio; the Gene Frankel Media Center For Performing Arts (MCPA); the George Morrison Studio; and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He has acted in several off-off Broadway plays and created a new definition of the micro-second when he appeared on the tv soap opera, Search For Tomorrow. He is a photographer and artist and created the photo-card company, ESPhotos. He is also an undercover trial attorney. He aspires to be the past president of the Society For The Preservation of Gravity. His latest play, The Last Act was a finalist in the international playwriting contest held by the National Yiddish Theater - Folksbiene.



Wings Of The Beast

Because it is this way
With us
Each a separate wing
Dipped in honey and vinegar
On either side of the beast aloft
Panicking when the other wing
Stops its flapping
Too dazzled by sun of self
To restrain ourselves
To learn whisper glide
Sustain notes easy
In mercury sky
Sweet with abstinence
Matchless compassion
Our lives braided together
By flight
Heightened fear aloft
Looking down
Beat down
Tread upon
Souls
I try to get
To your side
But the beast plunges
When we’re in total agreement

-Ethan Sirotko

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Janet Kaplan - Janet Kaplan's poetry books are Ecotones (2022; shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and published by The Black Spring Press Group Ltd., London), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (2011; Sandeen Prizewinner from the University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier’s Country (2003; Poets Out Loud Prizewinner from Fordham University Press), and The Groundnote (1998; Alice James Books). Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, and fellowships and residencies from the VCCA, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies (An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2007; Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James, Alice James Books, 2012; and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, 2017). She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and as a member of the creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edited the digital literary magazine AMP. She is currently an editor and co-publisher of PB&J Books, a cooperative literary press. Forthcoming from PB&J Books in 2024 is & Then, a prose abecedarian in deadpan.



from Ecotones:

Internet Chronicle

Sometimes the internet’s a mental hospital, zeroes in one wing, ones in another. You can’t imagine there’s anything meaningful. But that’s family.

I dreamt about the Internet. Far vhus is diss hinternet? Grandma asked. We can go there if you like. She never came back.

Death, text me here!

I thought about the Carl Sagan movie, how they download instructions for a space module and Jodie Foster’s character gets to see her father again—or a digitized him. The others think she’s mental.

A voice was left with two digits, and with them it wrote to infinity. There’s nothing else it can teach us, not with any variation of the sequence.

Lost, crazy, I follow the digits, babbling like a baby. To connect! To be inter! To be net!

Friends and faces, pages and birds. Grandma preferred her snake plant, her fine-toothed comb. I inherited them although I wanted her zeroes and ones. Hers in particular. I want them ad infinitum. Connected, as promised.

-Janet Kaplan

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Developing WPS 2024 Schedule - now in-person at the Woodstock Library and via Zoom
All WPS Events: Events

01/January 13th - Patrick Hammer, Jr.; Robert Langdon
02/February 10th - Lissa Kiernan; Mary K O'Melveny
03/March 9th - Ethan Sirotko; Janet Kaplan
04/April 13th - Poetry Month Special Event ("Unbroken Circle")
05/May 11th - Roger Mitchell; Steve Clorfeine
06/June 8th - Barry Wallenstein; Richard Levine
07/July 13th - Karen Schoemer; Martin Steingesser
08/August 10th - Craig Hancock; Marnie Andrews
09/September 14th - Christopher Heffernan; Jerrice J. Baptiste
10/October 12th - Joann Deiudicibus; Thomas Festa
11/November 9th - Judy Lechner; Teresa Costa
12/December 14th - H.R. Webster; Ken Holland and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2024 Member of the Woodstock Poetry Society?

Membership is $20 a year. (To join, send your check to the Woodstock Poetry Society, P.O. Box 531, Woodstock, NY 12498. Include your email address as well as your mailing address and phone number. Or join online at: www.woodstockpoetry.com/become.html). Your membership helps pay for meeting space rental, post-office-box rental, the WPS website, and costs associated with publicizing the monthly events. One benefit of membership is the opportunity to have a brief biography and several of your poems appear on this website.

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