Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, June 14th, 2025 at 2pm
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Irene Sipos
Perry S. Nicholas

Poets Irene Sipos and Perry S. Nicholas 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, June 14th, 2025 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:

Irene Sipos - Irene Sipos earned her MA in the legendary 1970s English Department of SUNY University at Buffalo. She retired from Buffalo State University where she taught English and Writing and was a co-founder of the Buffalo State Rooftop Poetry Club. Her work has appeared in national and local publications and anthologies including Lilith Magazine, Earth's Daughters, The Comstock Review and the New Croton Review. Irene is the author of a collection of poems, Stones, published by No Frills Press as well as several small chapbooks. She is a frequent reader in Western New York and Hudson Valley poetry venues and is a coordinator of the monthly Buffalo Corner Reading Series. She currently works as a writing tutor and freelance editor.



Inheritance

Not too many families regress, I think, as I polish the silver golf tournament
awards won by my paternal grandmother in 1908 and the napkin rings
engraved with family initials that held the linens at every night’s dining table.

Gertrude cultivated renowned beds of pansies, allowing bees to rest on her
slender hands as she dug in garden soil. She stitched quilts as decorative objects
featured in the “Ladies Home Journal”. She was unfamiliar with the kitchen
in her large Victorian house.

All of this, I have been told because she died during World War II
before I was born. I let the polish dry as instructed, then gently wipe
away tarnish with a soft cloth. It gleams now, pleased with itself.
On to the Russian candlesticks, the Kiddush cup, the delicate spice tower
from my mother’s family that I keep atop a bookshelf in my small apartment.

The chore of polishing silver is meditative and slow. Folding the cloth so as
to find areas not yet used, I reflect on the formality of my father’s
upbringing, the ocean journey of maternal great-grand grandparents,
the passage of generations, of geographic and time travels, of inheritance,
the doing and undoing of acquisition, of legacies and fortunes.

-Irene Sipos

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Perry S. Nicholas - Perry S. Nicholas is a professor emeritus of English at SUNY at ERIE in Buffalo, N.Y. where he was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award and the President’s Outstanding Teacher Award. He has published one textbook of poetry prompts, three full-length and six chapbooks of original poetry, along with two CDs of poetry. He has hosted 5 venues in the WNY area. You can see his work at perrynicholas.com.

His poems have appeared in Common Ground Review, Literary House Review, Caesura, Word Worth, Silver Birch Press, Snapdragon, Verse-Virtual, Slant, Feile-Festa, Louisiana Literature, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Chest, The Healing Muse, New York Quarterly, Great Lakes Review, Chronogram, and AHI. His poems have appeared on over twenty occasions in the Buffalo News. They also appear in the anthologies Right Here, Right Now, Resurrection of a Sunflower, Flash in the Dark, Le Mote Juste, and a Celebration of Western New York Poets.

Perry has judged the Just Buffalo poetry contest, the New York State Poetry Out Loud competition, the Word Worth fiction contest, and has been guest lecturer at Villa Maria College, Niagara Community College, Buffalo State College, Medaille College, Daemen College, and New York College in Athens, Greece. He has read his poetry in Plymouth, NYC, Woodstock, Albany, Schenectady, New Paltz, and Saratoga Springs. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on four occasions.

During his recent retirement, he has been interviewed for both Stockbridge, MA Library and the Hellenic American Project for Queens College.



The Letter
        Inspired by Poet Ken Holland

The last letter, not of the alphabet,
but the letter you need to write, you know the one,
to your friends, family, exes and etceteras,

before you bow out, exit the stage, bite
the bullet or dirt, buy the farm, kick the bucket,
give up the ghost, join the Choir Eternal—

you know, check out, as in dead as a doornail.
Compose, then send it before you change your mind,
before Charon HA ron turns back the ferry for non-payment,

before you find yourself lying about its contents
like Bette Davis in the movie of the same name
that reveals the truth about why she killed her lover.

Once you begin your letter, there is no stopping,
and, really, who knows when you might sign off?
You’ll not be around to endure any inquiries

from those who wonder, too late, why you chose
to hold off so long, circle several long city blocks,
before you finally found the nerve to mail it.

-Perry S. Nicholas

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Developing WPS 2025 Schedule - now in-person at the Woodstock Library and via Zoom
All WPS Events: Events

01/January 11th - Guy Reed; Will Nixon
02/February 8th - Alison Koffler; Dayl Wise
03/March 8th - Charlie Cody; Mike Jurkovic
04/April 12th - Poetry Month Special Event (TBA)
05/May 10th - Roberta Gould; Vivi Hlavsa
06/June 14th - Irene Sipos; Perry S. Nicholas
07/July 12th - Lee Slonimsky; Robert Charles Basner
08/August 9th - Matthew J. Spireng; Suzanne Cleary
09/September 13th - Jennifer Franklin; Lucia Cherciu
10/October 11th - Raphael Kosek; Raphael Moser
11/November 8th - Bruce Weber; Linda McCauley Freeman
12/December 13th - Cheryl A. Rice; Tom Bonville and Annual Business Meeting

Follow the WPS on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WoodstockPoetry/ and why not become a 2025 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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