Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 at 2pm
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Lee Slonimsky
Robert Charles Basner

Poets Lee Slonimsky and Robert Charles Basner 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, July 12th, 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.

*
Features:

Lee Slonimsky - Lee Slonimsky, a friend since childhood of the great American poet Robert Charles Basner, has published nine books of poetry in the US and, recently, six more in translation in Greece, Italy and Poland. His most recent American book is Bright Yellow Buzz from Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2022, and overseas, the just published Pitagora Nel Regno Animale (Pythagoras in the Animal Kingdom), translated into Italian by the playwright and scholar Enrico Bernard. As a day job he manages an investment fund, Green Hills Partners LP, which is dedicated to protecting the lives of animals. He lives in Red Hook, NY with his wife Carol Goodman, the (twice) Mary Higgins Clark award winning mystery novelist.


photo by Franco Vogt

Concentricities

You see the world through eyes so tiny that
a leaf’s an ocean or, at least, a lake.

You are Sir Wing Flash, flitting royal gnat
and maybe you will never write a book
or draw a sketch, or sing except for buzz
but you’re my hero, nonetheless.

                                              A breeze, a gust,
and now your whirl is gone, replaced
by empty sunlight. Here, amidst birch trees,
I ponder your quick-winged, spin legacy;
fine master of blue air, big crowd, flight pace.

I have a sense you know geometry!

Your concentricies in air amaze.

-Lee Slonimsky

*

Robert Charles Basner - Robert Charles Basner, M.D., Columbia University Emeritus Professor of Medicine, is heir to the farms, fields, fervents, and foliages of place slipping slowly, shyly, off the Catskill Mountains. An internationally recognized physician and biomedical researcher, educator, editor, and author, he continues to serve as a Special Lecturer in Medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Basner also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the City College of New York, where he studied composition and conducting.

For Medicine, Memoriam, his first collection of poems, is published by Spuyten Duyvil Press (2025).



In Winter Landscape
-after Lin Hukui’s ink and color on paper, “Dancing Cranes”

The Cranes are in winter landscape, without
winter, without landscape. They know their North;

they must trust their depict. They are whelmed
with whiten fined by black, ruffling unfinished flight.

Their wind-stalk sinks frigid in river’s reflect; they
stand on stars. Out of the great of gray, their snow-

ward hushed red hooded eyes absence. They balance
by hoisting cold’s coalesce, as haiku does. And when

for dream they dance, for music they can only muse,
their death imaginings are less mistaken than are ours.

-Robert Charles Basner

*

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-"Remembering Poets Passed"
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.

(click here to close this window)