Woodstock
Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, August 9, 2014 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
Alison Koffler
Jo Pitkin
Poets Alison Koffler and Jo Pitkin will be the
featured readers, along with the WPS Annual Business Meeting and an open mike
when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs),
29 Tinker Street on Saturday, August, 2014 at 2pm. Note: WPS&F
meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month at Golden Notebook (Upstairs).
Note the venue - we will be at Golden Notebook (Upstairs) for this reading
and throughout 2014. Thanks Jacqueline, and all at Golden Notebook.
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
29 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.goldennotebook.com
845-679-8000
Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival as part of the Woodstock Arts Consortium
is sponsoring this poetry event as part of the Woodstock "Second Saturdays"
Art Events. For a full listing of "Second Saturday" events, see: www.artsinwoodstock.org.
The reading will be hosted by poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are
free, open to the public, and include an open mike.
*
Features:
Alison Koffler- Alison Koffler was three times the winner of the Bronx
Council on the Arts’ BRIO Award for poetry in 1993, 2000 and 2006. She
was the recipient of the Poetry Teacher of the Year Award from Poets’
House and McGraw-Hill in 2003 and the Green Heron Poetry Award in 2011. Her
poems have appeared in such publications as Iris: A Journal for Women, Heliotrope,
Home Planet News, lifeblood: the woodstock poetry society anthology and
A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley.
She currently works as an on-site teacher-consultant for the New York City Writing
Project at Lehman College.
Praise Song
The dog and me, in our fleece coats,
sere blue street, six AM, a crow calls.
Dog’s trotting well, no pain today
in her old bones. A light or two
in neighbor houses. Gray snow
and salt on Orchard Lane North.
I’m warm in my boots as we cross
the meadow, past twisted cedars,
tufts of ice-rimmed grass. The dog
noses another dog’s tracks in snow.
I’m looking upward and around:
three starlings arrow across the field,
Overlook Mountain, cloud-streaked
beneath opening sky, in east, faint gold.
-Alison Koffler
*
Jo Pitkin - Jo Pitkin is the author of The Measure (Finishing Line Press), Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York (The History Press) and Commonplace Invasions (Ireland’s Salmon Poetry). She is also the editor of Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community (SUNY Press). Her award-winning poems have been published in many journals and anthologies including The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, Salamander, Stone Canoe, Nimrod International Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. After working as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, Jo pursued a career as a freelance educational writer and is the credited author of more than forty books for kindergarten through twelfth-grade students. She lives in the Hudson River Valley in a former public schoolhouse built in 1830.
photo by Howard Goodman
LUNA MOTHS
On the day I realize my father
might be ill, two luna moths appear
like lime-green handprints stuccoed
on the white walls of my office studio.
This husband and wife come to me
from the boughs of my black walnut tree.
While their spread wings cure, eight
eyespots fix on my clumsy, worried haste.
Because the moths only live to mate,
they do not have mouths. They do not eat.
Flying at night, the moonly moths live
for a week. This is all the span they have.
Now, fading by day like scraps of fabric,
the pair rests. Their feathery antennae tick
lightly in June gusts. At twilight, a sheer
single hand almost waves at me as it flutters
across the pale gold disk fobbed firmly,
like a pocket watch, to the deep blue sky.
-Jo Pitkin
Published in Commonplace Invasions, http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=333&a=260
***
2014 Schedule
01/January 11th – Darcy Smith; Tim Dwyer & 2013 Annual Business Meeting
02/February 8th – Gary Siegel; Joanne Pagano Weber
03/March 8th – Marina Mati; Robert Milby
04/April 12th – Dennis Wayne Bressack; Donald Lev
05/May 10th – Karen Schoemer; Timothy Brennan
06/June 14th – Rebecca Schumejda; Theodore Phelps
07/July 12th – Anique Taylor; Sparrow
08/August 9th – Alison Koffler; Jo Pitkin
09/September 13th – Lee Slonimsky;
Sarah Van Arsdale
10/October 11th – Richard Loranger; Teresa Costa
11/November 8th – Lee Gould; Norma Bernstock
12/December 13th – Dennis Sullivan;
Joe Krausman & 2014 Annual Business Meeting
Also, why not become a 2014 Member of the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival?
Membership is a nominal $15 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.