Woodstock
Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, July 11th, 2015 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
Donald Lev
Lucia Cherchiu
Poets Donald Lev and Lucia Cherciu will be the
featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society &
Festival meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday,
July 11, 2015 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 2015. 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.
*
Poets Donald Lev and Lucia Cherciu will be the featured readers, along with
an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at Golden
Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday, July 11th at 2pm. Note: WPS&F
meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month at Golden Notebook (Upstairs).
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
29 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.goldennotebook.com
845-679-8000
The readings will be hosted by Woodstock area poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.
*
Features:
Donald Lev - Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a 6-year hiatus in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. Among his honors have been a Madeline Sadin Award from New York Quarterly in 1973 and a Life Time Achievement Award from the Catskill Reading Society/Outloudbooks in 2003. He was Distinguished Visiting Poet for the Northeast Poetry Center in Sugar Loaf, NY in July of 2012. In 2008 Outloudbooks brought out his The Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002 a sampling from the first four decades of his writing. A chapbook, Only Wings: 20 Poems of Devotion was published in 2010 by Presa Press in Michigan, and a new collection, A Very Funny Fellow, was brought out by NYQ Books in February, 2012. His most recent book, Where I Sit, was published by Presa Press in 2015. His brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of "The Poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 classic Putney Swope. He lives in High Falls, NY, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.
Focus
I’ve been trying to put God in focus
As I plant myself in front of
Fans and air conditioners
Trying to keep cool.
I just got off the ‘phone
With my oldest friend (with whom I hadn’t
Spoken for a good 65 years till just now).
His mother used to pray for my conversion.
We spoke of friends who’d passed, and shingles, and
Families.
-Donald Lev
*
Lucia Cherciu - Lucia Cherciu is a Professor of English at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She was born in Romania and came to America in 1995. She has a Ph. D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is the author of the books of poetry Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag 2015), Lepadarea de Limba (The Abandonment of Language), Editura Vinea 2009, and Altoiul Râsului (Grafted Laughter), Editura Brumar 2010. Her poetry appeared in Connecticut Review, Cortland Review, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Paterson Literary Review, Pro Saeculum, Timpul, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, who is a talented photographer, and her two-year old daughter.
Winter Splinters
She went to confession,
asked the priest for atonement,
and he said, “I saw you
waiting for the bus in that frost yesterday—
boulders were cracking with cold—
and one hour later when I returned
you were still there:
that’s penance enough.”
That night she dreamed
of walking to the margin of town
looking for a tree to cut down.
In her sleep, someone was splitting wood
in front of her window. She could hear
his breath as he heaved the ax,
the bolt as he hit
right in the middle.
He mumbled something under his breath.
The words themselves she couldn’t decipher;
just woke up and found a stash of wood
next to her door
stacked like a sculpture.
Ice splintered into the walls
just enough not to crack the pipes.
("Winter Sprinters" appeared in Cortland Review and was nominated for Best of the Net)
-Lucia Cherciu
***
Developing 2015 Schedule all readings at Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
01/January 10th – Ken Holland; Perry S. Nicholas (postponed)
02/February 14th – Cheryl Rice; Glenn Werner
03/March 14th – Leonard Brown; Perry S. Nicholas
04/April 11th – Richard Parisio; Sabrina Miller
05/May 9th – Christian Ortega; Victoria Sullivan
06/June 13th – Andy Clausen; Pamela Twining
07/July 11th – Donald Lev; Lucia Cherciu
08/August 8th – Kathy Z. Price; Sharon Gannon
09/September 12th – Kenneth Salzmann; TBA
10/October 10th – Barbara Ungar; John Amen
11/November 14th – Marcia Slatkin; TBA
12/December 12th – George Wallace; TBA and Annual Business Meeting
Also, why not become a 2015 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.