Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, February 2nd, 2019 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)

Note: Due to Major Renovations at Golden Notebook
Our meeting is being held on the 1st Saturday this month

Leny Brown
Roger Mitchell

Poets Leny Brown and Roger Mitchell will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday, February 2nd, 2019 at 2pm.

Note: WPS meetings are usually held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month at Golden Notebook (Upstairs). Due to Major Renovations at Golden Notebook, our meeting is being held on the 1st Saturday this month.

Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
29 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.goldennotebook.com
845-679-8000

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:

Leny Brown -
Leny Brown left the Us
On May 1st 1970
Fleeing the intolerant rejection
Of the best minds
Of my generation
Some might remember this day
As the day american soldiers in the Ohio national guard
Shot and killed 4 students
At Kent State university!

44 years later May 1
We arrived back in Woodstock
Looking to see if there remained
Anything of a Spirit that inhabited Woodstock
In the 60's
Imagine my humbling surprise
To realize that Spirit
Is and will always be
Eternal

Here I be here now
To be guided
In thought and action
By that Spirit

Brolen 18-December 2019



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Roger Mitchell - Roger Mitchell is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Reason’s Dream. His new and selected poems, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, was published by Ausable Press in 2008. It won the Adirondack Center for Writing's "Readers' Choice Award" the following year. The University of Akron Press published his two previous books, Half/Mask, in 2007 and Delicate Bait, which Charles Simic chose for the Akron Prize, in 2003. His work also appears in The Zoo of the New: Poems to Read Now, Ed. Don Patterson and Nick Laird, a new anthology in the Penguin Modern Classics series. Mitchell spent the largest part of his working life at Indiana University. Other recognition for his writing includes the Midland Poetry Award, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear Pond, a work of non-fiction, two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the River Styx International Poetry Award, the Ren Hen Press’s Ruskin Art Club Award. He was a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Currently, he is Poetry Editor of the ezine Hamilton Stone Review and is writing a biography of the poet, Jean Garrigue. He and his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy, live in Jay, New York.



A Train at Night

I pick a seat on the waterside, a window
onto what will only be strings of scattered lights
across the river, little shoreline shacks with docks
or up on the bluffs or the set-back slopes, small squares
of white from the picture windows of the fifties.

The river whispers to itself nearby,
invisible, moving in a hundred layers
on its single persistent widening downward
trestle to the harbor and the seaward currents
and the scavenging winds like those I sometimes hear

above the house in the broken spruces and pines,
snapping branches, a clacking like mating gannets,
trees that have been there longer than people, those
who thought living under the ridge or above it
might be the right place to assemble their bones.

I love the lives of other people, and when asked
if the seat next to me is vacant, say, of course,
but dive down into the river of argument,
stream of narrative I’m in, wondering, if this
might be enough books to have pored over for clues

to the silence. I sneak a look at the book
my neighbor has hauled out of his pack. At his face, too.
I can’t read either. One of the bright fingerlings
swarming toward the world. I sit silently beside
him and his open book, looking at the window.

In it, my face shadowed, a few sleeping bodies
across the aisle, a glint of light on the river,
the mountains I don’t need to see to know they’re there.
Remote presences lean away from us, lure us
with silence and distance, closed as an unread book.

The conductors doze between stops now, the last stop,
its rows of wooden houses and high-backed shops flush
to the walkways, named for the river it sits by.
Three people get off under orange light and walk
separately up the hill and into the dark.

Twenty minutes away from the last station,
and the engineer, nearly delirious, lays
long wails of the horn trailing over the valley,
though somebody’s driving a car alongside us.
An escort maybe, a pilot ship, a guide.

We slide like boa into the station, each
lugging something, themselves, as though in a mineshaft,
up a steep set of stairs to the cars and, for me,
a long drive into the mountains, the towns peeling
away till the road is mine and a new day slips

past the old one, past the sleeping hamlets and farms.
The snow by the side of the road still where it was
yesterday morning, though someone is spending the night
up on the side of Giant, the car parked by the road,
for a morning scramble to the top to greet the sun.

-Roger Mitchell

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Developing WPS 2019 Schedule - all readings at Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
All of 2019 Events: Events

01/January 12th - Darcy Smith; T. G. Vanini
02/February 2nd (1st Sat) - Leny Brown, Roger Mitchell
03/March 9th - Bruce Weber; Celia Watson Seupel
04/April 13th - Brian Liston; Lissa Kiernan
05/May 11th - Howie Good; Reagan Upshaw
06/June 8th - Jack Hopper; Jessica Hornik
07/July 13th - Post Traumatic Press Publishing (Dayl Wise+)
08/August 10th - Kate Reese Hurd; Thomas Bonville
09/September 14th - Carol Graser; Mary Kathryn Jablonski
10/October 12th - Ken Holland; Susan Sindall(NA)
11/November 9th - Jerrice J. Baptiste
12/December 14th - George Wallace; Robert Basner and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2019 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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