Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, May 11th, 2019 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)

Howie Good
Reagan Upshaw

Poets Howie Good and Reagan Upshaw 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, May 11th, 2019 at 2pm.

Note: WPS meetings are held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month at Golden Notebook (Upstairs).

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:

Howie Good - Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. His latest poetry collections are I Am Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the literary journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely.



Mortal Thoughts

1. Death’s Little Apprentice

gets down on the floor
and fits himself somewhat awkwardly

into the chalk outline of a body,
but after just a minute or so,

struggles back up to his feet,
dusts off the seat of his pants,

and stands there sort of trembling,
a flash of lightning made of shadow.

2. Rehearsals for Extinction

Once a week, every week, skip in front
of a moving train, or swallow a near fatal
overdose of pills, maybe hang yourself
for some seconds from a ceiling hook,
or experimentally slide a razor blade
across a vein, maybe bite down hard
on the muzzle of a gun, or at least notice
those don’t look like normal clouds up there,
but angels with blood on their sneakers.

3. The Colonel of the Dead

after flexing
his cramped fingers,

records your name
in black ink
on black paper,

then lies back
with a weary sigh
on a sun chair,

pink high tops
crossed at the ankles.

-Howie Good

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Reagan Upshaw - Reagan Upshaw is a poet and art dealer in Beacon. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Able Muse, American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose, Poets & Writers, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and many other publications.



Jim Brodey

The Whitney, in a show last month
displayed in an expensive mat
a strip of coin-booth photographs
by Andy Warhol. In them sat

a young man in the Sunday suit
and necktie he would soon discard:
prize-winning poet, up-and-comer,
darling of the avant-garde,

Jim Brodey, with his hair still short.
laughed for the camera, quite at ease
while entering art history.
(Perhaps the artist muttered, “Cheese.”)

One of the Lower East Side crew,
Jim gave the New York School a poke
with funny yet hermetic verse
-- the man who out-Koched Kenneth Koch --

and won himself inclusion in
the Random House Anthology
of New York Poets, studbook of
the hipster aristocracy.

I met him eight years after that
at Saint Mark’s Church. My reading there
filled half the seats. I read the last
well-crafted poem and sought my chair

acknowledging polite applause,
thanking the host, exchanging hugs
with my invited audience
when he stood up. Was he on drugs?

He had been sitting in the back.
Now, blocking my way without a fuss,
he gave his name and then remarked,
as if to state the obvious,

“I wanted to see what you looked like,”
What did that mean? Defensiveness
prevented any glib response
as silently I tried to guess

if he was simply greeting me,
or was it an attempt to bait
the square he must have thought I was?
But he did not elaborate.

The cryptic utterance left me
nonplussed. I don’t know what I said
and can’t recall if we shook hands.
A few years later, he was dead.

The supercharged, ecstatic high
Jim courted in his poetry
turned vampire, bit him, and began
to feed on his vitality.

Poète maudit, a classic case
with modern ways to jolt the brain:
instead of absinthe, LSD,
amphetamines, then crack cocaine.

Addiction took its course until
the visitor to Tompkins Square
might see, among the usual drunks,
a homeless poet sitting there.

Then he was gone. The poet whom
that hungry Muse adores dies young,
some yellowed pages and his gift
among her crumbling trophies hung.

Today there is a faint but real
survivor’s guilt as I sit here
with mailings from AARP
and catalogs for garden gear.

Silly, of course. Our countrymen
indulge their taste for lighter fare
and want no truck with poetry,
outré or retardataire.

Yet poems keep our collective heart
alive as nothing else can do,
at length reshape degraded speech
and make the ancient feelings new.

Poets share this human duty,
writing gray-haired or dying young.
A small salute, Jim, brother poet:
live on in the altered tongue.

-Reagan Upshaw

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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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