Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, August 10th, 2019 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)

Kate Reese Hurd
Thomas Bonville

Poets Kate Reese Hurd and Thomas Bonville 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, August 10th, 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.

*
Features:

Kate Reese Hurd - Kate has a background in English lit, music and eurythmy movement (out of the work of Rudolf Steiner, not Dalcroze eurythmics). In early life she wrote a few poems in the personal vein, but what has really captured her imagination is the dance of the speech sounds, the vowels and consonants. For the past six years she has been writing miniature poetic speech sound etudes for all of the sounds. ‘Etudes’ are studies, like the ones that are written for instrumentalists to develop their skills — but many are also performed as pieces in their own right.

At this point she has a sizable body of etudes, alliterative ones for the consonants and assonant ones for the vowels and also the two together, and she has published a selection of them in a handy little book, along with a continuing series of articles on the subject of speech sounds and movement. But it is in the speaking of the etudes that the music, dance, joy and humor of the sounds come forth; and then the inherent quality of the movement of each sound becomes more and more clear. Ultimately, once all of the sound-movements are well-known, artistic movement-expression of poems can be performed — that’s the art of eurythmy. Though laying a true foundation for eurythmy work was the reason Kate took up this novel poetic-etude form, she’s been sharing the miniature studies as vocal treats for the past several years at local poetry gatherings, to the amusement and curiosity of listeners.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if poets paid more attention to the sound of the words they choose? Kate thinks so! Come hear.



M         Misty moonlit mizzle made marvelous moss mounds moist – magnificent!
           Mightily maddened, militant multitudes mow down murderous maniac
              mobsters in miserable maelstroms!
           Midges, mosquitos, millipedes and mindbogglingly-miniscule mites
              multiply in marshy domains and muddy Mississippi margins.
           Masterfully-maneuvered marionettes made the most mesmerizinG
              movements: minuets, mazurkas; the mambo and merengué.

vowel-to-M
ůrm     Curmudgeon McDermot gave sermons in Birming’am on exterminating
              vermin permanently – but squirming termites and every worm from
              the berme are determined to skirmish!
ĭmm The imminence of immense immaculate immortals immobilizes us
              immeasurably, immediately!
ium With our human acumen – and humongous humor – we catechumens
              documented a tumultuous humid spume of acculumating albumen
              and fuming cumin.

-Kate Reese Hurd

*

Thomas Bonville - I have lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley all my life. I regularly read, write and converse with the Rensselaerville Poets, as well as participate in open mics, including 394 Main in Catskill, every fourth Monday of the month. I have most recently been published in the February, 2019 edition of Chronogram magazine, as well as in the Albany Poets annual poetry journal, UP THE RIVER, Issues 6 and 7. I was a finalist in the 2019 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest with the poem, “The Smoke,” awarded as a Commended Poem.



Smoke

My father suffered with his fate, like his father, Clifford,
and his father’s twin brother, Clayton, had done before him,
my father, haunted for years by what he saw happen,
what eventually happened to him, just like he always imagined,
bedeviled with what he could see and not see,
another man in the family trapped in the throes of Parkinson’s,

the shakes obvious enough, the speech impediments,
the worst of it, the hallucinations, persistent and horrible...
That one New Year’s Eve, late in the life of the disease,
my father, wakening us all in the darkness of the night,
his voice screaming: “Everyone get out! Get out!
The house is on fire!” So real to him, standing alone
in the pitch black of the hallway, I turned on a light,
saw his head swiveling from side to side in panicky turns.
“What Dad?” I stammered, rushing to him.
“The smoke, the god-damn smoke!
See how black it is? We must get out!”

So we did, all of us, my mother, in shock, helpless,
my spinster sister, who looks so much like my father,
taking my mother by the arm,
one of my brothers, my youngest brother, home for the holidays,
helping me lead my father out the front door,
with no sign of fire or smoke anywhere.
We stood outside in the slushy snow,
not even with coats over us, no boots on our feet,
huddled along the edge of the road, shivering
in the Arctic air of the new year, my father staring
with his mouth frozen open, his eyes transfixed,
an arm extended, pointing to our house,
Christmas lights still lit, attached to the eves.
“We are losing everything!” he yelled.
“I can’t see the house anymore. Just the smoke!”
And we all said, yes, Dad, yes,
reaching together at the same time
to hold him tight, close to us,
trying to keep him from the ominous
smoke bearing down upon him.

-Thomas Bonville

*

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.

(click here to close this window)