Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, September 14th, 2019 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
Carol Graser
Mary Kathryn Jablonski
Poets Carol Graser and Mary Kathryn
Jablonski 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, September 14th, 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:
Carol Graser - Carol Graser hosts a monthly poetry series
at Saratoga Spring’s legendary Caffe Lena on the first Wednesday of
every month and has performed her work at various events and venues around
NYS. Her work has been published in many literary journals, recently in Devilfish
Review, Punch Drunk Press, Trailer Park Quarterly and Minute Magazine.
She is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Twist of Their Stems
(Foothills Publishing).
What If
Emily Dickinson’s rise
to poetic stardom was a reality
TV show? Think a Victorian house
with staid, heavily placed furniture
a white figure wisps across a distant
hallway, cut to a bee hovering
studiously over a patch of red clover
Characters will include an absolute
silence, a wind, sometimes soft
sometimes wailing, death, and
a rotating cast of flowers and insects
Emily herself stipulates
we can only film her in passing
Each confessional is a poem
ink spreading on paper
abandoned in random spots
discovered by the camera
lying amid, say, the debris
of a finished breakfast
-Carol Graser
Dissolving the Distance Between You
for
Marly and Josie
Pour water over the deeply frozen earth
skate deftly across the divide
Boil maple sap in the open air
the aroma a soft lure
Aim your arrows at flocks of words spoken
but not meant, follow the path of strewn feathers
Measure the gulf between you with an inaccurate ruler
one that shifts scale between atoms and stars
Nap in the full sun, let the sprouting grass rise
through your bones, wake up side by side
Collect pebbles, the close attention to ground
will bring you to the same stone
Talk to the wind, forget what you’re looking for, touch the petals
of flowers with no thought for a vase, give up ever arriving at the door
It’s the black crow intoning from a seed of dream
That’s the syllable that will save you
-Carol Graser
*
Mary Kathryn Jablonski - Saratoga Springs artist and poet,
Mary Kathryn Jablonski has been a contributor at Numéro
Cinq magazine and is the author of the poetry collections “To the
Husband I Have Not Yet Met” (APD, 2008) and “Sugar Maker Moon”
(Dos Madres Press, 2019). The recipient of several awards, grants and fellowships,
her work has appeared in numerous print & online journals including the
Atticus Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Film Live (UK), Poetry Ireland
Review, Quarterly West, Salmagundi, and Tupelo Quarterly. Jablonski
has run poetry programs in her region, frequently lecturing on visual poetry.
Her video/poem collaborations with filmmaker Laura Frare have been featured
internationally in journals, film festivals and exhibitions, and her artworks,
exhibited throughout the Northeast, are held in private and public collections.
Mare Spumans
A dark science swept me into this
birdless place. Each morning, the forgetting:
stars erased at daybreak, a thousand
deaths. Whelks strewn upon the shore, beautiful
in their wreckage: Fleshy pinks, pale
violets, the violence they endured
making them more beautiful. They call
from a former cloistered life and will be
smaller tomorrow, half-buried in the sand,
becoming sand. Nothing now to hear, broken
open, split to silence, still a sea within.
-Mary Kathryn Jablonski
(Reprinted from “Sugar Maker Moon” by permission of Dos Madres
Press)
Laika
She wanted it and didn’t want it
with equal strength. She wanted it
fiercely then didn’t want it just as fiercely
in alternating rhythms. Little Curly,
Little Bug, a stray, twice dispossessed,
chosen for her hardiness. No longer
to be trusted, the body inside the body,
stone inside a shell, grew shapeless. Designed
for no return, the night became infinite as
wedlock. Was it a failure to separate
in the end? She sought no other
world than this: to know kindness.
-Mary Kathryn Jablonski
(Reprinted from “Sugar Maker Moon” by permission of Dos Madres
Press)
*
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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