Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, January 11th, 2020 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)

Elizabeth J. Coleman
Lee Slonimsky

Poets Elizabeth J. Coleman and Lee Slonimsky 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, January 11th, 2020 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:

Elizabeth J. Coleman - Elizabeth J. Coleman is a poet, public-interest attorney, environmental activist, and mindfulness teacher. She is the editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, Earth Day, 2019), named one of the ten best poetry books (plus two anthologies) of 2019 by Beltway Poetry. The Best American Poetry blog wrote of HERE, “I felt, while reading it, that poetry was working its magic in me again, offering a renewed sense of faith, if not in the future, at least in the mystical power of poetry.” Coleman’s first poetry collection, Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), was a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollak prizes, and her second, The Fifth Generation, was described by poet Kathleen Graber as a “book of the most tender intimacies.” Coleman translated into “idiomatic and musical French,” per poet Deborah Warren,” Lee Slonimsky’s Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore Amoureux (Folded Word Press, 2015), a bilingual sonnet collection. www.elizabethjcoleman.com.



On a Saturday in the Anthropocene,

as I walk in the light of a two-rivered
island to my post office, I mourn

the last typewriter repair shop
in New York going out of business;

mourn that this moves us further
from letters, from connection,

from writing home.
I mourn that it’s so warm

monk parrots nest in Sheepshead Bay,
lovely as that sight is, mourn

what we’ve done to birds:
For 150 million years they saw

their reflections only in the sea.
Then I notice a fire escape

on a two-century-old building
casting a soft shadow; I see wheels

on a bicycle that, like meditation,
seem to slow time. I remember gorillas

stay up all night to groom their dead,
and reading about a woman in Ohio

who gave every building in town
a new coat of paint after she was laid off.

At my post office, endangered too,
I avoid the self-service kiosks, wait in line

for a human. A clerk waves me over
with her smile, asks where I’ve been.

She tells me about a cruise she’s taken
with her mother, describes the buffets,

the turquoise of the ship’s pool.
Now I’m smiling too. What’s your name?

I’ve been meaning to ask for ages.
Grace, she says, I thought you knew.

-Elizabeth J. Coleman

“On a Saturday in the Anthropocene” appeared in HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon, 2019, Elizabeth J. Coleman, ed.),
and an earlier version appeared in Coleman, Elizabeth J., The Fifth Generation, (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016)

*

Lee Slonimsky - Lee Slonimsky’s latest collection, his ninth, published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in New York City last September, is Tibbett’s Brook Park, 1953. His third book, Pythagoras in Love, as translated by Greek National Poetry Prize winning poet Stamatis Polenakis, is forthcoming from Thraca Editions in Greece in February. Lee also has poems recent or forthcoming in the journals Blueline and Millers Pond, and in Elizabeth J. Coleman’s brilliant earth-saving anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet.



Tibbetts Brook Park, 1953

Does light know how to swim?

The answer’s in this little brook,
sunlight striking, breaking up
to motes of luminescence that

do a fast crawl.

They’re ancient primal swimmers that
might as well have dived right off
Big Bang.

In the early 1950s
two grandmothers watched me swim
in the huge blue pool at
Tibbetts Brook in Westchester,
the last I can recall
seeing either one of them.
Now that moment comes to life:

I gaze upon much older ancestors
from this wooden footbridge,
slivers of photonic streak
gliding on black water
fed by icy tributaries
in the sudden thaw of March.

I too am the spawn of Big Bang,
though rather latterly,
as these early lightmote travelers
startle me with just how they
speed up when they swim
across the sprawl of noon.

Elegant yet lithe,
microscopically bright,
they’d cross the English Channel
if given the chance.
Just like my grandmothers
made the Atlantic Crossing
to a New World where
their grandson took a swim;
and they basked in August sunshine,
one of those eternal moments
gone before you know it.

Their faces gleam in memory,
as bright as light motes swimming.

To see the ghost of Big Bang
all I need to do is lift
my gaze from this sparkling stream
and gaze out at the sky.

Our present in this universe
is made up of the past;
like this rippling, lightstrewn stream,
it all goes by so fast.

-Lee Slonimsky

*

Developing WPS 2020 Schedule - all readings at Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
All of 2020 Events: Events

01/January 11th - Elizabeth J. Coleman; Lee Slonimsky
02/February 8th - Andrea Mitchell; Bruce Weber
03/March 14th - Guy Reed; Victoria Sullivan
04/April 11th - Brett Bevell; Rebecca Schumejda
05/May 9th - Judith Saunders; Raphael Kosek
06/June 13th - Elizabethanne Spiotta; William Seaton
07/July 11th - Barbara Ungar; Stuart Bartow
08/August 8th - Irene Sipos; Perry S. Nicholas
09/September 12th - Elizabeth Cohen; Lisa Rhoades
10/October 10th - Philip Pardi; Sparrow
11/November 14th - Anique Taylor; Mary Leonard
12/December 12th - TBA and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2020 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)