Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 2pm (eastern)

via Zoom

Leigh Ann Christain
Mike Jurkovic

Poets Leigh Ann Christain and Mike Jurkovic will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets virtually via Zoom on Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 2pm (eastern).

WPS meetings are held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month.

Due to the ongoing pandemic - for now, all meetings will be held virtually via Zoom
The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike. Thank you.

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:

Leigh Ann Christain - Annie Christain is a professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, Prelude, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She was a first-place winner of the Driftwood Press In-House Poem Contest and received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Her books include Tall As You Are Tall Between Them (C&R Press 2016) and The Vanguards of Holography (Headmistress Press 2021), selected for Sappho’s Prize in Poetry.

“Poetry as messages from another world, an urgent cascade of keys and codes; this is a poet I will follow into any dark without fear of losing our way. This book is a razor to cut your way out in case of emergencies. You will want to keep it close.”
--CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

“One phrase always comes to mind when I read Annie Christain’s work—sui generis. Her new collection is no exception precisely because it is! The poems in The Vanguards of Holography don’t just beat to their own drums; they invent new instruments, disrupt predictable prosodies, and innovate across the visual-spatial field. Binaries between “high art” and “low art” give way to a chorus of voices—Siri, Kafka, Moses, Prince, and Beyoncé among them. Grounded in keen juxtapositions, this book is as capacious as it is pithy, as futuristic as it is mythic, as cerebral as it is primal. Christain reprises her role as a one-woman poetry band.”
--Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems

In The Vanguards of Holography, each sentence reads like libraries compressed into rumor or metaphysical debates sussed into rat-a-tatting address, all bursting with buzzing signal. What bodies forth over and again—born of Annie Christain’s voracious intelligence and sidelong candor—is want unstanched by the hemorrhaging inventories of prophets, pop hits, op-eds, scriptures, wetworks, conspiracies, de-classified docs, corporate white papers, scandal rags, pillow talk, and demonology, herein. Her speakers, themselves amalgams of age-spanning time and globe-spinning space, stagger/swagger from the poems’ unheimlich premises (as in proposals; as in properties), grabbing at lapels, hot to bend ears and minds. If holography is, in part, a consideration of three-dimensional light, this award-winning collection lasers enlightenment, whiteness, and the spotlight into what? Luciferous poetry.
—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho



Drunk Historicity: Joseph’s Teleportation Staff Found in a Recent Archeological Dig with All Messages to the Pharaoh Stored and Intact

_{"Now I know we had no money/But I was rich as I could be/In my coat of many colors/My momma made for me." Dolly Parton}

Everyone wanted to know why Rachel just gave birth to a lizard, and Jacob explained to all of his sons that this is baby Joseph, and he’s a “chief administrator,” and when he’s old enough he’ll wear a coat of “many colors” his mom will make for him,

nanobots in clay surrounded by silicon for the bots to link to and transmit a human body. His sons were like, “Fuck that, but OK.”

As soon as Joseph started talking, he told his brothers they would all bow to him, and his autonomic nervous system would be powered by their children’s fear. When Joseph got his coat, so many people started offering him no interest loans and asking him to rule them. His father loved it.

His brothers noticed if they stressed Joseph out, like by calling him a reptile or shouting out the names of the coiled spirits they could see spinning in the back of his head, his face would glitch, as if it was a steal pin impression toy that someone punched. Joseph’s coat was running on some New Coke formula shit-level math, but he was beautiful most of the time like a Canaanite Donny Osmond.

Soon his brothers tossed out Joseph, stole his holographic coat, and put goat’s blood on it to show their father. About ten minutes after the father saw the coat and screamed, “Why? Why? Not my miracle son,” the coat contracted into a mesh ball drone that flew back to Joseph, unfurled, and then wagon-forted him back into a human. Plus, the coat made him get sick high from the blood, which was its second main function.

Fast-forward about twenty years, and Joseph was now right-hand man to the Pharaoh because Joseph had wings, which meant he came from the royal line of Alpha Draconis just like the Pharaoh. Joseph saw his brothers one day shopping for wheat, so Joseph gave them riches and all the wheat they could carry, but the wheat had a GMO signature that meant all future crops grown from that seed would belong to the Pharaoh. Plus, the Pharaoh met the family and basically said, “Yeah, take care of my livestock.”

All along, the father wanted to be reptilian, so he asked Joseph to inject him with his proboscis, which Joseph did, even though it doesn’t work like that, so Jacob just died painfully with a bunch of perverts watching.

When it was over, Joseph pressed a button on his staff, told the Pharaoh, “It’s done, dude,” and then teleported back to continue on with packin’ nines and stackin’ dimes that was all foretold in Joseph’s prizewinning dreams.

-Leigh Ann Christain

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Mike Jurkovic - Mike’s poetry and music reviews have been published globally but with little reportable income. Latest full length collections: mooncussers, (Luchador Press 2022); American Mental, (Luchador Press 2020); Blue Fan Whirring (Nirala Press, 2018). Anthologies: Calling All Poets 20th Anniversary Anthology, (CAPS Press); Reflecting Pool: Poets & the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018); Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose (Bright Hill Press, 2018) among others. Now in its 23rd year in the Hudson Valley, he serves as President of Calling All Poets. CD reviews online at All About Jazz and Lightwood. Mike serves as chairman of the curated Music Fan Film Series, Rosendale Theater. He hosts New Jazz Excursions alternating Saturdays 10am-12pm on WIOX 91.3FM, Roxbury, NY. Streaming live at wioxradio.org. His constant tirades against music corporatism appeared as The Rock n Roll Curmudgeon in Rhythm and News Magazine, 1996-2003.

He loves Emily most of all.

www.mikejurkovic.com         www.callingallpoets.net



In a room above a deli on the corner in a dream

Christmas lights chroma
the morning civics at Molly’s
as Jack swears Jimmy was
the best barkeep ever
and you nod yeah cos
you’re new in town
and don’t yet know
the whole borough truth
But you swear
on your mother’s grave
you know these guys
from the deli
on the corner
in a dream
about a deli
on the corner
in a dream
And you really need
some down time
but the devil
(and his deep state)
have other plans
for you boyo
in a room
above a deli
on the corner
in a dream
in a room
above a deli
on the corner
in a dream

-Mike Jurkovic

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WPS 2022 Schedule - all readings are now HYBRID: in-person & streamed via Zoom
All of 2022 Events: Events

Due to the ongoing pandemic - for now, all meetings will be held virtually via Zoom
The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike following the featured readers. Thank you.

01/January 8th - Bruce Weber; Jerrice J. Baptiste via Zoom
02/February 12th - Leigh Ann Christain; Mike Jurkovic via Zoom
03/March 12th - Alison Koffler; Ken Holland via Zoom
04/April 9th - The Hudson Valley Women's Writing Group via Zoom
05/May 14th - Roger Hecht; Saida Agostini via Zoom
06/June 11th - James Reitter; Jessica Cuello via Zoom
07/July 9th - Alison Woods; Matthew Burns via Zoom
08/August 13th - Arden Levine; Marjorie Maddox via Zoom
09/September 10th - Dennis Rush; Robert Charles Basner HYBRID: in-person & streamed via Zoom
10/October 8th - Joann Deiudicibus; Thomas Festa HYBRID: in-person & streamed via Zoom
11/November 12th - Cheryl Rice; Teresa Costa HYBRID: in-person & streamed via Zoom
12/December 10th - Anique Sara Taylor; Cate McNider and Annual Business Meeting HYBRID: in-person & streamed via Zoom

Also, why not become a 2022 Member or donate to the Woodstock Poetry Society?

Membership is $20 a year. (To join or donate, 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 our upgraded Zoom account, 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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