Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, May 14, 2022 at 2pm (eastern)

via Zoom

Roger Hecht
Saida Agostini

Poets Roger Hecht and Saida Agostini will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets virtually via Zoom on Saturday, May 14, 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:

Roger Hecht - Roger W. Hecht is the author of two collections of poetry: Talking Pictures (Cervena Barva Press) and a recently published chapbook, Witness Report (Finishing Line Press). Poet Bertha Rogers calls Roger Hecht "a poet unafraid to look at everyday life in the eye and tell the truth of it, in precise and elegant language." Poet Robert Bensen writes that Hecht's poems "create and shape a better, clearer vision." A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Yes, Poetry, Puerto del Sol, The Piltdown Review, Diagram, A-Minor, Book of Matches, and many other journals. He is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Oneonta, where he teaches literature and creative writing. rogerwhecht.wordpress.com



Snake Plant

That potted snake plant looks nothing like a snake:
it's a wide flat ribbon that ends in a point
—maybe a snake flattened by traffic
on some desert road—but no snake I know
sticks head-first in the dirt like a signpost,
though I’ve seen one slip quickly down a hole
between two rocks in my garden.
& no snake I know of is so cardboard stiff,
or pale green, or white rimmed,
though I've seen deep dark green snakes
with yellow racing stripes, & wouldn’t it be cool
to see a snake racing in helmet & goggles
buckled into a Formula One, tongue flick
for a thumbs up, tear around the track,
because snakes are fast, “a wrinkle in the grass,”
but often they freeze when cautious.
The snake that bit my daughter’s foot,
none too pleased to be nearly stepped on,
stood its ground long enough
for a cell phone selfie, which is how
they determined it wasn’t a rattler,
though I didn’t know that at the time, racing
across half of Pennsylvania in the pre-dawn night
with the only best-case scenario I could think of:
she’ll only lose her foot
that had inflated to almost twice its size,
each hour’s swelling marked with a paramedic’s sharpie,
a topo-map of toxins, but it was a copperhead’s bite,
so that was the worst of it, & by the time
I arrived at the hospital the anti-venin,
freshly flown in from the zoo, had begun cull the swell.
So, hurray for modern medicine
& for hospitals that write off exotic expenses
& for the taxpayers that absorb the cost
& for the snake that gave my daughter
a reputation for toughness
she carried the rest of the school year
& a story that’s good for a lifetime, that snake
that lay like a dark ribbon in the rocky shadows,
though nothing like a snake plant,
which looks much more like green lasagna
when you think about it.

-Roger Hecht

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Saida Agostini - Saida is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her first collection of poems, let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the author of STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook exploring the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi. Her poetry can also be found in the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology Not Without Our Laughter, Barrelhouse Magazine, Hobart Pulp, Plume, and other publications.

A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript. She is a Best of the Net Finalist and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives online at www.saidaagostini.com



notes on archiving erasure

love does not begin and end the way we think it does. love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up
   -James Baldwin

when I say
I love my family
what I mean
is I worship
the battle; you
can’t wish away
creation or re-order
blood. childishly
I thought we could
re-tell story(ies)
I mean to say,
I can’t lie. in truth
there are wretched
days I call my sister
and ask was this
real? did this happen?
she says nothing
part of love can be
called refusing to
answer. my mother
says let things lie
she means murder it
let our shame be
a suffocating vine:
we were made to
believe that everything
we bore was ugly: a family
of shell shocked
gods fleeing
their own clay - yet,
I will come back to
the door of our own home
sit at its steps, and fall in
love with the slow order
of our creation, the seasons
it took to urge kindness into
our natures. how we won
glory even as the city fell.

-Saida Agostini

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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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