Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, August 13, 2022 at 2pm (eastern)

via Zoom

Arden Levine
Marjorie Maddox

Poets Arden Levine and Marjorie Maddox will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets virtually via Zoom on Saturday, August 13, 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:

Arden Levine - Arden Levine is the author of Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, RHINO, and other journals, and been featured in AGNI Online, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and WNYC’s Radiolab. Arden lives, and does urban housing policy work, in New York City. More at www.ardenlevine.com.



Fortune

I know what my body will look like
as I age, not from consideration of my mother’s body,
but of my father’s. I have vision

that faltered by high school and, by college,
nearly failed. I also live behind glass.
But it’s more than this. It’s as if he and I had made a visit,

perhaps during one of those early rides down
the GW Parkway bike path, to an oracle
of Lamarckian evolution, who knew that

I, too, would shatter a tooth when I turned twelve
(though I’d repair it better) and would scar
my abdomen from contact with a sharp surface

(surgical in his case, geological in mine).
I’ve mapped it out. At thirty-six, I’ll cut open my face
doing a stupid thing. By forty,

my eyes will become a shade bluer
each time I cry, and I’ll have a sort of mouth
that shapes around proclamations

of the day ending by 10:00 a.m. Then at forty-five,
I’ll destroy my dominant hand in a car accident.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is why he shifted the pencil

to the other side over and over, saying
You won’t go left. You won’t.
Did he manage to scramble the cup of bones?

("Fortune" first appeared in Sixth Finch.)

-Arden Levine

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Marjorie Maddox - Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award), and her most recent 2022 collections Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press) and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts Publishing), an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards), and A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book)—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (assistant editor); and 650 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. The recipient of numerous awards, she gives workshops and readings around the world. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com


Photography by Melanie Rae

Treacherous Driving
                     "It's as safe as traveling to work..."
                         -a cardiologist before performing a transplant

The first night of the blizzard
that stranger inched into Ohio.
Halfway through he skidded
into our snow-spackled lives.
His heart is buried
in my father,
who is buried.

This is the hole
in the stranger, in my father,
in my own cracked
chest, hail cupped in its cavity,
the aorta beginning to freeze.

All winter,
the weather preaches white
lies: fields blank of roads,
a curve straightened,
the even light of sky.

Tonight the breeze is all
icicles, banner-like
from the clouds. Nothing
is moveable
in this treacherous state.

Our wheels spin,
their rhythm: a breath
that pulls us
then stalls. The law

of the body, of the state,
cannot replace the chain
reaction, jackknifed lives,
hope piling into hope.

The man and his heart,
cold on an icy road,
warmed us for weeks
while winter, a clear blue thing,
wafted light.

from Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts) and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf and Stock)

-Marjorie Maddox

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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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