Woodstock Poetry Society
in association with The Golden Notebook (goldennotebook.indielite.org)
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, September 10, 2022 at 2pm (eastern)
SUNDAY, September 11, 2022 at 2pm (eastern)

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Dennis Rush
Robert Charles Basner

Poets Dennis Rush and Robert Charles Basner will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets in person and streamed via Zoom on SUNDAY, September 11, 2022 at 2pm (eastern).

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

For the first time since February, 2020 we will be meeting in person at:

Nancy's of Woodstock - Artisanal Creamery
297 Tinker St, Woodstock, NY 12498
(845)684-5329
nancysartisanal.com
(part of the Bearsville Arts complex)

*** We ask all people who wish to attend in person to self-test for Covid within 24 hours prior to the event. Self-test kits are reasonably priced and available at nearly every pharmacy. ***

The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

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

To attend in person please self-test for Covid within 24 hrs of the event and just show up

The reading will be hosted by poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.

*
Features:

Dennis Rush - Dennis Rush grew up on a remote tobacco farm in Kentucky, and if a couple of things had gone better, he probably would have stayed and never written a poem. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Goddard College with an MFA in Creative Writing. He lives in Staatsburg, New York with his supportive wife, a few children and a menagerie of rescued animals. His first collection of poems, What Are the Rich Doing Tonight? (Dos Madres) was released in 2022.



Skinny

She’s not a vegetarian diet
or exercise skinny.
She’s skinny from
not having a ride and
walking everywhere,
neck slap, hurry up skinny.
Fat mommy skinny.
Smoking a found cigarette
skinny. Her exposed waist
stretched like peach skin skinny.
Like the way
jealous high school girls
want to be skinny.
Hipbones and collarbones
holding up her clothes skinny.
Broomstick skinny.
Walking down a weedy street
swearing like knocking
out teeth skinny.
Piggly Wiggly mayonnaise
on white bread skinny.19 18
Skinny like a wire clothes hanger.
Not an ounce of unnecessary
flesh skinny.
When she emerges from the pharmacy
like a worm,
she raises her skinny arm
to block the sun.
She plunges her skinny finger,
chipped and chewed,
into the bottle
and pulls out one or two
of her mother’s pain killers
for herself.

-Dennis Rush

*

Robert Charles Basner - Robert Charles Basner is heir to the farming and fielding of place slipping slowly, shyly off the Catskill Mountains. He is a physician, biomedical researcher, educator, editor, and author in the specialties of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine and physiology. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Columbia Review, Promethean, and Chronogram, and he has been an invited reader at the Woodstock Poetry Society, the Lace Mill in Kingston, Perfect Pitch: The Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He has also been heard as a featured reader on Planet Poet-Words in Space, an edition of the Writer’s Voice on WIOX Community Radio.

He is currently composing a suite of songs for soprano voice and viola, and a collection of verse, The Piano Tuner.



Spoken In October, To Be Heard In January
-after Andrew Wyeth’s “Snow Flurries”

If I let person into my landscapes, they
would be no longer landscape: worthlessness
to weather with lives so easily lost

what is already place, ochre what owns
oak, fence post fields already under flurries
further than forgotten, to be assured

ancience; autumnal: as though the absence
between leaf were ancience, or autumnal
was left in the light each day furthers from.

-Robert Charles Basner

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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 11th - 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 - Dennis Wayne Bressack; 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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