Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 2pm 3:30pm (eastern)

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Joann Deiudicibus
Thomas Festa

Poets Joann Deiudicibus and Thomas Festa will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets in person and streamed via Zoom on Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 2pm 3:30pm (eastern).

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

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.

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Features:

Joann Deiudicibus - Joann Deiudicibus teaches writing at SUNY New Paltz. Her poems and articles about poetry live in WaterWrites, A Slant of Light, & Reflecting Pool (Codhill Press), Typishly, Stone Poetry Journal; Poetry Quarterly; The Shawangunk Review, Chronogram, Calling All Poets publications, & Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). She’s been reading poetry out loud in bars, coffee houses, motels, and churches since her late teens. Ask her about true crime, cats, and confessionalism.



Survivor’s Guilt

Prepare yourself.
Prepare your shoeless feet for paths
scattered with stone, shells, bone-shatter, casings.

There will be flowers,
stems bound like limbs,
bunches of legs dangling above water;
flowers pulled from fields,
dug from torn ground, rootless.

There will be blood-black blooms,
mud-colored hair spilling like petals,
dark shards arranged in sharp angles.

Those chosen could not prepare:
Captives cast off like chaff
or thrown atop pyres,
stalks askew, barbed leaves lifting
like ash-flecked palms in prayer.

Prepare yourself.
The rampart about your heart bursting with grief,
as shrapnel seeps into tight red bud.

-Joann Deiudicibus

“Survivor’s Guilt” originally appeared in Shawangunk Review, volume XXI

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Thomas Festa - Thomas Festa is a Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where he has taught since 2005. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), and a study of John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006). Individual poems of his have appeared in Bennington Review, Chronogram, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Haiku Journal, Lightwood, Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Other recent work includes two scholarly articles on W.S. Merwin and reviews of the latest collections by Jorie Graham and Robert Hass.



The Algebra of Origins

Algebra, Latin for computation;
surgical treatment of fractures;
derived from Arabic, al-jabr,
the restoration of anything missing, lost,
out of place, lacking;
the reunion of broken parts.

On the school playground,
my daughter broke the birdlike bones
of her left arm.

In a sudden downpour, a tree
falls out of common usage,
split low on the trunk.

The forest remembers dead languages,
the radius and ulna, forgotten paths.

She didn’t cry her whole time in Emergency.
Shock retold each new face the jagged tale,
how she broke her fall.

My little daughter’s bones
set in sleep and draped in fiberglass
begin to heal.

She discovers the aftermath below
the poplar that struck our deck,
dead swallows in a birdhouse on the ground.

As we flew down the highway
to the hospital where she was born,
her suffering stole all meaning from my words,
but on my face I could feel
the shadows of a vast flock

passing in silent unison overhead.

-Thomas Festa

(first published in Lightwood, June 2020)

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

Meetings are now being held as hybrid events - in-person and 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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