Past, Present, Future Wedpoetry stuff...

Wednesday Night Poetry is prepping a few changes for the new year, so I thought I'd post one of the 2006 series posters I made, (click on it for a larger image) as an excuse to gab about it a bit.

Snow And Ice -- This past winter  Wedpoetry was canceled at the last minute at least four times (it might have been more)  for bad-ass storms that made travel hazardous.  So this winter, the series is going to take a winter break starting after its meeting on Dec 14th. through January and February. The first meetup of the new year will be March 7, 2012, when the all new 2012 Wednesday Poetry will begin.

Coming soon -- Tomorrow, (Nov 30)  is a Leonard Cohen themed open mic, followed by a workshop.  Next week (Dec 7), the feature had to cancel , there will be an open mic but the rest of the evening program is still to be determined.  The feature  On Dec 14, the last meeting of 2011, there is a four-person panel discussion called Putting Your Poetry Collection Together!  Panelists include Brad Davis, Leslie McGrath, Claire Zoghb and  Faith Vicinanza. During the open mic - it;s Grinch Night.

Changes in offing for 2012 are still up in the air. The group will likely be meeting in a different venue, and format may change a bit as well.  To mark the change, all entries on the wedpoetry wordpress  website have been archived to a site called http://wedpoetrypast.wordpress.com.  So if you have a link to a reading you did there that now is broken - just slip the word "past" into the address and it should work.

Dan DeRosa - good memories linger

Tonight at Weds. Night Poetry we will be remembering a local poet, and a former WNPS host Dan DeRosa - funny warm young man. I kidded him once that he had a dangerous smile which if trained on the polar ice caps would melt them right away.  That was after he had smiled at someone sad at Molten Java and they lit up like a Broadway marque. His smile told people it was okay to be themselves. He was everyone's friend or brother. Had an uncompromising positive attitude and great compassion towards the autistic and everyone else too.


When he graduated from Western CT State University in 2009,there was a graduation party (see photo at the right) and then at the end of the summer WNPS held a good-bye party for him, as he was off to grad school in Florida. For his going away present - he got to be the poetry feature for the evening. During the open mike portion we roasted him with poems and stories.

For my part, I wrote him a song, "Dangerous Dan" I had it up on Youtube at that time but later took it down because I was a bit horse the day I taped it and hoped to make a better version. I never did naturally. So here is the original verison once again from YouTube. The lyrics are posted below also. Dan died suddenly of cardiac related problems at only 33 years of age. He was a man who embraced life, took it on his own terms, who cared for everyone around him. May we all live even half as well.

 Dangerous Dan 

Dangerous Dan is going away to Florida
Dangerous Dan is leaving this cold state behind
He's going where the water's rising
he'll do well and that's not surprising
Dangerous Dan is a man still in search of his life.

Dangerous Dan is driving the road to his future
and being a poet, he's mapping it out verse by Verse
Life's a poetry slam of four score ten
Practice, edit, the do it again
Blend it into something inspiring no matter the score

Dangerous Dan has a smile like a bright summer day
His smile tells the world You can be who you are
He'll poem on some other page,
Dangerous Dan is turning the page and we'll see
what he will be

Dangerous Dan is going away to Florida
The King of Haiku will soon be expanding the form
We'll miss his wit and that dangerous mouth
 Think of us when you're in the south
Let wisdom guide all your rhyme
You can come back anytime.

Poetry in disguise at Halloween party

Pictured above, are the crazy folks at the annual Halloween thing at Wednesday Night Poetry,  missing are Faith, (a devil) Victoria, (a pizza delivery girl with a pizza) Ernie in a bandana with a pirate spyglass. And T.G. as herself, with Tess, as herself.  We can't forget Tess. I had 'em wondering, including Tess who barked at me in my head-covering Egor mask, I tried to talk very low pitchwise, and sit not like myself, no leg crossing or sitting on my feet.  The whole bit  seemed to upset Tess no end - the cues were too confusing I guess. Poor puppy.  

I read a short spoof of a poem in my ultra low-pitch, threatening Egor style:

Mouse traps
Hickory Dickory Dock
Little mousie ran up the clock
The clock struck one
And Mousie did run and run
until she was done dun  da dun, dun da dun da dun da dun

Poet Jason Labbe recommends daily writing discipline

Waiting for inspiration won't help you find some, according to Jason Labbe, who read at Wednesday Night Poetry last week at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown.

It's important to write every day, and out of that discipline discoveries come, he told the Wed. Night Poetry crowd during the Q & A following his reading. (I think that might be good advice for practicing almost any skill or art form - a discipline of playful, purposeful exploration.

Labbe has an unassuming, understated reading style. His work is evocative, surreal, yet somehow spare and stoic. I really enjoyed his featured reading. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Vigrinia and a chapbook called Dear Photographer (Phylum Press, 2009) which is out of stock already. He's also a musician and drummer actively involved in performing and recording. Visit his website for details of his doings www.studyinblue.com (If you run the cursor towards the top of the page a menu will appear.)

Reggie Marra "Bump" - a poem for Anne Marie

A poem about Reggie and his older sister Anne Marie as giggling children at play. Reggie read this during his featured reading at the Blue Z Coffeehouse on the one-year anniversary of Anne Marie's death on St Patrick's Day 2009.  --> Cherish life. You only get this one....
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http://www.youtube.com/v/D2Ws6-I_LEQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

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POETRY: Dick Allen enlightens listeners

Poet Dick Allen read at the Blue Z Coffeehouse last Wednesday. As always, his work is  fresh and filled with details in layers of image and nuance. Though he had three books for sale, (Present Vanishing, The Day Before: New Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected), he did us the great favor or reading lots of his new work.  When this happens in a reading - not only do you get to see where the writer is headed in terms of  ideas and technique - you also get the heightened delivery because people are frequently more excited about their recent works.

Afterwards during Q&A  Allen spoke to his self-taught Zen Buddhist  roots.  He expressed how mindfulness lends itself to poetry, and his involvement in meditation, his belief in nondualism, and also reincarnation. (I thought those last two seemed to conflict, but I see there are several meanings for nondualism. In one, matter is  illusion, in the other, there is only matter....)

All in all, it was quite a very interesting evening.Allen noted that there are over 3000 print journals publishing poetry and an unknown number of online journals, blogs and sites.  One interesting point: apparently many of these publications are staffed by younger editors who send form rejections to everyone. While even a fine writer's work isn't always a fit with a particular publication,  he said old school notables are hoping for at least a personal rejection not a form letter.  I suspect these editors often don't know who they are rejecting or they would be inviting further submissions. (Makes me wonder who I rejected when I had Bent Pin Quarterly!)

Allen surely qualifies as one of those notables. He has a Pushcart Prize, and has gotten NEA and an Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships. He's been published all over the map: The New Criterion, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, Stone Boat, Gettysburg Review, The New York Quarterly, and The Hudson Review.  Literally hundreds of his poems  have been in publications ranging from The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and Agni to The New England Review, as well as 40 + national poetry anthologies including five editions of The Best American Poetry . That's notable.

We also got another insight into  Dick Allen, in the form of his  wife, poet L. N. Allen, who read some fine work during the open mic. I am not sure but a "little bird told me" she may be reading for Wed. poetry fairly soon. Tweet.

-- Mar Walker
Read about a workshop on short poems given by Dick Allen Several years ago...
Read his book Ode to the Cold War on Google Books

Poetry: Mark McGuire-Schwartz - SURREAL!

Flying over rooftops with an alarm clock

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A post from December of 2009. Poems by Mark McGuire-Schwartz are quirky and a bit surreal, like eating pickles and pistachio ice-cream, then going to sleep and having a strange dream. I like this sort of thing apparently as  I have published seven of his poems in Bent Pin Quarterly.

"If your poems were paintings, based on their style, what painter would you be? Are you more Norman Rockwell or Miro?  Rembrandt or Picasso?" This is my stock question during Wed Night Poetry's Q & A.  It's a question that leaves many poets scratching their heads,  but  Mark gave me a truly fitting answer.

"I would be Chagall" he told me, reminding me that I had asked him this before.  Marc Chagall's  odd visions enchant and disorient at the same time, and often show people flying over quaint rooftops, or barnyard animals with luminous eyes hovering at some impossible angle...

Mark has a quirky reading style as well, featuring his self-effacing charm and an alarm clock or two. You can hear him read his work at the Monday Poetry Series t the Stamford Town Center Barnes and Noble. It's this coming Monday and it starts around 7 p.m.

>>>>>Mark has a new chapbook from his own Oy Vey Press... It's called  "Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna." Sure the tittle is a little surreal, just like the poems it contains.  I got my copy during his reading last week at  Wed. Poetry (which is now meeting at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown), and I am enjoying it very much.

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Mark had quite a few poems in Bent Pin during its run. The archive was down for a while but is partially restored:
Here is a list of his poems with links where available in the new Bent Pin Archive:

McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: Black Coffee
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: In Death
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2007 NEW LINK Title: Turkey Club
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 10/13/2007 NEW LINK Title: What I've Been Before
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 1/1/2008 NEW LINKTitle: 25 Short Poems
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/1/2008 Title: "Is Them Things Called Stars?"
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2008 Title: Coatless 
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 11/10/2009 Title: Heartless  

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems

Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker

Video from Wed. Night Poetry on YouTube

Just wanted to give a plug to new channel on YouTube. I was getting so many videos of other folks reading their poems on my thePuzzledDragon channel, that it seemed logical to make another one for those videos. I mentioned it in a previous post. You might also check out the subscriptions page, as I have subscribed that channel to lots of poetry channels on youtube, both slam and academic, local and international. Lots of great stuff to be found there.

A very good night at Wednesday poetry

Lisa Starr was the Wednesday Night Poetry feature last night. Her even presence, her honesty and words made for a very good evening. The open myk was also quite good - and to combat the grey of the not yet blooming world Louise K. read a bunch of one liners. Like Red Skelton she enjoyed her own jokes so much she could barely stop laughing to read them - and we were laughing to....  

I have video of Lisa, and also more or Robert Riche and Mother Tongue which I will be posting on http://YouTube.com/PoetsAndTheirPoems

We had our 1st haiku slam tonight at wednite poetry. What a fabulousevent!

Haiku night big hit
five seven five syllables
fit, end with a twist

We had our 1st haiku slam tonight at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series. Three little lines can hold so much. So many funny, clever haiku! I couldn't stop laughing and my uncle who always leaves early forgot to go home. And there were also gorgeous haiku followed by a pause then a collective gasp of surprise or awe.

Jerry Brooker and Frank Chambers came out of hiding armed with many haiku and Ernie Daruka, Sandra Mally, James Joseph Buhs, Dan DeRosa, Barb Stout and I all pulled our haiku shorts out of respective dusty notebooks or wrote a bunch of new ones for the occasion. This short form with a twist worked particularly well for James' pun-a-riffic styling. The final bout was between James and Dan. And after a close fight it was Dan who became our first haiku slam champ!

We all had an enlightening and entertaining time. Louise Sieviec surprised us by reading two traditional haiku in the original Japanese during the open myk. Jim Whiteside read a poem he wrote for Terry McLain. Barb Stout read beautiful haiku from a little book of them she had printed up quite a few years back. It was a grand and successful experiment! I suspect this will not be the last haiku night at WNPS.

So long for now to Wed Poetry, returning the mezzo gig

Though I will still be doing the email update and maintaining the wedpoetry.net website, I will be missing my weekly Wed Night Poetry fix from now until summer. And I will be missing it very much.

Next Wed. I have committed to slamming in the first White Plains Public Library Slam of the season.  After that, I will be attending a choir rehearsal every Wed. starting Oct 8 until the end of June and I will so miss the marvelous community of folks I have met over the incredible 14 years of this poetry series.  This seasonal music gig as a paid mezzo/alto in a church is my only job right now and I cannot afford to not go back. I do enjoy the work, just wish rehearsal was some other night.   Rehearsal gets out at 9:30 p.m. or so. I will head right to Molten Java  from there and try to catch the very tail end of Q&A.

I plan to take up the slack by going to other poetry events around the area and to music open mic nights at several local venues. 

Poetry poster based on a sculpture

This post was originally made on my Gallery blog on 2/3/07:


A few years ago, I took a sculpture class from the eccentric artist Alex Shundi at the Wooster Community Art Center.

The sculpture to the left was my project or one of my projects in class, and was done from a live model. On the right  is a poster for the Wednesday Night Poetry Series created entirely in Painter Essentials 3 from this same photo of the sculpture. The poster is really a digital collage. The materials are the WNPS logo (the chair) photos of the poet and his various books, etc. A lot of changes were obviously made to the photo. After arranging the collage materials, I did a bit of drawing over them to create the over all effect.

This is the first poster in that series that was created entirely by digital means. Early posters were a long series of hand-glued collage, drawing, then scanning printing, drawing more with digital effects also applied. The poster was for a reading (several years ago) by poet Charles Rafferty at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series.
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Poetry Poster: for 2/8/2006 event

This is a 8.5 by 11 inch poster which I did for a reading by poet Sou MacMillan. It was part of a series I made for the Wednesday Night Poetry Series in 2006. The method involved collaging bits of paper, (including publicity materials sent by the poet & the Wednesday Night Poetry program/flyer) marking on paper with oil pastel, crayon, white-out, pen and pencil, etc. In all my hand made posters, (as opposed to the strictly electronic ones) I was shooting for a depth of touch on each page. What I mean by that is, in the higher ressolution versions, if you zoom in on any part of the page, there is a lot going, a lot if interesting marks and colors to see.

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*Moved from the gallery blog where it was a Jan 07 entry