Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival as part of the Woodstock Arts Consortium is sponsoring the following poetry event as part of the Woodstock Arts Week. For a full listing of Arts Week events, see: www.woodstockartsconsortium.org.
Poets Gretchen Primack and Allen C. Fischer will be the featured readers when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Town Hall, 76 Tinker Street, on Saturday, April 12th at 2pm. Note: WPS&F meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month.
The readings will be hosted by Woodstock area poet Phillip Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.
Gretchen Primack’s publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Rhino, Best New Poets 2006, and others. Her chapbook The Slow Creaking of Planets is freshly minted from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at Bard College and at two maximum-security prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative. More information and poems can be found at www.gretchenprimack.com.
Allen Fischer is not reluctant to draw on his business background in his poetry. Although he lives for the most part in Saugerties, NY, he splits his time between city (Brooklyn, NY) and country (Saugerties, NY) with one month a year near Hamburg, Germany, his wife’s home town. His writing is also somewhat peripatetic as feelings and concerns are dealt with through the historic, social and scenic lenses of these various locations.
Retired as director of marketing for a nationwide corporation, Fischer’s writing is as likely to mine the images and conflicts of the world of business as it is to describe the seasonal extremes of upstate New York. From the Philadelphia area, a graduate of Haverford College, he attended Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies both in Washington DC and Bologna Italy. Later, he served in the US Army, also in Italy, thus setting in motion a life of changing locations.
Fischer came to poetry relatively late, beginning to write “whenever possible” in his forties. For about 12 years, he worked closely with poet William Matthews. Allen Fischer has published widely in journals such as The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Rattapallax and River Styx. In 1997, his poems were selected for inclusion in the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry and Bright Hill Press’ Out of the Catskills and Just Beyond, and in 2007, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers.
