Glad to be here again, this on the eve of the Summer Solstice, with a full complement of regular community open mic poets & our featured poet Glenn Werner. In a reward to the poets who got here on time, I abandoned the one-poem rule & let open mic poets read up to 2 poems! I reserved the right (after all I am le seigneur) to limit any late arriving poets to 1 poem. But we were it.
Sylvia Barnard began the night with a recent poem about the all-too-common sight in recent weeks, observing “Umbrellas.” Jan began with a poem from her adolescence, recited from memory, “The Amateur” about a beauty contest, then a brief vignette of an old women remembering a lover, “The Faded Dock.” Brian Dorn read a couple of social justice rhymes, the ironic “Standard of Living,” & a poem for us poets, “Words.” Mike Conner‘s poem “Steel Resolve” was about addiction to love, than about Spring time flowers, “My Friends Lily & Iris.”
Man-about-town, Joe Krausman, read a timely piece, “Spring Cleaning” (he hasn’t done it yet), then the punning “Sell Phone.” Anthony Bernini began with a Spring poem by e.e. cummings (one I didn’t recognize) & then his own computer-imaged poem “Let Us Shut You Down.” I concluded the open mic with an older piece current again with the revelations about the NSA listening to our telephone conversations (& dedicated to the Russian poet Vladimer Mayakovsky), “Now Listen.”
Glenn Werner has been a regular reader a mid-hudson poetry venues for a number of year & currently hosts an open mic in Beacon, NY on the third Wednesday of the month. He too read a Spring poem, “What the Cherry Tree Said” from his chapbook Premeditated Contrition (Mongrelpoet, 2013), followed by the title poem, & the hard-edged “Damascus Steel.” Switching to a poem not in his book, he read the darkly metaphysical “The Endless Wake,” then “Walking the Brooklyn Bridge” due out in the pending Up the River journal, & ended with the more optimistic “Wings.” Glenn’s poems are filled with images from the world around us, putting his philosophical & metaphysical ideas in things.
Join us every third Thursday at 7:30PM at the Social Justice Center, a $3.00 donation pays the featured poet & supports the Social Justice Center.
