Two great poets will be featured at Kingston’s Second Saturday Spoken Word show on Saturday, January 11th, at 7PM. Host Annie LaBarge is welcoming Roberta Gould and Donald Lev, reading the poetry of Enid Dame, to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills (320 Sawkill Road, Kingston) in what promises to be a great night of poetry in the Hudson Valley.
Roberta Gould has authored 10 books of poetry, including In Houses With Ladders, Pacing the Wind, and Louder than Seeds. Her work has appeared in many poetry journals: Confrontation, Green Mountain Review, NY Times and anthologies: A Slant of Light, The Art and Craft of Poetry, Rage Before Tears. She studied Romance Languages in Brooklyn College and the National University of Mexico, where in 1989 she organized an educational campaign encouraging European and American tourists to tip well and desist from price haggling with street venders. Her web site and blog are at robertagould.net. for information, poems and comments. She has completed a new poetry manuscript and studies Ping Pong at the Y.
Donald Lev met Enid Dame (1943-2003) at a NY Poets’ Cooperative meeting in 1978. They became life partners, and with Enid Dame, Lev founded the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which Lev still publishes. Lev attended Hunter College, worked in the wire room of the Daily News and the New York Times, and drove a cab for 20 years (with a 6 year hiatus in which he contributed to the Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). He started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology in 1969. Four decades of Lev’s work appears in Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002, followed by: Only Wings: 20 Poems of Devotion, and A Very Funny Fellow. He lives in High Falls, NY.
Enid Dame was a poet, writer and scholar whose work often reflected her Jewish background and culture. A series of midrashic poems appear in Stone Shekhina. Her other books of poems include: Anything You Don’t See, Lilith and Her Demons, and On the Road to Damascus, Maryland. Dame co-edited Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Dame also taught creative writing and the Bible as Literature at New Jersey Institute of Technology and was the Associate Director of the Writing Program at Rutgers University. She won two Puffin Foundation grants and a NY State CAPS fellowship for her work. A memorial volume of letters and poems written before Enid Dame’s death called: Where is The Woman? was published in 2006.
