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On the 17th episode of the Next Up to The Mic podcast, we welcome Carol Graser who was our guest at the Albany Poets Presents reading at Restaurant Navona on February 21, 2018.
Dan Wilcox wrote on his blog,
Carol has been around in the poetry scene long before she began hosting her open mic, reading in area open mics since at least the mid-1990s. Her poems are filled with tenderness, humor & with a playful, even silly, twisting of language, sometimes all at once, & she is a master of the political manifesto/rant. She began with “Poem Read in a Dream,” then on to a wedding poem for her son “Dissolving the Distance Between You.” A couple poems from when she worked at a bookstore, the first in the “persona” of a haiku, & “In Congress Park on a Lunch Break” talking to the violets, then to an ars poetica of sorts “Ghost of Ambitions.” She included a couple poems about her mother, one a pantoum about holidays after her mother’s death, & a couple poems that sprang from workshops with Bernadette Mayer (a veritable genre unto itself), one with a political bent playing on sounds & images from an assignment to use made-up words. One of Carol’s specialties are poems in the voice of voiceless objects, such as the haiku mentioned earlier, & another about, & in the voice of, “The Appendix.” She ended with an inspiring political rant from last year “Women March on Washington All Over the World.”
Carol Graser hosts a poetry reading series at Saratoga Spring’s legendary Caffe Lena on the first Wednesday of every month and has performed her work at various events and venues around NYS. Her work has been published in many literary journals, recently in Devilfish Review, Punch Drunk Press, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Minute Magazine. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Twist of Their Stems (Foothills Publishing 2007).
Please welcome, next up to the mic, Carol Graser.
Thank you!
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Music Credit
Our opening music was “Coast to Coast” by Dieljel Zambo (CL1AM1GRBRPMHA9X). Our closing music was “Imagination” by Danijel Zambo (44TCGFPF1L1434BE).
