 Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival joins in the celebration of the third annual WOODSTOCK ARTS DAY. On Saturday, May 26, WPS&F in association with the Woodstock Arts Consortium will present a reading with featured poets Will Nixon, Philip Pardi, and Matthew J. Spireng from 2:00PM – 3:00PM. This reading is hosted by Phillip Levine at the Maverick Concert Hall and is free and open to the public.
Will Nixon has published two chapbooks, When I Had It Made (Pudding House) and The Fish Are Laughing (Pavement Saw) plus poems in many journals and magazines. He has finished a cyberpunk epic, Lyndon Baines Takes a Fare to the Palace of Wisdom, about a Gotham cabbie in 2063. Now he's working on a poetry manuscript inspired by the movie Night of the Living Dead and on another about living in Hoboken in the 80s, Love in the City of Grudges. He lives in Woodstock. Philip Pardi's first book of poems, Meditations on Rising and Falling, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press. He lives in Phoenicia and teaches at Bard College. He recently had a nightmare involving a semicolon. Matthew J. Spireng’s full-length book manuscript Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published in 2006 by Bluestem Press at Emporia State University. His chapbooks are Encounters from Finishing Line Press, Inspiration Point (winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition), Just This, from Hampden-Sydney College, and Young Farmer, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. For more information, contact the Woodstock Arts Consortium (www.woodstockartsconsortium.org) or the Woodstock Poetry Society (www.woodstockpoetry.com). Labels: poetry events
 The New York Times has an interview on their website with the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey. In it she talks about her new book of poetry, growing up with a single mother, and the racial issues of living in the South.
From her biography at Emory University, where she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing: Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, and Duke University where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies. Her most recent collection is Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Link to Questions for Natasha Trethewey - New York Times
 Two highly respected poets who live in the Hudson Valley, Therese Broderick and Dan Wilcox, will be the featured readers when Poetry at the Hudson meets at the Athens Cultural Center, 24 Second Street, on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 2 p.m. An open mike follows the featured readings.
Broderick , who has a master's in fine arts, is a freelance writer and teacher residing in Albany, New York, with her husband and daughter. She has served as an officer of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, as a workshop leader for Knowledge Network and for WomanWords, as a book reviewer for The River Reporter, and as a volunteer poet at The Roarke Center social services agency. Her poems have won local and national awards and been published in such periodicals as Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Barnwood, 2River View, and Other Seven. She has been a featured poet at Caffe Lena (Saratoga Springs), Third Thursday (Albany), the Woodstock Poetry Society, and the Saratoga Poetry Zone (Saratoga Springs) and actively maintains a blog at poetry.blog-city.com. Wilcox, the host of an open mike at the Social Justice Center in Albany, New York, on the third Thursday of each month, is a member of the poetry performance group "3 Guys from Albany." He has been a featured reader at most of the poetry venues in the Capital District and throughout the Hudson Valley, publishes poetry under the imprint A.P.D. (Albany's poetic device, another pleasant day, etc.), and has himself been published in Out of the Catskills, The Second Word Thursday Anthology, We Speak for Peace, Chronogram, and numerous small press journals and anthologies. His work has also appeared on the internet and in self-published chapbooks. An avid photographer, he claims to have the world's largest photo collection of unknown poets. He is an active member of Veterans for Peace and maintains a blog at dwlcx.blogspot.com . The readings will be hosted by area poet Bob Wright. There is a suggested donation of $3. To reach the Cultural Center, proceed on NY 385 into the village of Athens and turn west onto Second Street; it is the second building on the right. For additional information, call 518-444-4561. Labels: open mic, poetry events
 This just in from Dan Wilcox:
Celebrate the Birthday of Walt Whitman at the Robert Burns Statue Washington Park, Albany, NY A reading of “Song of Myself” by local poets and other citizens Thursday, May 31, 2007 starting at 6:00 PM (rain or shine). This reading is free and presented by the Poetry Motel Foundation
and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild You may sign up to read by emailing Dan Wilcox at dwlcx@earthlink.net, or sign up on the night of the reading. We will be reading the "deathbed version" from the last Leaves of Grass. There are 52 sections. If you have a favorite section, sign up now to read that section. Be sure to bring a chair or blanket to sit on. Labels: poetry events
We have stumbled upon a video of Pierre Joris from a recent performance at the "Behind The Egg" series. In this video Pierre reads from "Meditations on the 40 Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj," accompanied by Munir Beken on Oud. If you have any videos or audio of Albany area poets and spoken word artists, let us know and we will start putting them up on the site. We are in the process of adding more multimedia to the website, so the more videos, the better. Labels: poetry events
 Poetry Open Mic on Wednesday, May 2 at Caffe Lena (47 Phila St, Saratoga Springs) with featured poet Bernadette Mayer. Sign up at 7pm, reading starts 7:30. Admission for this event is $2.00. This open mic is hosted by local poet Carol Graser.
Bernadette Mayer’s poetry has been praised by John Ashbery as “magnificent.” Michael Lally called her, “One of the most original writers of her generation.” Throughout the 1980s, she was the Director of the Poetry Project in New York City and she has taught there and at the New School. She is the author of numerous books including, The Bernadette Mayer Reader, New Directions Books. Last year, Tuumba Press published her interviews with Bill Berkson, What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? And recently the journal 0 to 9 she edited with Conceptual artist Vito Acconci in the late 60s was made available in one collected volume by Ugly Duckling Press.
Mayer's position at The Poetry Project made her a central figure in the community of artists and writers gathered at that time in New York City's Lower East Side, and many of her students from this period -- Lee Ann Brown and Lisa Jarnot among them -- have gone on to become writers themselves.
As a writer, Mayer is most often associated with the New York School, a rubric which refers to composers, painters, visual artists, conceptual artists, and choreographers in addition to writers. Mayer's use of compositional methods such as chance-operation, collage, and cut-up identify her as an artist pursuing concerns similar to those of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low or Frank O'Hara -- central figures in the New York School -- as well as more contemporary figures associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. But Mayer's work is also significantly influenced by modernist figures such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as well as by her background in classical studies, evident in her syllabi, reading lists and in her informal translations of Catallus. This program is funded in part by the Decentralization Program, a regrant programof the New York State Council on the Arts, administered by the Saratoga County Arts Council. For more information contact Caffe Lena at www.caffelena.org or 518-583-0022 Labels: open mic
 Esther M. Swanker, President of the Board of Trustees of the Schenectady County Public Library has announced the leadership for Schenectady's third One County One Book community reading program. The co-chairs are SCPL Trustees Carol Raphael of Glenville and Carl Erikson of
Schenectady.
The library is in the process of accepting nominations from the public for the 2008 One County One Book. The process, which has been the same for the previous OCOB campaigns, will involve public nomination of the 2008 OCOB book, committee review of the high vote getters to narrow the field to books meeting established criteria, announcement of the five finalists on August 15, public balloting from the final list, and the announcement of the chosen book in late October. The nomination process will close on June 8. Criteria for One County One Book includes that the chosen book lend itself well to community discussion and programs, that it be of interest to men, women and young people, that it be available in paperback, and that there be audio and large print versions. Nomination ballots will be available at Central and all 9 branches of the Schenectady County Public Library, through the web site: www.scpl.org , and at the Open Door Bookstore and the Whitney Book Corner. Schenectady's One County One Book selection for 2007 was Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper; the previous selection in 2006 was Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The program has grown in popularity each year. The 2006 program received the Mohawk Valley Library System Library Recognition Award for SCPL ".for its role in promoting reading and developing a sense of
community." A highlight of the 2007 OCOB program was a visit by author, Jodi Picoult, an event that drew over 1000 people. "This has been an incredible project for the library," said Esther Swanker. "It's an excellent exercise in fulfilling our goals of literacy and community unity. OCOB has brought thousands of people from throughout the county together in discussion groups and programs. We are very proud of
what we have accomplished with OCOB so far and look forward to what this third endeavor will bring in 2008."
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