For Immediate Release

Poets Lee Gould and Dimitris Lyacos will be the featured readers when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Town Hall, 76 Tinker Street, on Saturday, May 12th at 2pm. Note: WPS&F meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month except for October, when it is held on the 3rd Saturday.

The readings will be hosted by Woodstock area poet Phillip Levine. All meetings are free and open to the public.

Bios:

Lee Gould - D A bio -- ok -- Let's see -- my bio is kind of boring -- retired from teaching at Goucher College -- English and writing -- not tenure track but not adjunct either. Have taught at all levels from nursery school thru college --

Publications: Quarterly West, Berkshire Review, upcoming in Chronogram, Phoebe, Gay and Lesbian Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Women in the Environment, Passages, and others......pretty many I guess.

Live in Stockport -- what else used to teach modern dance -- have a manuscript I haven't shopped around yet -- am from Baltimore, MD originally -- up here 3 years. Oh Phillip -- I'm not that interesting really -- up until this past September worked with migrants here for BOCES........now trying to write more -- the result am getting more and more politically active -- and am producing some more poems..........

What's to say? Ask me some questions!

Dimitris Lyacos - Dimitris Lyacos (1966) is a contemporary Greek poet and playwright. He was born and raised in Athens where he studied Law at the university. From 1988-1991 he lived in Venice, then moved to London, studied philosophy at UCL and stayed there for thirteen years. He is currently based in Berlin.

His trilogy Poena Damni (Z213: Exit, Nyctivoe, The First Death) has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian and German and has been performed extensively across Europe and the USA. A sound and sculpture installation of Nyctivoe opened in London and toured Europe in 2004-2005. A contemporary dance performance based on the same book is currently showing in Greece. Lyacos' work has been the subject of lectures and research at various universities, including Amsterdam, Trieste and Oxford.

Lyacos' work is hard to classify since it crosses the usual boundaries of genre. It often takes narrative form, mixing poetry and prose, but moves into dramatic representation of character and situation in Nyctivoe, as well as a hard lyrical kind of poetry used to depict the break-up and eventual apotheosis of the body in the First Death. The possibilities of difference between the perceived and the objective outside world are exploited; we are watching the irregular flow of an internal monologue, an event in the external world, or even an event reflected onto the thinking and feeling surfaces of the protagonist's mind. Nevertheless the characters' bodies and the physical context of their lives are presented with impressive solidity. The man escaping from his city into a closely detailed, yet somehow Kafkaesque, world, has the everyday persona of an L.A.private eye in a 40's detective novel along with the intimation of being on the verge of an extraordinary adventure. Nyctivoe starts with the man from St. Mark's gospel living in a cemetery, tormented by demons, and cutting himself with stones. He searches in the soil for the grave of Nyctivoe, and in the urgency of his desire projects life into the body he has scraped up from the tomb, whose passage back to life is described with horrifying materiality. The grave becomes a "fine and private place" for lovers still capable of embracing. In the opening of The First Death a place is denied to the mutilated body which grinds against the rocks and suffers continuing degradation, physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated. Yet the bond between person and body that ensures life still persists, and, "at that point without substance/ where the world collides and takes off" , the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space -prompting, perhaps, a future regeneration.

For more information on the author visit www.lyacos.net.

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