Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, June 8th, 2019 at 2pm
Golden Notebook (Upstairs)

Jack Hopper
Jessica Hornik

Poets Jack Hopper and Jessica Hornik will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday, June 8th, 2019 at 2pm.

Note: WPS meetings are held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month at Golden Notebook (Upstairs).

Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
29 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.goldennotebook.com
845-679-8000

The reading will be hosted by poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.

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Features:

Jack Hopper - Jack Hopper has been writing and editing most of his life. He has four published collections—Miscellany (1962), The Ympes of Wanton Youthe: Poems 1963-93, Doubles: Poems 1995-2012, and Rafting the Medusa: Poems 2013-2018. He was chief editor at the NY academic publishing house AMS Press for 40 years, where he also founded and coedited Works: A Quarterly of Writing. His work has appeared in Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit; Literary Gazette; and The Healing Muse, and others. In Ithaca since 2005, he served two terms as Tompkins County Poet Laureate, and is a founder/editor of Cayuga Lake Books.



The First One Hundred Years

The empty wheelchair faces the door
like a dog that wants Out.
My mother’s gone to hospice
where people pass away—
but not gently, she: too feisty
with her tiny fists, and most,
her silence a wall
raised against that one
unwanted visitor.

Long before her last hurrah,
how many dances with Big Jack,
her husband who would die too young?
Their parties rocked the house
and kept us kids entranced
behind the upstairs banister.
In the mornings came the calm
of Claire de Lune played on her grand
as outside air fanned away
the clouds of nicotine.

Not till her last decade
did her quick step falter.
The only walker she preferred
was Johnny on the rocks.
The legacy of smoking— plastic lines
of oxygen coiling, slithering
on the floor around her
costing falls and fractures. Finally,
liver cancer that no splint could fix
entered without bothering to knock.
And in the mix of nurses, friends, relations,
came the ambulance, weeks later,
driven by a handsome paramedic
who caught her eye, his wink.
With such feints she kept at bay
her aging enemy
till the last day,
then turning
to the wall
passed through.

-Jack Hopper

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Jessica Hornik - Jessica Hornik is the author of A Door on the River (Chatwin Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement (including a recent feature as the TLS Poem of the Week), the Yale Review, and many other publications. She has twice been a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts, and was commissioned to write poems for the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia and the Arts Center of the Capital Region. Her collaborations with composers Joseph Hallman and Stephen Coxe have resulted in three song cycles and individual settings. Born and raised in upstate New York, she earned degrees from Cornell and New York University. She lives in the Mohawk River hamlet of Alplaus.



August

Sighing as I go,
exhaling summer’s heat—
I’m done. Done
introducing the goldenrod
to the roadside society
of asters. My final act.
September wakes now
to a blue like no other,
a glazed transparency,
the sunlight downright
urgent on the backs
of blackbirds. The river
sparkles hard, as though
an unglimpsed immortality
pressed up from below.
As though.

-Jessica Hornik
from A Door on the River

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Developing WPS 2019 Schedule - all readings at Golden Notebook (Upstairs)
All of 2019 Events: Events

01/January 12th - Darcy Smith; T. G. Vanini
02/February 2nd (1st Sat) - Leny Brown, Roger Mitchell
03/March 9th - Bruce Weber; Celia Watson Seupel
04/April 13th - Brian Liston; Lissa Kiernan
05/May 11th - Howie Good; Reagan Upshaw
06/June 8th - Jack Hopper; Jessica Hornik
07/July 13th - Post Traumatic Press Publishing (Dayl Wise+)
08/August 10th - Kate Reese Hurd; Thomas Bonville
09/September 14th - Carol Graser; Mary Kathryn Jablonski
10/October 12th - Ken Holland; Susan Sindall(NA)
11/November 9th - Jerrice J. Baptiste
12/December 14th - George Wallace; Robert Basner and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2019 Member of the Woodstock Poetry Society?

Membership is $20 a year. (To join, send your check to the Woodstock Poetry Society, P.O. Box 531, Woodstock, NY 12498. Include your email address as well as your mailing address and phone number. Or join online at: www.woodstockpoetry.com/become.html). Your membership helps pay for meeting space rental, post-office-box rental, the WPS website, and costs associated with publicizing the monthly events. One benefit of membership is the opportunity to have a brief biography and several of your poems appear on this website.

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