Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, January 14th, 2023 at 2pm
via Zoom only

Danielle Woerner
Virginia Konchan

Poets Danielle Woerner and Virginia Konchan will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets via Zoom only on Saturday, January 14th, 2023 at 2pm (eastern).

WPS meetings are (usually) held on the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month.

Beginning February, 2023 WPS meetings will meet in-person at the Woodstock Library and virtually via Zoom.

Woodstock Library
5 Library Lane, Woodstock, NY 12498
(845)679-2213
www.woodstock.org

The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend virtually: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike. Thank you.

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

Features:

Danielle Woerner - Danielle Woerner, an active member of the Woodstock arts community for nearly 25 years, is a singer, writer, songwriter and voice teacher. In 2014 she and her husband relocated from the Hudson Valley to Downeast Maine, where they run a small arts institute. She has a special affinity for writing English-language poetry in traditional Japanese forms: haiku, senryu, tanka and shahai (photo-haiga).

During the pandemic she created and designed her first poetry collection, I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard: Japanese Short-Form Poetry, Served with a Twist (Sunrise Song Press, 2021). A chapbook illustrated throughout with her photographs, it traces a life-journey from New York City to the Hudson Valley to Maine’s Bold Coast. Her poetry has been published in the arts and culture magazine Chronogram, the Three Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian & New England Writers (Resolute Bear Press, 2017); and an online sakura (cherry blossom) anthology released last year by the Canadian Consul-General of Japan in Toronto. She’s been a regular contributor to Eastern Structures, the journal of Asian poetry in traditional forms, since 2020.

As a journalist, Danielle was a regular writer for the Woodstock Times, and her features and op-ed pieces have appeared in Classical Singer, New Music Connoisseur, Hudson Valley Magazine and Newsweek. Her reporting for weekly newspapers in Maine was recognized in 2018 by the National Federation of Press Women. An acclaimed singer and recording artist as well as a BMI-affiliated songwriter, Danielle joined the Hudson Valley Haiku-kai in 2013, and the Woodstock Poetry Society in 2021.



From the chapbook I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard, Sunrise Song Press 2021:

Apple, flushed and warm
from the branch, falls to my hand,
          puts sun on my tongue

From the warming bog
that scrabbling slushy cackle:
          frogs talkin’ dirty

Bliss seldom moves us
to dive deep, haul up treasure
the way the Blues does

-Danielle Woerner

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Virginia Konchan - Virginia Konchan is the author of four poetry collections, Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2022), Hallelujah Time (Véhicule Press, 2021), Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2020 and 2018); a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and four chapbooks, That Tree is Mine (Gaspereau Press, 2020), Empire of Dirt (above/ground press, 2019), The New Alphabets (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press, 2015), as well as coeditor of the craft anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023). She holds degrees from Beloit College (BA), Cleveland State University (MFA), and the University of Illinois Chicago (PhD). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Best New Poets, The Walrus, and The Believer, her essays and criticism in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, Jacket2, and Guernica, her translations in The Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote and Circumference, and her fiction in StoryQuarterly, Joyland, and Memorious. Her work has been anthologized in several collections, and her honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, The Banff Centre, and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice. Co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary, and Associate Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, she currently teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

www.virginiakonchan.com




Vigil

Overwatered the fire lilies.
Underwatered the aloe.
Prayed to the sun god
to dispel my gloom.
Bought perlite and peat moss.
Made cuttings out of dahlia,
aster, gardenia, begonia, rose.
Charged crystals in the moon.
Claimed knowledge panels.
Accessed several past lives.
Testified to my greenery
of vistas yet unknown.
Drank vinegar.
Ate seldomly.
Consulted no one
except those the
spirit guides approved.
Was stringent, exacting.
Practiced loving action.
Rode my bike through
abandoned streets that
led to stately mansions
with automated sprinklers
misting trees from Brazil.
Spoke candidly in private;
was speechless in public.
A return to civilian life
without halo or word.
Sought true friends,
not those whom ego
or mere habit serves.
All this time my mother
lay dying in hospice, alone.
I held her paper-thin hand.
Rubbed her feet with oils.
Kissed her ancient forehead.
Embraced her body of bone.

-Virginia Konchan

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/11/poem-virginia-konchan-vigil/671968/?fbclid=IwAR39qq4Z8hAjjGi78fctU2FSw99lDw9LWk_c22eDvSgtr5OKgaSOYaXiYjA

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Developing WPS 2023 Schedule - February-December readings Hybrid: in-person and now at the Woodstock Library and via Zoom
All WPS Events: Events

01/January 14th - Danielle Woerner; Virginia Konchan (via Zoom only)
02/February 11th - Alison Koffler; Dayl Wise
03/March 11th - Allison Argueta; Brianna Heller
04/April 8th - Darcy Smith; Dennis Wayne Bressack
05/May 13th - Jerrice J. Baptiste; Mary K O'Melveny
06/June 10th - Irene Sipos; Perry S. Nicholas
07/July 8th - Kateri Kosek; Raphael Kosek
08/August 12th - David Messineo; TBA
09/September 9th - Barbara Ungar; Lucia Cherciu
10/October 14th - Bracha Nechama Bomze; Reagan Upshaw
11/November 18th - George Quasha; Sam Truitt 3rd Saturday
12/December 9th - Lisa St. John; TBA and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2023 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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