Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, November 18th, 2023 at 2pm - 3rd Saturday this month
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

George Quasha
Sam Truitt

Poets George Quasha and Sam Truitt will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets in person and via Zoom (and streamed live on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WoodstockPoetry) on Saturday, November 18th, 2023 at 2pm(eastern). NOTE: this month we are meeting on the 3rd Saturday.

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

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

*** We ask all people who wish to attend in person to self-test for Covid within 24 hours prior to the event. Self-test kits are reasonably priced and available at nearly every pharmacy. ***

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:

George Quasha - George Quasha is a poet, artist, musician and writer working in diverse mediums to explore certain principles (e.g., axiality, ecoproprioception), recently discussed by sixteen writers in Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (edited Burt Kimmelman, foreword Jerome McGann). The most recent of the seven books in his invented genre preverbs include Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole (2020), Black Scintillation (2022) and Waking from Myself (2022). Three essays in the poetics of thinking appear in Poetry in Principle (foreword by Edward Casey, 2019). Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in video art (2006), principally for his ongoing work of twenty-one years art is/music is/poetry is (Speaking Portraits); the T-Space 10th annual Poetry Award (2022); and an NEA Fellowship. His axial sculpture and drawings and are represented in Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (foreword by Carter Ratcliff, 2006). Edited anthologies include America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Colombian Times to the Present (with Jerome Rothenberg, 1973/2012). He is co-founder and -publisher with Susan Quasha of Station Hill Press in Barrytown, NY.



Gnostalgia for the Present

I write the date to touch time then tear myself away.
It’s just getting started in eternity.

These events refuse to not happen.
You get a taste for the unyielding.

Time asserts itself with authority before fading.
Saying this is a meaningless statement is strangely meaningful.

Self-confirming thinking has no outside.
It comes too fast to know if it’s right or care.

Nerves are narrative enough for a say.
I have time on my shoulders timed in feet.

Inspiration crowns the occasion in plumage passing fast.
I’m measured in tongues just affirming.

Starting to appreciate the thick storied sediment building up around our lives.
Judgment is disconnect.

Don’t bother looking for a non-promiscuous word when truth stops holding back.
You dance wild in the mirror never facing.

Words are never alone but forever lonely.
If this were a self I still couldn’t meet myself.

Journeying this surface longs to return to more than language.

-George Quasha
https://caesuramag.org/posts/gnostalgia-for-the-present-george-susan-quasha

*

Sam Truitt - Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of the ten works in the Vertical Elegies series, among others in print and other media, including most recently Tokyoatoto. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley; and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Among other recognitions, he is the recipient of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. He is a graduate of Brown University (MFA) and the University of Albany (PhD). The Director of Station Hill Press and producer and a co-curator of the Station Hill Intermedia Lab, he lives in Woodstock, NY. For more, visit: samTsong/about.



Pirates Founded Havana as Were All the Islands of the Caribbean Stolen

Our vision is an object worthy of the sky,
though boring to hear described
—
unless sky is the vision & the sun the eye of
Horus
—
““& ‘bell’ because everything rings””
—
or as Ashbery does slide that cloud past that fact
we place ourselves inside to clear the light we
leapt behind to ignite a field of brittle arpeggios
that transform into a tree in place of the stump
of once
—
“the algorithm of which breaks into them
phenomena”
—
to dull edge of what cobra appears to sense
enough
—
““like an explorer peering into a compass dial in
a world made only of ones & zeros””
—
to enter the words behind them from,
in case you’d missed them
—
a band of dithyrambs in shadow at the end of
crime
—
looking for gaps to form as they’re apt if you do
long & soft enough to their breaths in church of
Saint John (Coltrane that is)
—
““path “rather than replacing capitalism with
art”””
—
““in the face no sunsets (junkie)””
—
“““no face as witnessed by everything not just
borrowed & evolved is imitated”””
—
open to experience no word may stand in place
of
—
the only way to freedom is the song of
—

-Sam Truitt

*

Developing WPS 2023 Schedule - February-December readings Hybrid: in-person and now at the Woodstock Library and via Zoom (and streamed live on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WoodstockPoetry)
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; Will Nixon
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; Lissa Kiernan 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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