Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, July 13th, 2024 at 2pm
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Karen Schoemer
Martin Steingesser

Poets Karen Schoemer and Martin Steingesser will be the featured readers, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets in person and streamed via Zoom on Saturday, Saturday, July 13th, 2024 at 2pm(eastern).

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

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: 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.

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Features:

Karen Schoemer - Karen Schoemer's poems have appeared in Blazing Stadium, Hobo Camp Review, Pine Hills Review, La Presa, and the anthology Pretty Obscure (Far West Press, 2024). She is vocalist for the band Sky Furrows, which has released two albums (Sky Furrows, 2020 and Reflect and Oppose, 2023), and for Jaded Azurites, a duo with bassist Mike Watt. She is author of August, a new poetry chapbook/zine that will eventually be an album as well. A graduate of the Writers Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph's University in Brooklyn, she lives in Philmont, NY.



August 8

Our marriages, our fights
our black manufactured ideas
are memories now
lapping out of the old house turret
lapping and rushing and pushing

standing on the white dot of now
we are
unwieldy as balloons

with praying hands
we lift the wooden cage we lived in
a cage with very few bars
expenditure and replenishment
repetition and replenishment

I live on this bridge of swims
my hands shirk instead of sing
can I still love you?

-Karen Schoemer

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Martin Steingesser - Martin Steingesser is author of three books of poems. You can PREVIEW Yellow Horses:, the most recent: e.issuu.com/embed.html#9201165/41933626. As a performing artist, he says, “There are moments presenting poems when windows, doors, walls blow off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with who-ever is listening.” Attend one of his solo readings: Martin Steingesser Poetry Reading.

Martin served as Portland Maine's first Poet Laureate 2007-09. Poems have received awards, including the Betsy Sholl Award and First Place in Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Annual Maine Literary Awards Short Works category for Poetry. As a Teaching Artist, he has experience leading poetry workshops at all grade and age levels, from Elementary Schools through College, as well as for Teacher Training and Special Needs Groups. In 2016, he taught in Lifetime Arts Poetry Workshop Programs. From one series of such workshops, he formed an ongoing Poetry Group that continues meeting since 2016; and co-edited an anthology of the groups poems, Chorale (Deerbrook Editions: 2022). In 2006, he received the Maine Alliance for Arts Education’s Bill Bonyun Award “for exemplified talent and professionalism as an artist and contributions to arts education.” Author of an award-winning chapbook and performance work, The Thinking Heart: The Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum (Deerbrook Editions), with which he toured throughout New England, and abroad in Poland and Belgium. An elementary school student once wrote a poem about him: “At first he seems strange, / like an unknown code. / But when he opens up, you open up / to see one another. / His work is beauty, it moves you. // He brings you over the bridge of writing / to beautiful poetry.” More recently, he read for the monthly series Dialogues of Hearing and Seeing and the Jane Street Arts Center in Saugerties.



Blue Lesson
                 for Mary Oliver

Every morning I set out on road, or lake
or into the woods, looking for something
to catch my eye, or ear, something for the heart’s appetite,
something maybe to breathe into and call—well, yes,
a poem. I was playing, too, the part of a poet I know
who does this, who knows how to cast and jig a line,
time after time catching the prettiest fish, more than anyone
I know, and morning after morning—every morning
I came back empty-handed. Then, one morning
before leaving this country of the blue mountain
and blue lakes, I made it out onto Eagle Lake. O
there was the stillness of glass and a mist
to get lost in, and I found a monarch butterfly on the water
frost had caught by the wings. I breathed over it,
paddling home—not, finally, with the butterfly,
which flew, and more than the poem about how breathing
lifted wings, but how to come home again
and again with what look like empty hands, the gift
—and there is one, even when I don’t see, don’t listen—
how to hold this nothing, loving the flavor, its scent.

-Martin Steingesser

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Developing WPS 2024 Schedule - now in-person at the Woodstock Library and via Zoom (and streamed live on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WoodstockPoetry)
All WPS Events: Events

01/January 13th - Patrick Hammer, Jr.; Robert Langdon
02/February 10th - Lissa Kiernan; Mary K O'Melveny
03/March 9th - Ethan Sirotko; Janet Kaplan
04/April 13th - Poetry Month Special Event ("Unbroken Circle")
05/May 11th - Roger Mitchell; Steve Clorfeine
06/June 8th - Barry Wallenstein; Richard Levine
07/July 13th - Karen Schoemer; Martin Steingesser
08/August 10th - Craig Hancock; Marnie Andrews
09/September 14th - Christopher Heffernan; Jerrice J. Baptiste
10/October 12th - Joann Deiudicibus; Thomas Festa
11/November 9th - Judy Lechner; Teresa Costa
12/December 14th - TBA and Annual Business Meeting

Also, why not become a 2024 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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