Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, October 12th, 2024 at 2pm
Woodstock Library

HYBRID: in-person and virtually via Zoom

Joann Deiudicibus
Thomas Festa

Poets Joann Deiudicibus and Thomas Festa 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, October 12th, 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:

Joann Deiudicibus - Joann Deiudicibus teaches writing in New York's Hudson Valley. Her chapbook, Lost & Found is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (Fall 2024). Her poems and essays about poetry appear in WaterWrites, A Slant of Light, & Reflecting Pool (Codhill Press), Comstock Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands, Typishly, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Shawangunk Review, Calling All Poets Anthologies, Chronogram, Lightwood, as well as Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). Ask her about true crime, cats, and confessionalism.


photo by Christopher Wheeling

Notes for New Writers

Let the only liars you trust be poets.
Let what’s earthly be afterlife,
mud caked boots uprooted in spring.
Let absence fill you like blue flames
until silence devours your margins.
The silence of chaos tells nothing
as the silence of everything listens.
Like the trees, bear witness.
Hold these sounds with out-
stretched leaves. Can you speak
in song? Will you make
a picture of God, birthed
from your heart-throat,
cut from light, carved
by breath that blooms
in blood? May your body
be a poem: furrow and field,
everything in between
the lines—fresh waters,
paths of fallen fruit
rotting sweetly,
feeding what grows.

-Joann Deiudicibus

featured in Comstock Review
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Thomas Festa - Thomas Festa is a Professor of English at SUNY-New Paltz. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Earthen (Finishing Line Press, 2023), a monograph on John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006), and over two dozen scholarly articles, most recently on W.S. Merwin and James Merrill. Other recent work includes poems in Bennington Review, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Presence, and Modern Haiku.



Rebus

I hang up. In the distance, the snow- and stubble-covered Catskills ripple like the haunches of a sphinx. As I gather my books, dark figures huddle around the heating vents on a neighboring building.

brainstorming utopia
a rooftop committee
of vultures

Year after year, she brought home from school their colds and, more lasting, their stories. Like the one about the kindergartner stunted by his mother’s inability not to drink alcohol while he was in the womb who, when asked to identify Picasso on a diagnostic exam, confidently replied, “A kind of potato.” Where are her students now? I wonder on my way to class.

silkworm eggs in the fridge
a second opinion
on her lesion

-Thomas Festa

(First published in Presence 76)

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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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