Feb 10, 2010 – Exotic, Neurotic, Erotic Valentine’s Open Myk!!

Our Annual Exotic, Neurotic, Erotic Night.
Oh the throes of love, and the throws of love,
the flushing, blushing and boasting!
Irascible eros, indestructible, inescapable, irritating – OKAY, SO WEAR A BOA, A RAINCOAT, BRING A POEM !(Subtle, metaphoric, euphoric or not….) We celebrate the sensual, the ridiculous, the neurotic and the exotic aspects of that hormonal madness and beyond…….

Our theme night & open myk host: Moriah

Feb 17, 2010 – Creating the 5-minute poem workshop & open myk

Creating the 5 minute poem.

This is an exercise in creative spontaneity. In five minutes write and write, when times up, pick your best line, write it on a note card and then we put them together for WNPS’ The Boggle Poem.

Workshop and open myk host; LOUISE

Feb 24, 2010 – Laurel Peterson

LAUREL S. PETERSON, is editor of the literary journal Inkwell. She holds an M.A., in Writing from Manhattanville College and is a professor of English at Norwalk Community College (NCC) and an adjunct in the graduate school at Manhattanville College where she teaches expository and creative writing, and interdisciplinary courses in the arts.

At NCC, she co-founded the Fairfield County Women’s Center and acted as Director in its inaugural year, as well as starting a a women’s studies program at the college, which she chaired for four years.

Her poetry has been published in The Atlanta Review, The Baltimore Review, The Distillery, Poet Lore, SLAB, The Rio Grande Review, The Texas Review, Thin Air, Yankee, and others. In 2006, she was a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry for her poetry manuscript Mud Never Forgets. Her poetry chapbook, That’s the Way the Music Sounds, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (July 2009). Visit her webpage at http://www.laurelpeterson.com/ Read her poem “The Museum of Jesus’ House.”

Laurel is also a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), has written a newspaper column on history for Gannett Suburban. She says though New York City is her favorite place on earth, she and her husband, poet Van Hartmann, a live in Connecticut and Vermont, where she gardens, cooks, walks in the woods and, in the winter, reads by the fire.

March 3, 2010 – Brad Davis

Brad Davis is not a radio host or a Grammy winning singer-songwriter or a dead actor. Laid off this last August after twenty-two years at a private school in northeastern Connecticut, he is not even a classroom teacher anymore. But all’s well and all manner of things shall be well. Since August he has picked up two part-time jobs, one with an educational foundation based in California, the other as coordinator of programming for Sylvester Manor Educational Farm on Shelter Island out on the East End of Long Island. He works from his home in Connecticut where he lives with his wife Deb and cat Mr. Bibbs.

Brad also writes poetry. He earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His chapbook, Short List of Wonders, was selected by Dick Allen as the winner of the 2005 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and he has won an AWP Intro Journal Award and the International Arts Movement Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Paris Review, Image, DoubleTake, Connecticut Review, Tar River Poetry, Brilliant Corners, Rock & Sling, and most recently Suss: another literary journal. Brad has published four books with Antrim House. A poem first published by Suss: another literary journal follows.

YOU’VE CHANGED

A song by this title was written in 1942 by Bill Carey & Carl Fischer.
The phrases may be read in any order.

when I sing it              naked

she cries                  into the mirror

*************

March 10, 2010 – Dick Allen at the Blue Z!

On Wednesday March 10th, the Wednesday Night Poetry Series is pleased to present the incredible and accomplished Dick Allen, whose popular readings are combinations of humorous and serious poetry, with Zen floated into the mix. Don’t miss this reading – and come early, seats will fill up fast for this one!

Allen is a Pushcart Prize winner, and a recipient of both an NEA and an Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowship. His new poems have appeared recently in or are forthcoming in The New Criterion, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, Stone Boat, Gettysburg Review, The New York Quarterly, and The Hudson Review. Hundreds of other poems of his have appeared over the years in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Agni, The New England Review, and in over 40 national poetry anthologies. His poems have been in five editions of The Best American Poetry and another one will be in the 2010 edition. Allen’s poems and short essays have often been featured on Poetry Daily, as well as read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. In January-February, 2010, he (will be/was) the featured poet on the Tricycle/Rattle Poetry website.

Visit his website for some poems

His seventh collection of poetry, the Zen-Buddhist influenced Present Vanishing, was published by Sarabande Books in October, 2008. This last September, it received the 2009 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry. Allen’s previous two collections, The Day Before: New Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected, also were published by Sarabande Books.

Dick Allen and his wife, poet L. N. Allen, live near the shores of Thrushwood Lake, in Trumbull, Connecticut, with music—Bach and Bluegrass.

March 17, 2010 — Reggie Marra

Peace poet, personal journey facilitator, all around good-guy, Reggie Marra is a poet, author, and educator with over 33 years of experience in elementary, middle, secondary, and higher education.

He is a Master Teaching Artist with the Arts Division of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, and he works with organizations and individuals who are committed to ongoing growth and development. His Integral Journeys™ workshops provide safe, challenging spaces within which to explore identity, perspective, voice and purpose—your authentic place in the world—through the transformative power of language as it manifests in poetry, story, council, humor & nature.  Visit his website at IntegralJourneys.com.

He is author of four books: This Open Eye: Seeing What We Do, Living Poems, Writing Lives: Spirit, Self and the Art of Poetry, Who Lives Better Than We Do? and The Quality of Effort.
His poems have appeared in The Underwood Review, Many Waters, Let the Poets Speak, The Fairfield Review, Concepts, The Journal of Pastoral Counseling, “Story, Silence and Spirit: The Crisis of the First-Person Pronouns,” “Transformation or Stagnation: the Resilience Dilemma,” and “What Do You Mean, Spirituality?”

Prior to developing the Integral Journeys programs, he spent twenty-one years as a teacher, coach, and administrator in secondary and higher education. He currently lives in Connecticut with his family. His wife Marianela Medrano-Marra is our featured poet the following Wednesday. They are very different and quite complementary!

Empty Smoking Boot
August 6, 2006

Green shrubs and
distant haze-shrouded
hills lie beyond the
charred, smoldering
car frame. Scattered
tree limbs, twigs and
dry leaves lure the eye
from the blackened
metal to the lone
empty smoking boot
that leans on its side
against the small stone.
Laces through the bottom
four and top two eyelets
connect nothing,
lead nowhere, yearn
for familiar tension
and purpose. Brown
leather upper folded
down and back as if
to offer relief from
the heat for the absent
ankle and foot.

March 24, 2010 – Marianela Medrano Marra

Marianela Medrano-Marra was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and has lived in Connecticut since 1990. A poet and a writer of non-fiction and fiction, she holds a PhD in psychology, a professional counselor’s license and certification as a poetry therapist.

Medrano offers workshops and readings in various venues in Connecticut, New York and other parts of the country. Her poetry, rich with imagery and metaphor, often deals with women’s issues. In her workshops, she combines literature, psychology and spirituality to help others find new ways of knowing the wholeness of human beings.

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in Latin America, Europe and the United States. The following are her individual publications: Oficio de Vivir (1986). Santo Domingo: Editorial Buho, Los Alegres Ojos de la Tristeza/Happy Eyes of Sadness (1987). Santo Domingo: Editorial Buho. Regando Esencias/ The Scent of Waiting (1998). New York: Alcance, Curada de Espantos/One Who Has Seen It All (2002). Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Torremozas.

An Urban Sadness Converses with Ours

Leagues and leagues of blue sea
without a voice
a sound to guide us
Names also forgotten
confused in uncertain accents
Before
there were bats in the caves
to guard our names in the Guayabas
Also turtles and sacred trees
-surfaces to write them on-
That was before we drowned
before the wind swallowed us
There are no statues of our ancestors in Manhattan
and we have forgotten how to use wings
Yet inside there is a bright Zemi­
signaling a point of light
A voice sings in the sun
our bodies move towards the unkown.

From Goddess of the Yuca (unpublished)

Translated from Spanish by the author and Reggie Marra

March 31, 2010 – Workshop & Open Myk

April 7, 2010 -Claire Zoghb

WAR STORY

He’s put the war out of his mind. Shelling and murdered relatives behind him. But it lives on in his legs: one limb at a time shakes constantly, even in sleep, as if someone had told him once long ago that he could outrun memory and he half-believed it.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Claire Zoghb’s first full-length collection, Small House Breathing, won the 2008 Quercus Review annual competition. A chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press. Her work has appeared in Yankee, Connecticut Review, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, CALYX, Saranac Review, Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, Natural Bridge, Quercus Review, in the anthologies Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, Claire was the winner of the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition. She is a recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, an Urban Artists Initiative grant, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and has earned a certificate from the Amherst Writers and Artists Institute. She lives in New Haven, where she works as a graphic artist/book designer and teaches writing workshops for kids.

April 14, 2010 Sharon Charde

Sharon L. Charde, a retired family therapist and writing teacher, is an award-winning poet who has been published in over thirty journals and anthologies. She was editor of I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, which she published as a product of her weekly writing workshop at Touchstone, a Litchfield residential facility for adjudicated teen-aged girls where she’s volunteered since 1999. Sharon won first prize in the Flume Press 2005 chapbook competition for her chapbook, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail, which was published in September 2005. Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, a chapbook collection of poems on her son’s death, won first prize from The Dallas Poets Community in 2006, and Backwaters Press published her full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, in November 2008. She won the first Litchfield County Inge Morath Award in 2005, given for Sharon’s significant social impact in the arts, and the “Making A Difference For Women Award” from Soroptimist International of Greater Waterbury, CT in 2007. She has led women’s writing retreats in Lakeville, CT and Block Island, RI since 1990, and has lived in Lakeville since 1970 with her husband John.

AT THE BEST WESTERN

Across the small shining pool I see a boy
about ten, narrow body, loose nylon suit,
and then there you are rising out of him
like steam, in your own ten-year-old body,
navy trunks with the two red stripes down the side,
wet hair sticking to your forehead, you’ve just
gotten out of the pool and are calling me
to come and look at something on the other side.
Your bathing suit is drenched and droopy but you
are widely smiling, you’ve always loved
the water, want me to come in with you now,
swim the length of the shimmering rectangle.
Slowly I rise to move toward you, dive in
and then of course you are gone but the water
takes me in and I begin to stroke, first the crawl,
then I’m on my back and then over on my breast ,
laps and laps, my legs kicking then scissoring, heart
deep in the chlorinated liquid, not drowning.

April 21, 2010 – Workshop & Open Myk

4/28/2010 Lori Desrosiers

Lori Desrosiers grew up on the banks of the Hudson River in NY, but now calls Westfield, Massachusetts her home. Her chapbook of poetry, Three Vanities, is published by Pudding House Press. Her poetry has been published in BigCityLit, The Equinox, Blue Fifth Review, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, November 3^rd Club, Common Ground Review, Gold Wake Press’ five-poem mini-chapbook series and others. She is the Editor of Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, and also publishes Poetry News, an online newsletter of poetry-related events in the CT/Mass. region. She teaches English at Westfield State College and earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from New England College.

May 5th – Book Launch Event: Crush

A new anthology called Crush created by Faith Vicinanza is being released by Hanover Press, which has published books by a variety of Connecticut poets over the years including one-time state poet laureate, the late Leo Connellan. The evening’s featured reading will be various poets whose work is represented in the book.

May 12, 2010 – Jason Labbe

more info coming

May 19, 2010 – Workshop tba

May 26, 2010 – Lorraine Schein

June 2, 2010 – Daniel Nester’s poetry

Yes we have heard him reading his outrageous prose at a special event at Western CT State University this past December. But now we will hear his poetry at the Blue Z. Daniel Nester is a journalist, essayist, poet, editor, and teacher. His latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction (Soft Skull Press 2009). He is also the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), a collection of poems. His work has been anthologized in such places as The Best American Poetry, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll. He teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

June 9, 2010 – TBD

June 16, 2010 – Celebrate Summer Open Myk & Workshop

June 23, 2010 – Kim Bridgford

From here on down, the events already occurred!

The first part of our WNPS blog runs into future time, with the nearest date at the top. Once the end (of the booked schedule that has been put online) is reached, the blog turns tail, turns around and runs into past time with the most recent past reading at the top. So, unless you are looking for a reading that’s already gone by – turn around and scroll back towards the top!

Jan 20th, 2010 – Sympetalous at Blue Z

.

.

For an account of this great feature click here

.

.

HOST: Ernie      Direct from the 60’s, wild-eyed poet-guy Sympetalous will read his own all-natural hipster beat poetry.

The following poem is what Sympetalous sent as a bio:

A mild mannered reporter
for The Subterranean Homesick
News hears the call of fate and suddenly
awakes Some Velvet Morning when he’s straight
then starts to sway and write this way for no
apparent planetary reason save the
subtle motion of a Deep Blue Moon
and the Red Dwarf Stars…

And all the while a Whirling Earth performs
one full ellipsis around an ever Sacred Sun and soon
bright pulsing words from Pipes of Pan now rise & soar
and hang a bit about a pointed space filled with heat & light
and pairs of eager ears open wide to vivid minds
some even willing to shoot the rapids
and then float the calms
of this Stream o’ Con
Ki-o-tay

Jan 27th, 2010 – RETURN OF THE HOSTS at Blue Z

HOST: Lisa    YOU THOUGHT THEY WERE GONE BUT NOW THEY’RE BACK

Present hosts who read their own poems were: Faith Vicinanza, Mark McGuire-Schwartz, Robin Sampson, Louise Sieviec, Ernie Daruka, Lisa Marie Ackerly, Derek Crofut and Mar Walker. Moriah Vecchia drummed a chant instead. Past Hosts who read included Cheryl Panosian-Haddad, Victoria Munoz and Eli Cleary.  Poems were read for John Jeffrey, Anthony Arlotta, Alice Anne Harwood, Terry McLain, Peter Vicinanza, Dan DeRosa and Gerry Brooker. We would have read one for Mike Seri too but he said he was coming and somehow didn’t arrive.

You can see some video from the evening at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DF1DE477D3488EBF

The blurb was as follows:
Following our open myk, (which will be one poem a poet for tonight only) the feature for the evening is a gaggle of present and former Wedpoetry hosts doing their own song and dance act. err, wait no, their poetry (also one poem each). And we have quite a pack of present and former hosts. I understand that at least 13 of these folks (scroll down!) will be reading. Absent, retired and deceased hosts may be represented by a reading of one of their poems. COME AND FIND OUT WHICH PAST HOSTS ARE READING!!!

Feb. 3rd, 2010 – Colin Haskins at Blue Z

HOST: Mad Mar    

Poet  Colin Haskins has six books of poetry so far, all by  Ye Olde Font Shoppe: No Kisses,Mandlebrats, Sinspiration, Judas Goat, The Bones and Habitual Intemperance. His new book, Drinking of You, will be coming out this year.

Besides writing poetry, he likes to keep readings going around the state. He is executive director of the Riverwood Poetry Series and has the poetry director for the Wood Memorial Library, the Durham Public Library, the Avon Free Public Library The Buttonwood Tree and for One Soldier, One Poem Memorial Reading at Portland Middle School.

Jan 13th, 2010 – “Found Poem” Workshop at Blue Z

HOST: Derek

“poetry is everywhere, just keep an open mind and a pair of scissors.” -anon.

This workshop was very well attended and folks seemed to really enjoy it!!! Good job Derek!

Left you can see our host at his hosting duties, and below one of several tables working on their “Found Poems.”

The Workshop Blurb: We’ll be proving this quote on Wednesday, Jan. 13th, 2010 at our first workshop of the new year led by one of our newest hosts, Derek Crofut. We’ll be creating found poems of our own as we explore the hidden meaning of the everyday word. We will be rearranging passages from newspapers, cook books, and other non-poetic texts.