Sept. 1, 2010 – Labor Day Open Myk

This night is a celebration of all of us, bring your poems and songs and instruments, come celebrate working men and women, the labor of the day, the poem (a labor of love, or perhaps just a labor).  Open mike night, one poem per round, multiple rounds of poems by open mikers until time runs out.  Celebrate the start of school, the end of the dog days of August, and the coming of Autumn, a favorite time of the year for many New Englanders, even transplants (not born and raised here).

Nov. 3, 2010 -Rose Drew & Alan Gillott

This trans-Altantic husband and wife team — who met at Wednesday Night Poetry — now live in merry Old England where they run a poetry series at Stairwell Books in York. They were both regulars here when Wedpoetry lived at at the Bethel Arts Junction.

Read Classic Example a poem by Rose

Read Wednesday Night in Bethel a poem by Alan

Rose Drew is a bio-anthropologist who works with human skeletons. She is currently living in York England in (never-ending) pursuit of a PhD. Her day job consists of interpreting lifestyle and behavior from skeletal remains.

Alan Gillott says he is a poverty stricken poet and musician who’s favorite composers are Messien, Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. He enjoys reading, photography, Provenance and Archaeology. With his wife Rose Drew he runs a poetry series at Stairwell Books in York.

Oct. 27, 2010 — Annual Halloween Bash

Oct. 20, 2010 – The Duende Project (Tony Brown, Steven Lanning-Cafaro)

The Duende Project (formerly Duende) is the poetry and music project of Tony Brown, veteran performance poet and writer, and Steven Lanning-Cafaro, virtuoso electric bass player and guitarist. Check it out at ReverbNation

Formed in 2006, they’ve released two CDs and chapbooks (“Jim’s Fall” and “americanized”) on their own Loyal Weasel label/press, and have performed in poetry and music venues up and down the East Coast.

Tony Brown’s two most recent books are “Flood,” (Pudding House 2009) and “About A Boy,” (Loyal Weasel Press, 2010). He has three pushcart nominations, and the official title of “Legend of Slam” at the 2006 PSA slam nationals. His work has been published it “100 Poets Against the War” (2003); “From Page To Stage” (2006); “Appleseeds” (2008); and “In Their Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself” (2005) — and in journals such as The November 3rd Club, Riverwalk Journal, Worcester Magazine, Worcester Review, Ballard Street Poetry, World Literature Today, Breath and Shadow, Home Planet News, and many others. He’s also a regular columnist on the poetic life for the poetry website, http://www.gotpoetry.com . Tony blogs at http://radioactiveart.wordpress.com . He is self-employed as a training consultant and writer, and is a lifelong resident of Southern New England, currently residing in Worcester.

Steven Lanning-Cafaro is an in-demand musician with many irons in the fire, including as an instructor, a guitar technician, a session player and solo artist, and recently as the bass player for popular New England funk-rock band, 5 Flavor Discount. Together as The Duende Project, they have created a sound that adds elements of funk, rock, jazz, flamenco, and folk music to poems on topics from aging and love to social justice and questions of identity in a multicultural world.

Don’t miss this event!!!

Oct 13, 2010 – Jack Powers

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JACK POWERS’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Inkwell, Atlanta Review, Cortland Review, The Ledge, The Connecticut River Review and Naugatuck Review and other magazines. He teaches special education and English at Joel Barlow High School and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with his wife and three children. He was the CCTE Poet of the Year in 2005 and the NEATE Poet of the Year in 2009.

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Translation *

I confuse the names of Polish poets
blending all into one name beginning
with Z and ending with i, one poet
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with a range of styles and voices
that stun me, the idiot American,
imagining a country of one or perhaps
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two – a north Pole and a south Pole
churning out astonishing poems
somehow translated into my dumb tongue
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and I wonder: How? Did they rhyme
or consonate in the original Slavonic
sz’s and slaw’s and ski’s? How
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can the music travel across such
closed borders? How much
is creator and how much courier?

And how can I thank both for each
smuggled artifact, en- and decoded
intelligence that traveled so far
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* Previously published in The Ledge

Oct. 6, 2010 – Rich Hemmings & Debberae Streett

This husband and wife team has long been associated with the vibrant poetry scene, in York, PA

Richard Hemmings has been published in Nimbus, Mad Poets Review, Medicinal Purposes and other publications. His on-line appearances include Shirazad.com, Poetz.com and RogueScholars.com.

Debbera Streett is a poet living in southern York County. Her poetry has been published at Shirazad.com, in the York Daily Record, YorkWrites, and the York-Blog and at a number of other poetry sites. She hosts a monthly poetry critique session called “Revisions” on the 4th Sunday of each month.

ABORTION IN EIGHT WORDS
a poem by Debberae Streett

captivate
fornicate
ejaculate
impregnate
gestate
ruminate
dilate
eliminate

Sept. 29, 2010 – Doris Henderson

Poet Doris Henderson will tell you she’s just a small town girl from rural Long Island. A former teacher and theatre coach, she sees poetry as a performance art. She attended the State University of New York at Albany and holds an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, as well as three chapbooks: Transformations, Leaving the Plaza, and Distances. Doris lives in Danbury, Connecticut, where she attends workshops with writer friends, does freelance editing, and serves as president of the Danbury chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society. She has four children, six grandchildren and a cat named Azure.

Click here to read a write up of a recent reading

Click here to read a sample of poems from the book

“Doris Henderson’s first full-length poetry collection, What Gets Lost, is a work of stunning multiplicity, mingling jubilation and high jinx with a terrible sense of what gets lost, moving between glorying in the world’s beauty and exposing its follies and pitfalls, between reveling in the real and free-falling in a magically surreal realm of dreamand fantasy. What holds it all together i

s a sensibility as witty as it is wise, a voice in love with the possibilities of language and metaphor.” -From Antrim House

Sept. 22, 2010 – Found Poem Workshop

Sometimes the best poems aren’t written, they’re discovered.  Derek Crofut will be running his signature found poetry workshop on September 22nd. We’ll explore the accidentally poetic sources of normally mundane texts with the ambitions of stringing together snips of image and phrase to create something beautiful.   Source texts will be provided.   Bring a pair of scissors and an open mind!

Sept. 15, 2010 – Monica Youn

Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet whose poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Gulf Coast, Paris Review, Angi, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Poetry Review, among others. Read her poem Stealing The Scream on Poets.org

She was raised in Houston, Texas and graduated from Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She works as a lawyer at New York University Law School, and teaches at Columbia University. She has been a Stegner, McDowell and Witter Bynner Fellow, had a Yaddo residency and is on the Advising Artists Council, for the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Manhattan.

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Sept. 8, 2010

August 25, 2010 – Regie Cabico

Regie Cabico is well-known in the New York City area for his slam poetry and as a standup comedian.  He won the 1993 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and took top prizes in the 1993, 1994, and 1997 National Poetry Slams.

He has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Performance Art and received the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets & Writers.

He co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (Vehicule Press, 1998) and his work appears in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Spoken Word Revolution, among other anthologies.

He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and his plays have been produced at the Humana Theater Festival, Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater, Dixon Place, Theater Offensive, and the Kennedy Center Play Lab.

He is also a former artist-in-residence for NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute and presently works as the Artistic Director of Sol & Soul in Washington, DC.  There’s tons more – touring with Lollapaluza, and a herd of publications. Come out and hear this funny, enterprising and entertaining poet and performer!

August 18, 2010 – Elizabeth Thomas

Elizabeth Thomas is a widely published poet, performer, teacher and advocate of the arts. The author of two poetry collections and one book on writing for youth and teachers, she has read her work throughout the United States. She’s been a member of three Connecticut National Poetry Slam teams and in 1998 was a member of the U.S. team that traveled to Sweden.

Much of her energy and time is devoted to designing and teaching writing programs for schools and organizations in many parts of the country. These programs promote literacy and the power of written and spoken word. As an outstanding advocate of youth in the arts, Elizabeth Thomas is a coach and organizer with Brave New Voices: International Youth Poetry Slam and Festival. She is also the founder of UpWords Poetry, a company dedicated to promoting programs for young writers and educators, based on the belief that poetry is meant to be heard out loud and in person.

August 11, 2010 – Leslie McGrath

Leslie McGrath is a widely published poet and a former managing editor of Drunken Boat , an online journal of the arts. “My poetry is informed by my training in clinical psychology, as well as a background in Spanish language literature,” she said.

Her poetry has appeared in Agni online, Alimentum, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. Her literary interviews have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle and on public radio. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection of poetry, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage, was published by Main Street Rag Press (2009.) She is also the editor, along with Ravi Shankar, of Radha Says, the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika Vazirani, published by Drunken Boat Press. A chapbook, Toward Anguish was published by the Providence Athenaeum, 2007.

Read her poem How To Wolf A Cook on Poetry Liner Notes

August 4, 2010 – Tim Robbins

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Timothy Robbins is a musician and poet from White Plains, NY. He graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh with a degree in English Language, and had several works published in a student-run annual literary magazine there. He began performing poetry while studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Upon return back to the States, he moved into Danbury and joined the ranks of the Wednesday Night Poets.  A versatile and well traveled poet, Tim also  plays bass for the ska/punk band Strange Creatures based out of Westchester.  He says that most of his work will “correlate between
the two worlds” in which he has lived: NY and South Africa, and “delving into the concepts of home and spontaneous circumstance.”

He has a blog: The Consequences of Spontaneity. Check it out!

July 28, 2010 – Lars Ruppel, Sebastian 23, & Wolf Hogekamp

3 German Spoken-Word Poets on tour, sent by Gary Glazner of the Bowery Poetry Club.

Wolf Hogekamp lives as an a/v editor and poet in Berlin. Since 1994 he has been reading and performing poetry and organizes regularly Poetry Slams in Berlin. He is a pioneer of the German Poerty Slam scene. Since 2000 Hogekamp is the mentor of the Bastard Slam in Berlin, one of the most important and biggest Poetry Slams of the German spokenword scene. He was the founder of the first national of german speaking poetry slam in 1997, also he managed the 10th in 2007 in Berlin. More than 400 appearances with Poetry-Slams and readings on all important German-speaking stages.

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Lars Ruppel was born in 1985 and is the youngest professional Slam Poet in the German speaking area. Since the age of 16 he’s touring through Europe and fascinates the audience’s ears and eyes, with his passionated performance poetry and the largest glasses since Buddy Holly or Erich Fried. He won every important slam in Europe, the national team-competition and the german TV Poetry Slam. In 2009 Lars Ruppel published his artwork in three books of poetry. He works as a tutor in colleges and trains teachers in the field of modern spoken word poetry.His contemporary work is focused on the German Alzpoetry Project and the corporate networking of international Poetry Slams.

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Sebastian 23 is a poet from the unknown industrial town of Bochum. Born in 1979 as a son of a coalminer, he somehow grew up to become a poet. Today he is one of the most succesful slam poets, winning several National Slam Competions, touring all across Europe and America and starring as Special Guest at the U.S.-National Poetry Slam 2009. Far out on the Pacific Ocean he once saw and smelled a humpback whale. Very impressive.

July 21, 2010 – Joan Winokur

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Joan Winokur has been involved in the arts throughout her life, but once she discovered the joy of writing poetry, it became her passion. She was involved in the First Tuesdays in Wilton open mic started by Rose Drew. She reads regularly at the at the monthly Monday evening poetry event at the Stamford Barnes & Noble. She says her poems are about ordinary life and our shared emotional experiences. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals including the Connecticut River Review, Main Street Rag, Sensations Magazine,Main Channel Voices and in USA Today honoring 9/11.

July 14, 2010 – Gabrielle Zane

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Poet Gabrielle Zane, who first performed her work for Wed Night Poetry when it met at the Doctor Java’s Caffeine Emporeium, is a freelance writer and arts educator. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College.

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July 7, 2010 – Open Myk, the theme is change

Themed Open Myk hosted by Faith Vicinanza

CHANGES, in the vein of David Bowie (Changing ourselves, be willing to adapt to change, being the cause of change, wanting change, resisting change, anything related to changes in our personal, work, world at large life.

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time”

Some folks may also be heading over to the Avon area to the Sunken Garden Festival to hear Jean Valentine etc. No official trip is planned.

June 30, 2010 – Van Hartmann – at The Garage

This is our second meeting at our new venue  The Garage at 53 Church Hill Road, Newtown. DIRECTIONS

Van Hartmann teaches neoclassical and romantic literature, American literature, history of the novel, comedy, and film at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and his first book-length poetry collection Shiva Dancing has been published by texture press.

” Shiva Dancing takes the reader on a journey across a physical and emotional landscape of loss, grieving, and renewal. The poems are lyrical and elegiac. They probe the multiple layers through which we experience the loss that comes with living and the redemption made possible by exploring that loss with honesty, concreteness, and compassion. Each poem is set in motion by a concrete observation or recollected moment that releases its own organic stream of poignant associations. The result is an embodiment, in each poem and in the collection as a whole, of the complex energies and perceptions that define our most human experiences.”

He lives his wife Laurel Peterson in Norwalk, Connecticut.

June 23, 2010 – Kim Bridgford at “The Garage!”

This will be our first meeting at a new site called “The Garage,” which is a facility that is part of the Newtown Parks and Recreation department. See our New Venue page for directions.

Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at Fairfield University and editor of Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin. Her books include Undone, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets’ Prize; and In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. She is currently working on a three-book poetry/photography project with visual artist Jo Yarrington, focusing on journey and sacred space in Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan. She is the Connecticut Touring Poet for 2007.

Click to read a poem of hers posted on this site for her last WNPS Wedpoetry  reading

June 16, 2010 – Celebrate Summer Theme, Workshop

LAST REGULAR MEETING AT THE BLUE Z:

THEMED OPEN MYK: Loving the sun, the florals, the leaves, the beach, the fact that SCHOOL IS OUT? (Or maybe not loving it that much….  Summer is the theme!

Mysterious WORKSHOP: There will be a workshop by Lisa Marie with the assistance of Derek! We don’t know what they  are planning.  We love a surprise…

June 9, 2010 – Appreciate What is Open Myk

This week’s open myk is at the Blue Z, and we will be at the Blue Z until the end of June.

Stuff got you down?  But you have some fellow human-beings,  food to eat,  a roof over your head, enough change to buy a coffee on Wednesday nights and enough gas to get to poetry……    Look out of your window, go outside, go for a walk.  Smell the air after a thunderstorm, look at the vivacity of the green life all around you. Brew up a cup of tea. Think – you aren’t sleeping on the side of a road yet, and so what if poetry is moving – for now we have a great venue and will have another great venue soon – SOOOO bring your poetry of APPRECIATION! LIFE IS.  LET US SAVOR IT!

No one signed up, so the for Sunken Garden trips are canceled.

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.

May 26, 2010 – Lorraine Schein

Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer. She likes to write about feminist issues and fantasy/sf themes.

Her poetry and stories have appeared recently in Melusine, Home Planet News, the We’Moon calendar and the anthology Alice Redux, a collection of stories about Alice in Wonderland. Her poetry chapbook, The Futurist’s Mistress, is available from Mayapple Press. She will be teaching a spiritual writing workshop in NYC this summer.

Delphic (Projection #3)

The futurist’s mistress
(In this alternate scenario)
Sleeps in his bed,
Beside his other curved concubines,
Space and Time.
She projects herself, once more,
Endlessly into his future.

The dreams crash and glisten;
Presaging a love
More fantastic than science‑‑

The futures tighten around her
like his arms in the night.

May 19, 2010 “CRUSH” – a book preview event

So you missed the Valentine’s erotic neurotic open myk theme?  Not to worry — here is a new opportunity for palpitations and lustful longing.  This evening celebrates a new anthology called Crush created by Faith Vicinanza which 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. So come on down, with your own crush poems or anti crush poems!