I have been posting about the Broome County (NY) Arts Council’s celebration of poetry, including last week’s reading in which I was featured. This week’s installment is now available and can be found here, along with the prior weeks’ readings.
This week features three of my local poet-friends, Jessica Dubey, Burt Myers, and J. Barrett Wolf, along with Ithaca-area poet and professor Jerry Mirskin.
Jessica, Burt, and Barrett are all part of the Grapevine Group, the poetry circle with which I meet regularly to workshop poems. Burt is the one among us who writes formal poetry most often. He is very attuned to the rhymes and rhythms of lines, which you can hear in the reading and which is helpful to me when we are workshopping because I am not very conscious of those elements when I write.
Barrett, as poet-in-residence at the Bundy Museum and the founder of The Word Place, is one of the sponsors of this reading series and has appeared in each session to ask the poets questions after they read. It was wonderful to hear him read some of his work this week. I was glad that the other poets got to ask him some questions after his reading because I love hearing poets talk about their work and it would have been a shame if they had skipped over that part.
I’m happy to say that Jessica and I share not only Grapevine Group but also the Binghamton Poetry Project and the Boiler House Poets Collective in common. Her poetry is brutally honest and searing. I also admire her use of metaphor. Her first chapbook will be published next year. I’ll be sure to post about it here when it is available for pre-order.
While April is almost over, the BCAC is carrying the reading series into May, so check back next week for the next installment.
Top of JC's Mind 