Joanne and Merrill read at TAC

Yesterday, Merrill Oliver Douglas and I did our first ever appearance as featured readers at the Tioga Arts Council In Owego, NY.

We were excited to have a full house! I also like that in this photo you can see how beautiful the gallery space at the Tioga Arts Council is. At the moment, they are exhibiting artwork from high school students in Tioga county.

The person at the podium is poet Dante Di Stefano, who was serving as our host. His spouse Christina Di Stefano is the executive director of TAC.

I read first. This was the first time I’ve ever done a twenty minute set. I chose to structure my reading in three segments. The first group was four poems that centered around my mother, two from my chapbooks Hearts, forthcoming from Kelsay Books, one from my unpublished collection Small Constellation, and one that was written for the 2022 Women of Words reading at the Broome County Arts Council. Next came four poems that were reactions to happenings in the world or my world, including “The Banned Bookmobile” which was published by Rat’s Ass Review here. I concluded with four poems that center on the North Adams, Massachusetts area, all of which are included in Small Constellation and one of which, “Sprague Suite” (published by Wilderness House Literary Review here) is also in my new chapbook manuscript of ekphrastic poems based on artwork from MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).

I was very happy that the audience connected with my poems. Besides applause, there were nods, smiles, and even a few chuckles at appropriate points. I tried very hard to choose a few poems that had lighter elements, like “Liz Truss or Lettuce.” I think that helped to balance out some of the heavier topics, like the pandemic poem I had included.

What I hadn’t quite expected was that Dante would offer some brief comments on my reading before introducing Merrill. Dante holds a PhD and is widely published, so it was special to hear him praise elements of my work. I have a bit of a complex about my lack of academic credentials in writing, so it meant a lot to me that he recognized the heart of my work.

I was happy to be able to sit back and enjoy Merrill’s reading. She read a few poems from her chapbook Parking Meters Into Mermaids and some of her more recent work, including selections from her collection that is currently looking for a publishing home. Because Merrill and I are both part of the Grapevine Poets, I knew many of the poems from our workshopping sessions, but I love hearing how Merrill chose to edit her poems after we discussed them. As always, I was impressed with Merrill’s ability to choose just the right details to enable us to find our way into the depths of the poem. I am particularly moved by the way she writes about her mother, who is now facing a number of health issues in her elder years.

After Merrill’s reading and Dante’s glowing comments, we had a question and answer period. I had been nervous about this part, fearing that someone would ask something that I was ill-equipped to answer, but, of course, everything was fine. With the reading officially completed, there was time for informal conversation and viewing of the art exhibit. The TAC gift shop had copies of Merrill’s book for sale and she was busy signing copies, in addition to having conversations. We were both happy but tired when we left. Spouse B and Daughter T had both been at the reading and treated me to a celebratory (early) dinner out.

Many thanks to the Tioga Arts Council and Dante and Christina Di Stefano for making my first big reading so memorable. Its success is helping me to feel like more of a poet in my own right, although I will forever think of myself as a poet grounded in community, whether the Binghamton Poetry Project, the Grapevine Poets, the Boiler House Poets Collective, or other groups who have claimed me as a member.

Thanks to Gerri Wiley and Burt Myers who sent me photos of the reading. Only the photo of the sign outdoors was mine.

Very special thanks to Merrill Douglas for her support, friendship, advice, and example. I’m sure I would have been much more nervous were it not for her steadiness and companionship. I admire her work and like to think that we have some elements in common, so that my reading set the stage for hers.

Maybe, we will have the opportunity to do it again sometime…

SoCS: reading

I’m overjoyed with how well Merrill’s and my poetry reading went this afternoon! We had a wonderfully receptive audience and I’m very grateful to Tioga Arts Council for inviting us.

Many thanks to director Christina Di Stefano and to her poet-spouse Dante Di Stefano for creating such a welcoming space and for their kind words.

There may be another post after I’ve had a bit more processing time, but, for now, I think I will contentedly settle in for the evening at home.

[Update: Full post on the reading here.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is a word that starts with over. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/05/12/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-13-2023/

One-Liner Wednesday: poetry reading invitation

For folks in shouting distance of Owego, NY, please join me and Merrill Douglas for a poetry reading (in-person only) at the Tioga Arts Council, 179 Front St, on Saturday, May 13th, at 1:30 PM.
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This shameless self-promotion is brought to you by Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/05/03/one-liner-wednesday-washi-person/

The Grapevine Poets Read

April is National Poetry Month in the US and there are often poetry readings scheduled in celebration.

This year, the Broome County (NY) Arts Council invited the Grapevine Poets to present a reading, which happened Tuesday evening.

The Grapevine Poets is a group of local poets who meet regularly to workshop each other’s poems, meaning we bring in our drafts for feedback from the poets in attendance in order to assist us in revisions. We also have done manuscript reviews for each other, several of which have been chosen for publication. I am the current record-holder for most manuscripts reviewed with three, my chapbook Hearts (forthcoming soon from Kelsay Books), my full-length collection Small Constellation and my newest chapbook Half a Duet, both of which I am submitting to presses in hope that they will be published someday, too.

While we have been meeting for years and frequently mention the group in our acknowledgements or bios and although we have sometimes read at the same open mics, this was the first time that we formally presented ourselves as the Grapevine Poets. It was very much a collaborative effort with everyone pitching in and divvying up the tasks of scheduling, organizing, publicity, programming, etc. in conjunction with Connie Barnes at the Broome County Arts Council, which is still settling into its new home in the section of State St. in Binghamton often called Artists’ Row.

We decided on a format that each poet would read a poem from another poet we admire and one of our own. We each chose whether or not we wanted the poems to be related to each other in some way. I chose to link my selections thematically, reading “Woman in Suite A, 1922” from Kyle Laws‘ book Uncorseted and my poem “Studio 7 – Building 13” which both relate to a woman’s experience writing in a new studio.

After Connie’s welcome, Wendy Stewart provided the story of the Grapevine Poets, the format of the reading, and her selections. We had decided to each introduce the next poet, so Wendy introduced me and, after my reading, I introduced Sharon Ball. We continued with Burt Myers, Andrée Myers, Merrill Douglas, Jessica Dubey, and J. Barrett Wolf, who also led the question and answer period.

One of our big concerns before the event was would people actually come! I’m pleased to say that we had about thirty-five people there, which is sizable for a poetry reading in our area. There was a bit of a scramble to find and set up more chairs but it was a great problem to have.

I was happy that some people that I had invited were able to attend and that one person came because they recognized my picture from the flier that Burt had designed for the reading. Burt is the art director for the communications and marketing office at Binghamton University and we are grateful to have his professional expertise on hand, as well as his poetic voice.

I’m trying to wrap my head around knowing that some people might come to a reading specifically because it involves me. I’m more accustomed to thinking of myself within a group context, whether it’s the Grapevine Poets or the Boiler House Poets Collective or the Binghamton Poetry Project, and of invitations that come my way to read as being because of these affiliations and my more-established poet-friends.

But, with my first time as featured reader coming up on May 13 at 1:30 at the Tioga Arts Council in Owego along with Merrill Douglas and my first chapbook Hearts forthcoming soon from Kelsay Books, I’m trying mightily to adjust my mindset so I can present myself as more professional, for want of a better term.

Not sure I have the chops to pull it off, but I’ll try.

Cleaning Miller Pond by Merrill Oliver Douglas (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

A poem from my poet-friend Merrill Oliver Douglas is up on Silver Birch Press as part of their ONE GOOD MEMORY series. Enjoy!

Silver Birch Press

Cleaning Miller Pond
by Merrill Oliver Douglas

Puzzle: how to nudge this boat
among trailing vines and branches,
squeeze through the one bare space,
poke the reeds with the paddle
and pluck out the Coke can?

Then figure the best wrist action
for flipping a taco wrapper
from beneath the snarl of algae
that streams off the paddle
like hair from a corpse.

The bag between my knees
grows lumpy with Styrofoam
bait buckets, beer cans, a slack-faced
soccer ball, glass and plastic
bottles sloshing grainy water.

Puzzle: why is the world so filled
with slobs? And why,
on a mild spring morning
in downtown Elmira,
does all this garbage
beckon like carnival prizes?

Originally published in Eunoia Review (January 27, 2016).

Photo by Gorlov.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem after helping to pick trash out of three ponds in Elmira, New York, during a volunteer cleanup…

View original post 96 more words

Tioga Arts Council reading

Following up from this post about the National Poetry Month events with the Tioga Arts Council, I’m pleased to say that the reading yesterday at their gallery in Owego (NY) was a great success!

We had six poets, including my friends Merrill Oliver Douglas and Jessica Dubey, who each read a poem by another poet and one of our own. The selections were varied and I was introduced to some poets who were new to me.

We then heard from several people who are working with poetry in translation. Being able to translate poetry into a different language is an art form in and of itself and we were treated to hearing poems that were originally written in Bosnian, Slovene, and German. We even got to hear the poet Adin Ljuca read his work in Bosnian! Thanks to Erin Riddle, who coordinated that part of the program.

And thanks again to Christina Di Stefano for her leadership of the Tioga Arts Council, for her inclusion of poets and writers along with the visual and performing artists, for her gracious introductions at the reading, and for all the organizing that brought us together.

Another National Poetry Month project

I am a member of the Broome County Arts Council and recently participated in their Women of Words poetry reading and Spring Awakenings exhibit.

One of the many services of BCAC is sharing news from other arts councils and organizations in our region. That was how I found out that the Tioga Arts Council’s National Poetry Month project was to post recordings of people reading a favorite poem along with an explanation of why they chose it.

I’m pleased to say that the recordings are now available. If you click on my name Joanne Corey, you will hear me reading “Bereft” by Merrill Oliver Douglas from her chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids. Merrill is a local poet-friend and one of the Grapevine Poets with whom I workshop on a regular basis. Jessica Dubey, another Grapevine Poet, also has a recording up, as well as Jordan Jardine and Diane Weiner, whom I have not yet met.

On Saturday, we will gather at the Tioga Arts Council’s home in Owego for a reading, so I hope to meet them there. I’m sure you can expect another post about that here at Top of JC’s Mind.

Many thanks to Christina Di Stefano of the Tioga Arts Council for making this project possible!

Women of Words

Last night, I was honored to take part in the Women of Words poetry reading, presented by the Broome County (NY) Arts Council. Many, many thanks to Connie Barnes, the BCAC gallery manager, for organizing and hosting the event, which was held at the Orazio Salati Gallery, currently housing the BCAC Artisan Gallery and its Spring Awakening Exhibition.

As part of the Exhibition, each of the five Women of Words poets contributed a spring poem, which was framed and displayed along with the visual artworks. It was an honor for our words to be included in the Exhibition and a joy to read in the midst of so many wonderful pieces by local artists.

For me, it was also a joy to be reading with poet-friends from the Grapevine Poets, Wendy Stewart, Jessica Dubey, Carol Mikoda, and Merrill Oliver Douglas. I almost forgot to be nervous! We had three other Grapevine Poets in attendance, buoying us, and Connie gave us each wonderful, warm introductions. I also had daughter T in the audience.

Due to the size of the gallery and pandemic protocols, we had to limit the number of attendees. Connie took reservations in advance and I’m pleased to say that we “sold out”, if I may use that term for a free event. I was humbled when, after the reading, an administrator-friend from back in my days volunteering with our school district a couple of decades ago told me that she had signed up to attend specifically because I was reading. It was great to reconnect with her. Back in the years when we saw each other frequently, I hadn’t yet entered my current writing practice with either poetry or blogging, both of which I hope are more compelling than the committee documents I was working on back then.

I haven’t done a huge number of in-person poetry readings and, with the pandemic, had gotten accustomed to poetry onscreen. I remain grateful for those remote opportunities, especially in getting to hear readings from far-flung locations, but I had forgotten the power of connecting with a flesh-and-blood audience right in front of me. Hearing the occasional chuckle, seeing heads nod or eyes close while listening intently, and receiving applause are affirming that your words have reached someone, right then and there, and forged a community in that space, however briefly, something that is difficult to replicate with each individual in a little Zoom box.

In my set, I read a mix of published and unpublished poems. I began with “Thanks to the Department of Public Art” which I had written for a BCAC event in 2016 at the request of the Binghamton Poetry Project and which appeared in their Fall 2016 anthology. I included “Sisters” which I published in a blog post and “Sprague Suite” and “Monroe Bridge Mail” which first appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review. There is a blog post with background on those poems here. I read “Lily of the Valley” which was the poem I had written for the Exhibition and “Object Lesson” which is also unpublished, so I won’t share here, hoping that they will eventually make their way into a journal.

So, Happy National Poetry Month for US folks, Happy Spring for Northern Hemisphere people, and Happy Fall for you all in the Southern! Stay tuned for more poetry as we continue through the month of April.

Five Poems in Wilderness House Literary Review!

I am pleased and excited to share the link to the latest quarterly issue of Wilderness House Literary Review, which features five of my poems. Many thanks to poetry editor Ravi Yelamanchili and the whole team at WHLR for including me in their spring issue. If you are reading this in Spring, 2022, you can access the current issue at the link above; scroll down to the Poetry section to find Joanne Corey in the list of poets and click, which will take you to my work. If it is beyond that, you can find the issue through the cumulative index as Volume 17.1 – Spring 2022. While you are there, browse the WHLR archive for poetry, essays, art, fiction, and book reviews going back to Spring 2006. You’re sure to find something that will fascinate and delight you!

I thought I’d use this post to give some background on the poems and submission process. As folks who have been following Top of JC’s Mind for a while know, the last few years have been challenging for me as my family navigated the difficult last years of B’s mom and my parents, as well as the joy of welcoming a new generation to our family coupled with the complications of having them live across an ocean from us with the pandemic adding another layer of stress.

Because of all that, I was sandwiching in writing in a rather haphazard way and not concentrating on submissions. When I did begin making myself do the fraught work of preparing submissions, I concentrated on sending out my chapbook and collection manuscripts rather than journal submissions. Usually, a goodly number of poems in a manuscript have already been published in journals and I knew that I needed to get individual poems published as journal publications are the backbone of sharing poetry. Knowing that I was struggling with doing journal submissions, my wise poet-friend Merrill Oliver Douglas counseled me to choose five poems that I liked and send them out to a bunch of journals without stressing over style or if the poems related to each other or any of the other things that were keeping me paralyzed. I did that in early February. I chose to submit to WHLR because they were one of the first journals to publish my work back in Fall, 2015, just as I was getting more deliberate about publishing my poetry and just before we entered into our intensive phase with elder care. I thought there might be one or two of the five that would interest them but I was shocked and amazed that they accepted all five. (Being a good poetry citizen, I immediately withdrew the poems from all other journals to which I had submitted them.)

The rest of this post will give some of the background to the poems. You can choose to read them first, using the links in the first paragraph, or read the rest of the post first and the poems afterwards. I’ll write about the poems in the order in which they appear.

Starting off with a trigger warning, especially for family and friends who may not be ready to read “We probably should have taken off”, which is about the death of my father, known here as Paco. I wrote the first draft in the middle of the night while I was at the Boiler House Poets Collective residency only a couple of weeks after Paco’s death and workshopped it there. I did revisions and workshopped it again with the Grapevine Poets in October – and then couldn’t bear to look at it again for several months. I did the final edits in order to send it out this winter because I knew from the reaction of the poets who had seen the drafts that it was a strong poem. It’s sometimes hard for me to tell objectively when something is strong if it is also close to me emotionally. I had originally written this poem by hand in a journal and tried to replicate the spacing I had used when I put it into the computer. The use of white space seemed to fit the mood of the poem and is a frequently employed device in contemporary poetry, although some online journals advise against it because it can be hard to replicate in their publishing software. My original rendition is probably even “spacier” than the published version due to being on a larger page.

“Sprague Suite” is an ekphrastic poem based on the exhibit Transition: Decade of Decision, Sprague Electric>>MASS MoCA, 1989-1999 by Christopher Gillooly, which was on display there in 2018. When I was at our Boiler House residency that year, I felt as if it was my second home. I was drawn to it because it told the history of the former industrial site which is now home to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. I am from the North Adams area, so I also have a personal perspective on that history. The six sections of “Sprague Suite” relate to Sprague Electric, which occupied the site for several decades until 1986, manufacturing capacitors. For fun, I also played a bit with form in this poem. Sections I and VI are haiku and II and V are tanka. III and IV are my go-to, free verse. “Industrial Buddha”, the title of section V, is the name of a collage sculpture of found objects that was part of the exhibit. This poem is part of my full-length poetry collection which is currently submitted to several contests and publishers.

“In my purse” began as a Binghamton Poetry Project prompt in fall of 2020. We were studying list poems and the power of juxtaposition. I’m a fan of list poems and had written several previously. When we write from prompts, we only have about ten minutes to draft, so the poems tend to be relatively short. There is also so little time to plan or ponder that words often fall onto the page in unexpected ways, which is perfect for a list poem where juxtaposition is everything. Thinking this quickly-generated draft had potential, I decided to workshop it with Grapevine and revise it to send out to journals. I’m so happy it has found a home at Wilderness House Literary Review!

“Zoom Wedding – October 4, 2020” also began as a Binghamton Poetry Project prompt in summer 2020. We were to begin a poem with a line from Ocean Vuong’s searing “Aubade with Burning City” about the final evacuation from Saigon in 1975. We were, however, to take our poem in a different direction. I chose the line, “He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.” Given that we were then in the early months of the pandemic with public health rules making large gatherings impossible, I recast the line to open the story of a couple forced to cancel a long-planned June wedding and instead hold it in October via Zoom, which, for future readers who might see this after Zoom has been merged, renamed, or supplanted by newer technologies, is a video conferencing platform that gained ascendency when everything from business meetings to church services to family gatherings had to be cancelled or held virtually instead of in person. I began the draft during our BPP session and finished it the next day. I workshopped it with the Grapevine Poets, but then set it aside. I made some revisions in order to send it out this winter. I wasn’t sure if it would appeal to anyone as most people are trying to move beyond the pandemic, even though it hasn’t ended. Thankfully, with vaccines and treatments available, in-person gatherings are much safer in 2022 than they were in 2020.

“Monroe Bridge Mail” was drafted in May 2021 as I prepared to go on a private writing retreat back to North Adams to finish the manuscript which I referenced in the “Sprague Suite” section above. While I went to high school in North Adams, my actual hometown is Monroe Bridge, then home to about two hundred people, about twenty miles distant. I wanted to have some more Monroe Bridge poems in the collection, so I wrote this about our post office. I chose to employ a more conversational, storyteller mode, with long sentences and asides. It is a lot of fun to read aloud, which I had the opportunity to do at the Vestal Museum last summer.

Whew! Long post. If you have made it this far, thank you and congratulations! Please feel free to comment below. I love to know what people are thinking about my poems and/or posts.

SoCS: yarn bombing

Yesterday, when I read that Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week was “yarn,” the very first thing I thought of was my friend Merrill Oliver Douglas’s chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids. The title poem is about yarn bombing. For someone who may not be familiar with the term, yarn bombing is when someone puts yarn, usually knitted, on unusual objects, like parking meters, or tree trunks, or lampposts. It’s a fun and quirky form of public art.

While that poem is about yarn bombing, the chapbook itself follows a woman’s life through the decades. Check it out!
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Join us for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/06/04/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-5-2021/