Poets Carol Graser and Mary Kathryn Jablonski will be featured, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday, September 14th at 2pm.

The readings are hosted by Woodstock area poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.

Features:

Carol Graser - Carol Graser hosts a monthly poetry series at Saratoga Spring’s legendary Caffe Lena on the first Wednesday of every month and has performed her work at various events and venues around NYS. Her work has been published in many literary journals, recently in Devilfish Review, Punch Drunk Press, Trailer Park Quarterly and Minute Magazine. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Twist of Their Stems (Foothills Publishing).



What if

Emily Dickinson’s rise
to poetic stardom was a reality
TV show? Think a Victorian house
with staid, heavily placed furniture
a white figure wisps across a distant
hallway, cut to a bee hovering
studiously over a patch of red clover

Characters will include an absolute
silence, a wind, sometimes soft
sometimes wailing, death, and
a rotating cast of flowers and insects

Emily herself stipulates
we can only film her in passing

Each confessional is a poem
ink spreading on paper
abandoned in random spots
discovered by the camera
lying amid, say, the debris
of a finished breakfast

-Carol Graser

Dissolving the Distance Between You
                               for Marly and Josie

Pour water over the deeply frozen earth
skate deftly across the divide

Boil maple sap in the open air
the aroma a soft lure

Aim your arrows at flocks of words spoken
but not meant, follow the path of strewn feathers

Measure the gulf between you with an inaccurate ruler
one that shifts scale between atoms and stars

Nap in the full sun, let the sprouting grass rise
through your bones, wake up side by side

Collect pebbles, the close attention to ground
will bring you to the same stone

Talk to the wind, forget what you’re looking for, touch the petals
of flowers  with no thought for a vase, give up ever arriving at the door

It’s the black crow intoning from a seed of dream
That’s the syllable that will save you


*
Mary Kathryn Jablonski - Saratoga Springs artist and poet, Mary Kathryn Jablonski has been a contributor at Numéro Cinq magazine and is the author of the poetry collections “To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met” (APD, 2008) and “Sugar Maker Moon” (Dos Madres Press, 2019). The recipient of several awards, grants and fellowships, her work has appeared in numerous print & online journals including the Atticus Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Film Live (UK), Poetry Ireland Review, Quarterly West, Salmagundi, and Tupelo Quarterly. Jablonski has run poetry programs in her region, frequently lecturing on visual poetry. Her video/poem collaborations with filmmaker Laura Frare have been featured internationally in journals, film festivals and exhibitions, and her artworks, exhibited throughout the Northeast, are held in private and public collections. mkjpoet.com