Poets and Kate Reese Hurd and Thomas Bonville will be featured, along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets at Golden Notebook (Upstairs), 29 Tinker Street on Saturday, August 10th at 2pm. 

Kate Reese Hurd - Kate has a background in English lit, music and eurythmy movement (out of the work of Rudolf Steiner, not Dalcroze eurythmics). In early life she wrote a few poems in the personal vein, but what has really captured her imagination is the dance of the speech sounds, the vowels and consonants. For the past six years she has been writing miniature poetic speech sound etudes for all of the sounds. ‘Etudes’ are studies, like the ones that are written for instrumentalists to develop their skills — but many are also performed as pieces in their own right.

At this point she has a sizable body of etudes, alliterative ones for the consonants and assonant ones for the vowels and also the two together, and she has published a selection of them in a handy little book, along with a continuing series of articles on the subject of speech sounds and movement. But it is in the speakingof the etudes that the music, dance, joy and humor of the sounds come forth; and then the inherent quality of the movement of each sound becomes more and more clear. Ultimately, once all of the sound-movements are well-known, artistic movement-expression of poems can be performed — that’s the art of eurythmy. Though laying a true foundation for eurythmy work was the reason Kate took up this novel poetic-etude form, she’s been sharing the miniature studies as vocal treats for the past several years at local poetry gatherings, to the amusement and curiosity of listeners.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if poets paid more attention to the sound of the words they choose? Kate thinks so! Come hear.

Thomas Bonville - I have lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley all my life. I regularly read, write and converse with the Rensselaerville Poets, as well as participate in open mics, including 394 Main in Catskill, every fourth Monday of the month. I have most recently been published in the February, 2019 edition of Chronogram magazine, as well as in the Albany Poets annual poetry journal, UP THE RIVER, Issues 6 and 7. I was a finalist in the 2019 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest with the poem, “The Smoke,” awarded as a Commended Poem.