Category: Poetry

GV – Claudia Serea

CLAUDIA SEREA’S NEW POETRY BOOK LAUNCH

The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café on Friday, April 1 for a first look at Claudia Serea’s new book of poetry, Nothing Important Happened Today. Claudia will read and sign copies of her book. We will have JOE VERNAZZA and WALTER PICKWOAD as musical guests and there will be a Bring-Your-A-Game Open Mic for poets afterward.

GAINVILLE CAFE, 17 Ames Ave., Rutherford. 7 PM.
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert.
(201) 507-1800.

More information here.

From the book:

The other woman

She blooms in his mind,
a poisonous rose.

She wants to carry his babies
and I can’t stop her,
my friend said.

For hours, we walked around Soho
talking about our men,
how not to lose them.

Desperate times call
for great lingerie.

We bought thongs,
black lace with velvet roses.

At home, I shaved my worries
and dimmed the lights,

pretending to be
the other woman.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Mar. 16

Janet Kolstein

A Raw and Burnt Umber Bird (With Buff Titanium)

nestles inside the second lower case a
of a cut-out sign that spells
materials
across the front of an art store
in Paramus,
off Route 4,
when gloves have come off
with the stirrings of spring
which should bring
a feeling of hope,
you know,
that thing with feathers.*

* “Hope is the Thing With Feathers,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (151 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (287 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (70 followers)

WCW – Amy Barone

Wednesday, April 6, 2016, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Amy Barone’s new chapbook, Kamikaze Dance, is from Finishing Line Press, which recognized her as a finalist in the annual New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has appeared in Gradiva, Impolite Conversation (UK), Paterson Literary Review, and Philadelphia Poets. She spent five years as Italian correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily and Advertising Age. Foothills Publishing released her first chapbook, Views from the Driveway. A PEN America Center member, she also belongs to the Brevitas online poetry community.

Current Names

In Italy they name the wind,
the one force of nature people there fear the most.

Spiffero is the dreaded draft.
Venticello and brezza mean gentle breeze;
Scirocco, hot Southern winds that blow in from Africa.

The dry, frigid Bora hits the northeastern city of Trieste,
a seaside wonder where natives eat pasta and goulash.

When I lived in Milan,
I shunned the cultural aversion to the wind.
The land-locked city needed dusting,

something to carry away the gray,
a balm that only Mother Nature’s respiro—breath—can bring.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Celebrating the Poetic Legacy of Whitman, Williams & Ginsberg: A Literary Festival & Conference

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, Paterson, NJ

http://www.poetrycenterpccc.com/conference/

Call for panel presentations – deadline is May 15th, 2016

Conference is on June 3rd, 2017

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Mar. 9

The Golden Ratio

Janet Kolstein

It starts with scribbles
and spins into an empty circle —
with two dots and a small arc,
the marks say someone.

Arms and legs may be depicted
sprouting from the head,
or, from a vertical line,
defining the body
of humankind.

With more circles, more lines,
more dots of various size,
a family is drawn.

A big blob colored yellow radiates lines like limbs.

A family must have a place to live,
so a squarish shape is made. With a door. A window.
A chimney with smoke.

What’s a home without a tree? A blue sky?
Grass to connect us to the ground?

Flowers bloom into bloated hearts
and names on paper.
Stars. 3-D Boxes. Eyeballs.

We doodle hair-dos, clothes, guns and cars.
Desires.

The golden ratio,
and one, two, three-point perspective
emerge from fancier tools.
Symmetry assumes importance —
abstraction with allusive hues,
personal views.
From “I can’t draw a straight line,”
to eyes that follow you around the room.

How do they do that?

Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (151 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (287 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (70 followers)

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Feb. 24

Valentina

Mark Fogarty

The most beautiful woman I ever met,
Her name was Valentina.
Twenty-four, from the Greek islands,
Which one I don’t remember.

Married at 14, she had four children,
And when she smiled there were spots on her teeth,
Decalcified, not enough milk maybe.

Every beauty has a mole, an imperfection.
Welcome to American beauty.
Your kids can have enough to eat.

She washed my hair in the barber’s chair.
Her hands were sun and growing vines.
Greek hands wring fruit from stone, tell signs.
She anointed me with oil for my hair.

Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (145 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (283 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (71 followers)

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Feb. 17

Magnetic Roots Still Hold Me to the Ones I Love.

Zorida Mohammed

Dada, the day was still as we stood in the backyard.
You’re telling me about watering the cucumber vine
that had spread out on the young bamboo you’d cut for it.

The vine is full of yellow flowers,
reminding me of an Indian bride.

You are talking about going to the hospital,
but I can hardly hear
or comprehend your words.

The world around us is circling above our heads.

I remember thinking it was you
rolling across the sky as thunder
when lightning flashed.
I knew it was you
because you were never home
when it happened.

You left your books and Gandhi glasses.
Your toothless earthy smell stayed too.

When I saw you again,
you had a bruise on your right brow
where you’d fallen out of the hospital bed.

It was the first time I heard
my father cry.

Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (145 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (282 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (69 followers)

WCW – John J. Trause

Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of three books of poetry and one of parody, the latter staged Off-Off Broadway. His book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts, Exercises in High Treason, is forthcoming from Great Weather for Media. His translations, poetry, prose, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including the artists’ periodical Crossings, the Dada journal Maintenant, the journal Offerta Speciale, and The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow. Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lector, Andrei Chikatilo, and George “The Animal” Steele. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.

Bubo

I am an Owl
Who
Do not Howl

I whisper

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

GV – Mark Fogarty, Brendan Fogarty, and Fiona Conway

GET A JUMP ON ST. PATRICK’S DAY WITH MUSIC AND POETRY

The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café on Friday, Feb. 26 for a first look at St. Paddy’s Day. Irish piper BRENDAN FOGARTY will be joined by Irish vocalist FIONA CONWAY for a set of music from the Emerald Isle. Featured poet MARK FOGARTY will debut his new book of poetry, The Tall Women’s Dance: Poems on Women’s Basketball. There will be a Bring-Your-A-Game Open Mic for poets afterward.

GAINVILLE CAFE, 17 Ames Ave., Rutherford. 7 PM.
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert.
(201) 507-1800.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Feb. 10

Why I love chocolate

Claudia Serea

Because it starts with a small white flower
in the Theobroma cacao tree
whose name means “food for the gods.”

Because chocolate is old and well-traveled,
and cocoa beans were used as currency
by the Aztecs.

Because it comes from the plumed serpent,
Quetzalcoatl, a god cast away
for sharing chocolate with humans,

and shelling the cocoa beans from the pod
mimics removing human hearts
in sacrifice.

Because it’s fermented, roasted, and bitter,
and, like life, can cover surprises
and liquor.

Because 50 million people around the world
depend on it.

Because it thins the blood
and soothes the mood.

Because Montezuma
and Casanova consumed it.

Because I grew up not having it,
wanting it,
and waiting for it in line for hours
as if it were a holy relic.

Because it’s forbidden.

Because it stands for love,
food for this goddess,

and blooms in my mouth,
a sweet dark flower.

Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (145 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (281 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (67 followers)