Category: Poetry

WCW – Geraldine Green

Wednesday, August 5, 2015, 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

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

Geraldine Green is a freelance creative writing tutor, mentor and published poet. She lives in Ulverston on the Furness Peninsula Cumbria, UK, where she was born. Her latest collection Salt Road was published in 2013 by Indigo Dreams. Geraldine is writer-in-residence at Swarthmoor Hall and a guest tutor at the Hall and also at Brantwood Coniston. In September 2011 she gained a PhD in creative writing titled: An Exploration of Identity and Environment through Poetry from Lancaster University. A frequent visitor to North America, she has a two-week poetry tour planned for August 2015 where she will read at a variety of venues in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Geraldine blogs at geraldinegreensaltroad.blogspot.co.uk.

from Salt Road into the Bay

I walk out into wind,
salt & flat-caked mud
baked white in the sun,
tread among samphire,
spiked as yet unplumped
shoots of bright green
small pockets of prayer
parcels of ozone and ask:
are you really samphire,
that bright jewel of
Shakespeare?
Picked, plucked,
remembered from Lear?

GV – Seventh Year Poetry/Music Magic


The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café on Thursday, July 30 to begin its seventh year with the poetry of RON BREMNER along with featured musician BRENDAN FOGARTY.

Ron’s work has appeared in the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow anthology, International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Irish piper Brendan will be making a second encore for the group at GAINVILLE CAFE, 17 Ames Ave., Rutherford.

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Bring-Your-A-Game open mic will follow, with generous reading times.

17 Ames Ave., 7 PM
$7 donation includes coffee/tea and dessert
(201) 507-1800
Note switch of days this month to Thursday!

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 24, 2015

Zorida Mohammed

The Lost Parents

He rented her out
in the summer,
when no one would notice.

Always to a man,
a man with a car,
one of her father’s friends.

She’d been warned to heed the renter’s bidding.

They lived in the car,
and sometimes in a motel.

She was 13.

Her mother had disappeared early on.
Her siblings were “vipers.”

She searched and found her mother
in a mental hospital.
Or was it a an old folks home?

She forgave her everything.
The visit made her almost high

But the silence that followed
when her mother melted back into her world
plunged her into a wilderness.

Even her forgiveness
was not trick enough.

Blog – https://redwheelbarrowpoets.wordpress.com
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Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets

Robert Graham Stritch – My Own Things

Robert Graham Stritch performed at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the William Carlos Williams Society, held at William Paterson University. His song “My Own Things” uses lines from William’s poems as lyrics to a beautiful melody.

 

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 17, 2015

Zorida Mohammed

Escaping To The Ravine Again

The humdrum meaningless shit I had to do
over and over and over again.
My poor little life was choking to death
under kids I did not make, and the yoke
that grown ups in poverty foist on their kids.
The drudge work would not be so unbearable
if the folks in charge did not dog and kick you
for not doing it the way, the only way
one of them would have done it.

Anyway, here I am at the end of my career,
and I’m in the ravine again,
chasing fish on the internet, not fish,
but any article that catches my fancy
while paperwork waits—
the endless pile of paperwork.

I have to duck out to keep my sanity,
to free my brain, drown it in the ravine,
so I can last the rest of the day.
I do it between scheduled clients.
I make a beeline for the internet ravine,
flowing with all sorts of small fry life,
snippets that I can trap and tap into immediately,
a little mystery, learning something new,
propping me up, drinking ravine water,
internet-water delaying me
from getting back to the endless noting
and documenting.

Consciousness/unconsciousness,
and all other projected psychic apparatus,
reside in the body, the whole body,
not only in that pile of grey, grey matter
housed in our heads.

It reminds me of Indians toting cow shit
to purify their dwellings.

Blog – https://redwheelbarrowpoets.wordpress.com
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets

GV – Six-Year Celebration for Magic Circle


The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café in Rutherford, NJ on Friday, June 26 for its six-year anniversary! There will be cake!

Our special musical feature will be Rutherford bass maestro PETE McCULLOUGH doing a solo bass recital. Pete’s just back from a nationwide tour with Streetlight Manifesto and he’s all warmed up and ready to go.

Our special featured poet will be BOB MURKEN, a member of the Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ writing workshop, who has been published in our anthology and elsewhere.

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Bring-Your-A-Game open mic will follow, with generous reading times.

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

RWB Poets at the NYC Poetry Festival, 7/26/15

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets will be reading at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island. Join us on Sunday, July 26th, 4:00pm at The Chumley’s Stage. This is our second year at the festival. Claudia Serea will host. Our readers include Zorida Mohammed, John Barrale, Mark Fogarty, Anton Yakovlev and Wayne L. Miller.

Many other groups will be reading on three different stages between 11:00am and 5:30pm during Saturday and Sunday.

Travel directions here.

Birthday Sonnet – Matthew Rohrer



Morning bombed out car

smell in the neighborhood

chocolate and almond croissant

when everything else is closed

your new earrings pull down

your ears you are shy like they are

restaurants are too fussy

you just want blue sky

in a little circle overhead

with me it’s all the same

overcast days always turn me on

like Paris you are beautiful

though you’ve been around awhile




Matthew Rohrer


MATTHEW ROHRER featured at the Williams Center on April 1st, 2015. He has graciously contributed this poem. Matthew is the author of several books of poems, most recently DESTROYER AND PRESERVER, published by Wave Books, and SURROUNDED BY FRIENDS, forthcoming in April 2015. His poems have been widely published and anthologized, and he is the recipient of the Hopwood Award, and a Puschcart Prize, among others. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.



	


	





	

		
		
WCW – Douglas Goetsch
	


	
	
	

		


Wednesday, July 1, 2015, 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


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


DOUGLAS GOETSCH is the author of seven volumes of poems, most recently Nameless Boy (2015, Orchises Press). His writing has appeared in many of the leading journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, The Southern Review and Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the Donald Murray prize for non-fiction writing. He resides in New York City, is a renowned writing teacher, and is the founding editor of Jane Street Press. Visit him at www.douglasgoetsch.com


from Joe’s Tax


Are we ever more innocent than when doing taxes?

I’m not talking about how we rob the country

by deducting the case of Alpo we bought on Take


Your Dog To Work day, but just the helpless

look on our faces, the week-end in early spring

we’re hunkered down at a desk or kitchen table


strewn with receipts and instructions

from a government so much bigger than us,

hovering in space like a circle of priests…

	


	





	

		
		
RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 10, 2015
	


	
	
	

		
Janet Kolstein


For the Jugular


The grinning skull turns to the lady

with the bleeding feet

and bids her mount his yellow bus

as ochre dust conveys the heat

and slipping light.


And swinging on the cusp of night,

the bus’s door shuts tight

against her urgent need

and makes the destined

all-seeing eye of providence

a distant pyramid.


So she battles with the swollen air

like a boxer under water,

and flails her arms

against the bastards

out for blood

and going for the jugular

in a pulsing countdown

to surrender.


Over glass and jagged rocks,

with ragged breath, she stumbles onward

through blackened tree stumps

where wisps of smoke

rise in signals to the sky


and morph into butterflies

whose wings have beaten

37 summers.


Blog – https://redwheelbarrowpoets.wordpress.com

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets

Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets