Category: Poets

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Jan 21, 2015

Janet Kolstein

Samson and Goliath

Outside my fourth story window I could see for miles.

The sky lay softly on the low mountains,
the country and the city not so far apart,
and the sea not so very far away.

I used to imagine living in a foreign country,
just not like this.

Samson and Goliath dominated the horizon.

My doctor had pointed out
the two mighty cranes,
sometimes appearing as still
as an ancient colossus.

If I looked down, I could see
an unused swimming pool,
and, out towards the street and the traffic,
I saw a couple young medicos
with somewhere, quick, to go,
their white coats flapping
with the wintry air.

There would be work to do,
a lot of lifting and lowering of spirits,
and expectations,

a resetting of goals,
an activation of steel.

GV – ELECTRIC POETS, POETICAL MUSICIANS AND A NEW BOOK

The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café in Rutherford, NJ on Friday, Jan. 30 for our book release party for GEORGE PERENY’s From the Sounds of Chewing. He will be the featured poet and George’s band, Electric Poets Gathering, is the music feature. Check out Jim Klein’s intro to the book!

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.

William Carlos Williams and Paterson NJ

BBC 3 – Sunday Jan 11th at 5pm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xrq9n

(From the link)

A Traveller’s Guide to Paterson
Drama on 3

A Travellers Guide to Paterson. American poet William Carlos Williams poly-vocal epic poem Paterson is a portrait of his favoured city in New Jersey where he worked as a doctor . Michael Symmons Roberts presents a portrait of the same city today in reportage and documentary alongside a fictional drama which responds to events described in Williams’ poem .

Roberts travels to New Jersey to meet WCW’s family, friends, academics and community figures to explore Paterson and the stories in the poem . His new writing , commentary and interviews all arise from a direct engagement with the city and the poem, responding to the place as it stands – politically and economically .

Recorded at a political and economic turning point for the USA Michael Symmons Roberts tests today’s Paterson against the place Williams knew, and asks if the poet’s warnings about the effects of modernization and technology were prescient, or merely nostalgic. Walking the same streets, visiting the same districts, calling at the same buildings, this programme will open up a great 20th Century poetic masterwork, and at the same time create a new dramatic work , reportage and documentary, a new Paterson.

William Carlos Williams wasn’t from Paterson. He was an outsider. Michael is also a different kind of outsider who, like Williams is interested in the bigger picture – the state of the nation, looking through the intimate lens of small town America to comment on it

Paterson is a mid-sized industrial town in New Jersey, USA. In 1963, the great American poet William Carlos Williams published his masterwork. It had taken him almost three decades to write, and consisted of five books of poetry, reported speech, fragmentary reflection and conversations with other Patersonites, including Williams’ fellow poet Allen Ginsberg. It is a truly epic piece of work, still regarded as a jewel of modernist writing.

Williams knew the city intimately, not just as a poet, but as a father, a friend, a doctor working in the community. Turning his back on the grand abstractions and international perspectives of his fellow modernists Eliot and Pound, Williams dug into what he called ‘the local’.

Paterson is a poetic monument to, and personification of, the city of Paterson, New Jersey, which was Williams’ hometown. Its three driving themes are Paterson the Man, Paterson the City, and Identity. At the heart of the poem is an in-depth questioning of the burgeoning process of modernization and its effects.

A half century on, the town of Paterson has a population just under 150,000. It has large communities of Puerto Ricans, Bangladeshis and a Muslim population substantial enough to warrant Muslim holidays for all the town’s public schools.

As with many American cities, recession, unemployment , crime and social unrest in Paterson have grown in recent years.

All of this is explored in A Travellers Guide to Paterson.

WCW – Valery Oisteanu

Valery Oisteanu

Wednesday, February 4, 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

Valery Oisteanu is a writer and artist with international flavor. Born in USSR (1943) and educated in Romania, he adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. He has been writing in English for the past 42 years. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays: The Avant-Gods. A new collection of poetry with collage illustrations, titled Perks in Purgatory, was published by Fly by Night Press, New York, in 2010. For the past 10 years, he wrote art critic essays for Brooklyn Rail (New York). Oisteanu is also a contributing writer for French, Spanish & Romanian art and literary magazines. He exhibits collages and assemblages on a regular basis at the galleries in New York and also creates collages as covers and illustrations for books and magazines. Oisteanu also performs theater plays and musical collaborations with jazz musicians from all over the world, in sessions known as Jazzoetry. Valery Oisteanu is the receiver of Acker Award NYC 2013 for contribution to the avant-garde in Poetry Performance.

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

Spill green beer onto the ground
From a glass with a clover on it
Talking to Astrid about your Irish mother
Happy St Patrick’s Day Barney!
I cannot believe you are gone
Gone but not forgotten
The phosphorescence of your voice
On the corner of Grove Street
The shadows of Miller and Becket
They come to me in a dream
Barney in his couch, in his chair at Veselka
Lost in the maze of books at the Strand
Books that created resistance in Bucharest
Ionesco in the Evergreen review, devoured by the underground
Translating Gregory Corso into Romanian
I cannot believe Barney is gone

WCW – Lisa Marie Basile

Lisa Marie Basile

Lisa Marie Basile

Wednesday, January 7, 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

Lisa Marie Basile is the editor of Luna Luna Magazine and the small press Patasola Press. Her poetry and essays can be seen in Best American Poetry, Coldfront, Tin House, PEN American Center, Poets & Artists Magazine, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, Huffington Post, Thrush Poetry Journal, Poetry Crush, and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press) and of the full-length collection Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014). Lisa Marie has edited for Sundress Publications and Weave Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Best Small Fiction 2015 and the Best American Experimental Writing 2015 anthologies. She was the February 2014 feature poet for Poets & Artists Magazine, and has been named a top contemporary NYC poet to watch in features by The New York Daily News & Relapse Magazine. She is a graduate of The New School’s Masters in Fine Arts program for creative writing.

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

today my father came to pray
black denim & brown suede
a little tattoo of something holy
only he isn’t holy
he was raised at church & in fields of flora
in the back seat of the family Ambassador sedan
his eyes the color of that caballero tan
pinching his sister those pretty curls
setting fire to stacks of Playboy magazines.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Dec 10, 2014

Richard Greene

Homage to Omar Khayyam

Just before dawn,
a crescent moon and Jupiter
shone in the boundless clarity
of a December sky
like a flag unfurled
over the ramparts
of morning.

Workshop Poem – Nov. 19, 2014

Zorida Mohammed

SAVED BY THE LIMER*

I grew up without perfume,
or at least so I thought, until
I remembered my mother’s tiny bottle of KushKush
and the flowery talc they’d sprinkled
on Dada and Dadee before they were wrapped
in the 40 yards of cotton
so we’d know when they were visiting.

But those were prepubescent days.
When I discovered perfume,
I can’t remember which one,
my innards quaked
as if I’d snagged something
from the ether that surrounded me
but didn’t know it’d been there all the time.

The world outside my door and my neighbor’s door
greeted me with benign kindness,
kinder than my own drowning mother
who needed so much from me
as if I were her right hand,
as if our umbilicus was never cut
and I should have known what she needed.

I was a massive failure
and prayed daily to die as a younger teen
until Krishna, the good cricket player,
and avid limer at the village corner,
and at the Hindu school, picked me.

I thought it was my classmate Sita
he was looking at
until my next door neighbor
placed a folded up copybook page in my hand.
I ran straight to the latrine for privacy.
He liked me and wanted to meet me.

The whole world shifted that day.

The world has always been kinder to me than my mother
until, slowly over the years, I became the fairy God-mother
she never had, and we fell in love, truly and forever.
We even held hands when we walked.

The world never needed anything from me,
save for my eyes, peering
into every nook and crevice of everything
they discovered,
awakening the cells of my marrow.

I dipped in, and out,
as if nature were a stream,
and I a cup, dipping,
always dipping.

*Limer; In Trinidad, a person who gathers or hangs out with others for idle chatter.

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WCW – Robert P. Langdon

Robert P. Langdon

Robert P. Langdon

Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 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

Robert P. Langdon is a poet living in Northern NJ. He has worn many hats over the years, including Director of Sales and Marketing at a publishing house, Director and Curator at an art gallery, professional photographer and teacher. Robert lived in San Francisco for 13 years which helped raise his political and social consciousness and a strong appreciation for diversity and community in all it’s forms. These themes show up often in his writing.

Robert has been writing poetry and the occasional short fiction since the late 1980s. He began writing after being exposed to the poetry of Anne Sexton and discovering, through her writing, that poetry can be exciting and accessible. He is drawn to strong imagery and is influenced by confessional poetry and the works of Sexton, Sharon Olds, Diane Ackerman, Robert Lowell, Ai, and Gregory Orr among others. Robert’s own writing tends to focus on issues of identity and he uses poetry as a way to work through personal issues and reflect on meaningful events in his life. He recently released his first collection, The Candied Road Ahead: Poems & Stories available through Amazon.com in print and Kindle formats.

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

Malled

The Disney dream is a lie. Bambi has been rewritten.
No longer is it the danger of flames and firearms. It’s crossing
a four lane highway and being trapped against a median.
A warm blood Flower streaked by the wipers of a Humvee.

GV – 4th ANNUAL JACO PASTORIUS BIRTHDAY PARTY

The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café in Rutherford, NJ on Friday, Dec. 5 for our annual music/poetry birthday party for JACO PASTORIUS, bassist extraordinaire and hero of the creative spirit. Featuring JIM KLEIN as our MC, musicians PETE McCULLOUGH, MARK FOGARTY and VICTORIA WARNE, a slideshow made especially for this event by Jaco master curator ESPEN ASPLIN SORLIE, Jaco spoken word from AMY BARONE, and a cameo by the maestro himself. AMY BARONE, who has a new book of poetry, Kamikaze Dance, imminent from Finishing Line Press, will also be our featured poet.

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.

Workshop Poem – Nov. 12, 2014

Wayne L. Miller

Repast

orange juice yellow beets brown bread
once more she sets the table

arranging dishes
placing napkins

forks spoons knives
centering chairs by placemats

then placemats by chairs
tureen vegetable soup steam

cold salads covered
no grapefruit spoons or fish forks

yet again
she checks the simmering roast

reverently adjusting burners
almost hot enough

for bellies full
of memories

to start with
blue corn chips green salsa black olives

inviting me she
touches my shoulder