I have been posting about the Broome County (NY) Arts Council’s celebration of poetry, including last week’s reading in which I was featured. This week’s installment is now available and can be found here, along with the prior weeks’ readings.
This week features three of my local poet-friends, Jessica Dubey, Burt Myers, and J. Barrett Wolf, along with Ithaca-area poet and professor Jerry Mirskin.
Jessica, Burt, and Barrett are all part of the Grapevine Group, the poetry circle with which I meet regularly to workshop poems. Burt is the one among us who writes formal poetry most often. He is very attuned to the rhymes and rhythms of lines, which you can hear in the reading and which is helpful to me when we are workshopping because I am not very conscious of those elements when I write.
Barrett, as poet-in-residence at the Bundy Museum and the founder of The Word Place, is one of the sponsors of this reading series and has appeared in each session to ask the poets questions after they read. It was wonderful to hear him read some of his work this week. I was glad that the other poets got to ask him some questions after his reading because I love hearing poets talk about their work and it would have been a shame if they had skipped over that part.
I’m happy to say that Jessica and I share not only Grapevine Group but also the Binghamton Poetry Project and the Boiler House Poets Collective in common. Her poetry is brutally honest and searing. I also admire her use of metaphor. Her first chapbook will be published next year. I’ll be sure to post about it here when it is available for pre-order.
While April is almost over, the BCAC is carrying the reading series into May, so check back next week for the next installment.
It’s been quite a poetry reading week for me! I shared the link for my reading with the Broome County Arts Council here and now I will be sharing an event that happened on Tuesday evening which is now available for viewing through Facebook.
The event began with an interview of Dr. Louis Hoffman and Dr. Lisa Xochitl Vallejos, both of whom are psychologist/counselors and poets. They are the anthology editors, as well as contributors of poems and authors of the introduction and response activities. I was fascinated to hear them speaking about how they use poetry in and as therapy. The discussion resonated with me as a poet who recognizes the power of poetry to evoke deeper truths and who often uses writing to work through my reactions to real-life events.
Following the interview, over a dozen of the poets read their work from the anthology, including me. The range of work is wide and, as you might expect, some of the topics of the poems are difficult. A poem that dealt with racism was especially searing as we had learned the verdict in the George Floyd case just hours before the event.
The links in the second paragraph will take you to the reading and to University Professors Press if you wish to order your own copy of the anthology. You can also navigate to other volumes in the series, which I’m sure are all equally illuminating about the human experience.
I posted here and here about the first two readings from the Broome County Arts Council in celebration of National Poetry Month. I am pleased to announce that this week, I am featured along with Rindi Tas and kohloa, two poets whom I met through the Binghamton Poetry Project. We were scheduled to be joined by another BPP poet, Anita Shipway, but technical difficulties prevented Anita from joining us. The recording of the reading and our bios are available here.
I’m not sure how I came to be invited to participate in this series but I was honored to be asked. And excited. And nervous. This is my first time as a featured reader with a Q&A component and I was anxious to do a good job, knowing that most of the readers in the series are much more experienced, knowledgeable, and academically credentialed than I. I asked poet-friends to review my selections and practiced my reading, recording myself on Zoom to see how I sounded and looked. I plead guilty to over-thinking and over-preparing, but it kept me a lot calmer when we recorded.
I possibly babbled a bit answering Barrett’s questions. Barrett is part of the Grapevine Group, my local circle of poets who meet on a regular basis to workshop our poems, so we are used to “talking shop” together, but I’m not used to interacting with him in a formal setting. He asked thoughtful questions that flowed from the choices I had made for the reading but I am not great at thinking on my feet, so you all can be the judge on whether I made sense or not.
Because I didn’t take up poetry as a serious pursuit until recent years, I am not that well-known or widely published. I decided to do a mini-sampler of the kinds of poems I tend to write, realizing that I would be an unknown quantity to most prospective listeners. Of the four poems I read, only one is published. It appeared in the Nov. 2020 anthology of the Binghamton Poetry Project and can be viewed here.
The recording should be available on the BCAC website at the link at the end of the first paragraph, at least for the next few weeks. It will also be broadcast locally on the Bundy Museum’s radio station WBDY-FM radio (99.5 FM). Because I’m not sure how long BCAC will have the webpage active, I’m embedding the youtube link here, which I think will be permanent:
If you choose to give the reading a listen, I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment here or on the Top of JC’s Mind Facebook page. If you want to send me a private message at topofjcsmind@gmail.com, please put a comment on this post telling me to check for it so it doesn’t get lost among the various digests and posts sent there. My inbox is out of control!
I owe two of these poets a particular debt of gratitude.
When Nicole Santalucia, who is a Broome County native, returned to do graduate work at the state university, she founded the Binghamton Poetry Project (BPP). I first heard about BPP when Nicole read at a 2013 National Poetry Month episode of Off the Page, a radio program hosted by Bill Jaker on WSKG, our local public broadcasting radio station. Off the Page invited listeners to send in poems to their website and I was thrilled when they chose to read mine on the air! I began attending BPP’s free community poetry workshops for the general public, led by Binghamton University graduate students, in spring 2014. The connections I made there, particularly with Heather Dorn who has been a workshop leader, assistant director, and director of BPP, led to my joining the Grapevine Group, my local poetry critique group which you will hear more about shortly, and Sappho’s Circle, a women’s poetry circle which is, sadly, not currently active. The BCAC supports BPP through grants, so I was able to connect with them, as well. I was even invited to contribute a poem to BCAC’s Heart of the Arts award dinner in 2016. (Video here and text here.) I don’t think any of that would have happened without Nicole Santalucia and the Binghamton Poetry Project, so I owe her a huge thank you.
A shout-out also to Wendy Stewart, who is a member of the aforementioned Grapevine Group. Wendy always offers thoughtful advice on my poems and is supportive of me when I am being insecure, which happens with some frequency. Sometimes, we joke that she is just being Canadian!
I love the way Wendy uses language. I’ve learned a lot of new vocabulary from her. She is also masterful in the way she juxtaposes seemingly unrelated things so that we are invited to make connections we otherwise would not. She often uses her sly wit and penchant for understatement, both in her writing and in conversation, in a way that I admire, although cannot emulate.
Thank you, Wendy!
I hope you enjoy the recording. I’ll be back next week when I will be one of the featured poets.
In the United States, April is National Poetry month.
Broome County Arts Council (BCAC) is joining the celebration by hosting a series of virtual poetry readings by poets with ties to our area. The first reading, featuring Elizabeth Cohen, Dante Di Stefano, and Andrei Guruianu is available here.
Enjoy!
I’ll be back with additional posts as the celebration continues, including a more extensive post the week that I am featured along with other poets from the Binghamton Poetry Project.
I’m pleased to announce that I have a poem on display in my hometown. The Vestal Museum has just opened a new exhibit entitled Empty the Inkpots: The History of American Typewriters. They are displaying vintage typewriters and have compiled a binder with their research on the various manufacturers. In collaboration with the Binghamton Poetry Project, the Museum is also displaying poems by area poets who have attended BPP workshops. We poets were invited to submit and I was fortunate to have one of my poems selected.
My poem with two vintage typewriters and the research binderAn Oliver company typewriter
One of the fun things about the poems on display is that they are written in a monospaced typewriter-style font. Because most of us are used to reading text in variable-width fonts these days, the look of the poems on the page is quite distinctive.
My poem, bio, and inspiration statement on display
Because it is very hard to read from the photo, here is the text, although not in the special font:
SARS-CoV-2: A Novel Coronavirus
We are only beginning this novel, the first scenes in China, then South Korea, Iran, Italy.
In the United States, chapters are written for the hardest hit states— Washington, California, New York.
No cases in West Virginia— turn the page— it’s there, too.
Chilling numbers give way to vignettes— the family in Jersey that lost four members with two more in critical condition,
the NBC audio tech silenced forever, the loss of the doctor who tried to warn the Chinese government, the bus driver in Brooklyn dead in March.
The plot twists. The newest regions in lockdown. Italian coffins in rows, waiting
for cremation and burial without funerals. Speculation on treatments and vaccines, though none are proven.
Fines levied for being outdoors. Postponed elections. Shuttered courts.
How many tested. How many infected. How many dead.
We spend hours reading voraciously, awaiting the next installment in the serial.
The novel is long— and we may still be near the beginning. How many of us will see the final pages?
The suspense is killing us.
*
Joanne Corey, though she grew up in New England, has called Vestal home since 1988. A stalwart of The Binghamton Poetry Project since 2014, she last attended the fall 2020 workshop and also has participated locally with the Grapevine Group, the Broome County Arts Council, and Sappho’s Circle. She invites you to visit her eclectic blog at topofjcsmind.wordpress.com.
Inspiration: Like many poets, I write to try to process current events. I drafted this in March 2020 as the pandemic was beginning and workshopped it with my poet-friends of the Grapevine Group. It also became an exercise in the use of extended metaphor. *****
I wish I could share more of the poems here, but I only have permission for my own work. I hope that local folks will be able to see the exhibit in person. It is currently scheduled to be on display through May 31st. The link in the first paragraph will give times that the Museum is open and information on any special events.
While you are there, make sure to take part in the community poetry exercise. We are creating an exquisite corpse poem. Each person is invited to compose a sentence with adjective+noun+verb+adjective+noun without looking at the prior line. Bonus: You get to type it on a manual typewriter! Although I learned to type on a manual, it had been a long time since I had used one. Daughter T was with me and I had to do a bit of coaching. Physical carriage return was not something that she had ever experienced.
The Ekphrastic Review has a regular series of Ekphrastic Writing Challenges, in which they post a piece of visual art and invite writers to respond to it. I have had several poems published in this way.
Here is a link to the artwork and response pieces for the most recent challenge, “The Two Sisters” by Théodore Chassériau (France) 1843. Among them is a poem by Kyle Laws, fellow Boiler House Poets Collective member and ekphrastic writer extraordinaire!
My piece was not chosen in this go-round, but I thought I’d share it here. Enjoy!
Sisters
Is it the matching outfits that proclaim sisterhood – my sisters and I in pale
yellow with coordinating hats and gloves for Easter mass –
my daughters in black velvet with lacework collars in a rare formal portrait –
my granddaughters in rainbow- and-unicorn pajamas in pandemic London –
or is it the dimples that appear with smiles the entwined arms
Alzheimer’s runs in my father’s family. Paco’s father and all three of his siblings who survived into their seventies struggled with it. Because of his history, Paco enrolled in a long-term medical study on the effects of medications as possible preventatives for symptoms of the disease, which, unfortunately, did not find any effective medications.
As Paco aged well beyond the onset age of his afflicted family members without symptoms, we were relieved, as it looked like he might have avoided those particular family genes. People did always say that he took after his mother’s side of the family.
There are, however, other types of dementia, the risks of which increase with age. Paco, who will turn 96 next month, is suffering from some unnamed type of dementia. We are grateful that, while the memory loss is problematic, he has retained his generally cheerful disposition, sparing us all the personality changes that were so jarring in Paco’s father and siblings.
He has been having memory loss and cognitive problems for several years, which we had been managing with daily visits, phone calls, notes, pill organizers, and staff help. Things got immensely more complicated when COVID limited our in-person visits and disrupted Paco’s daily routine. It also made a possible move to the assisted living unit where his care could be better addressed more difficult, as family visits were nearly impossible for months.
When Paco became ill and was hospitalized in December, the decision to move out of his independent living apartment was made for us. There was no way that he could be safe without 24/7 staff availability, which he now has in the assisted living unit, where he has his own living room, kitchenette, bedroom, and bathroom along with three daily meals plus snacks, a nurse to manage and deliver his medications, aides to assist with activities, and the company of the other residents, all of whom have now been vaccinated against COVID-19 and most of whom he knew because they also started out in Independent Living in their senior community. Unfortunately, in-person visiting of people outside the unit is severely restricted, although I’m hoping that increasing vaccination rates and warmer weather permitting outdoor visits will ease the situation in the coming months.
Because I genuinely do try to address issues that are on the top of my mind here, it’s been difficult not to write about Paco’s dementia more directly over these last years. For a good chunk of that time, I avoided it because Paco followed my posts via email and I was afraid posting about it would further confuse or upset him. Now, he is well beyond being able to navigate email and websites, so I don’t have that worry – and the few people who read my blog and know Paco in real life already know the situation.
In truth, I’ve also had difficulty articulating my thoughts and feelings around this. Although my family dealt with cognitive decline with both my mother and father-in-law when they were terminally ill, Paco’s long, slow loss of memory has been even more excruciating. While I can adjust to the loss of short-term memory that results in answering the same question multiple times in a short phone conversation, I have a harder time dealing with the loss of long-time skills and words. When he can be looking at a dinner plate with his favorite food but not remember what it is. When he forgets the name of someone he has known for decades. When he, who was always meticulous in following his finances, can no longer add numbers.
It’s painful. Every time. And hard to express in words. Even in poetry.
My consolation is that it is seldom upsetting to him. By some grace, he is handling things with equanimity with only occasional moments of frustration.
He keeps reminding me of his favorite saying, “We’ll take it one day at a time.”
I carved out a bit of writing time today – a rarity in the whirlwind that has been my life lately.
I went to Linda’s blog to read the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt which is:
Your prompt for #JusJoJan and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “the beginning, the end.” Write about the beginning of something and the end of something. Bonus points if your first sentence contains “the end” and your last sentence contains “the beginning.” <– Read that again. Have fun!
I admit that I couldn’t wrap my head around beginnings and endings as I am mired in a seemingly endless middle with lots of twists and turns and no real clarity of if/when there will be a conclusion, so I set the whole enterprise aside and decided to do some housekeeping in my overcrowded Google Chrome window. One of the first tabs I went to was one for The Ekphrastic Review, which has a new monthly column on ekphrasis, which is the practice of basing one work of art on another, most often used in the context of writing poetry based on visual art pieces.
While I was there, I figured I should check out the current Ekphrastic Writing Challenge. It is a painting called The Two Sisters by Théodore Chassériau. Given that I have sisters – and two daughters and two granddaughters – the painting inspired a poem in response, so that has become my beginning (middle) and end for this post.
Well, perhaps not quite the end yet. The poem does have an end, of course, but the real ending will be when I submit it to the challenge. I want to let it set a bit and will probably share it with daughter T. I don’t have another meeting of my critique group before the entry is due, so I’ll have to trust sending it without professional critique and revision.
Still, it was nice to have a poem appear on a day that I hadn’t expected it – and to have a blog post appear when I didn’t think I would have one of those either.
Joanne Corey 