POETSWEDNESDAY & More

Joe Weil, Emily Vogel & Tara Betts at Barron Arts Center for PoetsWednesday, Wed., 8/13/14

 

PoetsWednesday

582 Rahway Ave., Woodbridge, NJ, 732-634-0413

Presents

Joe Weil

 

 

Emily Vogel

&

 

Tara Betts

on

August 13, 2014, 8PM

Open Mic to Follow

Workshop at 7:00PM

with

Emily Vogel & Tara Betts

 

***********************************************

Free

Refreshments Supplied by Wegmans & Deborah

 

Donations Are Greatly Appreciated

Thanks to Cynthia Knight, BAC Director, Brandon Powell, staff, and

The Woodbridge Cultural Arts Commission with the

support of Mayor John McCormac

 

PoetsWednesday Site: http://wednesdaypoet.typepad.com/

 

Directions: http://www.twp.woodbridge.nj.us/Departments/BarronArtsCenter/BarronArtsCenterDirections/tabid/754/Default.aspx

Contact: Deborah LaVeglia, Poetry Director, at [email protected]

Featuring on Wednesday, September 10, 2014:

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Tara Betts

 

Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue. Tara is a Ph.D. candidate at Binghamton University and a Cave Canem fellow. Tara’s work has appeared most recently in RHINO, Court Green, Bellevue Literary Review, Saul Williams’ CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV Books, 2012), VILLANELLES (Everyman Publishing, 2012) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (The University of Akron Press, 2012). She is co-editor of with Afaa M. Weaver of “Bop, Strut, and Dance”.

Emily Vogel

 

 

Emily Vogel’s poetry has been published in numerous journals, most recently in Tiferet, Lyrelyre, Maggy, Lips, The San Pedro River Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Comstock Review, [Spaces}, and The Journal of New Jersey Poets. She has published five chapbooks: most recently Digressions on God (Main Street Rag, author’s choice series, 2012). The Philosopher’s Wife, a full-length collection, was published in 2011 (Chester River Press). She has work forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Omniverse, and 2 Bridges Review. Recently, she collaborated with her husband, Joe Weil on a book of poetry, West of Home, which has been published by Blast Press. She is the poetry editor of the online journal Ragazine, and teaches writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.

 

Joe Weil

  Joe Weil is currently a professor at Binghamton University, and has taught graduate courses in both poetry and fiction. Prior to Binghamton, Weil founded the summer program for interactive arts at Arts High in Middlesex County, New Jersey. During Weil’s tenure as a master instructor in both poetry and fiction, his students won the Rutgers’ awards eight times (the highest award in poetry in NJ), and six of Weil’s students were admitted into the Governor’s school. Weil was also recognized by the NFFAA (a national high school awards foundation) twice as an outstanding teacher of the arts. Weil has appeared on PBS as well as reading his poetry on both NPR and Pacifica Public radio. He has been a featured poet with Stephen Dunn (winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize), Allen Ginsberg, as well as Louise Gluck, Thomas Lux, Gerald Stern, and Philip Levine. As a pianist and composer, Weil has had many works commissioned and has performed with such noteworthy musicians as Sweet Sue Terry, Perry Robinson, and Vic Ruggerio. His full length collections of poetry include What Remains (Nightshade Books), Painting the Christmas Trees (Texas Review Press), and The Plumber’s Apprentice (New York Quarterly books).

Everything Leaves by Tara Betts

 

Everything Leaves

 

There should be symmetry in the body of living.

Uneven in places, not scooped hollow,whistling

its winter clear through inside outward.  Some

eager collapse waits to cave in and scheme my

gait into stumbling.  Not the skin scraped clean

no fat and blood rinsed away, not lopsided or cold.

Sleep became an open tunnel with crooked turns.

Waking life numbs sits as plated white rice.

Every grain dull as serrations on butterknives.

Tiny points fantasize about zigzags of brutality.

 

When you want to explain missing pieces, hands

holding hungry knives seem to appear more often.

When you want to find what has been carved down,

Decomposition has no mercy or autumn colors,

everything leaves.  Whittled down, mined to watch

the canaries chirp their last songs just before lanterns

and bones are crushed with the veins of ore untapped —

inky carbon in the lost and found that no one checks.

The fragments flaked into chips and blades drawn

remind me there is so much more that could be taken.

 

                                                                                                               --by Tara Betts,

                                                                                      Previously Published by Ragazine.CC (July-                                    

                                                                                                                   August 2014)

Beginnings by Emily Vogel

Beginnings

 

 

I have been witness to the beginning of the world---

how it reeled and railed out of the darkest ambiguities,

wailing like an infant, desperate as a seed.

 

It arose as life made by way of sacrifice,

straight from the barrel of a impetuous gun.

 

It cried Christ---as if to be saved once again

by the gentle to and fro

of a rocking cradle,

 

amid the hard air of winter,

summer---not referential, not even a mere dream.

 

It withstood noise, the junk of language and voices.

 

Also, there were slight questions

upon visions of light, upon ceilings, and people

that passed like blurry shapes

through rooms.           

 

                                                                                 --Emily Vogel

Your Brother Was a Collateral Baby by Joe Weil

 

 

 

Your Brother was a collateral baby 

Your brother was a collateral baby
with fine high cheeks, and a ho ho ho,
his limbs went south, his head went north
ah that was long ago.

and the photo won a Pulitzer
a president wept, so a Noble he won,
their grief was but a moment's meme,
your mother's for her son,

and it grew until his absence
became the whole of her morning sky,
and the bread was stone, the stones they whispered
vengeance with a lullaby.

Oh you were raised on stones of memory
hard and bitter, you were raised
buried under your dead brother
where the dark suits graze--

Prize beasts of the Global village,
bankers, burghers, big shots all
all their children born of privilege
all earth's weapons at their call.

Your finger dreams it pulls a trigger
and, bang! their babies have to die,
but child, its not theirs who suffer,
never theirs who cry.

And if you kill one, they'll a thousand
blast into a photo op
where some liar sheds a fat tear
(to watch the Dow Jones drop).

Give up vengeance, it won't ever
free you. Love? Forget that word.
it's been scoured of all meaning.
Give up speaking. It's absurd.

Give up thinking heroes matter
Give up villains,feel the dust
pouring silken through your fingers
in that flowing trust.

Then go seek your little brother
head blown north and body south,
eat the dirt he has become, 
gather his song into your mouth.

Turn it all into a nursery
rhyme the little ones recite:
"Tum Tum was a collateral baby!
He went all winds Boom! Good night."

 

                                                                                                 --Joe Weil