Louis McKee, 1951-2011

Last November, the poetry world — the Philadelphia poetry world in particular — lost an important man: Louis McKee passed away at the age of 60. McKee was a long-time Mad Poet. Over the years, he was a featured reader, workshop leader, contest judge, and all-around friend. He is missed. He is deeply missed.

This Sunday, the Mad Poets will celebrate Lou — his life, his work, and his friendship — at the Mansion Parlor in Media Borough Hall. Close friends will share memories of Lou and read from his work. All are invited to attend and speak. Even those who may not have known Lou well, have felt his influence on poetry here in Philadelphia, and we all feel his absence. We hope that you will join us.

Here’s a little more about the featured readers.

Janet Spangler, poet

Janet Spangler grew up in Washington, DC, but later kept on the move, living in California, Connecticut, New York, Arizona, New Mexico, Turkey, and Mexico.  Along the way  she has been a reporter/photographer for the “Albuquerque News,” taught English as a Second Language in Turkey, and co-authored a fund-raising textbook.  She finally made it to Philadelphia and began writing poetry.  She has been a featured reader at Robin’s (now Moonstone Arts Center), the Tyme Gallery, Harvest Books, the Green Line series, and others.

Christine Weiser, novelist

Christine Weiser is a professional writer and editor, and co-publisher of the literary magazine Philadelphia Stories (founded in 2004). She is co-author of Ask Mr. Technology, Get Answers (Linworth 2007), and is managing editor for Tech & Learning magazine. She was the bass player for Philly girl band Mae Pang; and her current band, The Tights, can be heard in clubs in and around the Philadelphia area. Broad Street is her first novel.

This Thursday, the Mad Poets is delighted — dare I say giddy! — to host the Round Robin poets at Milkboy in Bryn Mawr. The group, which include Mike Cohen, Steve Delia, Missy Grotz, and Barbara Wagner, will offer a dynamic, coordinated reading, featuring works that the poets have helped each other craft and refine throughout their 10 years together.

But this isn’t just a rare reading from the Round Robin poets. This is a farewell party for one of the group’s members: long-time Mad Poet, Byrn Mawr regular, and all around spunky poet, Barbara Wagner, who will soon be moving to sunny Florida. If you’ve heard Barbara read before, then you know why it’s important to catch one last reading before she goes. If you haven’t, you’ll be glad you got to meet her before the chance is gone.

The reading will begin PROMPTLY at 7pm, followed by an open mic.

Here’s a little bit more about Barbara Wagner & the other Round Robin poets:

The Round Robin Poets (l-r): Mike Cohen, Barbara Wagner, Steve Delia, and Missy Grotz

The Round Robin began over a decade ago, when a young Steve Delia suggested that some of the poets might help each other with new poems or revising old ones by critiquing works in progress, by mail.  His idea was to have each member critique the poems that others had sent and then add a new poem to be critiqued on each round. The group began with five people, each would critique four poems, add his/her own, and eventually get their poem from the previous round and the 4 critiques of it.  Of course with the proliferation of electronic communication, the temptation to succumb to the efficiencies of email was great, but thanks to Steve’s leadership the poets were able to resist, and maintain the Round Robin in its pristine, snail-mail state.  Says Mike Cohen: “There is something about receiving a packet in the mail and having actual pages, to curl up and spend happy hours with those pages of thoughts from thoughtful, inspiring friends.” The fact that the Round Robin has been sustained for so long is testament to the pertinacity of the participants and to the reliability of the postal service.  In all this time, they’ve not had an incident of anything “lost in the mail”;  Postal workers may occasionally go on shooting rampages, but overall they do a very good job. The poets have also done a good job, and they have had no incidents of any of the members going on a shooting rampage… yet.

Those members are…

Mike Cohen: A person who appreciates poetry, art, and other dreams, Mike enjoys sharing perspectives on matters that matter and matters that don’t and how remarkably interchangeable the two types of matters are. Mike’s poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News. His poetic presentations have been featured in programs at various schools, bookstores, coffee shops, and libraries. His poems have been aired on SKN radio. Mike has served as a judge in the Montgomery County Poet Laureate competition. Currently, Mike hosts Poetry Aloud and Alive, a popular monthly poetry program in its fifth year at Mt. Airy’s Big Blue Marble Book Store. He takes part in guiding tours at Woodmere Art Museum.  His articles on Philadelphia sculpture appear in the Schuylkill Valley Journal in which he is a contributing editor.

Steve Delia has been crumpling balls of paper for 33 years. The ones he keeps he calls poetry. His first love was music but he had zero musical talent. He tried writing song lyrics and gradually drifted into poetry. He has 5 chapbooks: Revisited, Revised and Retyped Volumes 1 and 2, 1622 Church Street, Haiku And Other Imagining and Zoo Poetry. He enjoys collecting cd’s, eating scrapple by candlelight, and playing naked twister.He dislikes heights, shoveling snow, being diabetic, and all feet including his own.

Missy Grotz has followed a gypsy’s jaunt, including education at Penn State and a myriad of careers.  Her poetry has been published in the Mad Poets Review and Dining and Entertainment Weekly. Missy is a member of the Wild Women Poets and The Round Robin Poets, and has had the pleasure of reading at many venues around the Philadelphia area.  A series of children’s books known as the Aunt Missy books, inspired by her 14 nieces and nephews, is in the works. She has a collection of cat poetry entitled Cat Chat that will be out one day soon.

Barbara Wagner has performed her poetry and fiction throughout the Philadelphia and New Jersey area, including the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and the televised Café Improv program in Princeton, NJ.  Her work has appeared in several literary publications as well as on the internet, most recently Poets for Living Waters, created in response to the Gulf oil spill. Her children’s story The Giggling Ghost is featured on Smories.com. Her poetry awards include the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.  In addition to poetry, she writes fiction and has recently completed her second novel.

* * *

As always, the featured reading will be followed by a mixed-genre open mic. We’re just halfway through our annual open mic contest — which means there’s still plenty of time to snag enough votes to win a featured reading slot in December. So come on out! Bring your open ears, your open mind & your best poems!

"Self Portrait," by Peter Baroth

Peter Baroth is a writer, artist, and musician based in Philadelphia. He was born in Chicago, raised in Norman, Oklahoma, and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and Temple Law School. He has published a novel, Long Green, with iUniverse; and his most recent chapbook is Ski Oklahoma, published with Wordrunner Chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Philadelphia Poets, Legal Studies Forum, The Awakenings Review, E Pluribus Unum – An Anthology of Diverse Voices, Apiary, and elsewhere. He was the 2009 recipient of the Amy Tritsch Needle Award in poetry. He is also on the editorial board of Philadelphia Stories magazine.

You can read some of Peter’s poems here, here & here.

And you can check out Peter’s facebook album to view more of his exciting artwork.

Thursday! Thursday! Thursday! Join the Mad Poets for some sweet mixed genre action at Milkboy Acoustic Cafe in Bryn Mawr. This month we’ve got two poets & a novelist/essayist. Of course, we’ve also got our always exciting open mic, including the ongoing open mic contest where you can for a featured spot on this year’s schedule.

The really big news, however, concerns all of you (like me) who operate on poet time: We will be starting ON TIME. That’s right. Our schedule says 7pm, and we plan to have that ball a-rolling by 7:05p… okay, maybe 7:07p if that line for lattes is extra long. And here’s why. Our gracious hosts at Milkboy are holding steadfast to a 9pm closing time, and we as their grateful guests must abide. So, get there early. If you’re worried about dinner, don’t. Milkboy has some good grub — sandwiches, snacks, sweets, etc. Besides, you won’t want to miss a minute of this reading!

J.R. Bouchard is originally from upstate New York. After living in both Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia for academics, she is re-locating to Dallas, Texas and hopes to have a life long affair with academia. She just completed her MFA at Rosemont College, and is shopping around her thesis project, a full length collection of poems, called “The Body’s Discourse, Etc.”  Her work can be found in journals: Camroc Review, The Foundling Review, Mad Poets Review, The Promethean, Adirondack Review, Melee Live, WordRiot, and pieces forthcoming with Cantalonian Review.

Writer & teacher, Matt Jordan

Matthew Jordan teaches English and Writing at Holy Ghost Preparatory School and Montgomery County Community College. When grading doesn’t demand too much of his time, he writes essays, short stories and poems, and is currently working on a novel. Some of his essays have been published by Philadelphia Stories, where he also serves as an editor. He lives in East Falls.

Sarah Spath, poet

Sarah Spath (who was originally slated to read for us in March, but had to reschedule thanks to a yucky flu) is a poet and educator who is relatively new to Philadelphia. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University–Los Angeles and is a graduate of the Transition to Teaching program at Indiana University. Currently, she works as the Tutorial Coordinator at Philadelphia University.

Philadelphia Poetry Festival
April 23, 2011
12pm-4pm
Free Library of Phila., Central Branch
Montgomery Auditorium
1901 Vine Street, Phila., PA 19103 [get directions]

The Fest is going down from 12p-4p in the Montgomery Auditorium (that’s downstairs) and will include representatives from an eclectic mix of Philly poetry orgs, talking about their work and spotlighting one of their favorite poets. The Mad Poets Society is one of those organizations. (In fact, Eileen & I have been part of the organizing committee, along with Joanne Leva, Tamara Oakman & Leonard Gontarek). Eileen will do the talking for MPS & John Timpane will be our representative poet. We’ll hit the stage in the 3rd set, early in the 2 o’clock hour. Right after featured poet Nathalie Anderson. Come check us out, throw us some love & hang out with about a bazillion other hardworking poets and organizers.

If you’ve ever kicked yourself for not getting to this reading or that reading, now is the time to get a taste of what all the city’s various poetry orgs have to offer. No kidding. Check out the FULL SCHEDULE for more info. See ya there!!

Poet Brian Sammond has hosted poetry readings for the Mad Poets at Delaware County Science Institute, and currently hosts the Seasonal Madness series at Media Borough Hall.  He has hosted readings at the Blend at Blue Bananas Cafe on South Street as well.  But Brian is more than a host.  He has been a featured reader for Mad Poets and Poetry Blam!  Brian is a founding member of the Poetic Arts Performance Project.  His poetry has been published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Mad Poets Review. Some of Brian’s poems have also been set to music.

Brian unwinds from the rigor(morti)s of his programming career by riding his mountain bike about the hills of southeast Pennsylvania, playing with nieces and nephews, and of course writing poetry.

Brian’s poetry is fully thought out and finely wrought.  He has a fine ear for nuance and appeals to all the senses, including the sense of humor.  It is poetry you can appreciate and enjoy.

The featured reading, which begins at 7:15pm, will be followed by an open-reading-go-round hosted by Mike Cohen.  All are invited to read a few minutes’ worth of their own poetry (or someone else’s) or just to listen and enjoy.

Big Blue Marble Book Store is located at:

551 Carpenter Lane
(Mt. Airy) Philadelphia, PA 19119
215) 844-1870
www.bigbluemarblebooks.com

Retiring early from the practice of medicine, Christine Chiosi now spends her time writing poetry and short fiction.  Her poetry can be found in Carpe Articulum, and she anticipates June publications in Cloudbank and the Sierra Nevada Review. She has been favorably reviewed in NewPages.com, an on-line source for literary journals.  Christine has recently returned to the Philadelphia area after living and teaching in central Chile, where she completed a collection of bilingual poems.  Most recently (last week!) she was just selected by NPR to read her tweet of a poem (140 characters or less!) on air, for their National Poetry Month feature, which selects one tweeted poem per day, during the month of April. She is currently looking for a job to sustain her first love, which is drifting, thoughtfully, through the mine-fields of memory.

Lola Georg

Lola Georg works professionally in Business and Finance, with 25 years of management experience, predominantly in the non-profit sector. She volunteers as a counselor at Daemion Counseling Center in Berwyn, where she works with people who can not afford traditional therapy fees. Poet-wise, she has written poetry over the years because it is therapeutic, and she spends a lot of time thinking in metaphor. For fun, she likes to ski, hike, bike, and spend time outdoors.

Howard Lieberman started out as a neurosurgeon, but has been writing for years. His work has been published in about 10 journals, and even in the NY Times. Now, he primarily writes every day as his main hobby (others include: an obsessive chess playing mania along with a mania for collecting things: etchings, coins, pottery, antique books, anything that doesn’t run fast enough). He adds on endlessly to my poetry web site, artpoetry.com , where along with many poems, are poems combined with pictures (not his), notes on whatever is obscure, and a history of the last 100 years of poetry.

Susan H. Robbins

Susan H. Robbins, Ph.D., only recently discovered her ‘poetic voice’ after more than 25 years as a research professional evaluating education and health and human service programs.  She received two awards for her poetry at the 2010 Philadelphia Writers Conference. Two of her poems were published in the most recent volume of the Mad Poets Review. Susan has also performed her poetry at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey and at the Mad Poets Society 2009 and 2010 Festivals.  She truly hopes you enjoy her poetry.

Of course, we’ll round out the evening with the poetic stylings of our always eclectic open mic gang. That could include you, if you show up & bring some poems. Oh yeah, and we’re running our 2011 open mic contest, which means if you do read in the open mic, you just might get yourself a feature slot in December! So be there:

Mad Poets Mixed-Genre Reading & Open Mic
Milkboy Acoustic Cafe
824 West Lancaster Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Reading starts at 7pm, open mic follows.

We’re celebrating all month long, but tonight we’ve got an extra special event at Swarthmore Public Library, featuring nationally acclaimed poet Gregory Djanikian. The reading, which will be hosted by loyal Mad Poet Linda Fischer, will begin promptly at 7 pm. Refreshments will be served.

Gregory Djanikian, poet

Gregory Djanikian is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published five collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, and most recently, So I Will Till the Ground, all with Carnegie Mellon University Press. His awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center of Columbia University. You can read about him and preview some of his amazing poems here, here, and here.

Host Linda Fischer says: I heard Gregory Djanikian read some years ago under the auspices of the Mad Poets, and I became an immediate fan!  His poetry is completely accessible and always very moving, whether somber or humorous.  This is an evening you will really enjoy!”

This Thursday, at 7p.m., please join the Mad Poets mixed-genre reading series at Milkboy Acoustic Cafe in Bryn Mawr as we celebrate National Women’s History Month with three phenomenal women writers and performers. We’ll bring together a poet, a travel writer, and a performance artist in one eclectic and energizing event. Of course, we’ll follow it all up with our open mic contest! So come for the fabulous reading & bring out your own stuff to share!

First, meet the lovely ladies we’ll be listening to:

Jennifer J. Beaumont, Travel Writer

Jennifer J. Beaumont is a travel writer who was born in Jamaica and has spent her life exploring different places. An educator by profession, and a writer by avocation, she learns about life through travel. With an adventurous spirit, she is constantly in search of those things, large and small, spoken and unspoken, actualized and yet to be conceived, that evoke an “A-HA”, eyes full of wonder, smiles of unexpected delight, laughs of unmitigated pleasure, the seemingly incongruous linking of facts. She is unafraid of trying new things. Her newest project is a documentary – The Miracle Team – about Trinidad and Tobago’s men’s 4 x400 relay team that earned a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan and then set a world record in 1966 at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. You can read her work on her blog: http://jenniferjbeaumont.com/.

Gabrielle De Burke, aka Plum Dragoness

A native of West Philadelphia, Gabrielle de Burke (a.k.a. Plum Dragoness) is a multi-talented thespian, dancer & poetess who has been involved with theater since childhood. Throughout her early years, she studied various visual & performing arts media to cultivate her expressive theatrical personality while earning her BA in Theater from Temple University, with an exploratory concentration in African/Modern Dance, World Music, Jazz Voice & Anthropology. Gabrielle has had a profound interest in the performing arts that involved her in cross-cultural ventures that bridge the gaps between traditional sacred/secular dance, theatre and present day urban expressions of life. Her background in costume production, dance, voice, stage/film acting, poetry as performance & martial/internal arts techniques make a significant contribution to her creation of innovative performance art.

She is well-known for her performances & choreographic style throughout the Philadelphia area & abroad. Her work has been featured in local venues such as the Philly Fringe Fest, Painted Bride Art Center, World Café Live, the Rotunda, LadyFest Philly, the Kimmel & the Annenberg Centers for the Performing Arts. She has performed nationally at the Times Square Performing Arts Center in NYC, the Whittaker Center in Harrisburg, PA & the Kennedy Center in Washington. D.C., as well as festivals that include Ultraworld, Gaian Mind & Philadelphia EXperiment in Baltimore & Fredrick, MD, the Earthdance Festival in Laytonville, CA & the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, NV. In addition, she has presented on international stages like Om Festivals in Northern Ontario, the Global Roots festival & the Grand Theater in Toronto, Canada, the Rossport Gathering (as part of the Rossport Solidarity Shell to Sea Campaign) in County Mayo, Ireland & the Montezuma Gathering in Montezuma, Costa Rica.

In addition to her solo work, Gabrielle was a founding member and core performer from 2001 to 2006 in the black light mask theater troupe ArcheDream. As a core member of the company, she performed, choreographed, created costumes & acted as Assistant Artistic Director.

Gabrielle continues her commitment to the west Philadelphia community by organizing a free ongoing performance series going into its 10th season at the Rotunda for Foundation Arts called “Poet-tree en Motion.” She also formed the musical group known as “Plum Dragoness & the Elements,” who just released an album of spoken word/poetry accompanied by world music compositions called “Renaissance of a Poetess.”

Sarah Spath, poet

Sarah Spath is a poet and educator who is relatively new to Philadelphia. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University–Los Angeles and is a graduate of the Transition to Teaching program at Indiana University. Currently, she works as the Tutorial Coordinator at Philadelphia University.