March 8, 2009

Went to a poetry reading Friday night at RiverRead in Binghamton to hear Andrei Guruianu, Jerry Mirskin and Gerald McCarthy read their stuff. Chuck Webster's small works on paper, framed, hung on the walls. The place was full, which is always a good sign for a reading. Jerry gave an open invitation to all to join Liz Rosenberg, Andrei and him at the Bowery Poetry Club bar in New York for a reading Saturday afternoon, but I drive enough for work and another trip to NY wasn't in the cards.
Met Jim Stafford, who recently started Split Oak Press, and already has a backlog of chapbooks to be published. Ran into an old friend and former colleague at the newspaper, David Zeggert, and his wife, Sookyria, the subject of many of his works. But of course. Ziggy is teaching art at Broome Community College in Binghamton, which leaves him plenty of time to paint. Good thing, too, because his portraits are painterly and arresting. See his work in the April-May update of ragazine.cc.
Dropped in at Anthony Brunelli Gallery for the Don DeMauro one-man show, long overdue. Don teaches at Binghamton University and owns Spool Manufacturing gallery in Johnson City, a renovated factory-turned-exhibit space that gives birth to new ideas with every show they put up. I made a comment to Don about him showing at Anthony's gallery, and he gave me an insight sometimes easy to forget: "There's no competition here." Art's art ... we all pull together. A little bit of art history, however, reveals rivals whose competitive spirits, aka bursting egos, more than once got in the way of friendliness. That not being the case here, it was good to see the work on walls outside of Spool.
All in all, a good weekend. Now that it's nearly the middle of March, I'm going out in the mist to take down a forgotten string of Christmas lights.

Here's a poem I wrote last November:

The Third Rail

We two were one
three times, but
who is counting?
We walk
parallel paths
that seem
will meet
but never do.
The third rail
we have
in common
guides us, now,
from one
vanishing point
to another
at a pace
determined
by the nearness
of buried ties.