Reading

A reading and visual presentation of visual poetry, digital and analog works, by Terri Witek, Dona Mayoora, and Kristine Snodgrass. All women have published works world-wide including in the WAAVe Global Gallery Anthology 2021. Visual Poetry including asemics, glitch, and concrete (or New Concrete) is rapidly expanding in scope and defintion. In the past two years two anthologies of women in visual poetry have proven to be seminal texts in the ever growing (expanding) fields. Visual Poetry has advanced beyond erasure and collaged text to include new modes of digital, including AI and glitch, performance, textile, and sound and video. Witek, Mayoora, and Snodgrass have all collaborated with other visual poets and their work can be found in anthologies, journals, and critical essay/articles. 

We would like to present a group poem on behalf of the SU Slam Poetry Club at Susquehanna University following the theme of “What Our Walls Would Say About Us If They Could Talk.” Each of us individually would explore personal moments and unique experiences from our paths in college and in life, bringing some of the private part of our lives to the surface and challenging how to confront the uncomfortable parts of existing. We are still undergraduates, but we are each experienced poets and writers and have performed in open mics and slam poetry events which we organize and participate in every semester.  

A reading by four poets currently living on the Northshore in St. Tammany Parish:  Maggie Sorrels, Diane Elayne Dees, poet and dancer Catalina Reyna, and Dennis Formento. All four have been involved in poetry groups in St. Tammany or have performed in 100,000 Poets for Change: Northshore events.  

Each poet's reading should be 12 to 15 minutes each in length, with a few minutes afterwards for discussion with the audience.  The event preferably daytime. at the Greenway or another outdoor facility if possible. (Two of our poets have night driving limitations.) 

Diane Elayne Dees's most recent publication, The Last Time I Saw You, celebrates her friendship  with the late, much respected New Orleans art critic, Eric Bookhardt. She is also the author of three Origami Poems Project microchaps, and her poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. She is a blogger (Women Who Serve, on women's professional tennis.) Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large. She lives in Covington.

M.P. (Maggie) Sorrels was born in Vicksburg, MS and spent her formative years in New Orleans.  Maggie claims her inherited artistic talent comes from her parents.  Her mother was an artist and her father, a musician.  Maggie says “I paint pictures with words and make music from rhymes.” She is widowed, mother of 4, grandmother to 7 and great-grandmother to 16.  Her two books of poetry, “Legacy” and “It’s About Time,” are self-published.  Ms. Sorrels resides in Slidell, in St. Tammany parish.   

Catalina Reyna has been dancing since she was 6 years old, in her native Mexico City. She joined Paso de Oro Dance Company of Alicia Mendibles in Los Angeles in 2008. When she moved to Louisiana in 2013, joined the dance group, New Orleans Hispano America and in 2015 she created her own label, Xochiquetzally Cultural Project. She fusions dance and poetry with intention. She aims to convey messages of peace and hope for the human race as a cultural ambassador. 

Dennis Formento lives in Slidell, LA. Books include Spirit Vessels (FootHills Publishing, 2018), Cineplex (Paper Press, 2014,) Looking for An Out Place (FootHills, 2010.)  Edited Mesechabe: The Journal of Surregionalism, 1990-2001. St. Tammany Parish organizer for 100,000 Poets for Change, world-wide network of poets for peace, sustainability and justice. Published translations from Italian by poets Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giorgio Carbone and Cristina Campo, and contemporary poets Biagio Propato, Cony Ray, and  Donatella D’Angelo. He led the free jazz/free verse band, the Frank Zappatistas, and recorded a cd of jazz poetry with guitarist Ed Barrett, Music and Poetry from Looking for an Out Place. 

This reading will feature poetry performances by graduate students from the University of Southern Mississippi's creative writing doctoral program, the Center for Writers. Showcasing the wealth of variety our poets have in topic and style, the reading will include reflections on creativity, grief, queer expression, and more, all wrapped in a dazzling display of linguistic dexterity and emotional honesty. The students performing in this reading are all nearing graduation and can't wait to share the results of our recent labors with our local literary community.

This panel will showcase the lingering and salutary influence on American poetry of the poets of the New York School: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. The New York School Diaspora is wide-ranging, consisting of writers who honor the virtues of play, wit, the chaos of reality, and the belief that, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, life is too important to strangle with seriousness. This tradition deserves not only more adherents but more recognition and analysis from critics. The panelists will read some of their own New York School-inspired poems and discuss the School’s importance to their work and to American poetry.

Saturnalia Books authors Moncho Alvarado, Timothy Liu, Kristi Maxwell, Rob Ostrom, and Natalie Shapero will read from their work in celebration of the newly published anthology Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books.

The focus of this reading will be on the poetry of environmental crisis. The six readers all write about climate change, and in particular disappearing coastlines. Our reading will explore history and memory as our poems try to imagine an unimaginable future.  Questions our poems raise include:  what is the meaning of home in the Anthropocene? how does the idea of home change when we are faced with precarity? What work can poetry do in the world to speak out about environmental destruction and ecological grief?

This is a combined panel and reading on writing about illness, whether that be of a mental or physical nature. Each poet on the panel will read a bit of their work, followed by a discussion about the work and the various approaches the panel members take to address-- or not address-- illness. The work of each of these panel members explores the many stages, and ways of processing illness, disease, and health. 

https://youtu.be/K8jb8j353bU

New Orleans is a city teeming with creative energy. It is a place where artists are both born and reborn, a place that cultivates its own creative young and a place to which artists and creatives flock from other locales. Gold Room, a monthly reading series birthed out of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, is one of the city’s oldest continuous reading and performance series. In recognition of that, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation has granted us funding to curate and print a Gold Room Anthology to celebrate the many writers who've read at Gold Room, and we'd love to showcase our anthology poets at New Orleans Poetry Festival. 

Over the past twelve months, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting some of New Orleans’ most formidable talents: Daniel Lee, Meghan Sullivan, Mimi Ayers, Ryan Mayer, Isaac Lauritsen, and more. We are hoping to honor those who share our pages by offering them a stage to share. The root of our anthology is a celebration of the people we are blessed to make art with and this great city we are lucky to make art within.

The goal of this reading is to celebrate what Gold Room has always been and will further become: a staple of the New Orleans’ creative community. It is our honor to do this work and we are grateful for opportunities to build and bridge communities here in New Orleans.

New Orleans is an unusual city.  It lies along a river, lake and the Gulf of Mexico. 

This has meant it is a rich estaurine area: fish, seafood of all kinds abound.  It is also a port city-- a crossroads, and oddly, at the end of the line of one of the largest rivers in the world: a watershed for more than a third of the United States. 

People are drawn to the cultures here.  It is the most Africanized city in the United States because of the legacy of slavery.  It has been in the hands of the French, Spanish, briefly the British, and finally the Americans. 

Sugar, cotton and commerce made the city, as well as religion. 

What is the importance of this place to poets and other writers and artists who are natives and who choose to live here?  IS it a singular place?  Or is it too many places to enumerate? 

What does the city and region offer people who live, work and raise families here?  What is this urban landscape like? We've suffered many hurricanes, much corruption that's damaged the town. To read the papers, it is a hotbed of crime and misery.  Is this all that there is to New Orleans?  Bourbon Street, storms, crime and poverty? 

Whose eyes see this place as it is; its value?

What gifts or problems can be celebrated and bemoaned through the poetry of this place?