Celebrate National Poetry Month
Last Thursday Poetry Reading series
Middletown Township Public Library
55 New Monmouth Road - Middletown, NJ 07748
55 New Monmouth Road - Middletown, NJ 07748
This Thursday April 29, 2010
07:00PM - 09:00PM
I will be reading this week as one of the poets who were the winners of the 2009 Last Thursday Poetry Contest, along with Diane Lockward, Jessica De Koninck, and Nancy Scott. The poets will read their prize-winning poems and other selections. The readings will be followed by an open mic.
I realize that most of the online readers of this blog are far from the middle of New Jersey - but feel free to send good poetic vibrations that night to us.
Diane Lockward the Poet Laureate of West Caldwell NJ, is the author of the Quentin Howard Poetry Prize winning What Feeds Us
, Eve’s Red Dress
, and the chapbook Against Perfection. Her new book, Temptation by Water, is forthcoming this year. She has been published in anthologies, journals, and online, and was the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She conducts writing workshops, and works as a Poet-In-the-Schools for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine Dodge Foundation. Her prize-winning poem is "Organic Fruit."
Jessica De Koninck’s first collection Repairs
, a series of poems about loss, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been in anthologies and journals, including The Ledge, Bridges, the Paterson Literary Review, the Edison Literary Review and US 1 Worksheets and on-line in The Valparaiso Poetry Review and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A former Councilwoman and resident of Montclair, New Jersey, she is pursuing an MFA at Stonecoast, and is an attorney. Her prize-winning poem is the title poem from her collection, “Repairs.” 
Ken Ronkowitz is the owner/editor of poetsonline.org, a monthly online poetry magazine and web site for poets. His own work has been published in magazines including English Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Roadmap, Prague and the anthology, The Paradelle
. He is currently an adjunct professor and the Director of Writing at Passaic County Community College, and an adjunct professor at NJIT. His prize-winning poem is “’57 Chevy.” 
Nancy Scott is the current Managing Editor of U.S.1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S.1 Poets’ Cooperative in New Jersey. This critique group has met weekly for more than 35 years. In 2001, she was awarded a residency at Ragdale. Her poems have won many awards, and have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Slant dedicated its 2007 volume to her. Her chapcook, Siege of Raptors, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. Read Nancy Scott's "Mama's Closet."
Middletown Township Public Library, 55 New Monmouth Road, Middletown, NJ 07748
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s "
," Canto vi, Stanza 1, which begins with the famous line, 
, based on Jacques Brel's "Bachelor's Dance" lyrics".
was the U.S. Poet Laureate (1995-1997) was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for 
, a collection of poetry that ranges in subject from the Iraq War to the natural landscape of Hass's native California. His new collection, 
, experiments with elegy and narrative.
(Modern Library). "Donne—the tone of his voice in the love poems—was one of the first voices in poetry that felt entirely alive to me and burned its way into my head. For depth, richness, intensity, human complexity, the subtlety of thought, wit, surprise, he is inexhaustible."
(Oxford Paperback). "Hopkins may be the most purely gorgeous poet in the language. It's a small body of work, and he really has only three tones: excited happiness, and tenderness, and despair. But I never take his poems from the shelf without being wakened up by them."
by Walt Whitman published by Counterpoint Press. But any edition of 
, edited by Thomas Johnson—that's the book I grew up on—and 
, edited recently by R.W. Franklin, who took a fresh look at Emily Dickinson's manuscripts and made some revisions in the order of the poems and in the poems themselves. There is also a lovely 
designed for the pocket and edited by my wife, 
(New Directions). "I could have made four or five lists of 20th century poets—five French poets, five Polish poets, five American modernists, five Latin American poets, etc. But one poet—with the criteria that (1) I wouldn't want to live without a volume of the poems at hand, and (2) that I take that book down from the shelf often to remind myself of a scent that matters to me in poetry. Oppen published one small book in the early '30s, set writing aside to do political work, served in the infantry in France in the Second World War, came back, and after 25 years, took up the work of poetry again. His idiom is spare, he means to say what he knows, as simply as possible, and the simpler the poems the more mysterious they are. For clear water, a scrupulousness of mind, I turn to Oppen."
.
was conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted (the most famous parks designer of his time - Central Park in NYC is his) and Calvert Vaux in 1867, designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm between 1898 and 1938, and saw its first cherry tree planted in 1927. The park is listed on both the National and New Jersey State Registers of Historic Places.
