trudge trudge trudge
slip trudge trudge trudge slip trudge:
Albany blizzard

On Sunday I’m moving from Albany, NY, to New York City. Today I started saying goodbye to my friends with a few little gatherings. Although Albany was the site of probably the darkest year or two of my life, I did meet some incredible people here who I expect I’ll be friends with for a long, long time.

/ / /

and so we say our goodbyes

1.
over avacado tortas and enchiladas
iced tea and fresh salsa
we talk about work or lack thereof
share a laugh about the end of the world
tell stories about food poisoning
and a raffle at a Stones concert

2.
later there is a poetry reading
out-of-town poets with an in-town crowd
afterward we have a conversation
that is like the ones we’ve had before
in exactly the right way
Nina Simone is singing – we have to stop talking
when she gets to the Dylan tune
for the record, I am not Bob Dylan

3.
tomorrow there will be Japanese food
and the glow that always comes from it
but even this is not goodbye
who really has to say goodbye anymore?
I’m not heading west in a wagon
never to be seen again
I’m as close as ten numbers
as near as the computer screen
as far away as the edge of the universe

walking in the street
cars passing too closely:
icy sidewalks

I found this one in my notebook. I wrote it back in November after witnessing this scene.

old couple in the therapist’s elevator

she says “dirty rotten elevator”
he doesn’t even sigh anymore
just presses 2
puts his head down
kneads the brim of his gray-
checked fedora with one
arthritic hand

Listen using the player above.

coconuts in a winter bus shelter
like finding snowballs on the beach in Maui

/ / /

part of a river of stones

Listen using the player above.

/ / /

first my teeth pierce the soft nori skin
then move through the rice into the rich
avocado in the center

the mug of sencha fits perfectly in my hand
and there’s just enough room at the table
for these friends who will miss me when I go

/ / /

part of a river of stones

From 101006_caffe_lena

I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner with the poet Albert Glover tonight and then hearing him read at Caffe Lena. Thanks to Alan Casline for putting the event together and for inviting me to tag along. If you’re not familiar with Albert’s writing, look him up. He’s well worth the effort.

Here are the photos I took tonight of several of the poets who read, including Albert:

And here’s a video I shot of one of Albert’s poems:

I also have an audio recording of Albert’s entire set, which is going to be part of a new project I’ll be announcing soon. Stay tuned!

I asked my landlord for a weed wacker / and he gave me a slingblade

No, that’s not the first line of a terrible, Billy-Bob-Thornton-inspired blues song. Read on.

For those of you who know me even slightly, you know there is one underlying philosophy that informs every aspect of my life. It is the beacon of wisdom that lights my way forward, and it is this:

I hate manual labor, especially if it occurs outside.

So when I asked my landlord to borrow a weed wacker so I could clean up our side of the block, I fully expected to be pulling a crank line and buzzing my way down the street. Instead, I had a lovely opportunity to study the life of a 19th-century farmer as I hacked and chopped my way down the street.

Before we go to the video, allow me to mention two other facts:

• It was 78 degrees Farenheit
• The humidity was 96%

Let’s go to the tape:

This Thursday, one night only: the Poets Jazz Trio at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave in Albany. Poets Jason Crane (poems, sax, percussion), Dan Wilcox (sax, percussion) and Tom Corrado (bass) will perform a 20-minute set of jazz and Jason’s poetry. There will also be an open mic hosted by Dan Wilcox. The shindig starts at 7:30 p.m. Be there!

Listen to this poem using the player above.

First Night of Summer, 2010

At the Mobil station on the corner of Quail and New Scotland,
an obese man in a tank top delivers a lawnmower from the trunk
of his NASCAR-stickered beater to a young man in the latest

summer fashions. The obese man plops back into the driver’s seat,
reaches an arm through the open window to haul the door shut,
cranks up the radio, loudly injecting a surprising R&B track

into the first night of summer. Did the Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan
cashier in the Mobil station ever imagine himself here?
Did he play soccer or cricket as a child back home, dreaming

of the night when he’d sell Cheetos and Double Chocolate Milanos
to another obese man in dirty shorts, while R&B blared
and nervous SUV drivers stopped on the way to the suburbs?

Did any of us dream of this night? We sat on our mothers’ laps,
had our backs rubbed, dreamed of being paleontologists
or marine biologists or superheroes, not of schlepping to the gas station

to buy crap before the Red Sox game. In case you hadn’t guessed,
I’m the Second Man, one before Welles and not that many pounds off,
selling no wine before my time, plodding past the young and beautiful people

at the bars to get to the late-night sanctuary of those with no place else to go.
How the fuck did this happen? Where did the dumpster in my driveway
come from? Who put all those memories in there?

I want my mother, or at least the possibility she represented.
I want to go home, but I’m already there, and there’s a dumpster
in the driveway, and in a few days the men will come and haul it away.

Listen to this poem using the player above.

A poem for the Lark Tavern in Albany, NY, which was destroyed by fire in May 2010 and which will return.

Lark Definitions

it’s a bird noted for its singing
it’s a verb meaning to play
it can denote a certain lack of care
but that is itself a trick
a surface appearance that masks
desperate attention to detail
for we do care, each of us
we’ve stood naked under lights
that show blood red on film
we’ve bared all, opened our bone cages
to let fly the nightingales
(also noted for their singing)
we’ve confessed lovers, told
strangers truths no one else knows
all under the watchful eyes
of attentive servers who
notice yet don’t let on
a man in a bookstore asked me
how it feels to be the last
featured poet at the Lark
“I won’t be the last,” I said

Listen to this poem using the player above.

A poem for Albany-based writer and poet Moses Kash III. The first line is from a poem Moses read at Dan Wilcox’s Third Thursday Poetry Reading on May 20, 2010.

Photo of Moses Kash III by Keith J. Spencer

Stand up, Moses

white people have got hold of all the cash
except Americus Moses Kash the third
he remains independent of their influence
standing tall on bad knees and black sneakers
proclaiming … this word … and … this word … and …
the word, born of life lived with tall vision
he does not shirk his duty, tells it like it is
as he has seen it, felt its sting
captured its image in his lens
boxes and boxes and stacks and stacks
stacks and stacks and boxes and boxes
he still uses the word “mimeograph”
as if time stopped in the 1960s
and maybe it did
can you prove that your heart is beating​?

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Delaware

a deer crosses Delaware Avenue
flashing a shock of white-tailed rump
at the convenience store window
Thursday morning commuters jam the brakes
jarred from their talk-radio reverie
into an encounter with the world-as-it-is
this doe stops all the moving metal
the beat of her heart more powerful
than the combustion of the bones
of dinosaurs, explosions that
carry and eradicate the memory of nature

Listen to the entire set using the player above.

Bernie writing a poem on the side of the stage while his dad reads in the background. Photo by Bob Anderson.

UPDATE: The fine folks at Albany Poets sent me a recording of my set straight from the sound board. It’s higher quality than the recording I made and is now posted above. Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who came out to see my set tonight at Poets Speak Loud at the Lark Tavern in Albany. I had a fantastic time and was very touched to see so many friendly faces (including the folks who would have been there anyway).

If you missed the gig, here is my set in its entirety. You can listen using the player at the top of this post, or download the mp3 file for later by clicking on Download, right below the player. The first voice you’ll hear is that of Mary Panza, the MC and one of the prime movers behind Albany Poets. Enjoy!

Reading at the Lark Tavern. (Photo by Bob Anderson)

I’ll be adding to this album as more photos come in. Here are the first few from the reading.

This poster says 7:30 p.m., but it starts at 8 p.m.

I’m the featured poet tonight at Poets Speak Loud at 8 p.m. at the Lark Tavern, 453 Madison Ave. in Albany, NY. It’s an open mic, too. Sign-up starts around 7, so bring your own work along. I’ll be reading from my just-released book, Unexpected Sunlight (FootHills Publishing, 2010). Hope to see you there!

Photo of Bernie at the 2010 Albany WordFest (Photo by Keith J. Spencer)

My son Bernie (age 7) just found out that his poem “Dance To The Chocolate” won in his age group in the Fair Trade Delmar Chocolate Poetry Contest. He gets a prize, gets to read at the award ceremony, and gets his poem printed in the paper. It’s a good month for poetry in the Crane house. Here’s his winning poem:

Dance To The Chocolate

Dance to the music right?
Wrong! Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chooooooocolate
Yay!!!

Listen to this poem using the player above.

North Greenbush To Albany

Start: the Sharp house, aging Greek revival
in what was once Bloominville.
They used to bottle spring water here
until the well dried up. Then it’s three miles,
nearly all downhill, because the Hudson
draws all riders to its level.
There are two bridges – the first
across the railbed, trains carrying what few goods
we still produce and the many others
we pull in like driftwood from the sea.
These caravans of metal containers are
bound for Manhattan, lodestone of heartbeats
and rushing blood. The same lines
carry women and men to concrete hope,
to the race, to the scurry. Some will return,
lowering their sights and settling in for the long haul.
Others will half-return, riding more prestigious lines
to their magazine homes. Or so I imagine,
in the ten seconds it takes my legs
to propel the bicycle over the tracks.
The second bridge is at the base of the hill,
the bottom of the gravity well. The concrete wave
crests atop the Hudson, that once mighty barrier-highway
that is now the scenic accompaniment to stroller moms
and weekend excursionists. The river is brown on this April afternoon,
laced with the white rush of recent rains. Soon
they’ll haul the old battleship back to the dock,
so children can giggle on the blood-washed decks
where their grandfathers stood taught, gripping the rails
with terror-strengthened fingers.
The river bridge descends into the city.
The Hudson is reluctant to give up the living,
and matches every descent with a grinding climb,
testing my resolve to leave its banks. A slow, steady rhythm
carries me past Albany Lodge No. 49 and the Beirut remains
of a once majestic hotel. This is the King’s Highway.
George Washington once climbed this same hill, walked
through this city when concrete was wood, pavement
was cobblestone or dirt, before Rockefeller’s bulldozers
created this modernity, drained its character for the queen.
The general is remembered with a street and a park and a blue iron sign.
The bells are tolling the three-quarter hour as I pass the chambers
where the laws are made, and the halls of education and bureaucracy.
Then it’s home, where a distant city’s baseball team is on the radio,
and I cook my imported convenience-store noodles and sit down to write.

Jan Marin Tramontano

For the third time in as many weeks, I went to a poetry open mic last night. This one was the Live from the Living Room reading at the Capital District Gay & Lesbian Community Center on Hudson Ave.

The featured poet was Jan Marin Tramontano, an Albany-based poet and fiction writer. She read several poems about her trip to Paris and its museums from her book Woman Sitting in a Cafe. I quite enjoyed those poems, particularly a wry and observant take on the Mona Lisa. Tramontano also read several love poems, or as she described them, “love poems, self-love poems, and a love poem about our little boy.” All were very poignant, particularly those that mentioned her husband, who was sitting in the room.

Following the featured reading, a half dozen poets read a couple poems each. Dan Wilcox read a wonderful piece about wanting to read love poems to someone … a poet whose name I didn’t catch (but who I always see at the library where he works) read a funny poem about heaven as a gated community … and performance poet A.C. Everson recited a piece about what a bastard Cupid is. I read two recent pieces, “Luxury Hotel” and “Robby Burns’s Hat.”

I’m impressed with how diverse and active Albany’s poetry scene is. As I said at the reading last night, “I go to whichever poetry reading Dan Wilcox writes about.” Good advice, if I do say so myself.

Last night I went to the Albany Poets Presents open mic at Valentine’s here in Albany. A recording of that reading is now available at AlbanyPoets.com. My section starts about 9:45 into the recording, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

Here’s my contribution to the memory of Monday. For more, read Dan Wilcox’s Birthday Poem, 2009 and his write-up of the event.

Robby Burns’s Hat

Crusty snow beneath our boots
as we watch a limber young poet
scamper atop the McPherson Legacy.

Once settled between Robby’s legs,
he takes the beret — the same one
they used last year —

and balances it on top of Robby’s head.
The last time, it was up there a week before
a less young, but no less limber, poet

found the beret at the base of the Legacy
and rescued it from oblivion, restoring
the cap to its place of honor twelve months later.

And so it goes, year after year, in honor
of the man who started it all, and who
made the trail through the snow that we follow.

Back in the early 90s, I wrote and performed a lot of poetry. It was all very specific to its time and place. Looking back on it, it was mostly crap.

In recent years, I’ve started writing again. In fact, I’m getting serious about it, meaning that I’m actually trying to — gulp — improve and seek out criticism. I’ve been helped a great deal in this effort by some poets from the upstate New York region.

I decided last night to finally go read some poems in public again. And I chose the perfect event — Poets Speak Loud, an annual gathering in tribute to the former dean of the Albany poetry scene, Tom Nattell. You can hear last night’s event in its entirety at albanypoets.com. The site is a great example of how to run a local poetry site. Frequently updated, welcoming of all poets, full of useful features.

The open mic was a lot of fun. I felt very welcomed by the organizers and established poets, several of whom encouraged me to come out again. Little things like that mean a lot. By and large, the quality of the writing was good. There were highlights — Dan Stalter’s hilarious and insightful slam performance, Mary Panza’s reading of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, and Scott Casale’s sensual reading of a poem about sex. Host Dan Wilcox kept everyone in good spirits and kept the evening moving right along, which is always appreciated.

Bob Burns

After the reading, most of the gang walked to Washington Park. One of the poets — I know his name but will leave it out to protect him from prosecution — climbed atop the statue of Robert Burns and put a beret on top in honor of Nattell.

I was curious about the history of the statue. I found this online:

The Robert Burns Statue was erected in 1888 in Washington Park and has an amazing story. One Mary Macpherson, a poor house maid, saved all of her money and donated $30,000 to build what has been called the best statue of Robert Burns in the World and is the second oldest surviving statue of Burns to be created in the United States. It is also one of 20 monuments in the world erected before 1890 in honor of that great Scottish poet. The statue is the largest work ever produced by Charles Calverly, who was born in Albany in 1833. His most complex work was the 16 foot Burns monument, a seated figure cast in bronze, resting on a pedestal of Scottish granite. The statue is formally known as the Macpherson Legacy to the City of Albany.

Google Books has a Harvard publication from 1889 called Historical Sketch of the Burns Statue by R.H. Collyer. You can read it at the Google Books site.

Anyway, check out the podcast. I’m in Part 2.

In 2008, I was a panelist on the Parents Panel of the Albany Times Union newspaper. That meant writing a monthly article and occasional blog posts. Here is part 1 of my look back at 2008 from a family perspective:

2008: A look back at my year in parenting (Part 1)

We’ve been there two other times, too:

Five Rivers adventure

Return To Five Rivers

Unfortunately, it also has one major design flaw. The light switches that control every light in the auditorium are located about three feet up on the wall outside the auditorium, and the switches blink.

How do I know this? Because while the theater was filling up and the final ensemble was finishing its rehearsal, my two-year-old son, John, saw the pretty blinking light and pressed all the switches, turning off every light in the auditorium. Some people started leaving. My wife overheard one patron say, “They must not want us in there now.”

I saw what John had done and turned the lights back on. The rehearsal finished, and the rest of the show went off without a hitch. But some architect ought to be giving the college a refund for that part of the design. Or they should have a “no two-year-old boys” policy.

Labor writer and activist Jonathan Tasini

Jonathan Tasini has written a simple and compelling piece about NY Gov. David Paterson’s call for pension givebacks for state employees. Here’s the core of Tasini’s argument:

We could wipe out the budget deficit–or, certainly trim it down to something trivial–by raising taxes on the very wealthy and going back to a more progressive taxation system that we had in the 1970s. You know this: if the state replaced the existing rate structure (consisting of 5 brackets with rates ranging from 4.0 to 6.85%) with one consisting of 14 brackets with rates ranging from 2.0 to 15.0%, we could bring in $6-7 billion more, and perhaps as high as $11 billion.

Under this plan, 95 percent of the state’s taxpayers—95 percent of the people—would receive a tax cut. Like the proposals championed by President-elect Barack Obama, a more progressive taxation system would be easing the burden on the people who are the most at risk in our economically troubled times. The top one percent of taxpayers—whose average income is $2.685 million—would see their taxes go up about 5.4 percent. The four percent below that top one percent—those people whose average income is $326,000—would have their taxes rise 1.4 percent.In fact, the top five percent would have their dues burden slightly reduced because higher state taxes would lower their federal obligations.

Everyone else would realize a reduction in their taxes.

I highly recommend the rest of the article, too.

The Four Families get together for a holiday shindig:

The fine folks at Thacher State Park in Voorheesville, NY, had a Native Thanksgiving celebration this weekend. Here are a few photos from our time there:

Late Summer In Albany, Part 1:

Late Summer In Albany, Part 2: