Enjoy an evening of live-stream poetry featuring Mike Jurkovic, Guy Reed, Cheryl A. Rice from Green Kill on Wednesday, August 12 at 8PM. If you would like to attend please follow this link: eventbrite.com. 

We are all living with this new normal. The economic impact on the performing artist community has been devistating. Green Kill live-streaming events are accessed by making a donation on eventbrite.com. The eventbrite system requres that you contribute something to gain access. The recommended donation for this event is 10 dollars but whatever you can contribute would greatly help these performers. All proceeds are divided equally between the performers and Green Kill. Green Kill is able to bring this live stream to the public through the personal investment of the owners. Please help us to keep this quality program going. 

The live stream event is broadcast on YouTube using high-quality sound and video production. The artists who use Green Kill for live-streaming believe that a quality performance is the best way to bring their art to you. 

Meet Mike Jurkovic

Live performance audio from Calling All Poets Series @ Roost Studios and Art Gallery, New Paltz, NY May, 2016.

A 2016 Pushcart nominee, Mike Jurkivic’s poetry and musical criticism have appeared in over 500 magazines and periodicals (Main Street Rag, North Dakota Quaterly, Raven’s Perch) with little reportable income. Full length collections, AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2020) Blue Fan Whirring, (Nirala Press, 2018); smitten by harpies & shiny banjo catfish (Lion Autumn Press, 2016) Chapbooks, Eve’s Venom (Post Traumatic Press, 2014) Purgatory Road (Pudding House, 2010) Anthologies: Reflecting Pool: Poets & the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018); Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose (Bright Hill Press, 2018); 11/9 Fall of American Democracy (Independent, 2017)); WaterWrites: A Hudson River Anthology, and Riverine: Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers (Codhill Press, 2009, 2007) Will Work For Peace (Zeropanik, 1999). President, Calling All Poets, New Paltz, Beacon,, NY. Music features, interviews, and CD reviews appear in All About Jazz, Van Wyck Gazette, and Maverick Chronicles 2018-present. Featured poet: London, San Francisco, NYC, Albany, Baltimore. Tuesday night host of Jazz Sanctuary, WOOC 105.3 FM, Troy, NY. Was a monthly contributor to Elmore Magazine, 2008-2016; Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange, 2003-2010; Chronogram, 2005-2007. His column, The Rock n Roll Curmudgeon, appeared in Rhythm and News Magazine, 1996-2003. His photo-visualizations have been published sporadically and exhibited twice in the Hudson Valley.

He loves Emily most of all.

www.mikejurkovic.com

https://www.mikejurkovic.com/works/poetry

Ten Questions

Do you remember when you first saw yourself as an artist?

Not sure. I think I always had a hunch. I would pursue songwrting, music production, I was always writing and felt that as long as I was making something from nothing I was creating, which is what I though artistry was all about. I later learned it was also about community and giving of oneself.

Do you have anything you feel compelled now to say about your art?

I hope it gets the message across. Whatever that message might be at any instance of creating, I hope it’s getting across.

Is there an artist that keeps coming back to you for inspiration?

Dylan. Vonnegut. Joni Mitchell. Hi ho.

Do you feel you have support from colleagues?

Absolutely! Beyond doubt. That’s what makes the Hudson Valley the unique thing it is among writers. We’re not afraid to listen. We’re not at all obsessed about where we are on the open mic list.

Do you feel removed from the conventional world?

I don’t believe any artist of any discipline should feel removed from that sense of place. Maybe suspended in time, but not removed from place.

What is it like to wake up everyday for you?

Well I won’t pretend I don’t beat back all the anxieties we all share about any given day. How could one not? The only way not to feel or prove we’ve dropped the ball culturally, climate-wise, politically, socially, societally, racially, you name it, is to wake up to it each day and try you’re best not to let go.

What role do you see your art having in society? 

Art in general: It’s as necessary as breathing. It’s as serious as death. My own art? Again if I get whatever the message is across, it’s a fine fine day.

Do you get high from creating?

Yes and I’m also often high while creating. But I always edit and read with a clear head, unless my sinuses are kicking in.

What are you not being asked that you’d like to share? 

Well of course there’s the usual uy the books, visit the website stuff but I think we’ve covered it.

When are you most happy?

It’s all of a piece. Being home with Emily. Reading from whatever riser one can find. Walking through the Gunks, Fahnstock, our property. Working food bank. If you don’t find some kernel of happiness in everything it gets kind of grey quick.

Meet Guy Reed

Guy Reed is author of Second Innocence (Luchador Press) and the chapbooks, The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), Still Life With Acorn (Fool Head Press),  and co-author, with Cheryl A. Rice, of Until The Words Came (Post Traumatic Press). He’s published in journals, anthologies and contributed two poems, performing one, in a featured role for the film, I Dream Too Much. Also an essayist and filmmaker, Guy is currently working on a documentary about the Esopus Creek. A Minnesota native, Guy’s lived in California, Oregon and currently resides in the Catskill Mountains with his wife and their children.

guyedwinreed.com

Ten Questions

Do you remember when you first saw yourself as an artist?

I was 13 in Ms. Braun’s 8th grade English class. I don’t know what happened, always a reader, not a writer, I suddenly filled a notebook with poems, wrote a radio play, and a short story that earned my best grade, A++. I saw myself as a writer living alone, taking a break from “writing books” wearing a thick cardigan sweater while sipping coffee and overlooking a rocky seacoast. Famous and rich.

Do you have anything you feel compelled now to say about your art?

I live in the woods with my family on the side of a Catskill mountain, sip coffee and noodle around on poems while mostly wearing flannel though I have many wool sweaters, too.

Is there an artist that keeps coming back to you for inspiration?

So many, poets, artists, musicians, writers and thinkers, but if I had to choose 1 poet, it would be the poet Jack Gilbert.

Do you feel you have support from colleagues?

Yes

Do you feel removed from the conventional world?

The conventional art/poetry world, yes, an outsider I guess. But poetry itself recognizes no hierarchy or convention. The conventional world like we see on TV? Yes, I try to distance myself from “noise” as much I can, but the conventional world in terms of nature and survival, earning a paycheck, putting food on the table and trying to live a life while trying to understand a life, no, we’re all in this together. Most of what we perceive as “conventional” is an illusion.

What is it like to wake up everyday for you?

Pretty great. I love waking up and the earlier the better. Getting to sit at my desk while it is still dark in the morning is very exciting each morning I can do it. I like seeing stars in the morning to begin my day if I can. 

What role do you see your art having in society?

If there is a moment of beauty or truth that I can shape into a work that goes out and sparks a moment or experience of beauty or truth in another, a reader or two, then I couldn’t ask for more. Any other role I could ask for  the work would just be numbers, honestly. At whatever point the work is out in society, it’s all out of one’s control. It gets a life of its own then. 

Do you get high from creating?

I wouldn’t call it high, but I do get an energy buzz, an excited rush when a poem ‘clicks’ into place. Any revision that makes a poem stronger gives its own buzz. Certainly the generation of something that feels hot gives an initial zap, as well. They’re all a little different, but it gives the rest of the day a bounce!

What are you not being asked that you’d like to share?

I am a quality over quantity kind of person.

When are you most happy?

Having a hold of an exciting thread of thought & image that is tearing off so quickly I can hardly write fast enough. Having nothing to do all day except read and write. Working on a poem, revising it and getting it just right, discovery in the process.

Meet Cheryl A. Rice

The Wages of Moonlight

I first saw myself around the age of four. We lived in the first floor of a house in Wyandanch. There was a broken-down pavilion in the yard that we were warned to stay away from. I drank the last drops of soda syrup from bottles waiting by the back door to be returned. 

I am compelled to recall the past in fits and starts. Like those drips of soda syrup, the past returns with some effort, and little welcome. 

The artist who comes back to me again and again these days is Anna Held. A brief flash in the early 1900s, her star was polished by Ziegfeld, but she was the one who shone. A powerful Jewish refugee who adopted the persona of a Parisian coquette, she died at 46 of a rare disorder we still have no cure for. 

I am supported by those ancient stars, paid to excess by the moon and her fickle appearances. Support comes first from within. If there is any applause about, enjoy it for what it is—the current phase of consent. 

In the last few months, convention as we know it has been upended. I long to return to that broken-down pavilion of the past, stepping carefully around floorboards that will bear no weight. I long for the trumpet vines and moonflowers that surely by now have created the only roof it ever needed. I long for the sweetness of soda syrup, dappled with impurities, from bottles beside the tin milk box. I long for the milkman and his shiny white slacks. 

Upon waking, I immediately miss the moon, no matter her demeanor of the night before. I rush to the bathroom, and am not ashamed of it. Any who pretend otherwise are invoking a false narrative. 

Art is a sign of society. Without it we are beasts, tearing our masks off in a crowded Walmart, lengthening the stay of immoral diseases by kisses of black dust. 

The act of creation offers me clarity, not intoxication. I am reassured that I am still connected to the segment of humanity that has both feet in the dirt and eyes in the stars.