Guilford Poets Guild

Guilford Poets Guild Member Julie Fitzpatrick, Winner of the 2020 Artist Award Grant for Spoken Word, will be presenting her new work, “All the World’s a Stage: A Guilford (Pandemic) Love Story” on September 25th at 12 noon on the Guilford Green.

Fitzpatrick interviewed more than 70 Guilford residents to create her spoken-word piece, which interweaves Shakespeare’s insights with pandemic tales and local love stories. “All the World’s a Stage” examines love in its many forms—showing how and where it can appear in places obvious and unexpected, and how it has the capacity to lift up and unite people.

The show will feature five female performers who represent many diverse facets of the Guilford community: Stephanie Little Brown, Dana Canaveri, Alice Chen, Victoria Newman and Meg Teape. Christina Stevens will provide ASL (sign language) interpretation. Julie will play the Poet Narrator of the piece. More information on the exciting upcoming festival can be found at: https://guilfordperformingartsfest.org/the-festival/festival-schedule-2021/

On October 14th at 7pm, The Guilford Poet Guild welcomes Poet Greg Coleman to our Second Thursday Poetry Series! At 6:30pm there will be an Open Mic. If you would like to participate in the Open Mic, please email: guilfordpoets@gmail.com.

Greg Coleman, MS, MFA, is the owner of HeartStone Labyrinths, llc, a poet and writer, a political activist, and a master labyrinth designer an artist. He has done labyrinth/writing workshops at the Clockhouse Writers Conference at Goddard College and The Freshwater Poetry Festival and poetry workshops at the Clinton Art Gallery’s Poetry Place on revision, writing a long poem, and Walking With Your Muse – a labyrinth workshop to help writers to move beyond a hurdle in their writing. Greg has created over 100 Intentional Labyrinth designs, each with its own handbook that describes its intention and how to use it. The designs are created to help individuals and groups work with particular physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns. He has given workshops on labyrinth design, and using labyrinths to understand and work with abundance, grief, and finding one’s path, among other topics, in high schools and colleges, hospitals, and at wellness fairs in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. For over four years, he has written his weekly Vigil Letter, a commentary on the week’s political events. He lives with his wife Edwina and his cat Emily Jane in Moodus, Connecticut, where he creates new labyrinths, gives workshops, writes essays and poetry, and works with individual clients. To read more about Greg’s life and work, please visit his website: http://heartstonelabyrinths.com/about-heartstone-labyrinths-llc/about-me/

The event is free and open to the public.

Once available, please register on the Library’s website, https://guilfordfreelibrary.org/guilford-poets-guild-second-thursday-poetry-series-greg-coleman/43528/. A Zoom link will be sent to you directly.

On September 9th at 6:30pm, the Guilford Poets Guild welcomes Rennie McQuilkin, former CT Poet Laureate (2015-2018) to join our Second Thursday Poetry Series! We will begin with an Open Mic. If you would like to participate in the Open Mic, please email: guilfordpoets@gmail.com

Rennie co-founded the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he directed for 9 years. His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, and other publications. The author of several poetry collections, he has received a number of awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the CT Commission on the Arts, the CT Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and its 2010 poetry award. He lives in Bloomfield, CT.

The event is free and open to the public.

Please register here on the Guilford Library’s website. A Zoom link will then be sent to you directly.

The new issue (June 2021, Issue 4) of the online poetry journal Circumference, edited by Gemma Mathewson and Mark McGuire-Schwartz, has just appeared. Three Guilford Poets Guild members have poems in this issue: Juliana Harris, Edward Walker, and Patricia Horn O’Brien. You can read the issue here. Congratulations!

On May 13 the Guilford Poets Guild hosted a quintet of talented young poets at its Second Thursday Poetry Reading. The following five students read their work via Zoom on the Guilford Library website: Kilee Simon, Anushree Ajgaonkar, Cameryn Ludwin, Alex Ferguson, and Haley Moriarty. Usually, at this time of year, The Guild hosts an Awards Program for GHS students but, due to the Pandemic, an in-person gathering was not possible. This year, due to the cooperation of George Cooksey and the English faculty at Guilford High School, who chose poems for The Guild to select, a lively evening of poetry was enjoyed online. The Guild looks forward to returning to the usual format next April with the high school poetry contest held during National Poetry Month.

We humans sure are creative with time, aren’t we? This arbitrary turning clocks backward or forward twice a year, assigning time to zones and lines and frames. Even Guilford Poets Guild member Jen Payne tries to trick time, setting clocks randomly wrong and always fast as if she can somehow control the hours, beat the Kobayashi Maru of time.

Even Albert Einstein said time is an illusion — “a stubbornly persistent illusion” — that time and space are merely “modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

Of course, if you think too hard on things like that you end up down rabbit holes and worm holes…want to come along?

Then check out the next issue of Jen’s MANIFEST (zine). It’s About Time this time — time travel, time loops, time passing — a 28-page, full-color book filled with artwork, photos, poetry, and a curated Spotify playlist. Cost: $6.00.

POEMS

• Time Peace
• Moonwalk Writer
• Time Flies
• Time Traveler
• There is No Synonym for Reunion
• This Affliction of Longing
• Shape-Shifter, Time-Shifter Crow
• Black Bird Haiku
• Missing Banksy

OTHER INGREDIENTS: acrylic paints, collaged elements, color copies, color scans, colored markers, Dymo labels, ephemera, essays, Golden gel medium, hand-drawn fonts, ink jet copies, laser prints, mixed-media collage, one sci-fi geek, original photographs, pigment inks, poetry, postage stamps, postcard art, rubber stamp art, time travelers, vintage magazine pages, vintage photos, vintage postcard, and watercolor paint, with thanks to the Leo Baeck Institute, Joy Bush, Paul Delvaux, Albert Einstein, Esther Elzinga of StudioTokek, Rowland Emmet, the Everett Collection, Michael Jackson, Julien Pacaud, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Robinson, Sir John Tenniel, and Rudolph Zallinger.

Part artist book, part chapbook, MANIFEST (zine) is a hold-in-your-hands art installation featuring poetry, inspirational quotes, mixed media collages, photography, and bits and pieces of creative whatnot. Layered with colors, textures, and meanings, each issue is handmade then color-copied and embellished. The result is a thought-full, tactile journey with lots of nooks and crannies for you to discover along the way. Learn more…