{"id":16039,"date":"2012-10-27T12:41:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-27T19:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16039"},"modified":"2012-10-27T12:42:15","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T19:42:15","slug":"jackson-heights-poetry-festival-is-profiled-in-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16039","title":{"rendered":"Jackson Heights Poetry Festival is Profiled in The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Lloyd Robson reads for JHPF in October. Photo by Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

I don’t particularly like the title, “Poets Gather in Exile, in Queens<\/a>,” because I certainly don’t think of myself, as a writer or in any other way, as living in exile because I make my home in Queens, NY, but I like the article very much.<\/p>\n

It’s funny how these things happen. I took over Jackson Heights Poetry Festival<\/a> and its First Tuesdays<\/a> reading series in June of this year and started hosting the series in September. K C Trommer<\/a>\u00a0was our first reader and it was a lovely evening<\/a>, most especially because we got some nice press coverage on DNAinfo<\/a>. Paul DeBenedetto, the reporter who wrote that story, was so taken with the evening that he did a profile of one of the poets who read, Norman Stock<\/a>, whose first book of poems, Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>won the 1994 Peregrine Smith Poetry Series. (Norman’s second book is called\u00a0Pickled Dreams Naked<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/em>John Leland<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em> read DeBenedetto’s profile of Stock and contacted me to see if there might be a story about a developing community of writer’s in Queens.\u00a0John came down to our October reading<\/a>, at which Lloyd Robson<\/a> was the featured reader, met some of the writers who attended, and “Poets Gather in Exile<\/a>” was the result.<\/p>\n

What I like best about the article is the way it captures the sense of a building and burgeoning community of writers, which is, for me, the most important function that First Tuesdays<\/a> can serve:<\/p>\n

For Mr. Goodrich and Ms. [Honor] Molloy<\/a>, the exiles from Brooklyn, the monthly reading could not compensate for what they had lost \u2014 what they had moved to New York to be a part of. Ms. Molloy used to spend free hours toiling in the Brooklyn Writers Space; wherever she walked there were other writers, who would tell her about their readings and offer to come to hers. \u201cI feel like an expatriate,\u201d she said, \u201clike I lost my country.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet.<\/p>\n

Was it really so injurious for a writer to be away from what Mr. Goodrich called the \u201cdesigner organic tapioca shops\u201d or \u201chipsters with double-wide strollers\u201d? In two months, they had found a good wine shop, a dry cleaner, a grocery. They had run into a newly arrived actor they knew; another day they ran into the poet\u00a0K C Trommer, with whom Ms. Molloy used to work at Simon & Schuster and who was also a newcomer to the neighborhood. They had met Mr. Feldstein, who told them about the reading series.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all starts to fall together,\u201d Mr. Goodrich said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I also–I can’t help it–like the picture that Michael Kirby Smith got of me:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I hope you’ll go read the whole piece<\/a>, and I hope you’ll come to next month’s reading, with Luis H. Francia<\/a>, on November 13th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t particularly like the title, “Poets Gather in Exile, in Queens,” because I certainly don’t think of myself, as a writer or in any other way, as living in exile because I make my home in Queens, NY, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16039"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16049,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16039\/revisions\/16049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}