Hemingway's #2: Pittsburgh Poetry Society

Last night, after the staff cleared a table of students, we heard Nancy Esther James, Liane Ellison Norman, Christine Pasinski, Fred Peterson & Christine Aikens Wolfe read for Hemingway's second Summer Reading Series. This group composed the Pittsburgh Poetry Society, not an online group. I read afterwards in the Open Mic and it got a good response! Here's my poem.

Standout readers were, for me, the Christines- both were educators, both had well-composed observational poems coming from places of love. Christine Pasinski spoke with a hearty Glassport (or Clairton? Dravosburg? not 100%) accent, clearly and carefully discussing her family members and teaching experiences in a succinct free verse. Christine Aikens Wolfe brought poems about poetry readings and being a writer, which were on the whole very playful and lyrical, often falling into and out of rhyme. Standout poem for her was "At a coffehouse reading (definitely not Hemingway's)" wherein she observes and almost intercedes in a seduction attempt by a young poetry critic on a beautiful young woman. I'm very glad to have met Christine Wolfe, and I got her email so I can stage a reading with her --full disclosure-- I know her previously from some Quaker potlucks I've attended (I also know Nancy Ester James from my Quaker Meeting-- it's "a small town big city").

All of the readers were skilled and presented poems which often metrical and rhyming. Fred Peterson in particular committed to couplets in his poems lamenting his love life. Jimmy Cvetic closed with a reading of his own, although I couldn't hear it because the air conditioning was too loud. --poetryburgh@gmail.com