Three poets with Mid-Atlantic ties read at Downtown Artist Cellar tonight
Mar. 21—MALONE — The Downtown Artists Cellar hits keep coming for Support Women Artists Now (SWAN) during March-long programming at 410 E. Main St. in Malone.
Today, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., poets Jane C. Miller, Robin Caudell, and Andy Fogle will read from original works. An Open Mic session will follow the readings, providing a platform for local poets and enthusiasts to share their own creative expressions.
Sponsored by the Thrive Project, the event promises an evening of diverse poetry that showcases the richness of contemporary verse.
MID-ATLANTIC POETICS
Miller, based in Wilmington, Delaware, presents her latest work, "Canticle for Remnant Days," published by Pond Road Press in 2024.
Also co-author of "Walking the Sunken Boards," she has been recognized for her poetic prowess in journals such as Colorado Review, RHINO, and Apple Valley Review. Her accolades include winning the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and receiving two fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Miller is the associate editor and co-founder of the online poetry journal Quartet (www.quartetjournal.com).
Caudell, born and raised on Maryland's Eastern Shore, draws inspiration from coming of age in Chesapeake Country as a descendant of Indigenous Nanticoke and enslaved people of color. She was awarded a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. A Cave Canem Fellow, her poetry has appeared in anthologies including "The Power of the Feminine 'I,'" "Peregrine Volume XXXV: Black Poets Speak" and "The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South." Her debut book, "Black Heel Strings: A Choptank Memoir," won the 2023 Veterans Writing Award and will be published by Syracuse University Press in Spring 2025. An award-winning journalist, Caudell has been a Staff Writer at the Plattsburgh Press-Republican since 1990.
Fogle, who hails from Virginia Beach and now resides in upstate New York, is the author of "Mother Countries," "Across from Now," and seven chapbooks of poetry, including "Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda," co-translated with Walid Abdallah. His work is characterized by its depth, emotion, and a keen observation of the human experience. As the poetry editor at Salvation South, he continues to contribute to the vibrant poetry community.
JANE C. MILLER
From a very young age, Miller like poetry and got more involved in writing in high school and college.
Her father worked for General Motors, and her family lived overseas in Norway, Germany, France, and Belgium. She graduated high school from the International School of Brussels. Afterward, she attended two years at Tufts University and finished her English degree at McGill University in Montreal.
"Once I left college I was like 'What do you have to write about?'" she said.
"We haven't experienced anything? So I just thought you don't have anything to write about, so what do you think you're doing? So I stopped writing poetry, anyway, for a long time, 30 years at least. Then I had an opportunity to come back to it after thinking I could write a novel. Then I realized that wasn't happening. So I ended up just getting shorter and shorter, until I ended up back in poetry and I've stayed there."
Home is North Wilmington, Delaware. A decade ago, she retired from nonprofit work and started writing poetry a couple of years before that.
"On a whim, I applied for a fellowship that the state of Delaware offers to writers of all kinds," Miller said.
"It's an annual fellowship program, and I got one for an emerging poet that year. You get a monetary stipend, but have to account for how you used it to further your craft. It's an incredible program. They have emerging, professional, and master levels."
"Canticle for Remnant Days" is her first full-length collection.
"A lot of these are lyric poems with narrative tendencies," she said.
"I guess that's a good way to describe it. It came out at the end of January. So I've done a couple of readings and stuff like that. That's kind of where I'm at right now, but I'm looking forward to getting back and doing more writing."
ANDY FOGLE
Andy Fogle calls himself really lucky that he knew in 10th grade that he wanted to devote his life to the arts.
"There was a brief episode in the 4th grade, "he said.
"That's a funny side story about a poem that I wrote that my teacher, against my permission, published in little cheap school newspaper. I was just playing around. In 10th grade, I don't remember exactly what happened, but I mean there was just different music that I got into and reading interviews with those musicians they mentioned certain writers, and so I would look at those writers. That would just sort of lead to these discoveries, and it just kind of went off."
One of his teachers assigned a really wide-open creative project.
"That I felt was really cool," he said.
"It was pretty quick and clear in 10th grade that I wanted to do stuff with literature, music and arts. I feel super lucky. Not many people know in 10th grade, you know, what at least your general path is going to be. Somehow, I did."
Fogle attended George Mason University for undergraduate and graduate school.
"In high school when I was in the 11th grade, I quickly became close friends with this 12th grader, and he was going to be going to George Mason and that put it on my radar," he said.
"I remember doing a little bit of research about it, and it seemed like it had a good English department."
REALITY CHECK
Fogle would go on to receive an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry.
"I started also taking some education classes, too, because I started realizing: 'Alright, I might need to have a real, you know, normal job to support me,'" he said.
POET AS EDUCATOR/EDITOR
Fogle has been an educator for 27 years, and he's in his 19th year teaching high school in Delmar, NY.
He is poetry editor of Salvation South, "a refuge for Southern storytellers and a haven for Southern readers" co-founded by Chuck and Stacy Reese.
"Doing that editing work, that's really easy for me to find time and motivation for," Fogle said.
"It can suck up time really fast, but it's fun. There's two huge differences between that editing work that I do and my teaching work, both of which are huge, huge advantages. One is that my students have to be there. The people who submit to this magazine want to be there. They want to be published, and they're happy to go back and forth with my comments about poems or something."
Fogle said there are some things you can never know about your success as a teacher.
"There's a lot you don't know about how much you're feeding somebody's literacy or their view of life in the long term," he said.
"You don't really know know and feel like I did good until a kid goes to college and then maybe comes back to the high school and visits or gets in touch with you. It's like this hand grenade that never goes off. You throw these things, and like well did it work? I think so, kind of maybe."
The validation is more immediate with Salvation South, which is published weekly online.
"There's a new issue that's got three columns in it, and one of them is the poem that I accepted and worked with the poet on," he said.
"It's like, you know, I can see tangible results of my work, so it's kind of so much easier than teaching. I'm working with people who speak the same language, all sorts of things about the South and sorts of things about poetry and so forth. I'm also like a little bit obsessive that I'll check the submissions queue everyday."
HIS PRACTICE
Fogle isn't the type of writer that practices his craft every day for x-amount of time.
"I can do that, it's great," he said.
"But I've written, for the most part, in stolen moments. I carry around a little pocket notebook that fits in your shirt pocket. Really working on poems, I'm pulling on a laptop. I mean I do scribble things in this notebook still, but I just set up the habit of being able to work a phrase in or write down a title and eventually it goes into this other notebook or some file on my computer. It's really very messy and unorganized. I don't how much raw material is somewhere where I don't know where it is. Some day I'll discover it, and be like, 'Oh, I forgot this month that I wrote all this stuff.'"
"A period of a week or two where suddenly 10 or 20 pages of things finally comes together from scraps and things I've jotted throughout the year. Then nothing much really comes together for months, and then there's another week where here's another dozen pages of stuff. But I'm okay with that. It's alright. I don't worry about it drying up because I'm reading all the time, too."
Right now, Fogle is working his way through playwright August Wilson's "Century Cycle" also known as "The Pittsburgh Cycle."
"I just loved 'Fences,' which I just stumbled on by accident in the library while I was in high school, and then kind of re-encountered it 10 years or so ago and loved it more and for different reasons, it's became one of my holy books," he said.
The free event is sponsored by the Holiday Inn Express and funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature will offer attendees a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of contemporary poetry.
Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com
Twitter@RobinCaudell
