Fixed and Free Poetry Reading

FEATURED POETS: Larry Goeckel  & Bonnie Rucobo

(see bios below)

• All Poets and Poetry Appreciators are invited
• Bring your poetry and your friends!
• Time Rule: 4-minute limit on the open mic
• For more information, including Zoom link, email Billy Brown,  welbert53@aol.com

SCHEDULE OF THE EVENING:
6:30 – 6:45 pm Log in to Zoom Session, Free-for-all conversation
6:45 – 7:00 Open Mic Poets (4 min. time limit)
7:00 – 7:15  Featured Poet – Larry Goeckel* – Larry Goeckel’s poems to be read by Stefi Weisburd, Anastasia Andersen and George Kalamaras, and perhaps others.
7:15 – 7:30  Featured Poet – Bonnie Rucobo*
7:30 – 7:40  Break
7:40 – 9:00 pm: Open Mic Poets (4 min. time limit)

*Note: order of featured poets may change.

Now in its 13th year, Fixed and Free, meeting the fourth Thursday each month (skipping November and moving to 2nd Thursday for a special potluck holiday reading in December), with host Billy Brown, and/or guest hosts, provides a relaxed, welcoming, supportive community for poets, lovers of poetry and other divine creatures, to share and enjoy the magic and power of poetry, as well as each other’s company. Reading is optional. Read your own poems or poems by other poets, or sing a poem set to music! No subjects, words or feelings are forbidden. Our constitutional & human freedoms of assembly, association, speech and religion, are respected at Fixed and Free poetry gatherings.

Features’ bios:

Larry (Lawrence) Goeckel is a former master sergeant who served in Korea, Kosovo, Spain, Turkey, the Philippines and Iraq as an electronics warfare and aircraft technician. After retiring from the Air Force in 2005, he completed his Masters in Fine Arts on the GI Bill at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He taught at UNM and was the poetry editor for Blue Mesa Review. Goeckel was a longtime poker buddy and poetry compatriot of Gene Frumkin. He was teaching English at Eldorado High School in Albuquerque, NM when he suffered a series of strokes that cut short his writing career. In the Spring 2007 issue of Double Room, Goeckel wrote about his work: Russell Edson, who I admire very much, makes a useful distinction between fiction and poetry in Double Room #4, claiming that: “Fiction describes reality with words, poetry with images.” He goes on to claim that poetry is not a language art the way that fiction is; since poetry works with images, it is closer to painting or silent film. The successful prose poem thereby utilizes the strengths of prose and poetry, art and cinema, and by so doing, hopefully succeeds in tripping up the reading public, landing them face first in a poem without them knowing it. To engender this confusion, I present my prose poems fully justified, or in a strip down the middle of the page— like a photocopy of a newspaper article. I like to think of my prose poems as statues that have been reassembled into blocks of marble, with their potentiality still visible.

In the tradition of Russell Edson, with a touch of Raymond Chandler, Goeckel wryly reports on the world through a unique, surrealistic lens. His keenly observed prose poems, shaped like newspaper clippings, might land you in a seedy hotel reeking noir and contemplating killing a pimp “not for love … but for the way he licked chicken grease from his fingers,” or in suburbia frantically listening to a 911 recording say “Ah, you complain too much.” Whether its Kansas “with the melody blown out of it” or a fugitive cowboy’s eyes “shining like clean windows with the desert behind them”, Goeckel summons cinematic scenes that make you laugh and marvel at these compelling vignettes from a highly imaginative mind.

Bonnie Rucobo Here are three things you may not know about Bonnie Rucobo:

She was an American Field Service exchange student to New Delhi, India, as a high school junior.

That same year she was part of a successful effort to integrate a swimming pool in Baltimore County, Maryland, located a block from her high school.

Since the start of the pandemic, she has hiked the trails in the Albuquerque Foothills, taking more than 3,000 photographs. Partnering with Sense of Wonder and the New Mexico Imaginative Collective, she has created five videos of poetry and photography aired on YouTube.

Bonnie is an Albuquerque poet, children’s author, and photographer. Born in Washington, D.C., she received a B.A. in literature from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and a J.D. from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California. She has worked as a Public Radio news reporter and director, a rating specialist for the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and Oakland, and a Human Rights Analyst for the City of Albuquerque Human Rights Office. She has authored two award-winning children’s books published by Albuquerque’s Wildflower Press: King Pachuco and Princess Mirasol and its sequel. She has also written Word Sculptures in the Albuquerque Museum Sculpture Garden, a collection of twenty poems describing sculpture at the Museum. Bonnie’s poems also appear in our first Fixed and Free anthologies, 2011, 2015 and 2018.