HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the February edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Joseph Ross and Michael Salcman, hosted by Laura Shovan. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, February 13th at 7 p.m., at 6100 Foreland Garth, Columbia, MD 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.
An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center at (410)-730-0075.
Below, get to know Joseph and Michael!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Joseph: What an interesting question. My husband, Robert, probably shows up most but he is often whispering within the poems, even if he isn’t mentioned. Martin Luther King shows up in many of my poems too.
Michael: My father and my wife Ilene.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Joseph: Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.
Michael: In bed at home in the early hours before rising on my iPad; next best, at anchor in a sailboat.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Joseph: I straighten the things on my desk before I write.
Michael: New ideas and first lines on iPad or paper notebook come at any time; new drafts occur at my desk computer. In the early hours editing on the iPad quickly goes through several drafts.
Who always gets a first read?
Joseph: There’s no one person who reads my work first. I share with very few people.
Michael: My wife Ilene and less so poet friends in New York & Baltimore; Ilene is usually in the kitchen and if I read her a new poem and my eyes get watery I know I have landed a good one. She gives me a rating but doesn’t cry.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Joseph: Martin Luther King’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
Michael: Complete poems of Wallace Stevens more than twice, ditto Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop, Crow by Ted Hughes, and New and Selected Poems of Tom Lux, my teacher; recently finished my second reading of all seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Lost Time (no third one is on the horizon).
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Joseph: Naomi Shihab Nye reading at one of the early Split This Rock Poetry Festivals.
Michael: Ilene and I hosted a reading and celebration by Richard Wilbur at the Century Association in New York; I invited Tom Lux and Edward Hirsch to give a joint reading at the City Lit Festival in Baltimore. They were terrific.
• Joseph Ross is the author of five books of poetry: Crushed & Crowned (2023), Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013), and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Xavier Review, The Langston Hughes Review, and The Los Angeles Times.
Joseph teaches English and Creative Writing, and can be found online at Facebook under Joseph Ross and at www.josephross.net, where he regularly writes.
• Michael Salcman is former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland, a child of the Holocaust, and survivor of polio. His poems have been published in Barrow Street, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, and Smartish Pace. Michael’s books include The Clock Made of Confetti (2007), Poetry in Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness and Healing (2015), A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016), Sinclair Poetry Prize winner, Shades & Graces: New Poems (2020), Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize winner, and NECESSARY SPEECH: New & Selected Poems (2022).
You can learn more at www.salcman.com, or reach out to @poedoc via X, formerly Twitter.
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