Poetry Reading Review

Poetry Reading Review
On May 2nd 2012 Harry Staley and George drew performed a poetry reading at the Science Library of the State University of New York’s Uptown Albany Campus.   Harry C. Staley is a distinguished Joyce scholar and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Albany, where he taught from 1956 until his retirement in 1993. His poetry has been published in Groundswell, Psycho-poetry, The Little Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Review, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere. George Drew, poet and former student of Harry Staley at the University at Albany, is the author most recently of The View from Jackass Hill (2010), a collection that mourns, eulogizes, and celebrates deceased friends, family members, and favorite poets. Together, they performed in celebration of a 49 year friendship and their respective careers as esteemed and well acknowledged poets.
George Drew opened the reading and framed it in its entirety as an epilogue to his teacher, Harry Staley. He paid tribute to his tenure at SUNY and described his work as being engaging, thoughtful and subtly funny. He read poems that correlated with the friendship and mentorship he had with Staley and these consisted of poems named “I came to Clevland”, “Women like Her”, “Making up with Milton”, “The View from Jackass Hill”, “The Annexation”, “The Way Forward” , “Doing Dante one Better” and “The Older I get the More I think of Keats”. Drew spoke in a very animate voice which engaged his readers and each of his poems ended with a bang, often a clever punch-line which drew laughter from the crowd and created a light-hearted atmosphere in the venue. For example, in “I came to Cleveland”; the speaker describes the most horrid omelette he has ever eaten in Cleveland in splendid detail with the very last line declaring that “we should always honor moments of great defeat”. After Drew had read his own poems he introduced Staley by reading some very short poems which Staley had written and which had a great...