Yorkville Diner Offers Customers a Side of Poetry with Their Meals

May 11, 2012 - PRLog -- The poets have landed in Yorkville. If you stop by Gracie’s Corner Diner at East 86th Street, on the southwest corner of First Avenue, Monday evening May 14, you can enjoy a free side of poetry with your meal. The popular neighborhood diner features two hours of poetry the second Monday evening of each month, hosted by local writer Peter Chelnik. A regular customer at Gracie’s, published poet and long-time Yorkville resident Chelnik offered, this February, to bring his poetry reading series to the diner. The monthly series which he calls Go Cat Go! kicked off in March and features an open reading with a different guest poet each month.

A longtime fixture on the New York City poetry circuit, often performing his poetry accompanied by tenor saxophonist Bob Feldman, Chelnik has authored seven poetry books, “Railroad Heart,” “East Coast Line,” “Manhattan Wilderness,” “Eternity Road,” “Wildflower Serenade,” “Paradise Highway and his most recent “Strawberry Harmony.” The reading attracts mostly neighborhood residents for audience, while the poets come from all five boroughs, Long Island, nearby New Jersey and even as faraway as Chicago and Nepal to read their work.

This Monday evening, May14th, the guest poet will be the multi-talented Robert Gibbons, actor, model, musician, published poet and educator. Originally from Belle Glade (Palm Beach County), Florida, Gibbons is a graduate of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical (A & M) University, and taught in the Palm Beach, Prince George and Fairfax County school districts, before moving to New York in 2007 where he now works as an English Specialist for the Renaissance Charter High School of Innovation of East Harlem (Manhattan), New York City. Gibbons is also a cast member of Gordon Gilbert’s traveling show “Monologues from the Old Folks Home.”

Attending poetry workshops at both Cave Canem and the 92nd Street Y, Gibbons had studied under master poets Cornelius Eady, Marilyn Nelson, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, and Linda Susan Jackson. His poetry has been published in “Cartier Street Review,” “Nomad's Choir,” “Stained Sheets,” and “The Palm Beach Post,” as well as in several anthologies including “Dinner With the Muse, The Anthology of the Green Pavilion Poetry Event,” ed. Evie Ivy (Ra Rays Press, 2009), and “hell strung and crooked,” eds. Jane Ormerod, Ice Gayle Johnson, Brant Lyon, Thomas Fucalora (Uphook Press, 2011).

Upcoming guest poets for Go Cat Go! at Gracie’s Corner Diner include Suffolk County's First Poet Laureate and Walt Whitman Birthplace 2011-2012 Writer-in-Residence George Wallace in June; Chicago hairstylist turned poet, and founding editor of Uphook Press, Ice Gayle Johnson in July; and curator of the Park Slope Brownstone Poets, Astoria resident Patricia Carragon in August. Hoboken publisher and author Roxanne Hoffman of Poets Wear Prada featured in March. Her co-editor, the poet, fiction writer and translator Jack Cooper, originally from Tenafly, New Jersey, now making his home in Bushwick, read for the series in April. Poets Wear Prada published Chelnik's "Paradise Highway" in 2007.

Gracie’s Corner Diner is located at 352 East 86th Street at the southwest corner of East 86th Street and First Avenue. Sign up for the open reading begins at 6:45PM. The reading starts at 7:00PM and continues till about 9:00PM. No cover, but a food/drink purchase is required. Take the 4, 5 or 6 train to East 86th Street and Lexington Avenue. The diner is a short walk from the station.