"Ralph Nazareth introduced me as the new head of the PoemAlley Advisory Committee.
As I handed out business cards and circulated pads for names and addresses I thanked Ralph Nazareth for allowing me the time to talk to those gathered at Curley’s that night and for his many years as head of the PoemAlley Advisory Committee. He’s been extremely generous with his time and more importantly his spirit.The business cards had my e-mail address on it and how to contact Rolf Maurer about the PoemAlley blog.
I opened with a brief description of the origins of PoemAlley. How it was formed by Ann Yarmal, Catherine Ednie and a few others under the guidance of the Stamford Unitarian Church. Their idea was to reach out to the community with hands, hearts and heads filled with poetry. They shared those gifts while offering the people of the community a chance, and a place, to respond in kind. They were pioneering souls and deserve to be recognized and thanked for their initiative.
Then I went on to explain how I thought long and hard about accepting the challenge of being head of the Advisory Committee. I’d taken my time. TIME. That’s the real challenge. Already there’s not enough time for me to do all that I have, want or need to do; so would it be wise to accept? I realized that if I did I’d need to have resources to accomplish anything and the BEST resource I could ever want or ask for can be found every Tuesday night at Curley’s Diner: The poets of PoemAlley.
During the next year, or however long I am head of the committee, I will be leaning heavily on them for ideas, resources, time and energy.
First, we’re revitalizing the blog. Rolf Maurer is going to make it a showplace for our poets and all those interested in poetry and the arts. I ask all the poets to have at least one poem a month posted there. I know that’s asking a lot of you but let’s try. We’ll also be asking our British connection if it would okay to post their offerings. I would like to see the blog become a clearing house for all information taking place in the arts community of Fairfield and Westchester counties. Workshops, readings, events should all be posted there. At present we get much of this information through Ralph Nazareth’s multiple e-mails each week. I want the people of our community and the wider community to KNOW what’s happening. That’s first on the agenda and though time consuming it’s a relatively “easy fix”.
I went on to say that for at least the first six months I don’t want to reach too high but there are some other things I have in mind to do during that initial period of time.
In the past PoemAlley sponsored the publication of a number of collections of poetry written by the Poets of PoemAlley including: Eating Our Hearts Out (Yuganta Press, 2004), Wednesdays at Curley’s. The books are wonderful. I cherish the fact that my earliest poems were published in them but, alas, books are very expensive to produce hence they must be priced rather high to generate any positive income for PoemAlley. When I did my talk on how to read a poem last May I brought a number of CDs with some of my poems and one or two of my radio shows on them. They sold for $3.00 each and the dozen or so copies I brought sold out immediately with all proceeds going to PoemAlley. The success of that night planted the seed for an idea of what I later called: The CD Initiative. On July 10th I was able to put the plan into action when the Poets of PoemAlley were invited to read their work at the Stamford Unitarian Church. The theme was The Labyrinthine Ways. After recording the poets’s offerings and with some editing I was able to produce a CD of approximately 55 minutes. PoemAlley will be selling them for $3.50 each. I see us doing this for all our future events. This isn’t to say we are abandoning the printed word altogether, but it may be some time before we mount another anthology and until then we’ll have the CDs of our readings. An added bonus is that the poets will have a chance to hear themselves. In some cases this may prove to be a helpful learning tool.
By the way, the ten or so CDs that I brought Tuesday night sold out immediately. Remember they make great gifts and if you buy five or more the price drops to $3.00 each.
Next week, through the heroic efforts of Eva-Maria Palevich, another member of the Advisory Committee, we will be meeting with the Bonnie Krois, the administrator at Edgehill Community for Seniors. We’ll be discussing the possibility of doing some outreach programs there. We might start with a reading or two then we might see about doing some workshops there also. I imagine these might be similar to the one Richard Duffee did at Westhill High School this year. It was an extremely successful venture and it brought Carley Pierre into our midst. For that alone it is a great success.
Finally I’m working on trying to get a special event planned for the Fall. I won’t go into any detail until I have some more of the pieces in place but I hope it will be on the scale of last year’s highly successful “Green Fuse” event."
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