Jan 23, 2012

One War's One-Month Twilight: WWII Veteran Hoby Rosen To Speak At Curley's This Tuesday

This week's featured poet and artist, Hoby Rosen, will be sharing his recollections of his military service during the grueling closing winter months of World War II in Western Europe. Launched on December 16, 1944 in a rash attempt to break up the American/British/French alliance by crippling Allied supply channels, Hitler's surprise Ardennes Offensive became more widely known as the Battle of the Bulge for the bulge it created in the Allies' front line.
Me-262 "Swallow" jet fighter-bomber

From the misery of trench foot and the historic, if ineffectual, introduction of the first jet-propelled fighter, to the melancholy of wartime holidays and the atrocity of the Malmédy Massacre, the conflict, involving the biggest engagement of the war by U.S. forces, (600,000 soldiers) and costing more than 190,000 lives all around, encapsulated the pyrrhic confusion of horror, hope, suffering, ingenuity and cruelty that characterizes all wars. 
POW massacre, Malmedy, Belgium, 1945

Hoby went on to study at Johns Hopkins and the University of Southern California, where he concentrated on writing, drama and film production.

Soldiers exchanging Christmas gifts, 1944
PoemAlley member and sculptor--with studio space at Stamford's Loft Artists Association (one of numerous art organizations with which he is affiliated), Hoby enjoys working in wax for bronze casting, though he also dabbles in treated paper, glass casting and wood. Click here to see some of his work. He can be reached at hobyart@aol.com.

Jan 18, 2012

PoemAlley Reads @ Edgehill Retirement Community

PoemAlley founding member Eva-Maria Palevich invites everyone to attend a special reading this Friday at the Edgehill Senior Community on Palmer's Hill, located on the Stamford border with Greenwich. A free-form presentation, it is hoped this event, given the strong youth-orientation of our culture, will serve as a reminder of what we owe one another as a society, across generations and across ranges of experience.

In addition to Eva-Maria, attending readers will include Ralph Nazareth, Robin Kurtz, Eddie Wright, Bill Buschel, Caroline Holme and many others. Besides her regular output of gentle, insightful pieces, bespeaking an engaging combination of wisdom and wonder, Eva-Maria is also active with the PoemAlley Advisory Committee, of which this Friday's program is her latest Committee project. Raised in West Berlin, Eva-Maria has a degree in Graphics and Design from the Lette-Verein photographic school. Check out her poetry on this blog's very first posting from 2009 here and some literary feedback regarding a discussion on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets here.

When:
Friday, January 20, 2011
4 PM--4:55 PM

Where:
Edgehill Retirement Community
122 Palmer's Hill Road
Stamford, CT 06905

Phone/e-mail:

Jan 10, 2012

Sharing Privacy

Death, sex, love, and guilty deeds and thought: these four are private, death because it is the rarest event, occurring only once to each of us, and normally in seclusion; sex because we seek privacy to avoid embarrassment and foster intimacy; love because it exists in internal feeling, sensation, and imagination the individual desires to share with only one other; and guilty deeds and thoughts because they spontaneously seek secrecy in order to avoid humiliation, degradation, exclusion, and loss of opportunity.

 Religion traditionally seeks control of these four experiences. Religion encourages us to regard our own retention of these four in privacy as intrinsically injurious because we cut ourselves off from the commonality of experience-ignoring the implications of the fact that others cut us off from sharing their own tightly held experience. It would have us believe that we cannot prosper as individuals because our consciousness is too meager to support us cut off from intimacy with others in their own private experiences of death, sex, love, and guilt. The goal of both religion and literature is to help us acquire or regain unimpeded access to the totality of experience freed of the restrictions and blindness created by concealment of our own and others’ death, sex, love, and guilt, but religion and literature face different obstacles in this effort.    
Getty images

Literature, as the art form that shares an individual’s private experience across space and time with other individuals, is uniquely appropriate to supplement the deficiencies of individual experience that religion addresses without the controls religion places on individuals.

Literature improves on religion in a second way: it offers readers access to the privacy of others while religion shunts others’ experience away from us into the social dead end of confession. The primary defect of literature in this task of replacing religion is its lack of reciprocity: the author normally does not read the reader’s response nor the reader’s own expression of private experience. But reciprocal and mutual sharing, the ideal of religion, has rarely existed in religion anyway in recent times: a Catholic may share private experience with a priest, but the priest, rather than reciprocating, just symbolically readmits one to the realm of common experience (communion) on the premise that relieving oneself of one’s isolation from the priest, and thus supposedly from the deity, can supplant the need to share experience with the rest of the congregation, or humanity. The cleric is an interloper in the process of reconciliation: instead of having the community bond directly, he offers some relief from the pain of isolation as a pretext for creating dependency on the church.

Literature seeks to eliminate the mediation of the cleric and church by letting the reader know at least one person shares something of his or her private experience without demanding the price of conformity and obedience.


One cannot immediately fill the void of literature’s lack of reciprocity and mutuality. But the sustained habit of writing and exchanging writing and responses with friends can begin to remedy this deficiency. For writers who know and share with other writers, some communion develops within the group that can, to some extent, will itself to remain open to others. If that reciprocity and mutuality could remain open, for the members the desired functions of religion could be served.
                   
Richard Duffee 
December 28, 2011

Cultural Gulfs, Environmental Strain, War... And An Abiding Hope

Charminar Hiderabad
Vandana Shiva, Munich (2005)
Irrepressibly dynamic peace and anti-nuclear activist, Greenwich resident Ayumi Temlock returns to PoemAlley after a two-month visit to India to talk about who she met, what she saw and the programs she participated in, conducted by such luminaries as ecology and food sovereignty activist, physicist Vandana Shiva (1993 Alternative Novel Peace Prize Winner), among others.

ISRO Manned Return Vehicle
temple ceiling
Over the last few years, Ayumi has been instrumental, independently and/or in conjunction with Greenwich/Stamford Peace Action and WESPAC Foundation, in protesting the proliferation of armed drone aircraft used against people of Yemen, Afghanistan and other nations, raising public awareness regarding the paucity of the official account of the 9/11 bombings and--a subject especially close to her--advocating for the abolition of nuclear weaponry.

 For the latter cause, Ayumi personally arranged the financing and travel arrangements to bring two Hibakusha, Takashi Morita and Junko Watanabe, from Brazil to relate their first-person accounts as survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to UConn students, New York residents and members of PoemAlley at Curley's in 2010. Listen to their historical contributions as translated by Ayumi at 3:35 (right after Dev Crasta and Rebeka Radna's ethereal duet) in the video below of the Green Fuse PA event, held at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford (UUSIS) on April 24 of that year.

Jan 9, 2012

Navigating Dual Skies: PA's Nick Miele To Lead Barnes & Noble's Open Mic

Nick Miele went to college in Long Island and joined the United States Air Force as an avionics specialist servicing F-15 fighter craft, during which time he received an MA in Aeronautical Science. Currently he is with AirCastle, LLC, a Stamford-based firm specializing in supplying aircraft to commercial fleets worldwide.

Complementing these technical pursuits, Nick will take many of his selections, shared tonight at the cafe in the Stamford Barnes & Noble, from a series of progressively more challenging PoemAlley offerings spanning the last couple of years, building to a mosaical critique of stateside life during a time of dramatic economic and political upheaval.

Currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University, Nick will be one of the participants in the upcoming PA reading at the Edgehill Retirement Community in Stamford, scheduled for 20th at 4 PM. In the meantime, click on his own blog, Wordsmiths: A Gaggle of Poets, under "Associated Links" on the left for his latest observations, sources of inspiration and activities.   

Barnes & Noble's Open Mic night, hosted by Frank Chambers, begins the second Monday of each month at 7:15 pm in the Cooking section of the Stamford Town Center location.

For more information, contact:
Barnes & Noble
Stamford Town Center
100 Greyrock Place Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248