Poise, Power and the Pen

Committed to forums of healing, multifarious avenues of creative expression and female affirmation, this Monday’s Barnes & Noble Open Mic guest reader, Northampton, Massachusetts-based Janet Aalfs, has spent more than three decades as performer, safety/movement arts instructor, community activist (first kindled through her father’s teaching her about the civil rights movement) and published writer.

 Janet’s poetry and essays have run in numerous publications, such as Sinister Wisdom, Onion River Review,  A Fierce Brightness: 25 Years of Women's Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002) and North Atlantic Book’s 1993 Women in the Martial Arts (she also holds a a seventh-degree black belt in Shuri-ryū and a fifth-degree black belt in Modern Arnis).

Dissecting relationships, nature, love, gender violence and other topics, Janet’s collections include 1996’s Full Open (released through her own Orogeny Press) and Lubec Tides—a 2007 finalist in the Bright Hill Literary Center Chapbook Contest. Reviewing her most recent title, Bird of a Thousand Eyes (Levellers Press, 2010), Thomas Sayers Ellis admires the author’s honest and lyrical eagerness to mix schools and play with customary structure, encouraging those “… comfortable with the narrow limitations of linear approaches to ‘Subject’… to open and read with all their senses.”

Women at the Helm

Janet Aalfs

Doves rise over harbor waves as sun
ignites the dance. Quill and bone, wind
and blood, hearts lost cradled undersea

the chant alive: nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Anguish can't defeat us.
From desert forest mountain shore

through whip and gasp, rape and ash,
the lotus a bright bird soars
to interrupt the choking, to revive

the tree of life, leaf-light dreams
in children's eyes, pain their milk-teeth
grind dispersed. Wings and clouds.

We sing, though we cannot mend.
We dance, to honor death.
We witness, aligned,

to break the raging silence,
to weave this moment's breath
more fiercely, more kind.

For more samples click on VerseWrights.com and Perugia Press.

Spanning appearances at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival (which has included such protean luminaries as recently-passed poet/playwright Amiri Baraka) and Goddard College’s The Power of Words, among other venues, Janet received most recently the 2013 UMass Center for Women and Community Leadership and Advocacy in the Arts Award. She also served as poet laureate of Northampton from 2003­-2005.

Click here for an interview where she reminisces with fellow UMass alumnus Sandy Mandel on the 35th anniversary of the university’s women’s studies program, their initial interest in feminist theory and how it fostered their devotion to social and individual transformation through art.

Learn more about Janet’s ongoing supportive work in Easthampton at the Valley Women’s Martial Arts: Institute for Healing and Violence Prevention Strategies, a hub of nurturance and empowerment which she has directed since 1982.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), now beginning at 7:00 p.m.

  

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248