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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
203-323-1248
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06901203-323-1248
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