Welcome to PoemAlley, Stamford, Connecticut's eclectic venue for poets, poetry reading and discussion! Open to anyone living in Fairfield County and the surrounding area, we meet Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm at Curley's Diner on 62 Park Place (behind Target) . Come contribute, get something to eat, or simply listen!
Sharon Charde, retired psycho-therapist and highly-accoladed
poet, reads this Tuesday at Curley’s Diner from numerous chapbooks and
publications reflective of the economical and sensitive style for which she is known.
Sharon most recently earned first prizes both in the
Arcadia Press 2014 Ruby Irene Chapbook Contest (deadline for the next round is November 15) and the Broad River Review’s
Rash Awards competition. Her work has appeared more than sixty-five
times in Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, Ping-Pong (literary organ of the Henry
Miller Memorial Library), Poet Lore and many other
journals and anthologies. In addition, she has seven Pushcart
nominations to her name.
Sharon has edited and published I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, containing the work of the adjudicated teens she has
volunteered with since 1999 through the creative writing program at Touchstone,
a residential treatment center in Litchfield, Connecticut for girls ages 12
through 18. A devoted writing teacher for twenty-three years, Sharon has been
awarded fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center For The Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony.
Yaddo Gardens entrance
She has released several prize-winning chapbooks, such as BadGirl At The Altar Rail (Flume, 2005), Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, (Dallas Poets Community Press, 2006) as well as 2008’s Branch In His Hand, a full-length collection from Backwaters Press, later adapted for radio by the
BBC in 2012. Described as a requeim in poetry, Branch recalls with sparse but unflinching eloquence the death of Sharon's son in 1987 during
a trip to Italy and the transformative effect the freak event had on herself and her
family. After Blue, for which she
won honorable mention in Finishing Line Press’s 2013 chapbook contest, was
published in September 2014. She’ll be at Yaddo, the famous artists’
retreat in Sarasota Springs, New York, this spring.
“Black
Lives Matter, Too”, next Monday’s timely installment of Stamford Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program, features Barbara Bethea, the “Afrikana Madonna”, a poetess and motivational
healer with a wonderfully exuberant presentation style (to which those who
attended her July appearance at Curley’s last year can attest).
A creative
therapist certified through the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT),
Bethea works with Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Sexual Assault & Violence
Intervention program as a rape counselor advocate and is an active member of
the renown Afrikan Poetry Theatre in Jamaica, NY (now in its 39th year),
founded by the late John Watusi Branch and Yusef Waliyaya, poets and cultural
workers in the early 1970s.
Besides helping adults achieve recovery and empowerment from chemical
dependencies and intimate partner violence, Barbara’s activities
supporting at-risk teens both in health care and church settings demonstrates
an inspired dedication to dignity, mutual interest and empathy in pursuit of
acceptance of one another and our individual struggles, transcending an
oft-bandied call for mere “tolerance” or cynical recommendations on how to accommodate intolerable behavior on the part of officialdom.
While the
brief video below, “Supreme Teens”, which Barbara produced in association with the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, highlights how
critical an open and engaged response is to
these concerns, their acute import readily applies to the future of all in an open,
civil society, given the portentous escalation of police brutality and killings
targeting the non-white population of the country in recent years.
Her
inspirational outreach also extends to recorded material, such as Like Manna for the Soul, a nine-track CD released in 2007, and televised presentations, like this 2013 example from Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Can We Talk Television:
Barbara is an adjunct professor at the College of New
Rochelle/School of New Resources, Brooklyn Campus. You can contact her directly
at afrikanamadonna1@aol.com.
Hosted
by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry takes place the
second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the
bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.
Described as “an unusually accomplished debut” by Nancy Willard, Psalms for a Child Who Has Lost Her Mother(FinishingLine Press, 2015) complements Carol Japha’s personal and social humanity as an
artist, editor, non-profit professional and activist, formerly with Viking
Press, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Charles H. Revson
Foundation and the Peace Corps.
As Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, Carol will illuminate her
quest “to discover the mother I lost so long ago, and myself” through samples of her spare, lyrical
writing, expressing the bond between a mother and daughter, identity
and connection and other themes from her first chapbook.
The distinctive,
even blessed, absence of the maudlin in this detailed chronicle suggests to the
author of A Shimmering That Goes with Us,
Mary Ann Larkin, a subtle, freeing effect to her work: "It's under an
'infinite wingspan' that Carol Japha gathers together the painful details of a
child losing her mother… with no sentimentality,” building to a “revealing
achievement” which plants, as the sample below makes clear, one leg in an evolving present, with the other anchored
to the legacy that propels it:
Knapsack
I will carry her in my pocket
like a slingshot
like a candy bar
like change to buy it
like shells from the seashore.
In my knapsack
like a sweater against the cold
a trail map to find my way
a pocketknife
binoculars to see from the top of the hill.
I will ask her
which fork to take which way to return. February, 2015
Concurrently, Carol has developed her graphic skills
(the cover painting of Psalms is her piece,
“The Doll”) through a series of workshops and residencies from Bennington College and the Virginia School of Creative Arts to the Silvermine School of Art in Wilton. A Greenwich resident raised in
Chicago, Carol has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a
graduate of Barnard College.
Join us, Saturday, September 5, for the penultimate session in a series of four independent creative therapy workshops, offered free to female survivors of sexual violence, conducted by Dr. Marianela Medrano, psychologist, poet and nationally-certified
poetry therapist.
At the conclusion of the series,
participants will be enriched by a selection of poems that will serve as a
steady and indispensable resource in their journey through healing and will have the opportunity to share their writing in the Sanctuary
of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in downtown Stamford.
Marianela has used creative writing as a means to help people reduce stress, cope
with pain and raise their level of emotional well-being. She hopes to help participants
confront their trauma and give voice to difficult-to-express feelings through various
forms of writing, including poetry and literature. Her own writing has appeared
in her 2011 collection Diosas de la
Yuca/Goddessof the Yuca(Madrid, Ediciones Torremozas), as well as numerous
literary journals and anthologies in the United States and the Dominican Republic. Find out more about her practice and work here and here.
This FREE
program, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Stamford, is presented
by the The Center for Sexual Assault Crisis Counseling and Education, which has been offering counseling, educational outreach and support
services in Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan,
Norwalk, Stamford, Westport, Weston and Wilton since 1979.
Resolving
the rift between our accepted notions of the Civilized and the Wild is the subject for this year’s summer poetry service at the Unitarian Universalist
Congregation. The theme was suggested by Reverend Frances Sink’s reading of The Practice of the Wild(Counterpoint,
2010), an essay collection from poet Gary Snyder.
How we
define these concepts, how they might substantiate a schism that needn’t even
exist and how the prevailing view (especially in regard to Western industrial life) affect our
relations, are just some of the points addressed
this Sunday in a reading featuring participants from the UU community and PoemAlley, including Bonnie
Klotzko, Joseph De Matteo, Dale Shaw, Marianela Medrano, Enzo Malaglisi, John
Sakson, Rowyda Amin, Adriana Rexon, as well as program leader, Ralph Nazareth.
The Receding Orgastic Future
Ralph
finds a topical and unsettling allegory for our fast-devolving times in the
closing musings of Nick Carraway from Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic of
opulence, tragic pining and unwarranted privilege, The Great Gatsby, dramatized in this clip from the 2013 Baz Luhrman film:
Instead of rediscovering our original ties with
the biosphere, in the face of global economic collapse, terminal nuclear
contamination, water/oil depletion, solar flare-induced electrical grid
failure, Civilization instead insanely
cries more desperately for fighting Carraway’s inexorable current, not just in
pursuit of flattering, or sanitized post-WWII pasts that never existed, but, as
recent two-dimensional output from Hollywood demonstrates, of ill-conceived “Jetsonian”
futures that could never be, either.
Keeping The Wild at Bay…
Tomorrow-land, a sort of Atlas Shrugged for children from Disney, packaged as an upbeat ode
to the way the future used to be, makes a hollow attempt to condemn our commitment to social procrastination, passivity and distractions. For the 2015 George Clooney
vehicle, itself, proves to be a prime exemplar in defense of the status-quo
assumptions sustaining today's dysfunctional traits—mainly, the magical,
unexamined belief that everything can be remedied with the right application of
technology (by the right people, of course).
This fervent Gatsbyesque yen to believe helps
sustain real-world delusions that serve energy and financial interests who
benefit mightily by the present Civilization/Wild divide. Contrary to Washington
and corporate sponsors proclaiming some nuclear or hydrocarbon Renaissance is
just around the corner, able to sustain the US for decades to come (one of the
newer financial bubbles-in-the-making, fracking, can only last a few years, according to Peak Oil expert Richard Heinberg), or
constitute a “bridge technology” toward a renewable energy future, the only
reality such ideas represent is so many boats of infinite growth floundering
in the currents of an unyielding, finite planetary system.
Related contemporary definers of the “civilized”
or “progress” informing the titular sleek and high-tech metropolis of TL’s alternate world are a conditioned commitment to convenience, safety and material certainty against everything outside the fragile barriers of our
built-up surroundings, be it predatory animals, senescence, or the demonized
human threat-of-the-month.
While Tomorrowland toler-ates a given natural habitat and its denizens as no more than decorative accents
to a human imposition on the landscape (save for some birds,
the only evidence of Nature is the prairie surrounding the city), last year’s Interstellar (Paramount/Warner Bros.) espouses an almost strident hostility to the ecosystem
as a whole.
Keeping the Wild Harnessed
Suffering
from a global blight of unspecified origin, much of industrial society has reverted
to an agrarian state to feed a future dying populace, slowly suffocating from a
decline in atmospheric oxygen (somehow connected to the Blight). Cooper,
a bitter ex-astronaut-turned-farmer (played by Matthew McConaughey)
has the opportunity to find a new home for our species in a planetary system
beyond a recently-discovered wormhole, leaving behind his children, but not the
hubris that got humanity into the predicament it faces.
Far from even intimating that any facet of industrial
civilization’s cumulative assaults on the air, water and land might possibly be
responsible, the egotistical rationale for what is happening wavers between the
speculation that in some Gaianistic pique, Earth is pushing humanity out of its
nest for its own good, or rebelling out of hostility (“caretaking” of the Earth
is viewed by Cooper with contempt even as he cluelessly practices the same synthetic pesticide/herbicide-supported monoculture farming that is destroying our agricultural base today).
Other than humans, not another living thing,
save for trees and crops, appear in the film (Cooper’s farm doesn’t even
have a dog), as if, once more (though to far less glitzy effect) the world is pared down to only what humans can get from it—a sentiment
emphasized when the utilitarianized earthly environment is reproduced with
faithful insipidness within an O'Neill-style orbital habitat that
doesn’t even offer the solace of parklands.
John Adolphus Etzler
This anthropocentric perspective harkens back to a post-Enlightenment
complex of suppositions that morphed a distancing from religious dogmatism into
a materialist distancing of humanity from the environment from which it sprang. Historian Steven Stoll
makes the case in The Great Delusion (Hill
& Wang, 2009) how eccentric 19th century German utopian engineer John Adolphus Etzler, internalizing all the
conceits of the Industrial Age, popularized the backbone of “free market” ideology:
endless growth, decreeing that if humans want
something, not only will Nature provide, but it can do so forever. Thus, in the
end, Cooper and humanity indeed survive, but only unapologetically to lay the
slow-burn foundation for using up another world in the same way.
A Dream Not Just Left Behind, But Never There
This is
not to say that the problem with the concept of human civilization rests necessarily
with its capacity to shape the physical world, but with a contemporary dearth
of symbolic thought that used to discipline it. The question is how mindful (and
modest) our awareness of this association can influence our attitudes
about the Civilized and the Wild.
This
is not an inconceivable prospect. InThe Forge and the Crucible(University
of Chicago Press,1979), Micea Eliade’s overview of alchemical
thought, he observes how early metal-working cultures the world over often
maintained a mindful veneration of blacksmiths for their skill in fabricating
both hand tools and weaponry—corresponding to the creative and destructive capacities in
us all. Agrarian societies in Europe projected their awareness of natural
cycles in reproduction and agriculture to mining activities such that when a
vein was exhausted, it was thought to be simply a matter of closing up the
site, like a fallow field, to give its ores time to replenish themselves—maybe erroneous, but a belief indicative of a patient and cooperative, rather than exploitive,
attitude rarely seen today.
Like
Gatsby insisting he can repeat the past, our metaphor-deficient, frantically over-commodified
existence proffers hopeless entrancements at every turn promising we can hit some
cosmic “reset” button to deal with rising sea levels, virulent superstorms or
some other unpredictable disaster, as if such concerns are no more than
transitory inconveniences on the road to something always better… always
greener.
Ultimately,
if Civilization’s adherents are willing to work with and learn from integration
with the Wild, the former could not only become more civil (rendering the latter, less
frightening in the process), but more flexible, too--a crucial attribute, as Civilization’s survival
would depend not on fighting the current, so much as adapting to where it is
taking us.
Where:
Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
20 Forest
Street (directly across from the Avon Theatre)
This evening PoemAlley will celebrate the lives and memories
of Stamford resident Ella (Daisy) “Diva” Evans and Eddie Wright in front of Curley’s
Diner. Close friends and fellow participants at Tuesdays at Curley’s, Diva died
on July 13, mere weeks after Eddie, who had been struggling with lung cancer.
Eddie Wright
They were devoted members of Mt. Nebo Full Gospel Church in
Bridgeport, as well as of a congregation in Norwalk, where Eddie lived. We are
honored they found in the PA community an outlet for their experiences,
observations and convictions, expressed through a range of pieces by turns picaresque, nurturing and profound.
In particular, Eddie’s output took the form of ongoing
personal conversations with God, related in the form of a series of journal
entries, which he shared with PoemAlley almost every week (even through his
health crisis), captivating both for their sly humor and inclusive, meditative
appeal (not surprisingly, Eddie, who passed on June 13, had also presented
sermons in church on occasion).
This special memorial gathering will begin in Columbus Park
at 7:30 pm and include the singing of “Amazing Grace”:
Sharon Charde, retired psycho-therapist and highly-accoladed
poet, reads this Tuesday at Curley’s Diner from numerous chapbooks and
publications reflective of the economical and sensitive style for which she is known.
Sharon most recently earned first prizes both in the
Arcadia Press 2014 Ruby Irene Chapbook Contest (deadline for the next round is November 15) and the Broad River Review’s
Rash Awards competition. Her work has appeared more than sixty-five
times in Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, Ping-Pong (literary organ of the Henry
Miller Memorial Library), Poet Lore and many other
journals and anthologies. In addition, she has seven Pushcart
nominations to her name. 
Sharon has edited and published I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, containing the work of the adjudicated teens she has
volunteered with since 1999 through the creative writing program at Touchstone,
a residential treatment center in Litchfield, Connecticut for girls ages 12
through 18. A devoted writing teacher for twenty-three years, Sharon has been
awarded fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center For The Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony. 
