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!
Christie Fountain is a Stamford resident and unpublished writer whose muse is the United States Postal Service.
Initially involved with the Tuesday night sessions at Curley’s in 2010, tomorrow night Christie will present notes and observations taken from a workshop on creative nonfiction she took with Vijay Seshadri, a few months after he received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Hope Street, Glenbrook, CT
Holding a master’s degree in linguistics, Christie served on the staff of Wigwag, a short-lived general interest magazine in 1989-1990, one of a variegatedrange of pursuits over the years: “I’ve done a lot of things but not one thing for very long. I recently found my Pan Am stewardess uniform in a trunk in the basement. What’s that thing pinned to the blouse? Oh yes, the cockpit key.” Currently, she is founder and president of Stamford's Glenbrook Neighborhood Association.
Due to poor weather, Open Mic at Barnes and Noble's annual reading
in honor of Valentine’s Day has been rescheduled for this Monday evening, February 15, emphasizing a broader and more fundamental
spin from past gatherings. This year, program coordinator Frank Chambers
challenges contributors to deliver “unconventional love poems directed at
subjects other than people, [be it] to the laying down of arms, to equality… a
couplet to your dog, cat, iguana… [or] a sonnet to Trump (if you must).”
How what we invest our affections in molds our
concepts of love, whether an ideal, a social or political affiliation, or
something more visceral and individual in its satisfactions, like impassioned
devotion to a sport or hobby--all contribute to the numerous sides
of that one emotion prized for its uniquely energizing and unpredictable appeal
since the beginning of human experience.
Prized, but also cautioned against in
instances when two forms of love become conflated, or come into conflict,
playedout to most gruesome effect in Shakespeare’s ever-relevant tragedy, Titus Andronicus, wherein the demands of
nationalism, vengeance and custom embody a virtual arranged marriage between
the individual and the state. The play’s eponymous Roman general, over a career marked by indiscriminate devotion to
patriarchy and empire, sacrifices almost all his 25 sons in battle (in one
instance, even personally dispatching a son for disloyalty) and, ultimately, sees
Lavinia, his sole daughter, raped and maimed, only placing primary devotion to what’s
left of his family when betrayed by the incoming Emperor, Saturninus.
Anthony Hopkins takes his cinematic turn as the cruel, yet pitiable general in Julie Taymor’s contemporized
1999 film version,Titus:
Love’s persistent ability, however, to
establish a presence even when having nothing material to be projected upon, be
it home, country or family, forms the universal basis for faith and mysticism in
a life of unknowns, as cogently expressed by Matthew McConaughey'spop-theologian Palmer Joss to
uber-empiricist astronomer Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster in this scene from the 1997
Robert Zemeckis adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact:
Hosted
by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry takes place (usually) on 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.
Due to poor weather, Open Mic at Barnes and Noble's annual reading
in honor of Valentine’s Day has been rescheduled for this Monday evening, February 15, emphasizing a broader and more fundamental
spin from past gatherings. This year, program coordinator Frank Chambers
challenges contributors to deliver “unconventional love poems directed at
subjects other than people, [be it] to the laying down of arms, to equality… a
couplet to your dog, cat, iguana… [or] a sonnet to Trump (if you must).” 
Prized, but also cautioned against in
instances when two forms of love become conflated, or come into conflict,
played out to most gruesome effect in Shakespeare’s ever-relevant tragedy, Titus Andronicus, wherein the demands of
nationalism, vengeance and custom embody a virtual arranged marriage between
the individual and the state. The play’s eponymous Roman general, over a career marked by indiscriminate devotion to
patriarchy and empire, sacrifices almost all his 25 sons in battle (in one
instance, even personally dispatching a son for disloyalty) and, ultimately, sees
Lavinia, his sole daughter, raped and maimed, only placing primary devotion to what’s
left of his family when betrayed by the incoming Emperor, Saturninus.
