NEW DATE: Prey Of Tigers, Prey Of The Heart--Open Mic On Love And Its Various Destinations

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, 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.

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's pop-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.

For more information, contact:

 Barnes& Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06906

203-323-1248