Because WE Are Poems: Esther Cohen At Open Mic

After two years, cultural activist, poet/novelist and teacher, Esther Cohen comes back to the Stamford area this Monday night at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic to offer poetry writing instruction (no fair leaving your pen at home!) and share from Breakfast With Allen Ginsberg (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2016), her newest collection of fifty pieces, spanning writing, family, friends and life from the Catskills to the Big Apple.

For a preview, enjoy “Dear Everyone”, Esther’s contribution to Alimentum's Menupoems 2010 program, performed at Tout Va Bien in New York, sponsored by the online journal of gastronomical literature:

From humorous fiction, like 2006’s Book Doctor (Counterpoint) and the relatable warmth of God Is a Tree and Other Middle-Age Poems (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2008), to the dignity of her innovative photo essay book of blue collar life, unseenamerica (Regan Books, 2005), Esther demonstrates an artful thirst for melding the personal and social dimensions with a fuller appreciation of workers and what they contribute (click here to see a 2011 interview with journalist Sheryl McCarthy on CUNY TV’s One to One, where Esther talks of her work with the Bread & Roses Cultural Project, Local 1199, from where unseenamerica grew).

Her September 5 entry from her poem-a-day site (www.esthercohen.com), “Labor Days is a We Poem” captures this synthesis through a series of vignettes bearing the invisible grace and daisy chain-like interconnectedness that forms the unsung, yet indispensable contributions that at all levels make society worthwhile for everyone—as opposed to defining its value based on the actions of an over-promoted few. Lyricist/drummer Neil Peart’s “Nobody’s Hero”, performed by Rush, dramatizes the cheapening distraction of celebrity fixation at the cost of acknowledging real-world nobility to be found around every corner:

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s 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), beginning at 7:15 p.m.