Richard J. Newman & Cora Santaguida: Addressing Gender, Housing & Social Injustice In Two Venues

Three years after his previous visit, essayist, translator and poet Richard Jeffrey Newman returns to Curley’s this Tuesday to share both older material and selections from Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions), published last year, completed through a grant awarded by the Queens Council on the Arts.

Richard’s creative focus on matters of feminism, progressive masculine identity, justice and what reviewer Richard Hoffman describes as finding meaning in the “possibility of redemption”, informs most of his poetry and commentary, typified by recent, in-depth blog entries from his website (www.richardjnewman.com), addressing his view, as a survivor of child molestation, on the Harvey Weinstein scandal and his difficulty as a writer in keeping pace with the reaction to the emboldened face of American white supremaciscm under the new administration, witnessed in last year’s Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue confrontation.

His other titles include For My Son, A Kind of Prayer (Ghostbird Press 2016), as well as The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh (Junction Press 2011) and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2006)--both translations of, and contemporary commentaries on, classical Persian poetry. Richard’s journal credits, both online and in print, include Salon.com, Another Chicago Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Diode Poetry Journal, among others.

 

The preview below from War Zone, Maggie Hadleigh-West’s 1998 documentary of her face-to-face challenges to sidewalk cat-callers in Manhattan, like Richard’s debut title, The Silence of Men (Cavankerry Press, 2006), with contributions by Yusef Komunyakaa, stresses the point that gender relations rooted in equality, empathy and respect can only go so far if engaged men are not willing to be both open about the motivations for harassing conduct and being proactive in changing the status quo, as much as the women threatened by it.  

                 

A professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, Richard is on the executive board of the Queens-based Newtown Literary Alliance (publisher of the Newtown Literary Journal) and continues to curate the First Tuesdays neighborhood reading series at Terraza Cafe in Jackson Heights. You can listen to last January's interview with Richard by Rachelle Escamillas of KKUP radio here. 

As a poet/essayist and housing/political activist, Cora Santaguida, besides reading assorted pieces on relationships, longing and misadventures in pop subculture, will also be emphasizing the importance of social empathy-raising (particularly as it relates to affordable housing and economic justice) as one of several featured readers Tuesday evening at Confluencia in Danbury.

This 2018 essay excerpt, derived from Cora's experience of being homeless twice, embodies a powerful balance of subjective and objective details, conveying one corner of a nationwide complex of numerous social problems, whose popular view as being perpetually insoluble depends on the mistaken belief that they are unrelated, rather than interconnected problems--and hence of benefit to self-styled "stakeholder" interests: 

"Strong wills in straw houses"

I had a whole circuit of people that I knew and recognized . I could point out who was homeless, who was on a waiting list for housing, who had housing, and who had housing and fucked up and were homeless again. I could also tell you who went to which clinic. It was an unspoken thing between us; we were able to recognize one of our own, and we would guess who will end up in the hospital, and who would be next to lose their housing. We gossiped about what got who admitted last week, who just got out, and who is back again after only a week. ‘They’re doing really good now,’ is what we would say, when we knew that nothing was going to change. So many of us had accepted our fate, and there were plenty of people counting on that for profit. The only thing temporary about us was our housing situation.  

In addition to being a PoemAlley member, Cora has been active in the Green Party of Connecticut since 2012. One of the major accomplishments of her role as the State Coordinator for the 2016 presidential campaign of Dr. Jill Stein was organizing her appearance at the Old Town Hall in Stamford in July of that year, before an audience of approximately 150 people.

She has also served on various committees over the years, and is currently in her second term as Co-Chair of the Fairfield County Chapter and was recently elected as Co-Chair of the National Ballot Access Committee of the Green Party of the United States. Cora is also a Justice of the Peace in Stamford.

Confluencia is a literary confluence celebrating a wide range of voices, drawn from students, faculty and staff, community members, and award-winning writers, gathered twice a semester to share the experiences of different cultures via the written word.

This event is free to the public; refreshments will be served. RSVP encouraged.

Where:

Naugatuck Valley Community College

NVCC Danbury Campus

190 Main Street

Second Floor, D-203

Danbury, CT

When:

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

5:30-7:30pm

Contact:

203-575-8044

nv.edu/confluencia

Between Learning And The All-Knowing: Remembering Eva-Maria Palevich

Part of the PoemAlley family since its inception, Eva-Maria Palevich passed away March 3, 2018 at Brighton Gardens residence in Stamford in the presence of her husband Edward and daughter, Allegra. Recalls Ralph Nazareth upon hearing the sad news, “We (will) all remember her fondly—her seriousness, her playfulness, her pixie smile, her gentleness, her caring, her interest in poetry and its power to transform the world in deep and mysterious ways.”

One of Eva-Maria’s contributions to the first PA blog entry in 2009 captures wonderfully this combination of the mischievous and the numinous:

We can not Change the Cards we are Dealt

She keeps a message

on her computer screen

to be able to get through the day.

It reads:

We can not change the cards we are dealt,

Just how we play the hand.*

Poor thing, she feels so weary.


I emailed back:

“You know what I would do?

I’d quickly do some texting

to Him who did the dealing.

It would read:- ‘May I please

be Thy apprentice since I am learning,

and Thou are all knowing!’

Then I’d press send….”

EMP

* Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

As to her gentleness, Eva-Maria lent a tranquil, informed weight to her readings, as can be seen at 4:58 in this video condensation by Bill Buschel of the “Green Fuse” PoemAlley program held at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in May, 2010:

Born October 10, 1934 in Chemnitz, Germany, Eva-Maria grew up in Berlin, attending the Lette Verein, where she studied graphics and design and, in 1957, married Edward Palevich. Prior to settling in Greenwich in 1980, they lived in a variety of major cities over the years, from Cincinnati and London, to Dusseldorf and the Milan/Lake Como region of Italy.

Eva-Maria tutored German, was active in the Second Congregational Church in Greenwich and, in addition to her interlaced devotion to her family and writing, served as an invaluable member of the PoemAlley Advisory Committee for many years. Remembers Ann Yarmal, who co-founded the poetry group with Catherine Ednie in 2000, ““I knew and cared for Eva-Maria during the time we spent in the ‘90’s, and she is always special in my memory, as so Ed, who encouraged and supported her gifts and abilities.”

Condolence messages may be sent to Ed and Allegra at 59 Roxbury Road, Stamford, CT 06902.

A memorial service will be held this Saturday, March 24, 2018 at 11:00 a.m. at The Second Congregational Church in Greenwich, CT.