Where Meaning Is Secured: An Evening With William Hayden, Poet Laureate Of Norwalk

Join the song, music and poetry tomorrow night at Curley's to celebrate the naming of PA's own William Hayden as Norwalk's new Poet Laureate, succeeding Norwalk Community College English professor Laurel S. Peterson.

The new appointment was announced at the city's Annual Lit Crawl event, organized by the Norwalk Public Library. As a poet, singer/songwriter, Bill intends to complement the writer lectures and other programs created by Laurel with new poet talks and discussions, as well as ekphrastic poetry events--in response both to Bill's own enthusiasm for the visual arts and the growing gallery and entertainment scene in the community he has called home since 1970. “It seems like there’s a move toward artistic and cultural energy in town,” he said in a recent piece by Rachel Baron on nancyonnorwalk.com.

Acclaimed for The Good Folk Coffeehouse, the folk music venue he and his wife Brandi have run for the past 28 years in Rowayton, Bill is also active in Monday Expressions East at New Haven's Neverending Books and the Poetry Salon at the Fairfield Public Library.

Pete & Maura Kennedy will perform at
Good Folk Coffeehouse in September

A voracious reader (typically borrowing a dozen library titles at a time), Bill first developed a fascination for words through stabs at writing nature poetry while working as a lifeguard in his teens, maturing through his years in the international shipping industry, up to his latest contributions to 2018's Oysterville (Woodhall Press LLP), a digital recording and chapbook of Norwalk poets edited by Laurel, and the new PoemAlley anthology, Tuesday Night Live (Yuganta Press, 2018), edited by Ralph Nazareth and Catherine Ednie.

The piece below encapsulates the sort of thrill of promise and possibility implicit in every blank page, which Bill hopes to convey in his new role:

Writing

a clean sheet, don't you know?
the lines upon that knowing
stretch, with a tautness
seldom thought about

a burst awaits, black torrential
forms, flowing secretly
the deeper the point plunges
the more meaning is secured
not at each end, but in between
where the images grow
to new blossomed freshness

each starlight, poetic power
increases twenty fold
each other leaf's
a turning frame (to be)
setting, like a jeweler
in his way

You can keep up with Bill's musical and writing activites through his Facebook page.