Tomorrow night's Open Mic speaker is
Kaaren Whitney, a UK-based homeopath, who returns this month each year to the
Connecticut from which she originally hails, sharing her most recent poetry and
observations on the alternating tensions and acts of tenderness defining our
associations with one another and the natural world.
Protected behind the furious media competition
as to whether the terminal degradation of the biosphere will be irreversible in
some twelve years, can be technologically remediated in thirty, is irreversible
right now (or is even happening at all), lies a seemingly collective,
half-conscious unwillingness to acknowledge the only fruitful responses that
are as time-tested as they are unavoidable to any outcome—adaptation and
reciprocity.
Kaaren's 2016 collaboration with
photographer Jim Nind, The Turning Of the Year: A Book for 8 Seasons
(Solstice-Equinox Press), marking the annual
times honoring celestial shifts and ancient celebrations, is part of an ouvre which serenely,
yet firmly draws attention to the interplay between these neglected
perspectives and the dominant ones of obsessive appropriation and indifference.
This weekend’s Typhoon Hagibis striking
Japan is just the latest consequence of this current disregard for the
wilderness beyond a collective solipsistic idea of a worthwhile reality, having
struck Fukushima Prefecture--site of the world's largest ongoing
nuclear disaster, which has been killing life in the Pacific for eight years.
Complementing her homeopathic
practice in Suffolk, Kaaren has also constructed her
own Labyrinth and walks this as a form of meditation, enhancing what she brings
to several ritual groups. In
addition to taking part in three area poetry groups, Karen has appeared at the
Halesworth Fringe Festival and has participated in poetry events as far as
Australia.
Catch up on some of her past appearances in Stamford here, here and here.
Catch up on some of her past appearances in Stamford here, here and here.
Hosted
by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble Open Mic meets the second Monday, each
month in the movie/music section on the main floor of the Stamford bookstore at
7:15 pm. For more information and directions, contact:
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place, Suite
H009
Stamford, Ct 06901
203-323-1248
