When The Big Sad Wins

Susan Cossette-Eng (center), Development
Director, Voices of September 11^th and Found-
ing Director Mary Fetchet and Frank Fetchet

Returning to the Stamford poetry scene since her last appearance at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program in 2012, New Canaan resident Susan Cosette-Eng will read both favorites and new material at Curley’s this Tuesday evening, including selections from Peggy Sue Messed Up, her new collection currently being shopped around to publishers (click here to read the titular piece).

Known for her semi-satirical, feminist forays into the confounding conformity of growing up in the staid, “privilege prisons” of such affluent enclaves as her own Darien, Susan (who names Sylvia Path, T.S. Eliot, Constantine Cavafy and The Beatles among her many creative influences) posts the full range of her work through her blog, MusePalace, including this empathetic tribute to beloved comedian/actor Robin Williams, who committed suicide last summer after a lifetime struggling with depression:

God’s Comic

\ -for Robin Williams

These are the days.

The big sad rolls in,

With the moon’s mud tide.

Thick fog –

Choking, rising

In a strangling surge.

If I could wish you up

Out–

I would.

If I could

Save you—

I would take you with me.

To Paris, or someplace lovely.

******

These are the days,

I am reminded over tea

How we are perceived–

Rays of light,

Bits of sunshine.

Friends

Lovers

Mentors

While we fight

The dark inside, and no one no knows.

You stood on your head,

Made me laugh–

What happens,

When the big sad wins?

There is no halftime show.

August 15, 2014 by musepalace

Susan also deals professionally with the pressures of upholding an external façade of normalcy while dealing with  protracted internal pain on a more public level in her new capacity as Development Director for Voices of September 11^th, a New Canaan-based non-profit whose services span mental health, community resiliency/preparedness and long-term support for survivors, victims’ loved ones and first responders impacted by 9/11, the Virginia-Tech massacre and other episodes of domestic mass violence and terrorism.

Coming to her new role from the New Canaan YMCA, where she last served as director of development, Susan has personal ties to the collapse of the Twin Towers, having lost a former co-worker in New York, around the time she started with the Y as Director of Marketing and Communications. Find out more about Voices and its latest work at www.Voicesofseptember11.org.

A graduate of UConn at Storrs, Susan is a recipient of the university’s Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry in 1985 and 1986. You can read more about her background at AuthorsDen. 

Cutting Out To Cut A Rug of One’s Own

Following-up on her December appearance, Susan Cossette-Eng will be sharing work this evening at Barnes and Noble's Open Mic in Stamford from Peggy Sue Messed Up… and other poems, her latest chapbook coming out this fall.

As the eponymous sample below conveys, Susan’s writing often invokes a self-determinate rebuke of the frustrations of love, rejection, loss, as well as middle-age, borne of the denaturing demands—especially upon women--of growing up in the upscale suburban environment of her native Darien, where, appropriately enough, much of the original Stepford Wives was filmed in 1975 (see the movie trailer at the end of this entry).

Deemed lacking in sufficient “Stepfordosity” to play an extra even in the more tongue-in-cheek Nicole Kidman remake shot in New Canaan nearly thirty years later, Susan currently works in town as a fundraiser. 

Peggy Sue Messed Up

Maybe it was the crinolines…

Which itched.

I dunno.

Or the unrealistic expectations of perfection—

The ideal girl, with her Aquanet curls.

I gave up.                                 

I ditched the dance,

Dumped the dude in the sharkskin suit—

with his flask in the ass pocket,

his whiskey breath and mindless promises

and his cock

pressed against me during the cha cha cha.

I gave up.

Took my yellow Edsel ,

Golden chariot–

drove clear cross town

To the bluffs of Ithaka,

 overlooking the crashing sea

The glittering lights

From the heights

Of the world before me—

The prom queen is complete.

She is done.

You, Neptune, take my tiara.

I never wanted it.

I give up.

Susan is a two-time recipient of University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry (where she earned her MA in English studying with James Scully) and has done post-graduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Besides Scully, some of her major writing influences include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Constantine Cavafy. Keep up with her writing and thoughts at her blog, MusePalace.     

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cooking section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

Setting Fire To The White Picket Fences Of An Imaginary Nation

Raised in Darien, CT, Susan Cossette-Eng, tonight’s featured Open Mic poet, writes frequently in rebellious defense of genuine relationships, love and the sanctity of just plain individual humanity (especially relating to women) against the Plasticville artifice and faux freedom of the American suburban ideal that keeps us from effective engagement with the larger world.

Here is a sample from last October:

A scene from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives 

(1975), shot in Darien’s Goodwives’ Shopping Center

unhinged

Unhinged, unglued,
unspeakable

this is nothing new–

These doors wide open,
window screens torn
white picket fence, now kindling–

My new normal is born.

Unusual,
Unreal,
Unstoppable

The train on its tracks–

tilt-shifted photo of an actual tract housing develop-
ment betrays the toy-like unreality of suburban life 

Racing toward nothing,
an unnamed station
in an imaginary nation

There’s no turning back.

Such sparse eloquence is currently being collected in Life: Version 2.1, a forthcoming chapbook and can also be enjoyed at “MusePalace”, Susan’s blog of her latest poetry, ruminations and links to the writing of others addressing consonant themes, like Denise Duhamel’s “Kinky”  (a piece that translates the stylized imagery of the iconic Barbie and Ken dolls into the realm of flesh-and-blood eroticism) and the ouvre of James Scully, the acclaimed poet with whom she studied (along with Marilyn Nelson Wamiek).

book accessory for 1965 Slumber Party Barbie

A graduate with an M.A. in English from UConn-Storrs, Susan is a two-time recipient of the university’s Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry and has also done post-graduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center.   

Find out more about Susan at AuthorsDen.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the 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 Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

Though dated, the following music video to Rush’s “Subdivisions” expresses the suffocating alienation still peculiar to growing up in today’s built-up “apocalypse”:

_____
Of related interest:

Books

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz (Basic Books, 2000)

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck (North Point Press, 2010) 

Class:a Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (Touchstone, 1994)

The Fifties: a Women’s Oral History, Brett Harvey (HarperCollins, 1993)

Too Much Magic: WishfulThinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012)

Online

“Is Barbie Based On a German Sex Doll?”, Adja’s Blog, June 2011

"'Don't eat!': Controversial 1965 Slumber PartyBarbie came with scales permanently set to just 110lbs and 1a diet book tellingher not to eat", Martha De Lacey, Daily Mail, November 2012