"In The Land Of the (Willfully) Blind": Poets In Conversation With Ralph Nazareth And Duane Esposito

Ralph Nazareth

Duane Esposito

In addition to reading their own work, Ralph Nazareth and Duane Esposito, Thursday night's guests of the Norwalk Poet Laureate’s Poets In Conversation series, will also discuss favorite subjects, respective approaches to the craft and their ideas as to its purpose and necessity—especially in today’s unsettling times.

Ralph’s 2017 follow-up to 2005’s Ferrying Secrets, Between Us the Long Road (released by Owlfeather Collective as a fundraising vehicle for a non-profit he co-founded [see below]), while featuring pieces of phantasmagoric satire, outrage, desire, mourning and more penned before the current administration, nevertheless maintains a well-timed propulsive inevitability in its critique of everything from the simplistic allure of parochial political thinking (“Oil Change”), intercultural contact/assimilation (“The Song Of the Plumber”) and unexpected exultation and hope (“The Eyes Of Gaza").

In particular, the Ozymandean spectre of unconscionable destruction (“The Long Oar”) versus the sensitive demands of the child (“Listening To the Radio On the Way To the Nursery”, "After Night Prayers"), whose logic we dismiss for some mad definition of the “practical”, challenges the reader to consider just who the real grown-up is.

The urgency of this juxtaposition is matched with uncomfortable fidelity by Rush’s authoritative performance of their thirty-three-year-old song “Distant Early Warning”, released at the height of the last period of threatened nuclear conflagration:

Duane’s own writing wrestles on similar ground to his friend Ralph’s (especially as to the ultimate indifference of time and Nature to our comparatively ephemeral concerns), constellating about suffering, the burden of knowing (both for the individual and the society) and, as the following video of his “In the Whitecaps Of Pain” suggests, the alienation associated with both:

A professor of English at Nassau Community College, from where Ralph retired in the same capacity, Duane spoke at Curley’s Diner in 2012 and has appeared in numerous literary publications. He has three collections, including Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005) and Declaration For Your Bones (Yuganta, 2012). A Long Island resident, he received an MFA from the University of Arizona; in 1994 his writing was selected by Diane Glancy for an Academy of American Poets Award. You can find out about Duane’s latest writing and appearances on Facebook here.

When:
Thursday, December 7, 2017
7-8:15 pm

Where:
Norwalk Public Library
(Main Library Reading Area)

1 Belden Avenue

Norwalk, CT 06850

Contact:
Cynde Bloom Lahey
Director of Library Information Services
203-899-2780

Poets In Conversation is a free program of the Norwalk Public Library, organized by Pushcart Prize-nominated Laurel Peterson, Norwalk Poet Laureate; learn more about the participants and the series by contacting Laurel directly at laurelpeterson@att.net.

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Proceeds from the sale of each copy of Between Us the Long Road will be donated to GraceWorks International, a charitable organization based in India, co-founded by Ralph (a Mangalore native), providing humanitarian outreach to countries in the developing world. Structured on a less intermediated basis than most other non-profits, 100 percent of donations go directly to people in need.

Direction For A Wind That Has Nowhere To Go

Declaration For Your Bones, the latest release from Yuganta Press, collects the poetry of Duane Esposito, wherein he shares decades of grappling with loss, memory, grief and mortality, both as personal and unavoidable universal experiences.

In a culture often all-but-frantic in its dedication to keeping pain at bay, Duane's guest reading of poetry from Declaration, held at Curley's earlier this month--and the discussion it inspired, proved an uncompromising reminder that the things that happen to each of us over the course of our lives, for better or for worse, become an indelible part of us, no matter what we might have in mind. In particular, the introductory correspondence between Yuganta publisher (and academic colleague) Ralph Nazareth and the poet, which led up to this collection, speaks to the honesty and searching courage of Duane's observations.

You can watch Duane reading "Here Are The Days", "Spring" and three other pieces below:

One of the scheduled participants in next month's "Mysteries of Light" reading at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford (see Upcoming Events on the left), Duane Esposito is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York and holds an MA from SUNY Brockport, as well as an MFA from the University of Arizona. Duane's writing was selected in 1994 by Diane Glancy for an Academy of American Poets Award and twice earned him a nomination for a Pushcart Prize (2003, 2009). Besides Declaration, Duane has published two other collections: The Book of Bubba (Brown Dog Press,1998) and Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005).

Find Duane is in conversation with three other poets on Bill Buschel's Just My Eyes blog here, or comment on his work and contact Duane directly on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/duane.esposito.