Duane Esposito & Ralph Nazareth: Friendship and Individuality In Defiance Of Time

Building on the their experience as co-presenters at last December’s “Poetry In Conversation” program at the Norwalk Library, this evening friends and academic colleagues Duane Esposito and Ralph Nazareth will be reading from their new collection, Dropping Death (Yuganta Press, 2018) at the Stamford Barnes & Noble bookstore this evening. 

Martin Buber (1878-1965)

Duane Esposito

In his write-up for the Colorado Review, poet Tim Wood draws particular attention to Dropping as a successful effort in its atypical commitment to honoring both, rather than suffusing either, contributors’ creative voices, such that “the point is… to bring them into orbit around one another. "

Ralph Nazareth

Among other interpretive lenses Wood applies in his examination is existentialist Martin Buber’s “I-Thou/I-It” dialectic in laying out how Duane and Ralph’s collaboration ties their friendship with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of that fundament of sapience, our sense of Self--and, by contrast, expressions of Otherness, be it in meeting a new neighbor, encountering different cultures, Death, or, in the sample below by Duane, the priorities of childhood: 

head inside to things

nearby—
the toys

& crumbs & crafts

& such—
& I

lie beside it all—
rub my kids’ bellies—

tell them the story

Duane Esposito is a Professor of English at Nassau Community College, (from where Ralph recently retired). Duane holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and has placed work in dozens of journals. Prior to Dropping Death, he has published three collections, including Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005) and Declaration for Your Bones (Yuganta, 2012). He also resides on Long Island with his family on Lopsided Farm.

Ralph has released several collections, and is a dedicated poet, publisher and teacher who has worked in academic, penal and community settings--including the Tuesday night PoemAlley group based in Stamford’s Curley’s Diner. His book Ferrying Secrets was originally released by Yugadi Publishers, Hyderabad, India in 2005 and is available through Ralph's Yuganta Press. Last year’s Between Us the Long Road was published through Owl Feather Collective as a fundraiser for GraceWorks, Inc., the international non-profit foundation Ralph manages (find out more here).

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the music/DVD section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06906

203-323-1248

"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.

___

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.

A Dalliance That Transforms God

Who we are, where we are going and how love, pain and the weight of experience determine why these questions matter to us are some of the themes constellated in the compact, yet uncommonly forthright work of Duane Esposito, tonight’s Barnes & Noble Open Mic featured poet.

A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee (2003 and 2009), Duane will read selections from Declaration of Your Bones, his latest collection (Yuganta Press, 2012), following up on Cadillac Battleship, published by Broken Tribe Press in 2005. Duane released his first poetry collection, Book of Bubba, through Brown Dog Press in 1998.

Along with PoemAlley facilitator, Ralph Nazareth, Duane teaches at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, where he is an Associate Professor of English. He holds an MA from SUNY Brockport and received an MFA from the University of Arizona. His writing was also selected by Diane Glancy for an Academy of American Poets Award in 1994.

For more information—and to get a feel for his sonorous reading style, click BlogTalkRadio for a 2009 interview with Marcia McNair, or check out the entry covering his previous area appearance at PoemAlley just over a year ago.

The following piece evokes the commonplace with the cosmogonic to pit mortality, regret and other undeniable realities against the still-more-undeniable need to confront, adapt, or move on. 

The Loons
by Duane Esposito

1
The rain falls steadily inside your head.
You will die quite cloistered by autistic music.

The leaves these days
drift toward home.

If you fail to fly, 
they will murder your psyche.

Do you know dalliance
transforms God into a spook? 

2
To close the distance between vast shores, 
I cease being tired of memory.

To no longer chew the bruises of history, 
I speak for the constancy of love.

To no longer wonder 
what it means to be alive,

I refuse to be dragged 
through infantile desires.

Here’s the terror I’ve had to bury: 
you left me with a paralyzed, half-body.

I announce my obsession with rain.
I’m sorry for the stardust that led to creation. 

3
Sometimes, when clouds 
touch water, you’ll soon arrive.

I reach for you-- my gone father-- 
for the blank you left behind.

But loons, once in the whitecaps of pain, 
have left these lakes for winter.

In dream they sleep near my head
& twitch against my neck.

Keep up with Duane online at www.duaneesposito.com.

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

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.