Because WE Are Poems: Esther Cohen At Open Mic

After two years, cultural activist, poet/novelist and teacher, Esther Cohen comes back to the Stamford area this Monday night at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic to offer poetry writing instruction (no fair leaving your pen at home!) and share from Breakfast With Allen Ginsberg (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2016), her newest collection of fifty pieces, spanning writing, family, friends and life from the Catskills to the Big Apple.

For a preview, enjoy “Dear Everyone”, Esther’s contribution to Alimentum's Menupoems 2010 program, performed at Tout Va Bien in New York, sponsored by the online journal of gastronomical literature:

From humorous fiction, like 2006’s Book Doctor (Counterpoint) and the relatable warmth of God Is a Tree and Other Middle-Age Poems (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2008), to the dignity of her innovative photo essay book of blue collar life, unseenamerica (Regan Books, 2005), Esther demonstrates an artful thirst for melding the personal and social dimensions with a fuller appreciation of workers and what they contribute (click here to see a 2011 interview with journalist Sheryl McCarthy on CUNY TV’s One to One, where Esther talks of her work with the Bread & Roses Cultural Project, Local 1199, from where unseenamerica grew).

Her September 5 entry from her poem-a-day site (www.esthercohen.com), “Labor Days is a We Poem” captures this synthesis through a series of vignettes bearing the invisible grace and daisy chain-like interconnectedness that forms the unsung, yet indispensable contributions that at all levels make society worthwhile for everyone—as opposed to defining its value based on the actions of an over-promoted few. Lyricist/drummer Neil Peart’s “Nobody’s Hero”, performed by Rush, dramatizes the cheapening distraction of celebrity fixation at the cost of acknowledging real-world nobility to be found around every corner:

Hosted by Frank Chambers, 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 Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

The Artful Souls To Everyone

Presenting an original hodgepodge of creative wistfulness, humor and social inclusivity, this Tuesday’s featured PoemAlley reader, novelist/poet Esther Cohen hails from Manhattan, where she serves as Executive Director of Bread & Roses, the cultural arm of 1199/SEIU, New York’s health care union.

Esther is the author of two novels, No Charge for Looking (Schocken), a 1988 distillation of her obsession with Jews, Arabs and the city of Nazareth “and a naive American woman trying hard to understand what she sees” and Book Doctor (Counterpoint, 2005), a hilarious but tender swirl of romance, creative aspiration-channeled-through revenge, and writer’s block revolving around the conflicted life of Arlette Rosen, the titular manuscript consultant.

Two titles from 2008, God Is a Tree and Other Middle-Aged Prayers (Pleasure Boat Studio) and Don't Mind Me: And Other Jewish Lies (Hyperion), display her humor in non-narrative format, the first, a collection of poetry, the second, “the complex, but all too familiar, language of the Artful Untruth”, illustrated with New Yorker panache by Roz Chast.

Growing out of her work at Bread & Roses, Esther also edited Unseenamerica: Photos and Stories by Workers (Regan Books, 2006), based on a Pure Visionary Award-winning photography program she created wherein thousands holding assorted blue collar jobs were taught how to document in black-and-white images the poignancy and  joys of their lives, as well as--to quote program participant Sam Contreras, a building maintenance worker--the “artful souls to everyone.”

In fact, her simple response to this excerpt from “For Memory” from Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 says everything about Esther’s fervent humanism:

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds.

           

To which, Esther says, “Ditto!”

Mentioning on her website (http://esthercohen.com/) how Book Doctor “took years to write”, Esther’s dedication to the shaping of self-definition through self-expression (for her, the mystery road of the writing process and who she meets along the way), rather than through practical vocation, alone, finds sympathy in the character of Jack Bellicec, a poet frustrated by the gimmicky expectations of the “Me” Generation, played by Jeff Goldblum in Philip Kaufman’s claustrophobic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978):

In inventive opposition to the small-town intimacy of Donald Siegel’s 1956 original film (click here for more about the germinal Jack Finney novel), the setting is now switched to frenetic, jumbled San Francisco, where the price of taking for granted the seemingly autonomic urban conveniences and services provided through the work of semi-ignored cabbies, garbage collectors, telephone linemen and other stewards of the cityscape who seem to have stepped right out of Unseenamerica, is an inhuman automatonicism threatening to engulf all our lives.









You can contact Esther Cohen at bookdoctor@rcn.com.