Looking Back To Look Forward With Van Hartmann

Dr. Van Hartmann, tomorrow night’s featured poet at Curley’s, has placed work in numerous literary journals and has released two books through Texture Press: the redemption-themed collection Shiva Dancing (2007) and Riptide, as well as Between What Is and What Is Not, a chapbook published in 2010 by The Last Automat Press. 

In his most recent title, Riptide (released in 2016), Van uses natural imagery to explore the ambiguity embodied in human affairs both on the intimate and the global scale, typified, according to Sheila Squillante (Editor-in-Chief, The Fourth River literary journal), in Van’s contrast between “a batch of succulent fiddleheads plucked from the forest and offered to a lover” and “an atom bomb test that blooms like a chrysanthemum against a childhood sky”. Click here for a preview of two pieces from this collection.

John Hoppenthaler’s (Domestic Garden) praise of Van’s sensually adroit and often elegiac work in its ability to “look back to look forward” is echoed in Van’s own observations in the 2016 interview on Life Edge 030 in affirmation of reading and literature as enduring guides to truth and what it means to be human in a time warped as much by competing political solipsistic outlooks as by a fast-paced culture with little patience for introspection: 

Originally interested in studying medicine (where he found the art of storytelling was considered part of an engaged physician's repertoire), Van gravitated toward English at the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D., following an A.B in History from Stanford. Currently, he teaches literature, film studies and conducts poetry workshops at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

He resides in Norwalk, Connecticut with his wife, Laurel Peterson, Poet Laureate of Norwalk (who has organized readings at Norwalk Community College, where she is Professor of English) and their yellow lab, Calder, who revels in whimsy, patience, and persistence. Van can be contacted at Van.Hartmann@mville.edu or at van.hartmann@gmail.com.

"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.