A Celebration, Two Homecomings And Two Guest Readings!

Welcoming Curley’s Diner co-owner/poet Eleni Begetis Anastos back from her family wedding in Greece tonight at PoemAlley is fellow Tuesday Night Live contributor Susan Cosette—herself returning to Stamford since moving out of state last year--and John Stanton, scuba diver/instructor, poet and novelist.

A former student of Marilyn Nelson at the University of Connecticut, Susan is a two-time winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and presently serves as Annual Fund and Communications Manager for the Minneapolis non-profit Way To Grow, devoted to closing the educational gap in the Twin Cities area, where she currently resides. 

Addressing a broad range of subjects, Susan wrote the piece below last February in response to Trump's prescription for school shootings, exhibiting a consistent combination of immediacy and emotional detail.

#Enough

I hid in a closet while my best friend was killed.

I texted my sister.

I love you. 

Tell Mom and Dad to get here, fast.

I don’t want to die.

Thirty of us in a closet,

Paper plates for fans.

This is not supposed to happen here.

The police came.

If you had a bag, you had to drop it in a pile.

Then, three questions—

Are you hurt?

Did you capture anything on phone or video?

Do know anything about the gunman?

After that they let us leave.

The guns have changed,

Our laws have not.

Your rights to own a gun—

All I hear is mine, mine, mine.

You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

A kid in a candy store of AK-15 blood.

I refuse to be the kid you read about in textbooks,

The statistic.

We don’t want your thoughts and prayers—

We want policy and change.

You, President,

I dare you.

Tell me to my face—

It was a terrible tragedy,

It should never have happened.

How much money did you get from the National Rifle Association?

You want to know something?

It doesn't matter, because I already know.

Thirty million dollars.

Divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States

In the one and one-half months in 2018 alone,

That’s $5,800.

Is that how much we are worth?

Shame on you.

There is no hashtag for our grief.

Click here for information on her recent collection, Peggy Sue Messed Up.  Susan’s latest  work can be found at www.musepalace.wordpress.com.

John Stanton’s 20 years working in the scuba industry has encompassed travel, teaching, diving under ice and into shipwrecks, as well as his first published article for a 1986 issue of Skin Diver. Besides subsequent work for technical manuals and other non-fiction, John also updated in 2008 A Jesuit In Belize, a family memoir by William Kane, first released in the 1920s, of Father William ‘Buck’ Stanton and his remarkable humanitarian experiences as teacher, scientist and explorer as a missionary in turn-of the-century Central America.

John’s own wont for relaxed, irreverent observations on random topics finds expression in poetry and rhyme in the collection Pooplets Of Truth (Stanton Lonestar Books, 2014) which, he assures, is “never vulgar or laced with subliminal messages from another dimension.” His 2010 performance of “3^rd Grade” at the Southern Playhouse, Minneapolis brings to mind both Jean Shepard and Lenny Bruce:  

His fiction manuscripts have made the quarter finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Of the Year and the semifinals in the Clive Cussler Society Adventure Writer Contest (named after the acclaimed author of Raise the Titanic!, Cyclops and many other titles featuring marine engineer/adventurer Dirk Pitt).

John’s own rollicking entry into the nautical/techno-thriller genre, The Lone Star Used Submarine Company (Gabriel's Horn Publishing, 2012) finds struggling commercial diver Buck Davies leading a makeshift crew in flight throughout the Caribbean in an old Soviet submarine, after he thwarted the corrupt Cuban official who attempted to swindle him in its sale. Bumbling from island to island, Buck and his friends encounter pirates, eccentric characters and romance while eluding the navies of the world.

In his other novel, a toilet paper salesman, a dominatrix and a general share center stage with Cassandra Vega, the traumatized heroine of The Truth About UFOs, Aliens and All That, (Gabriel's Horn, 2009) when humanity’s collective expectations about the existence and character of flying saucer aliens somehow wills the little guys into existence—and no one knows what their plans are.

Learn more about all of John’s projects, including the forthcoming, Imagine Somewhere Else (not to mention what is his favorite book, preferred liquor and most memorable shark encounter) at www.johnstantonbooks.com.

Singing About The Dark Times—Now And Then

In association with the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, PoemAlley celebrates the release of Tuesday Night Live (Turn of River Press, 2018) this Saturday afternoon in downtown Stamford.

Ralph Nazareth and Eleni Anastos Begetis

Hoby Rosen and Alex McDonald

The fourth in a series of PA member anthologies edited by group facilitator Ralph Nazareth, Tuesday Night will be dramatized with a series of live readings by numerous contributors both local and from the tri-state area, such as Rona Schenkerman, Cora Santaguida and Eleni Begetis Anastos, who, as co-owner of Curley’s Diner, has generously provided a regular weekly home for this uniquely dynamic gathering of poets, essayists, musicians and other artists since PoemAlley’s founding by Ann Yarmal and Catherine Ednie in the late 1990s. Over this span, the group has grown, not just in attendance, but in warmth, interchange and community, notably embodied by many departed members over the years, including Herb Davison, Alex McDonald, Hoby Rosen, Eddie Smith, Diva, and, most recently, Eva-Maria Palevich.

From 9/11, perpetual global wars, erosion of civil liberties, to the current nadir of what seems to be a comprehensively regressive time, Tuesday nights at Curley’s Diner endures as an irrepressible haven for open thought, singing and joy.

While you can scroll to the bottom of this post for further details, this is also a good time to catch up on other books produced by individual PA members over the last few years:    

Former Fairfield County resident Susan Cossette Eng’s Peggy Sue Messed Up (CreateSpace, 2017) applies the home-base theme of growing up female in a bastion of suburban conformity as a launch pad for weighing the ethics of the Atomic Age, confronting the consequences of poverty and inequality and highlighting Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to cringe before Beltway patriarchy in defense of reproductive rights, among other affecting, timely topics. Below is a video collage version of “Struldbrug at the Wine Bar” (her musings on European musical culture),  one of several engaging adaptations of her pieces posted on her Youtube channel: 

Now residing out-of-state, Susan collaborated frequently with fellow PA member Neddy Smith, a Norwalk-based musician, who has played both solo and with bands live and in the recording studio in Jazz, Funk, Brazilian, Caribbean and other genres. His positive zeal for music both as performer and as enthusiastic educator has been extended to fiction with the publication last year of Valerie Palmary: A Small-Town Girl (NedGJean Publishing, 2017). A novel of creative and entrepreneurial self-discovery in the aftermath of family tragedy, Neddy regards it as a prose vehicle to further his own and his company, NedGJean International's, commitment to "help guide young writers to follow their dreams with a passion for producing projects and (making their) dreams become a reality." He maintains a  blog called "Words and Music".

One of the earliest contributors to this blog, Enzo Malaglisi published Castelforte, his first collection, in 2017 (Xlibris), showcasing a powerful body of work dealing with desperation, love, fear, the irresistible comfort of needing things, as well as more large-scale subjects like freedom and justice—all unified by the theme of redemption. Click here to read his remarkable “At the Mercy Of a Higher Hand” from 2011.

Saturday’s Tuesday Night Live launch party is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served (and bring your lungs, too, as there will be singing).

When:
3-6 pm
Saturday
October 20, 2018

Where:
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
20 Forest Street
Stamford, CT 06901

Contact:
Ralph Nazareth
203-570-2168

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