"Because Loneliness Is Quiet": An Evening With Pat Mottola At Barnes & Noble's Open Mic

As tomorrow night’s featured poet at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program, Pat Mottola will read selections from her first collection, Under a Red Dress (Five Oaks Press, 2016), demonstrating how the title’s diaphanous image is used to unify musings on human sensuality and connection, consolation and longing, expressed through the varied portraits of people, times and artifacts, from struggling veterans and temptresses, to old family photos and her immediate family, such as her mother, who never “caught up to Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan”.

 

Beyond inter-generational experience, though, Wally Swist (Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love) characterizes the work of the Puscart Prize nominee as mining “a millennial loneliness that can be as sexy as a red dress.”

The universal, often repressed tension of relationships buoyed or pushed down by external expectations and circumstance is insightfully enlivened in her Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize-winning ekphrastic piece, inspired by the Edward Hopper oil painting of the same name. 

Room in New York, 1932
            –after Edward Hopper
 
See for yourself––look through the open window.
Come closer, as if you were invited. My husband
buries his head in the newspaper. Tell him I’m here,
I wear the red dress because loneliness is quiet.

If nothing else, the room is honest. Between us,
only the bare wooden table. And the door. Outside,
the ledge and window meet, greet you like a black-edged
announcement. I turn away, one finger poised

on the keys of the piano, threaten to break the silence
that fills the room. I could reach for the door.
Instead I face away, as if I am not looking
for a way out, as if you couldn’t imagine my story.

You can also click here for writer/director John Kaiser’s own brief film interpretation of the same vignette, starring Anna Rosselli and Jason Heil.

Pat teaches Creative Writing at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received both an M.S. in Art Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Besides her work with SCSU students, she is thrilled to teach both art and poetry to senior citizens throughout the state and is especially proud of her most recent undertaking, mentoring Afghan women through the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. 

 She has placed work in numerous journals including War, Literature & the Arts, VietNow Magazine, Paterson Literary Review and the San Pedro River Review, whose co-editor, Jeffrey Alfier, admires her poetry as “sweeping, heartfelt, and skillfully rendered”. 

 

Besides her roles as co-president of the Connecticut Poetry Society and co-editor of Connecticut River Review, Pat’s love and advocacy of the form is well-represented not only by her serving as keynote speaker for the IMPAC-Young Writers Award and study with major poets from across the country, but also via such playful engagement via a website quiz inviting visitors to match photos of acclaimed poets with particular quotes. 

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.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06906

203-323-1248

When Reality Gets Tossed, Like A Salad

Tonight’s featured poet at Curley’s Diner was initially drawn to the form by no less than Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes), his English teacher while attending New York City’s Stuyvesant High School. Neil Silberblatt began penning his own work while at Cornell University.

In addition to his writing, Neil is very active in organizing Voices of Poetry, a traveling venue for prominent poets and musicians, held at The Sherman Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), the New Britain Museum of American Art and other locations around Connecticut.

Most recently, Neil has placed two pieces in last October’s “It’s Political” issue of the literary publication Verse Wisconsin. So Far, So Good (Lulu), his 2012 collection, is prized by fellow poet and Voices participant, Joan Kantor, for its blend of “… honesty and accessibility” with humor and elegant word-choice.   

Madison Avenue (part of his New York Suite), Grand Prize Winner in the Open Community Poetry Contest sponsored by Hennen's Observer (which also nominated the poet for a Pushcart Prize), conveys with sparse power how standard mandates of self-worth, opportunity and integrity get twisted out of all meaning on the altar of globalized consumerism:

MADISON AVENUE

At the Viand Coffee Shop...

on Madison Avenue

          which must not be confused

          with the Viand on East 86^th

          or the Viand on Broadway

come the young ladies fresh from

their visit to the Met

or, if they dare, the Whitney

         because one can only

          take so many Rothkos

          or Van Goghs

          in a morning

wearing their

dazzling tennis whites

which have never seen,

and will never see,

a ground stroke,

as they pick apart their

salads

and each other.

Now enter

the ladies

bearing handbags

with names

like children,

     the real thing

     of course,

     no knock offs here

as they survey the

dieter’s special

and eye the desserts

cordoned off

behind the counter.

Their conversations hushed

as they spread

butter

and gossip.

Two blocks away

from the Viand Coffee Shop

on Madison Avenue

     which must not be confused

     with the Viand on East 86^th

     or the Viand on Broadway

stands a refugee

from Senegal

as black as the plum

into which she bites,

its juices dripping

down the side of her hand,

as she quickly sets up

her display of

counterfeit handbags

on the street-corner.

 

She is

real;

the plum is

real;

the bags –

     as she will quietly tell you

     in her rich Senegalese accent,

     with her breath scented by plum -

are beautiful,

but fake.

  

Neil has a second collection of poems, tentatively titled Present Tense, due for release later this year.