The Season Asks “Joy, First”

Partake of words, food and entertainment at Holiday Cheer at Mapleview Towers, a festive afternoon gathering organized by regular PoemAlley contributor Jane Wickham, to be held this Saturday in Mapleview's Community Room for residents of the Stamford apartment complex.

Eleni Begetis Anastos

Open to area poets and members of Tuesdays at Curley’s (hosted by Curley’s Diner co-owner and poet Elena Begetis Anastos), Saturday’s celebration of seasonal hope, fellowship and spoken art encourages all to share a favorite short piece (to be read by someone else, if preferred) in an atmosphere accented by refreshments, live music provided by PA members, as well as movie screenings spanning the Transcendental and Beat periods, including 1978's Emily Dickinson: "A Certain Slant of Light" (check out the poet's moody winter meditation "There's a Certain Slant of Light" here), featuring Julie Harris, and the 2006 documentary, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg.

Newly-discovered, this 1860 daguerreo-
type is purportedly only the second photo of
Dickinson (to left, with friend Kate Scott
Turner) found

Here’s a portion of Harris’ brilliant take on the private 19^th century poet from 1976's The Belle of Amherst...

... and here's the trailer for the Ginsberg film by Jerry Aronson, with commentary by Joan Baez, William F. Buckley, Ken Kesey and others:

New to Ginsberg? This deliriously animated version of "Howl" (created as part of the eponymously-titled 2010 film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman) demonstrates the enduring socio/political impact of his work, fifty-seven years after its first controversial publication:

When:

Saturday, December 14, 2013

3-6 PM

Where:

Mapleview Towers

Community Room

51 Grove Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Contact:

Jane Wickham, 203-274-5474    

Breaking The Silence

Join members of PoemAlley tomorrow morning for the annual summer poetry service held in the Sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford, located downtown directly across from the Avon Theatre on Bedford Street.

   Breaking the Silence, this year’s theme, includes Agnes Roberts, Ralph Nazareth, Richard Duffee and several other PA members exercising the imperative of the poet to speak out against suffering or run the risk of being complicit with the forces of oppression, whatever they may be. While poetry has many faces and serves various needs, in this reading it will mostly present itself as an instrument for living meaningfully in these dark times.

Refreshments will be served in the Social Room following the service. Housed in a 142-year-old church, the UUSIS is the parent organization of PoemAlley. You can learn more about it under "Associated Links" to the left.

When:

Sunday, August 25, 2012

10-11am

Where:

20 Forest Street,

Stamford, CT 06901

(free parking available in the municipal lot across the Forest Street entrance)

Phone/Email:

203-348-0708

admin@uusis.org

Managing Coolness And The Echoes Of Old Applause

For followers of Connecticut Public Radio or Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe, listeners to the Thursday, May 31 broadcast of his self-titled program were treated to guest co-host PoemAlley’s Ralph Nazareth as part of the CMS 2012 Poetry Show (click here to listen to it in the CPR archives).

Reading from his 2005 collection Ferrying Secrets, Ralph and Colin touched on everything from the tempting possibilities of Homeland Security’s new list of terrorist watch words and Connecticut's leading poetry events, to the ties between creativity and mortality and the re-emergence of poetry’s relevance since the late 1980s.

So wide in his appeal that even farmers would stop working their fields to gather and listen to Pablo Neruda read, Ralph observed how poetry, once consigned to the static critiques of academia, is "changing lives” anew by addressing social issues via slams, multimedia performances and other dramatic outlets.

As PoemAlley moderator for many years, Ralph talked of witnessing how the form’s inviting capacity for personal expression has blossomed into a renewed yearning for exercising one’s voice both for oneself and on behalf of those who have none (not to mention the spontaneous capacity to do so through the compositional capabilities afforded by cell phone technology).

Nick Flynn

Richard Wilbur

Calling into the show from near the end and the prime of their respective careers, guest poets Richard Wilbur and popular memoirist Nick Flynn shared their complementary drives as students, readers, writers and performers.


First published in 1947, Wilbur as poet (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems; Things of This World, 1956), children’s book author, prolific translator and collection editor, could not overemphasize the power of outspoken, unabashed delivery, reminding writers that “poetry began as song.” Perhaps a natural sensitivity, given the National Book and T.S. Eliot Awards-winner's work as French translator and librettist on the Leonard Bernstein 1963 musical production of Tartuffe, which yielded numerous actors’ interpretations of his interpretation of Moliere’s comedy--an experience he found uniformly enjoyable, as opposed to the translation process, which Richard found both “slavish and lively”. For a taste of the Nobel Laureate’s own work, enjoy Wilbur’s reading from the 1994 Riverwood Poetry Festival:

Part of a generation of longer-lived writers like the recently-passed Adrienne Rich, Wilbur, now 91, is philosophical about his remaining output, referring to his latest collection, Anterooms (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and his June 2 appearance at this summer’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival probably his last. Wilbur prefers to pull back before giving a disappointing showing, either in print or before the microphone. The video below adapts Canadian rock trio Rush's affecting lamentation on the inevitable transition from virtuosity to the Void:

Interestingly, Ralph and Colin observed how, of all forms of writing, poetry’s intellectually and physically compact character confers a rare and intimate immortality.


For instance, Ralph confessed to often keeping small pieces in his wallet to re-read when in need of support. Of continued utility is Wilbur's "A Wedding Toast," which Ralph has had many opportunities to share with nervous fathers-of-the-bride (Ralph closes the program with a reading of his similarly-themed "Lightning Bugs" from Ferrying). McEnroe attested to his own obsessive muttering of the line “fresh linen for the backs of thieves” from “Love Calls Us To Things of This World” (1963’s The Poems of Richard Wilbur).

The line’s paradoxical generosity is mirrored in the work of Indian poet Reddy Shankreti, who challenges the reader in his 2011 collection Voyager (University of California Press) by using the figure of Kurt Waldheim--one-time UN Secretary General and former Nazi--to highlight the moral complexity of being human.

A poetry instructor at Green Haven Prison for many years, Ralph believes similar exercises, such as Colin's and other's gleefully defiant competitions to write poetry based on Homeland Security’s newly-released list of terrorism “trigger” words (scroll here for the complete list) are further ways where poetry can serve to examine ethical issues by divorcing them from emotionally-controlling contexts.

Context regarding the craft of poetry, itself, is a different matter for Nick Flynn, whom, while informally serving as an “ambassador” for poetry to the mainstream due to the success, in particular, of his memoirs The Ticking is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2010, 2004, Norton, respectively) spoke on learning not just how to write it, but about its history and feeling privileged to have studied with older practitioners like Allen Dugan as an aid to “finding your tribe” within the field. The PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning author of three poetry collections, including The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands and Some Ether (Graywolf, 2011, 2000, respectively) will be reading this evening from 7 to 9 pm at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford as part of the Riverwood Poetry Festival. If you can't make it, here's his reading of "Haiku (failed)" from The Captain Asks:

Wary of his perceived “coolness” by mainstream culture, given that the majority of poets work in obscurity, Flynn expressed a mild disorientation--in contrast to Wilbur’s delight--regarding seeing his efforts filtered through others' performances. Previewing re-enactments of episodes from his life in the forthcoming Julianne Moore/Robert DeNiro feature adapted from Another Bullshit Night “can be an eerie experience.” See how faithful the production of Being Flynn is for yourself here:

The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival began June 1-3 at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington and continues on Wednesdays through August 1. Graced in past seasons with readings by Billy Collins, Maxine Lumin, Grace Paley and other celebrated poets, Sunken Garden has been regaling audiences with verse and music among the garden's fragrant blooms for twenty years and offers workshops and opportunities for one-to-one discussions with poets. Learn about Theodata, Sunken Garden's new online journal here. Here's a sampling from the current season:

Ralph joins Antoinette Brim, Randal Horton and Doug Anderson this Sunday, June 24, from 2 to 4 pm in reading poetry of social justice at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center as part of the Riverwood Poetry Festival, a four-day celebration which began June 21, now in its fourth year, taking place in several sites throughout the Hartford area. Other participants, including Maggie Kearney, Sonya Huber, Walter Butts, Janet Bowdan and Tony Fusco, round out a program incorporating readings by up-and-comers, live music and a panel discussion with poetry journal editors. Click here for full details; email: riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com.

Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Hill-Stead Museum

35 Mountain Road

Farmington, CT 06032

860-677-4787 ext.134

poetry@hillstead.org

Riverwood Poetry Festival (six venues)

Asylum Hill Congregational Church

814 Asylum Avenue

Hartford, CT 06105

860-525-5696

http://www.ahcc.org/

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

77 Forest Street

Hartford, CT 06105

860-522-9258

City Steam Brewery

942 Main Street

Hartford, CT 06103

860-525-1600

http://www.citysteambrewerycafe.com

Connecticut Science Center

250 Columbus Boulevard

Hartford, CT

860-724-3623

http://www.ctsciencecenter.org/

Connecticut Science Center

250 Columbus Boulevard

Hartford, CT

860-724-3623

http://www.ctsciencecenter.org/

The Wadsworth Atheneum

600 Main Street

Hartford, CT 06103

860-278-2670

http://www.thewadsworth.org/

PoemAlley Reads @ Edgehill Retirement Community

PoemAlley founding member Eva-Maria Palevich invites everyone to attend a special reading this Friday at the Edgehill Senior Community on Palmer's Hill, located on the Stamford border with Greenwich. A free-form presentation, it is hoped this event, given the strong youth-orientation of our culture, will serve as a reminder of what we owe one another as a society, across generations and across ranges of experience.

In addition to Eva-Maria, attending readers will include Ralph Nazareth, Robin Kurtz, Eddie Wright, Bill Buschel, Caroline Holme and many others. Besides her regular output of gentle, insightful pieces, bespeaking an engaging combination of wisdom and wonder, Eva-Maria is also active with the PoemAlley Advisory Committee, of which this Friday's program is her latest Committee project. Raised in West Berlin, Eva-Maria has a degree in Graphics and Design from the Lette-Verein photographic school. Check out her poetry on this blog's very first posting from 2009 here and some literary feedback regarding a discussion on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets here.

When:
Friday, January 20, 2011
4 PM--4:55 PM

Where:
Edgehill Retirement Community
122 Palmer's Hill Road
Stamford, CT 06905

Phone/e-mail:

203-595-2403/www.edgehillcommunity.com

Poetry and Sculpture by Aziza Gowon

passing

sometimes in the oddest places
a poem is born

looking out an office window
staring down at the men in black
jackets and trousers
marching home

sitting in a walled cubicle
without sun or air
florescence beaming down
daring me to write
anything that denies, shakes or breaks
this mold

beyond the men
a nimble tree shakes lime tresses
in the late April sun

pearl colored petals
fallen in the melee
dervish dance at my feet

my cubicle a walled
hothouse of ideas
waiting to be born

and gulls
harbingers of everything
soar and caw
mocking, mockingly say:

who are these creatures
and why are they in my space?

even as I write these thoughts
the wind has changed
the dragon clouds have passed
the sun is going down

yet hearkening
invisible
beauty lasts, beauty lasts.



office innuendo

“she broke up with her boyfriend
no
really
i heard he’s into hedge funds
hip hop
or ihop
who told you
the mail guy
the cleaning lady
oh yeah the shish kebab man
saw them
yelling over coffee
and croissants
or was it wi fi
he was smoking outside B&N
listening to CNN
and she hit him
they called the police
and ran into pottery barn
found a florist
and feasted on mall hot dogs
no
yes
they’re getting married
and left town
to settle down
by the marsh
off the shore
in that shack
by the bay
that girl saw them in Stop and Shop
buying diapers and chicken
at the take out
WITH CASH !
i knew that wasn’t a baby doll
ouch !
its 4:45
let’s bounce”


poetry and art by Aziza Gowon
©2010

Selections by Agnes Roberts

The Tales Of Women

Women, for centuries, have been known as house wives.
We were always told, a woman's place is in the home.
But today, we have broken down the barriers
and created a place in history for ourselves.
No more are we only tools.

Some women still choose to run the household.
While others have chosen to be in the corporate world.
Some are Carpenters, Masons, Electricians, Teachers,
Doctors, Lawyers, Politicians and Preachers.
Still, some men try to belittle us, saying
women have no place in a man's world.

Oh yes, they are afraid of a strong woman.
Given the task of a man, we do it without fear or scorn.
And that's fact, but the pay they cut back.
We'll keep fighting until we are recognized
as a great force in all societies.
And are given the wages we rightfully deserve.

Sisters, fight on, for this battle is not just for the strong.
If we remain true, focused and faithful,
then, victory will be our song.

Copyright 2002 Agnes Roberts

Our Creator

God is the being who created us all.
He is not a plaything or a toy,
Even though his name is taken in vain
He still forgives us all the same.

God is the being who created us all,
Color of skin means nothing at all,
If man continues to divide us,
There is no maybe God will chastise us.

God becomes more angry every day
As he listens to what we day and do
To each other day after day.
When they shoot us and we die,
Peace; Peace, is the constant cry.

One creator made us all: flesh,
Blood and bones we are,
A fact no one can deny.
Vast destruction will be this country's end
If man don't try to make amends.

Copyright 1996 Agnes Roberts
photography by Anita Patterson