Kaaren Whitney: Turning Of The Year--And Turning A New Global Leaf

Tomorrow night's Open Mic speaker is Kaaren Whitney, a UK-based homeopath, who returns this month each year to the Connecticut from which she originally hails, sharing her most recent poetry and observations on the alternating tensions and acts of tenderness defining our associations with one another and the natural world.

Protected behind the furious media competition as to whether the terminal degradation of the biosphere will be irreversible in some twelve years, can be technologically remediated in thirty, is irreversible right now (or is even happening at all), lies a seemingly collective, half-conscious unwillingness to acknowledge the only fruitful responses that are as time-tested as they are unavoidable to any outcome—adaptation and reciprocity.

Kaaren's 2016 collaboration with photographer Jim Nind, The Turning Of the Year: A Book for 8 Seasons (Solstice-Equinox Press), marking the annual times honoring celestial shifts and ancient celebrations, is part of an ouvre which serenely, yet firmly draws attention to the interplay between these neglected perspectives and the dominant ones of obsessive appropriation and indifference.  

This weekend’s Typhoon Hagibis striking Japan is just the latest consequence of this current disregard for the wilderness beyond a collective solipsistic idea of a worthwhile reality, having struck Fukushima Prefecture--site of the world's largest ongoing nuclear disaster, which has been killing life in the Pacific for eight years.

Complementing her homeopathic practice in Suffolk, Kaaren has also constructed her own Labyrinth and walks this as a form of meditation, enhancing what she brings to several ritual groups.  In addition to taking part in three area poetry groups, Karen has appeared at the Halesworth Fringe Festival and has participated in poetry events as far as Australia. 

Catch up on some of her past appearances in Stamford here, here and here.

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble Open Mic meets the second Monday, each month in the movie/music section on the main floor of the Stamford bookstore at 7:15 pm. For more information and directions, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, Ct 06901

 203-323-1248

Pat St. Pierre: “Composing Nows” In Words And Images

As this evening's Open Mic guest, Wilton resident Pat St. Pierre is a freelance writer and amateur photographer whose love for the written word and poetry, in particular, was kindled initially while attending New Canaan High School.

An admirer of the simplistic style of Emily Dickinson, Pat uses words and photography in capturing small vignettes, ranging from life's ordinary events to its darker journeys--as depicted with startling inevitability in the following from The Ephrastic Review:

The Family in the Red House

While walking through woods

Near a rambling river

I came upon a paint peeled red house

barn like in appearance,

broken window panes,

tall grasses covering old cement steps

unattended for years.

Who inhabited this red house

and where are they now?

I entered cautiously through the front door,

looked around the open space.

Dishes with cobwebs adorned

the wooden kitchen table.

Shriveled food occupied the old refrigerator.

The scene appeared as though 

a family simply disappeared.

Bedroom quilts covered most beds,

one bed remained unmade.

As I walked around

floorboards creaked like soft screams.

I slipped on a small throw rug;

moving the rug with my feet,

I discovered a trap door located in the floor.

Slowly, I lifted the rusty hinge.

There in the hollow space

were skeleton bodies.

The family stayed behind in the paint peeled red house.

Pat's award-winning adult and children's poetry, as well as assorted fiction/non-fiction, has run in The Camel Saloon, Fiction 365, Friday Flash Fiction, The Kids Ark, Silver Boomer Books, among many other venues, while her photography has graced the covers and pages of Gravel, Sediments, Our Day’s Encounter and Peacock Journal. 

Her first chapbook, Reality of Life, was published by Foothills Publishing, followed by Theater of Life (Finishing Line Press)--nominated in 2010 for the New England/Pen/LL Winship Award; fellow Finishing Line poet Debbie Richard considered Pat's third release, the photo-accompanied Full Circle (Kelsay Books, 2014) a “mosaic... of memories... reflect(ing) the seasons in nature, in human frailties, and in coming home again.”

An avid participant in many writing workshops over the years, Pat is a past member of the Saugatuck Poetry Group and the Rose and Thorn Literary Ezine. Go to her blog, pstpierre.wordpress.com, to view her latest photography and writing.

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month 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

Time, Motion & Words

Of Rebecca’s Forsythe’s latest collection, Roman Sky (Turn of River Press, 2016), Joan Tucci challenges “anyone to winnow their (favorite poems) down to a handful. It can't be done.”

Now drawing on as many miles and destinations as bulbs she has planted in her Massachusetts garden (many of which have bloomed), tomorrow night’s featured poet has resumed a career as a childcare provider and roadie, with motorcycle trips through dozens of states with her husband, among other experiences, relations and observations both lingering and wry, shaping a style admired for a clarity and grace uncommon in much of contemporary poetry.

Besides Roman Sky, Rebecca has published Newfoundland Ferry (Turn of River Press, 2010 ) and 2001’s Prairie Morning. Click here for information on her 2011 appearance at Curley’s and audio samples of her musical collaborations with her daughter, Amanda. 
 
The video photo album below of Rush’s “Ghost Rider” (from 2002’s Vapor Trails) visually enlivens the similarly perception-changing, introspective and regenerative pull time and motion can hold for the writer-as-rider, expressed by the rock trio’s lyricist/drummer Neil Peart, whose own two-wheeled explorations are related in Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me! (ECW Press, 2016), Far and Away: A Prize Every Time and other travel memoirs.

Gil Fagiani: Our Competing Attentions For The Soul & Heart

An essayist, short story writer and poet, this Tuesday night’s featured speaker at Curley’s, Gil Fagiani, has filled his ouvre with accounts of the ups and downs of close to seventy years of life, shaped at different times by discipline, despair and rediscovery.

Several of his poetry collections cover his middle class upbringing in Stamford, such as Chianti in Connecticut (Bordighera Press, 2010) and Grandpa’sWine (Poets Wear Prada, 2008; a bilingual version forthcoming, translated into Italian by Professor Paul D’Agostino of Brooklyn College). Rooks (Rain Mountain Press, 2007) concerns his military college years at Weider University in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Now living in Long Island City in proximity to the streets of his time as a heroin addict in the 1960s, Gil grew into a social activist in response to the discrimination he witnessed by the police when dealing with drug users of different backgrounds and, by his forties, found poetry and fiction the most affecting forms of communicating awareness of the injustices he saw. As he says in a 2015 New York Times interview with David Gonzalez, “You don’t change people with political rhetoric.”

Following on such titles as the state hospital-situated Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Gil’s latest book from his time at a South Bronx heroin treatment center, Logos (Guernica Editions, 2015), emphasizes the need for wider understanding of the complexity of an issue too often dismissed judgmentally by extending his internal struggles (including the confusing mix of hope and potent illusions of empowerment) to those of all of us in times of crisis.

En route, and instrumental to Gil’s recovery were his rekindled ties to his heritage upon learning that the Fagianis hailed from a line of dialect-specific poets in Lanciano: “These towns in Italy were their own universes,” he told Gonzales. “When I asked someone for directions to the street named after my uncle, he started reciting one of his poems.” This has culminated in his current co-curation of the Italian American Writers’ Association, based in Manhattan.

Below is his contribution with Stephen Siciliano, reading, respectively, from Stone Walls (Bordighera Press, 2014) and The Goodfather at a 2015 IAWA event held at the Cornelia Street Café; musical accompaniment by Peter Dizozza:

___

Additional Reading:

Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Hart, Carl, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (P.S.) (Harper Perennial, 2014)

Mate, Gabor, M.D., In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (North Atlantic Books, 2010)

Perspectives Molded by Pain: A Writer’s Journey

Speaking through a selection of visceral, poignant poetry and passages from a memoir-in-progress, lifelong Connecticut resident Cora Santaguida, this Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, will describe her experiences coping, adapting, accomplishing and just plain surviving through the legacy of formative psychological and emotional trauma over the last few decades.

Forced to retire early in 2003 from mentoring, job coaching and youth empowerment work in the public sector, Cora sustained tenacity in shining light on personal shadows both for her own benefit and that of many others enduring similar challenges in silence, accumulating experiences by turns moving, infuriating and generous-minded, all contributing to the profound interplay between self-expression and self-discovery on the road to recovery.

A cum laude graduate from The College Rochelle with a BA in English, Cora has run for public office twice in Stamford (where she serves as a Justice of the Peace). She continues to involve herself in political and social justice activities, mostly surrounding the 10 key values of the Green Party.

While repression might serve as a short-term self-defense mechanism against violent affronts to one’s potential, dignity or welfare, many suffer in modern society because of its own collective exercise of a repression that is more willful in its evasiveness than subconsciously protective.

Current proposals by the Pentagon to artificially excise horrific events from the memories of war veterans (theoretically eliminating PTSD), is the most recent of numerous efforts at manipulating consciousness (see here and here), symptomatic of a way of life so ill both in how it defines--and globally projects--itself, that it would sooner reshape the human condition from scratch before acknowledging the fundamentals of human sensitivity.

Whatever is repressed, suppressed or decompensated for, the following video to Five Finger Death Punch’s “Remember Everything” (whose lyrics inspired one of Cora’s tattoos)  argues with authority and anguish how that which is done to the mind and body is at least as important as the impact it has on what both do over the course of a lifetime: 

When The Caged Fire Talks, Does It Cage Us?

In contrast to the prehistoric discovery of fire as a tool for the creation of leisure time and the opportunity to build culture, contemporary television turns the tables by adapting us to someone else’s idea of what culture is supposed to be. Franklin Street Works’ latest media exhibit, Your Content Will Return Shortly, dissects this seductive and ubiquitous tie between viewer and TV from the perspectives of commerce, technological perception and development, as well as the overall psychological sculpting of society.

“This show was inspired by a desire to connect my own research on historic video exhibitions and readings in media theory—including texts by David Joselit and Marshall McLuhan,” explains Terri C. Smith, the exhibition’s curator, “with observations of our own contemporary relationships with ‘television,’ which for many is streamed at will via a laptop, bypassing the TV set altogether.”

Preceding the 5:30-7 pm artists’ tour and café discussion this evening with Siebren Versteeg and Jeff Ostergrem (both of Brooklyn) and New Haven-based Catherine Ross, Franklin Street Works has arranged with the University of Connecticut to present its second ekphrastic poetry reading beginning at noon, courtesy of Pamela Brown and students from her UConn writing class, whom, as post-VHS/CRT-era  adopters of the latest iteration of technology, like live streaming video, iphones and Blueray DVDs, will offer generation-specific interpretations of the works on display.

Catherine Ross, IFO, 2006, video still, courtesy the artist

Among the eleven artists participating in Your Content, Jeff Ostergren contributed Stimulus,  a timely two-channel video display that uses the details of pharmaceutical ads to demonstrate how, with sirenic finesse, TV delivers viewers to advertisers as a captive audience, while pretending to primarily serve their entertainment and information needs. Sports coverage and sitcoms aside, “commercials ARE the content,” Jeff reminds, as “the programming they surround are sublimated by the lurking capital that funds them, that relates to the content that is geared towards a… focus group-determined viewer.”

Emily Roz, Presidents, 2006, 20 Polaroid prints, courtesy the artist

How TV gets us to compartmentalize elements of current events and fiction with equal rigidity is demonstrated in Emily Roz’s Death by Mel, wherein Polaroid photos of TV images from various films featuring Gibson in the role of a killer are displayed side-by-side, removed from their individual contexts. A complementary sequence of cinematic presidents drives the point home with disturbing impact that, despite the fact most viewers would have more familiarity in their lives with the latter encounter (as mediated via TV news) than the former, the vital distinction between the entertainment industry's interpretation of 'real-life', as opposed to 'realistic' no longer matters: Each piece “brings to mind an entire genre… and (encourages viewers to) accept certain pretexts without question.”

Made possible in part through the support of the Community Arts Partnership Program awarded to Franklin Street Works by the City of Stamford and a two-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Your Content Will Return Shortly opened on January 24 and is on display through Sunday, March 24. In addition to Jeff Ostergren’s and Emily Roz’s pieces, the program features the work of Christopher DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Catherine Ross, Carmelle Safdie, and Siebren Versteeg.

Situated in an old row house near the UConn campus, Franklin Street Works is less than one hour from New York City via Metro North and about one mile (a 15 minute walk) from the Stamford train station. On-street parking is available on Franklin Street (metered until 6 pm except on Sunday), and paid parking is available nearby in a lot on Franklin Street and in the Summer Street Garage (100 Summer Street), behind Target.

When:

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Noon-1:15 PM, UConn Poetry Reading

5:30-7 PM, Artists’ Walk-Through & Café Discussion

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

___

Additional Information:

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, Atlas (2010)

David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, The MIT Press (2010)

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore & Shepard Fairey, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Gingko Press (2005)

Marshall McLuhan & Lewis P. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The MIT Press (1994)

Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment, St. Martin's Press (1992)

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