Autumn’s Firestorms And Hellfire Missiles Over Lethe

Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic guest this Monday night is Connecticut native Charlie Bondhus, last year’s Main Street Rag Poetry Award-winner for All the Heat We Could Carry, his latest collection, and finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Book Award.

A prolific contributor to many publications covering an impressively wide geographical and editorial swath (the Hawai'i Review, the Alabama Literary Review, not to mention CounterPunch, the online and print publication of social and political commentary), Charlie’s versatility of theme and construction is supported by a unifying attention to vibrant imagery and emotive detail.

Compare the intimate, yet broadly filial tone of the sample below with “Looking Back” , “Syria” and “Return Ghazal”, a trio of pieces from last November's Poets' Basement posting on CR, which invoke the same human dimension as "October", but applied to the financial/political connivance behind the pursuit of global hegemony by framing current scenarios of visceral and ethical razing within a mythological conscience:

October

Five months after coming home,

you stomp out to the yard

after I insist on helping you,

the rake’s tines scraping the driveway,

making a nails-on-chalkboard sound.

I watch from the window, hurt but admiring

the ease with which you roll

the season’s lovely casualties

into large and small heaps,

working until a sudden gust

turns the morning’s labor

into a firestorm,

red and yellow clumps breaking apart

and spreading themselves across the lawn.

You return in the evening

sweat-covered and dirty,

leaning on your rake,

bearing, by way of apology,

the last chrysanthemums of the season,

a dying man

rediscovering his beauty.

Charlie graduated from Saint Anselm College, received his MFA from Goddard College and his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. He teaches English and creative writing at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey. 

Previous collections include How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2007 Blue Light Press First Book Award, and two chapbooks, What We Have Learned to Love (winner of the Brickhouse Books’ 2008-2009 Stonewall Award) and Monsters and Victims (Gothic Press, 2010). Click here to enjoy this playful tribute (along with other videos), "Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman", performed in 2009 at Amherst Books.

And click here if you would like to correspond with Charlie and keep up with his activities on Facebook.

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 cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), now beginning at 7:00 p.m.

  

For more information:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

In The Swing With Neddy Smith

Norwalk-based jazz bassist, composer, recording artist /producer and PoemAlley member Neddy Smith announces the release of Mood Swing, his latest CD.

As demonstrated through his prior recordings like “Give It Up” and “Liberated Woman” (1982) and the 2008 album, Turnaround, leading his own groups such as TransWave, his Jazz Duo or Trio and Neddy Smith and Friends, or producing jazz music/education festivals, Neddy is undeniably devoted to all aspects of music and the enthusiastic popularization of its varied forms.

The uplifting and subtle melodies of his latest offering, recorded at his own studio, NedGJean International Inc. in Norwalk, will be shared with viewers this Sunday when Neddy and his band perform as part of an interview on Our Lives on Optimum Cable’s News 12.

Neddy’s jazz and blues performances are derived intimately from the cultures of his native Jamaica, as well as from folk/world-music, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, Asian, European, and American classical sources. Mood Swing benefits from Neddy’s admiration for one of his favorite musicians, Thelonius Monk, specifically, “The Little House”, a simple poem he penned.

His band mates include Andrew DeNicola (flute, alto, soprano, and tenor sax), Marcel Blanchet (drum kit on “Mood Swing”), Thomas Ice (keyboard on “Pretty Little Flower” and “The Little House”), Michiro Negishi (multi-keyboard “Wildebeest”, “Mood Swing”). Guest musicians include Willy Dalton (multi-guitars on “Am in Love with You”) and Deborah Hawkins (keyboard on “Am in Love with You").

Click here for additional information and videos representative of Neddy's joyous performance style.

Air Times:

Sunday
January 26, 2014, Midnight and 4:30 PM

Monday
January 27, 2014, Midnight

In Quest of Vision in a Closed Space

Jose Yrizarry will talk and share his work this evening as Curley’s featured reader, drawing from his varied experiences as teacher, counselor, advocate and adventure guide on his journey into the “visionary landscape.”

Three Drops in a Pot (1^st Books Library/AuthorHouse, 2004) and Consumed But Destined to Prevail (AuthorHouse, 2008), his two chapbooks, embody Jose’s positive and resolute explorations in out-of-the-box approaches to the tasking problems of alienation, ideology and discord which needn’t define our affairs as human beings as inextricably as we think they must.