The Everyday Glory Of Finding More Questions Than Answers

Chicago native David Lieberman, tomorrow night’s featured PoemAlley speaker at Curley’s, has worked as a teacher, reporter, editor, ghost writer and, through it all, a poet. Among Tuesday’s selections he will read pieces from Simulacra, his latest collection, due for release later this year.

Holding degrees in English from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, David hopped several centuries professionally, going from an academic specializing in medieval English literature to writing for the electronics trade press, and has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, the C. W. Post Center of Long Island University and a number of high schools in suburban Chicago and on Long Island.

Of his first collection, The Task, The Hoard & The Long Walk Home (Yuganta Press, 2004; available below under "Collections and Anthologies"), PoemAlley co-founder Ann Yarmal admires how, through his seemingly effortless wordcraft and questing enthusiasm for our tapping the full potential in all our lives, David “shares with us the feelings of inconsequence and the struggle to discover our worth and our joy, with purpose and an insistent instinct for survival.” Jean Mellichamp Milliken, Editor of The Lyric is likewise drawn to his writing’s enobling reminder “that lives are adventures of mythic proportions where questions come more readily than answers.”

These themes of indomitable perseverance, self-discovery and eager curiosity find comparable expression in the acclaimed 1955 novel by Patrick Dennis (inspired by his real-life aunt, Marion Tanner) and subsequent stage and film comedy Auntie Mame. Below is a clip with the heroine’s signature “Life is a banquet!” rejoinder, delivered by Rosalind Russell in the 1958 film version, distributed by Warner Brothers: 

 

David currently lives with his wife in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he watches hummingbirds by the hour and yearly plans to make a Japanese garden in his wild backyard.

Poise, Power and the Pen

Committed to forums of healing, multifarious avenues of creative expression and female affirmation, this Monday’s Barnes & Noble Open Mic guest reader, Northampton, Massachusetts-based Janet Aalfs, has spent more than three decades as performer, safety/movement arts instructor, community activist (first kindled through her father’s teaching her about the civil rights movement) and published writer.

 Janet’s poetry and essays have run in numerous publications, such as Sinister Wisdom, Onion River Review,  A Fierce Brightness: 25 Years of Women's Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002) and North Atlantic Book’s 1993 Women in the Martial Arts (she also holds a a seventh-degree black belt in Shuri-ryū and a fifth-degree black belt in Modern Arnis).

Dissecting relationships, nature, love, gender violence and other topics, Janet’s collections include 1996’s Full Open (released through her own Orogeny Press) and Lubec Tides—a 2007 finalist in the Bright Hill Literary Center Chapbook Contest. Reviewing her most recent title, Bird of a Thousand Eyes (Levellers Press, 2010), Thomas Sayers Ellis admires the author’s honest and lyrical eagerness to mix schools and play with customary structure, encouraging those “… comfortable with the narrow limitations of linear approaches to ‘Subject’… to open and read with all their senses.”

Women at the Helm

Janet Aalfs

Doves rise over harbor waves as sun
ignites the dance. Quill and bone, wind
and blood, hearts lost cradled undersea

the chant alive: nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Anguish can't defeat us.
From desert forest mountain shore

through whip and gasp, rape and ash,
the lotus a bright bird soars
to interrupt the choking, to revive

the tree of life, leaf-light dreams
in children's eyes, pain their milk-teeth
grind dispersed. Wings and clouds.

We sing, though we cannot mend.
We dance, to honor death.
We witness, aligned,

to break the raging silence,
to weave this moment's breath
more fiercely, more kind.

For more samples click on VerseWrights.com and Perugia Press.

Spanning appearances at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival (which has included such protean luminaries as recently-passed poet/playwright Amiri Baraka) and Goddard College’s The Power of Words, among other venues, Janet received most recently the 2013 UMass Center for Women and Community Leadership and Advocacy in the Arts Award. She also served as poet laureate of Northampton from 2003­-2005.

Click here for an interview where she reminisces with fellow UMass alumnus Sandy Mandel on the 35th anniversary of the university’s women’s studies program, their initial interest in feminist theory and how it fostered their devotion to social and individual transformation through art.

Learn more about Janet’s ongoing supportive work in Easthampton at the Valley Women’s Martial Arts: Institute for Healing and Violence Prevention Strategies, a hub of nurturance and empowerment which she has directed since 1982.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble 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), now beginning at 7:00 p.m.

  

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

"Torn, Disassembled and Ostensibly Glamorous In The Cyber Age": An Evening With Juliana Huxtable

An artist, writer and, as DJ, a veritable steward of the New York nightlife scene, Juliana Huxtable will deliver a mix of performances and readings tomorrow night at Franklin Street Works through the signature personas of Internet-addicted cyborg, priestess, witch and trans girl.

At a time when such topics as LGBT recognition, sexual violence in the armed forces (click here for a related PA entry) and the creepy acquisition by a leading search engine of a series of leading military robot manufacturers pepper the news, her staple fascinations with human identity, physicality, technology and the cross-fertilization of such themes could not be more timely, and will be expressed with the help of friends from the fomenting Manhattan creative 

underground.

Anachronism (2013)

A contributor to the ongoing FSW exhibit, Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art, Juliana is a member of the House of Ladosha art collective and has written for, or been referenced in, Maker Magazine, ArtForum and Mousse. Click here for a recent interview. She has appeared at Envoy Enterprises, Artists Space, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other New York venues. The Juliana 1 video from her Vimeo channel has unrestrained observations on urban pretension, body objectification and gender expression in character-based video games. Get a feel for her punchy delivery in this hilarious segment from TMI:

You can contact and keep up with Juliana's activities on Facebook.

When:

Saturday, March 1, 2014

5:30-7:30 PM

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Phone/e-mail:

203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org