Tuesdays at Curley's

Welcome to PoemAlley, Stamford, Connecticut's eclectic venue for poets, poetry reading and discussion! Open to anyone living in Fairfield County and the surrounding area, we meet Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm at Curley's Diner on 62 Park Place (behind Target) . Come contribute, get something to eat, or simply listen!



Oct 26, 2015

Facing The Branch-Points Of Life

Sharon Charde, retired psycho-therapist and highly-accoladed poet, reads this Tuesday at Curley’s Diner from numerous chapbooks and publications reflective of the economical and sensitive style for which she is known.

Sharon most recently earned first prizes both in the Arcadia Press 2014 Ruby Irene Chapbook Contest (deadline for the next round is November 15) and the Broad River Review’s Rash Awards competition. Her work has appeared more than sixty-five times in Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, Ping-Pong (literary organ of the Henry Miller Memorial Library), Poet Lore and many other journals and anthologies. In addition, she has seven Pushcart nominations to her name. 
Sharon has edited and published I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, containing the work of the adjudicated teens she has volunteered with since 1999 through the creative writing program at Touchstone, a residential treatment center in Litchfield, Connecticut for girls ages 12 through 18. A devoted writing teacher for twenty-three years, Sharon has been awarded fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center For The Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony.  
Yaddo Gardens entrance

She has released several prize-winning chapbooks, such as Bad Girl At The Altar Rail (Flume, 2005), Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, (Dallas Poets Community Press, 2006) as well as 2008’s Branch In His Hand, a full-length collection from Backwaters Press, later adapted for radio by the BBC in 2012. Described as a requeim in poetry, Branch recalls with sparse but unflinching eloquence the death of Sharon's son in 1987 during a trip to Italy and the transformative effect the freak event had on herself and her family.       
      
After Blue, for which she won honorable mention in Finishing Line Press’s 2013 chapbook contest, was published in September 2014. She’ll be at Yaddo, the famous artists’ retreat in Sarasota Springs, New York, this spring. 

Oct 7, 2015

Ferguson Is Everywhere: Poetry Therapist Barbara Bethea To Lead "Black Lives Matter, Too" Reading At Barnes & Noble


“Black Lives Matter, Too”, next Monday’s timely installment of Stamford Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program, features Barbara Bethea, the “Afrikana Madonna”, a poetess and motivational healer with a wonderfully exuberant presentation style (to which those who attended her July appearance at Curley’s last year can attest).

 A creative therapist certified through the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT), Bethea works with Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Sexual Assault & Violence Intervention program as a rape counselor advocate and is an active member of the renown Afrikan Poetry Theatre in Jamaica, NY (now in its 39th year), founded by the late John Watusi Branch and Yusef Waliyaya, poets and cultural workers in the early 1970s.

Besides helping adults achieve recovery and empowerment from chemical dependencies and intimate partner violence, Barbara’s activities supporting at-risk teens both in health care and church settings demonstrates an inspired dedication to dignity, mutual interest and empathy in pursuit of acceptance of one another and our individual struggles, transcending an oft-bandied call for mere “tolerance” or cynical recommendations on how to accommodate intolerable behavior on the part of officialdom.

While the brief video below, “Supreme Teens”, which Barbara produced in association with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, highlights how critical an open and engaged response is to these concerns, their acute import readily applies to the future of all in an open, civil society, given the portentous escalation of police brutality and killings targeting the non-white population of the country in recent years.


Her inspirational outreach also extends to recorded material, such as Like Manna for the Soul, a nine-track CD released in 2007, and televised presentations, like this 2013 example from Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Can We Talk Television:


Barbara is an adjunct professor at the College of New Rochelle/School of New Resources, Brooklyn Campus. You can contact her directly at afrikanamadonna1@aol.com.

 
Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry takes place 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

Sep 6, 2015

An Infinite Wingspan For Grief and Growth

Described as “an unusually accomplished debut” by Nancy Willard, Psalms for a Child Who Has Lost Her Mother (FinishingLine Press, 2015) complements Carol Japha’s personal and social humanity as an artist, editor, non-profit professional and activist, formerly with Viking Press, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the Peace Corps.
As Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, Carol will illuminate her quest “to discover the mother I lost so long ago, and myself” through samples of her spare, lyrical writing, expressing the bond between a mother and daughter, identity and connection and other themes from her first chapbook.
The distinctive, even blessed, absence of the maudlin in this detailed chronicle suggests to the author of A Shimmering That Goes with Us, Mary Ann Larkin, a subtle, freeing effect to her work: "It's under an 'infinite wingspan' that Carol Japha gathers together the painful details of a child losing her mother… with no sentimentality,” building to a “revealing achievement” which plants, as the sample below makes clear, one leg in an evolving present, with the other anchored to the legacy that propels it:  
Knapsack
I will carry her in my pocket
like a slingshot
like a candy bar
like change to buy it
like shells from the seashore.
In my knapsack
like a sweater against the cold
a trail map to find my way
a pocketknife
binoculars to see from the top of the hill.


I will ask her
which fork to take
which way to return.

February, 2015
Concurrently, Carol has developed her graphic skills (the cover painting of Psalms is her piece, “The Doll”) through a series of workshops and residencies from Bennington College and the Virginia School of Creative Arts to the Silvermine School of Art in Wilton. A Greenwich resident raised in Chicago, Carol has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a graduate of Barnard College.
Learn more about her work at her blog, www.motherfulchild.com.

Sep 3, 2015

Healing From Trauma Through Self-Expression Continues!

Join us, Saturday, September 5, for the penultimate session in a series of four independent creative therapy workshops, offered free to female survivors of sexual violence, conducted by Dr. Marianela Medrano, psychologist, poet and nationally-certified poetry therapist.

At the conclusion of the series, participants will be enriched by a selection of poems that will serve as a steady and indispensable resource in their journey through healing and will have the opportunity to share their writing in the Sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in downtown Stamford.

Marianela has used creative writing as a means to help people reduce stress, cope with pain and raise their level of emotional well-being. She hopes to help participants confront their trauma and give voice to difficult-to-express feelings through various forms of writing, including poetry and literature. Her own writing has appeared in her 2011 collection Diosas de la Yuca/Goddess of the Yuca (Madrid, Ediciones Torremozas), as well as numerous literary journals and anthologies in the United States and the Dominican Republic. Find out more about her practice and work here and here.


When:
9 am
September 5 & 12, 2015

Where:
The Center
733 Summer Street, Suite 503
Stamford, CT

Registration:
Rosie Enyart
This FREE program, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Stamford, is presented by the The Center for Sexual Assault Crisis Counseling and Education, which has been offering counseling, educational outreach and support services in Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan, Norwalk, Stamford, Westport, Weston and Wilton since 1979.

Jul 31, 2015

Letting Go Of The Green Light

Resolving the rift between our accepted notions of the Civilized and the Wild is the subject for this year’s summer poetry service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. The theme was suggested by Reverend Frances Sink’s reading of The Practice of the Wild (Counterpoint, 2010), an essay collection from poet Gary Snyder.

How we define these concepts, how they might substantiate a schism that needn’t even exist and how the prevailing view (especially in regard to Western industrial life) affect our relations, are just some of the points addressed this Sunday in a reading featuring participants from the  UU community and PoemAlley, including Bonnie Klotzko, Joseph De Matteo, Dale Shaw, Marianela Medrano, Enzo Malaglisi, John Sakson, Rowyda Amin, Adriana Rexon, as well as program leader, Ralph Nazareth.

The Receding Orgastic Future
Ralph finds a topical and unsettling allegory for our fast-devolving times in the closing musings of Nick Carraway from Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic of opulence, tragic pining and unwarranted privilege, The Great Gatsby, dramatized in this clip from the 2013 Baz Luhrman film:


Instead of rediscovering our original ties with the biosphere, in the face of global economic collapse, terminal nuclear contamination, water/oil depletion, solar flare-induced electrical grid failure, Civilization instead insanely cries more desperately for fighting Carraway’s inexorable current, not just in pursuit of flattering, or sanitized post-WWII pasts that never existed, but, as recent two-dimensional output from Hollywood demonstrates, of ill-conceived “Jetsonian” futures that could never be, either.

Keeping The Wild at Bay…
Tomorrow-land, a sort of Atlas Shrugged for children from Disney, packaged as an upbeat ode to the way the future used to be, makes a hollow attempt to condemn our commitment to social procrastination, passivity and distractions. For the 2015 George Clooney vehicle, itself, proves to be a prime exemplar in defense of the status-quo assumptions sustaining today's dysfunctional traits—mainly, the magical, unexamined belief that everything can be remedied with the right application of technology (by the right people, of course).

This fervent Gatsbyesque yen to believe helps sustain real-world delusions that serve energy and financial interests who benefit mightily by the present Civilization/Wild divide. Contrary to Washington and corporate sponsors proclaiming some nuclear or hydrocarbon Renaissance is just around the corner, able to sustain the US for decades to come (one of the newer financial bubbles-in-the-making, fracking, can only last a few years, according to Peak Oil expert Richard Heinberg), or constitute a “bridge technology” toward a renewable energy future, the only reality such ideas represent is so many boats of infinite growth floundering in the currents of an unyielding, finite planetary system.

Related contemporary definers of the “civilized” or “progress” informing the titular sleek and high-tech metropolis of TL’s alternate world are a conditioned commitment to convenience, safety and material certainty against everything outside the fragile barriers of our built-up surroundings, be it predatory animals, senescence, or the demonized human threat-of-the-month.


While Tomorrowland toler-ates a given natural habitat and its denizens as no more than decorative accents to a human imposition on the landscape (save for some birds, the only evidence of Nature is the prairie surrounding the city), last year’s Interstellar (Paramount/Warner Bros.) espouses an almost strident hostility to the ecosystem as a whole.

Keeping the Wild Harnessed

Suffering from a global blight of unspecified origin, much of industrial society has reverted to an agrarian state to feed a future dying populace, slowly suffocating from a decline in atmospheric oxygen (somehow connected to the Blight). Cooper, a bitter ex-astronaut-turned-farmer (played by Matthew McConaughey) has the opportunity to find a new home for our species in a planetary system beyond a recently-discovered wormhole, leaving behind his children, but not the hubris that got humanity into the predicament it faces.

Far from even intimating that any facet of industrial civilization’s cumulative assaults on the air, water and land might possibly be responsible, the egotistical rationale for what is happening wavers between the speculation that in some Gaianistic pique, Earth is pushing humanity out of its nest for its own good, or rebelling out of hostility (“caretaking” of the Earth is viewed by Cooper with contempt even as he cluelessly practices the same synthetic pesticide/herbicide-supported monoculture farming that is destroying our agricultural base today).

Other than humans, not another living thing, save for trees and crops, appear in the film (Cooper’s farm doesn’t even have a dog), as if, once more (though to far less glitzy effect) the world is pared down to only what humans can get from it—a sentiment emphasized when the utilitarianized earthly environment is reproduced with faithful insipidness within an O'Neill-style orbital habitat that doesn’t even offer the solace of parklands.

John Adolphus Etzler
This anthropocentric perspective harkens back to a post-Enlightenment complex of suppositions that morphed a distancing from religious dogmatism into a materialist distancing of humanity from the environment from which it sprang. Historian Steven Stoll makes the case in The Great Delusion (Hill & Wang, 2009) how eccentric 19th century German utopian engineer John Adolphus Etzler, internalizing all the conceits of the Industrial Age, popularized the backbone of “free market” ideology: endless growth, decreeing that if humans want something, not only will Nature provide, but it can do so forever. Thus, in the end, Cooper and humanity indeed survive, but only unapologetically to lay the slow-burn foundation for using up another world in the same way.

A Dream Not Just Left Behind, But Never There
This is not to say that the problem with the concept of human civilization rests necessarily with its capacity to shape the physical world, but with a contemporary dearth of symbolic thought that used to discipline it. The question is how mindful (and modest) our awareness of this association can influence our attitudes about the Civilized and the Wild.

This is not an inconceivable prospect. In The Forge and the Crucible (University of Chicago Press, 1979), Micea Eliade’s overview of alchemical thought, he observes how early metal-working cultures the world over often maintained a mindful veneration of blacksmiths for their skill in fabricating both hand tools and weaponry—corresponding to the creative and destructive capacities in us all. Agrarian societies in Europe projected their awareness of natural cycles in reproduction and agriculture to mining activities such that when a vein was exhausted, it was thought to be simply a matter of closing up the site, like a fallow field, to give its ores time to replenish themselves—maybe erroneous, but a belief indicative of a patient and cooperative, rather than exploitive, attitude rarely seen today.

Like Gatsby insisting he can repeat the past, our metaphor-deficient, frantically over-commodified existence proffers hopeless entrancements at every turn promising we can hit some cosmic “reset” button to deal with rising sea levels, virulent superstorms or some other unpredictable disaster, as if such concerns are no more than transitory inconveniences on the road to something always better… always greener.

Ultimately, if Civilization’s adherents are willing to work with and learn from integration with the Wild, the former could not only become more civil (rendering the latter, less frightening in the process), but more flexible, too--a crucial attribute, as Civilization’s survival would depend not on fighting the current, so much as adapting to where it is taking us.


Where:
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
20 Forest Street (directly across from the Avon Theatre)
Stamford, CT

When:
Sunday, August 2, 2015
10 am

Contact:
203-322-5438, Ralph Nazareth

Jul 27, 2015

Friendship Defined By Faith And Poetry

Diva (left) with Eleni Begetis
This evening PoemAlley will celebrate the lives and memories of Stamford resident Ella (Daisy) “Diva” Evans and Eddie Wright in front of Curley’s Diner. Close friends and fellow participants at Tuesdays at Curley’s, Diva died on July 13, mere weeks after Eddie, who had been struggling with lung cancer.

Eddie Wright
They were devoted members of Mt. Nebo Full Gospel Church in Bridgeport, as well as of a congregation in Norwalk, where Eddie lived. We are honored they found in the PA community an outlet for their experiences, observations and convictions, expressed through a range of pieces by turns picaresque, nurturing and profound.

In particular, Eddie’s output took the form of ongoing personal conversations with God, related in the form of a series of journal entries, which he shared with PoemAlley almost every week (even through his health crisis), captivating both for their sly humor and inclusive, meditative appeal (not surprisingly, Eddie, who passed on June 13, had also presented sermons in church on occasion).

This special memorial gathering will begin in Columbus Park at 7:30 pm and include the singing of “Amazing Grace”: