Belonging To The Song: Andrew Calhoun Returns To PoemAlley With More Words, Music & Perspectives

Folk singer and poet Andrew Calhoun returns tonight after two years to regale PoemAlley and Curley’s with readings and live music from 2011’s Grapevine, a solo-performed tribute to formative influences like Martin Carthy on his life and music, featuring, respectively, restored and historically updated performances of “Oh, Susanna” and “Patrick Henry” and 2013’s Living Room (with vocal contributions by his daughter Casey). Here’s a duet performance from 2013 of Andrew’s original composition “Peach Song” below:

 Both of these titles, along with the Scottish ballad collection Telfer’s Cows (2004), Tiger Tattoo (2003) and 1993’s Hope, among many others, are available through Andrew’s artists’ cooperative Waterbug Records. Check out his own and the music of other bardic artists at the 23-year-old label here.

Broadly praised over the years by critics from the Chicago Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch to Performing Songwriter for his keen use of imagery and the sensitivity of his challenging, perspective-jumping performances, Andrew’s writing also embodies these attributes, collected in titles like 1989’s Twenty-Four Poems. Suffused with careful comparisons, the piece below delights in love’s paradoxical wont to leave us each unmoored in time while also honoring the personal history of the beloved, expressed in acts both gentle and dramatic:

When We Make Love

© Andrew Calhoun

It is the sweetness of raspberries growing
Full in the sunshine
Near a salt tossing ocean
Easing up and down between continents,
Pregnant with mystery

When we make love
Sunken treasure rises to the surface
Breaking free, rocking endlessly,
Blissfully disappearing,
Giving itself away

When we make love
It's the hush in the theatre
Before the curtain
The promise made and kept in the same moment
A poem composed in a dream
Remembered in a dream

When we make love
We belong to the song
Where I kiss your resistance
Through halls of childhood
Through walls of adolescence
Through trials of womanhood
And at last you know

With our bodies exploding in gentleness
With great winds whistling the treetops,
Quick as a tomahawk,
You and I
Together
In past, present and future

You know
It is you that I love
When we make love

The influence of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx comes through The Trilogy Trilogy (2012), Andrew’s first book of humor, containing numerous vignettes with intriguing and easily-relatable titles like “Because I’m Neurotic” and “Sweating the Big Stuff”.

Casting Out Satan From The Mills—And The Hypo

A resident of England since 1971, where she maintains a homeopathic practice and serves as guardian of a local labyrinth and Sacred Circle, Connecticut native Kaaren Whitney returns to Stamford Monday night, October 14. as featured poet at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic.

Besides contributing work to Painting to Poem (2006), A Book of Graces (2009) and numerous anthologies, Kaaren has read at the Halesworth Fringe Festival and open mic events around the world. A commended winner of the Fakenham Poetry Competition in 2008, Karen maintains an active online presence in the UK, including a blog for Poetry Aloud and frequent contributions to the webzine Ink, Sweat and Tears. Kaaren is also a member of the Suffolk Poetry Society.

While much of her writing is known for its focus on nature (see past postings here and here),the full continuum of her work and activities as poet, healer/health freedom activist (see her Facebook link in support of vilified vaccine researcher Andrew Wakefield) and metaphoric observer show that no matter how much we might let ourselves be lulled by the abundant wares and ways of mass industrial production, the transition from mere existence to true thriving depends on embracing the link between our experience as individual human beings and the living environment in which humanity evolved.

In its multi-layered meditation of a man atop a ladder restoring the thatch roof of a simple dwelling and the Gaia-centric purpose to which he would put it, Kaaren’s 2011 poem “Balance” builds on the anthropologically-themed “And They Made Tools” (see below), a 2009 ekphrastic piece derived from a John Tuckett cyanotype (see above, left), toward a firm advocacy for a more compassionate proportion in future between what we can do for--as opposed to to--one another and the planet:

And They Made Tools

simple at first, a stick, a sharpened bone,
extensions of coarse fingers, rough ragged
from grubbing soil to get at starch tubers,
roots for the blood clan's sustenance, once mashed,
stone pounding fibre into flat pulp,
sweeter, easier to eat.

Walking the land, they learned by feel its skin,
discovered food from the earth-speak terrain.
They found river pebbles, half cracked, thonged them
stick fashion, granting more accurate aim.
Flaked flints, 'slicers', scraped clean small mammal hides,
destined to become medicine bags, clan
clothing for these nomadic gatherers
who captured prey in nettle woven nets,
traps sprung from tree limbs, from stick covered holes.

Survival their goal, uniformity
a surety, but new ways of doing,
living, becoming tool makers took hold.
They walked the land upright.
They lived in community.
They made tools.
And they survived.

Kaaren Whitney, 2009

Though the rebel do-it-yourself movement typified by the advent of 3D printing technology looks to recharge consumerism with a more personalized form of mass production, it is the current convention of hit marathon-length “slow TV” programming in Norway that makes for a better example of Kaaren’s themes in action. 

NRK broadcasting’s counter-intuitive utilization of video—the medium that’s done more to foment a culture of distraction and creative impatience than anything else in the last 70 years—is reacquainting stressed contemporary viewers with the frantic-less pace and dedication associated with traditionally absorbing pursuits, like knitting, fishing, fire stoking and even rail travel, all presented in real-time detail, much like the field-to-kitchen table experience evoked by Kaaren’s “Berries This Year”. 

Keep up with Kaaren and her work on Facebook here. 

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), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

  

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

________

Additional Information:

 

The Case for Working with Your Hands, Or, Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good
Matthew B. Crawford
Penguin Viking, 2011

Made by Hand: Looking for Meaning in a Throwaway World

Mark Frauenfelder

Portfolio, 2012

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honore
HarperOne, 2005

The Global Heart Awakens: Humanity's Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love
Anodea Judith
Shift Books, 2013

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
David C. Korten
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006

Toolmaker Koan (novel)
John C McLoughlin
Baen, 1987

The Craftsman
Richard Sennett
Yale University Press, 2009

Waging War on the Autistic Child: The Arizona 5 and the Legacy of Baron von Munchausen
Andrew J. Wakefield
Skyhorse, 2012

TheAndrew Wakefield Story: How Big Pharma and the UK Government Destroyed a Man to Save a Flawed Vaccine Program

David L. Lewis PhD

Skyhorse Publishing, 2014 (forthcoming)