Singing About The Dark Times—Now And Then

In association with the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, PoemAlley celebrates the release of Tuesday Night Live (Turn of River Press, 2018) this Saturday afternoon in downtown Stamford.

Ralph Nazareth and Eleni Anastos Begetis

Hoby Rosen and Alex McDonald

The fourth in a series of PA member anthologies edited by group facilitator Ralph Nazareth, Tuesday Night will be dramatized with a series of live readings by numerous contributors both local and from the tri-state area, such as Rona Schenkerman, Cora Santaguida and Eleni Begetis Anastos, who, as co-owner of Curley’s Diner, has generously provided a regular weekly home for this uniquely dynamic gathering of poets, essayists, musicians and other artists since PoemAlley’s founding by Ann Yarmal and Catherine Ednie in the late 1990s. Over this span, the group has grown, not just in attendance, but in warmth, interchange and community, notably embodied by many departed members over the years, including Herb Davison, Alex McDonald, Hoby Rosen, Eddie Smith, Diva, and, most recently, Eva-Maria Palevich.

From 9/11, perpetual global wars, erosion of civil liberties, to the current nadir of what seems to be a comprehensively regressive time, Tuesday nights at Curley’s Diner endures as an irrepressible haven for open thought, singing and joy.

While you can scroll to the bottom of this post for further details, this is also a good time to catch up on other books produced by individual PA members over the last few years:    

Former Fairfield County resident Susan Cossette Eng’s Peggy Sue Messed Up (CreateSpace, 2017) applies the home-base theme of growing up female in a bastion of suburban conformity as a launch pad for weighing the ethics of the Atomic Age, confronting the consequences of poverty and inequality and highlighting Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to cringe before Beltway patriarchy in defense of reproductive rights, among other affecting, timely topics. Below is a video collage version of “Struldbrug at the Wine Bar” (her musings on European musical culture),  one of several engaging adaptations of her pieces posted on her Youtube channel: 

Now residing out-of-state, Susan collaborated frequently with fellow PA member Neddy Smith, a Norwalk-based musician, who has played both solo and with bands live and in the recording studio in Jazz, Funk, Brazilian, Caribbean and other genres. His positive zeal for music both as performer and as enthusiastic educator has been extended to fiction with the publication last year of Valerie Palmary: A Small-Town Girl (NedGJean Publishing, 2017). A novel of creative and entrepreneurial self-discovery in the aftermath of family tragedy, Neddy regards it as a prose vehicle to further his own and his company, NedGJean International's, commitment to "help guide young writers to follow their dreams with a passion for producing projects and (making their) dreams become a reality." He maintains a  blog called "Words and Music".

One of the earliest contributors to this blog, Enzo Malaglisi published Castelforte, his first collection, in 2017 (Xlibris), showcasing a powerful body of work dealing with desperation, love, fear, the irresistible comfort of needing things, as well as more large-scale subjects like freedom and justice—all unified by the theme of redemption. Click here to read his remarkable “At the Mercy Of a Higher Hand” from 2011.

Saturday’s Tuesday Night Live launch party is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served (and bring your lungs, too, as there will be singing).

When:
3-6 pm
Saturday
October 20, 2018

Where:
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
20 Forest Street
Stamford, CT 06901

Contact:
Ralph Nazareth
203-570-2168

Richard J. Newman & Cora Santaguida: Addressing Gender, Housing & Social Injustice In Two Venues

Three years after his previous visit, essayist, translator and poet Richard Jeffrey Newman returns to Curley’s this Tuesday to share both older material and selections from Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions), published last year, completed through a grant awarded by the Queens Council on the Arts.

Richard’s creative focus on matters of feminism, progressive masculine identity, justice and what reviewer Richard Hoffman describes as finding meaning in the “possibility of redemption”, informs most of his poetry and commentary, typified by recent, in-depth blog entries from his website (www.richardjnewman.com), addressing his view, as a survivor of child molestation, on the Harvey Weinstein scandal and his difficulty as a writer in keeping pace with the reaction to the emboldened face of American white supremaciscm under the new administration, witnessed in last year’s Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue confrontation.

His other titles include For My Son, A Kind of Prayer (Ghostbird Press 2016), as well as The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh (Junction Press 2011) and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2006)--both translations of, and contemporary commentaries on, classical Persian poetry. Richard’s journal credits, both online and in print, include Salon.com, Another Chicago Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Diode Poetry Journal, among others.

 

The preview below from War Zone, Maggie Hadleigh-West’s 1998 documentary of her face-to-face challenges to sidewalk cat-callers in Manhattan, like Richard’s debut title, The Silence of Men (Cavankerry Press, 2006), with contributions by Yusef Komunyakaa, stresses the point that gender relations rooted in equality, empathy and respect can only go so far if engaged men are not willing to be both open about the motivations for harassing conduct and being proactive in changing the status quo, as much as the women threatened by it.  

                 

A professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, Richard is on the executive board of the Queens-based Newtown Literary Alliance (publisher of the Newtown Literary Journal) and continues to curate the First Tuesdays neighborhood reading series at Terraza Cafe in Jackson Heights. You can listen to last January's interview with Richard by Rachelle Escamillas of KKUP radio here. 

As a poet/essayist and housing/political activist, Cora Santaguida, besides reading assorted pieces on relationships, longing and misadventures in pop subculture, will also be emphasizing the importance of social empathy-raising (particularly as it relates to affordable housing and economic justice) as one of several featured readers Tuesday evening at Confluencia in Danbury.

This 2018 essay excerpt, derived from Cora's experience of being homeless twice, embodies a powerful balance of subjective and objective details, conveying one corner of a nationwide complex of numerous social problems, whose popular view as being perpetually insoluble depends on the mistaken belief that they are unrelated, rather than interconnected problems--and hence of benefit to self-styled "stakeholder" interests: 

"Strong wills in straw houses"

I had a whole circuit of people that I knew and recognized . I could point out who was homeless, who was on a waiting list for housing, who had housing, and who had housing and fucked up and were homeless again. I could also tell you who went to which clinic. It was an unspoken thing between us; we were able to recognize one of our own, and we would guess who will end up in the hospital, and who would be next to lose their housing. We gossiped about what got who admitted last week, who just got out, and who is back again after only a week. ‘They’re doing really good now,’ is what we would say, when we knew that nothing was going to change. So many of us had accepted our fate, and there were plenty of people counting on that for profit. The only thing temporary about us was our housing situation.  

In addition to being a PoemAlley member, Cora has been active in the Green Party of Connecticut since 2012. One of the major accomplishments of her role as the State Coordinator for the 2016 presidential campaign of Dr. Jill Stein was organizing her appearance at the Old Town Hall in Stamford in July of that year, before an audience of approximately 150 people.

She has also served on various committees over the years, and is currently in her second term as Co-Chair of the Fairfield County Chapter and was recently elected as Co-Chair of the National Ballot Access Committee of the Green Party of the United States. Cora is also a Justice of the Peace in Stamford.

Confluencia is a literary confluence celebrating a wide range of voices, drawn from students, faculty and staff, community members, and award-winning writers, gathered twice a semester to share the experiences of different cultures via the written word.

This event is free to the public; refreshments will be served. RSVP encouraged.

Where:

Naugatuck Valley Community College

NVCC Danbury Campus

190 Main Street

Second Floor, D-203

Danbury, CT

When:

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

5:30-7:30pm

Contact:

203-575-8044

nv.edu/confluencia

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: