Duane Esposito & Ralph Nazareth: Friendship and Individuality In Defiance Of Time

Building on the their experience as co-presenters at last December’s “Poetry In Conversation” program at the Norwalk Library, this evening friends and academic colleagues Duane Esposito and Ralph Nazareth will be reading from their new collection, Dropping Death (Yuganta Press, 2018) at the Stamford Barnes & Noble bookstore this evening. 

Martin Buber (1878-1965)

Duane Esposito

In his write-up for the Colorado Review, poet Tim Wood draws particular attention to Dropping as a successful effort in its atypical commitment to honoring both, rather than suffusing either, contributors’ creative voices, such that “the point is… to bring them into orbit around one another. "

Ralph Nazareth

Among other interpretive lenses Wood applies in his examination is existentialist Martin Buber’s “I-Thou/I-It” dialectic in laying out how Duane and Ralph’s collaboration ties their friendship with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of that fundament of sapience, our sense of Self--and, by contrast, expressions of Otherness, be it in meeting a new neighbor, encountering different cultures, Death, or, in the sample below by Duane, the priorities of childhood: 

head inside to things

nearby—
the toys

& crumbs & crafts

& such—
& I

lie beside it all—
rub my kids’ bellies—

tell them the story

Duane Esposito is a Professor of English at Nassau Community College, (from where Ralph recently retired). Duane holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and has placed work in dozens of journals. Prior to Dropping Death, he has published three collections, including Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005) and Declaration for Your Bones (Yuganta, 2012). He also resides on Long Island with his family on Lopsided Farm.

Ralph has released several collections, and is a dedicated poet, publisher and teacher who has worked in academic, penal and community settings--including the Tuesday night PoemAlley group based in Stamford’s Curley’s Diner. His book Ferrying Secrets was originally released by Yugadi Publishers, Hyderabad, India in 2005 and is available through Ralph's Yuganta Press. Last year’s Between Us the Long Road was published through Owl Feather Collective as a fundraiser for GraceWorks, Inc., the international non-profit foundation Ralph manages (find out more here).

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the music/DVD 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

"In The Land Of the (Willfully) Blind": Poets In Conversation With Ralph Nazareth And Duane Esposito

Ralph Nazareth

Duane Esposito

In addition to reading their own work, Ralph Nazareth and Duane Esposito, Thursday night's guests of the Norwalk Poet Laureate’s Poets In Conversation series, will also discuss favorite subjects, respective approaches to the craft and their ideas as to its purpose and necessity—especially in today’s unsettling times.

Ralph’s 2017 follow-up to 2005’s Ferrying Secrets, Between Us the Long Road (released by Owlfeather Collective as a fundraising vehicle for a non-profit he co-founded [see below]), while featuring pieces of phantasmagoric satire, outrage, desire, mourning and more penned before the current administration, nevertheless maintains a well-timed propulsive inevitability in its critique of everything from the simplistic allure of parochial political thinking (“Oil Change”), intercultural contact/assimilation (“The Song Of the Plumber”) and unexpected exultation and hope (“The Eyes Of Gaza").

In particular, the Ozymandean spectre of unconscionable destruction (“The Long Oar”) versus the sensitive demands of the child (“Listening To the Radio On the Way To the Nursery”, "After Night Prayers"), whose logic we dismiss for some mad definition of the “practical”, challenges the reader to consider just who the real grown-up is.

The urgency of this juxtaposition is matched with uncomfortable fidelity by Rush’s authoritative performance of their thirty-three-year-old song “Distant Early Warning”, released at the height of the last period of threatened nuclear conflagration:

Duane’s own writing wrestles on similar ground to his friend Ralph’s (especially as to the ultimate indifference of time and Nature to our comparatively ephemeral concerns), constellating about suffering, the burden of knowing (both for the individual and the society) and, as the following video of his “In the Whitecaps Of Pain” suggests, the alienation associated with both:

A professor of English at Nassau Community College, from where Ralph retired in the same capacity, Duane spoke at Curley’s Diner in 2012 and has appeared in numerous literary publications. He has three collections, including Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005) and Declaration For Your Bones (Yuganta, 2012). A Long Island resident, he received an MFA from the University of Arizona; in 1994 his writing was selected by Diane Glancy for an Academy of American Poets Award. You can find out about Duane’s latest writing and appearances on Facebook here.

When:
Thursday, December 7, 2017
7-8:15 pm

Where:
Norwalk Public Library
(Main Library Reading Area)

1 Belden Avenue

Norwalk, CT 06850

Contact:
Cynde Bloom Lahey
Director of Library Information Services
203-899-2780

Poets In Conversation is a free program of the Norwalk Public Library, organized by Pushcart Prize-nominated Laurel Peterson, Norwalk Poet Laureate; learn more about the participants and the series by contacting Laurel directly at laurelpeterson@att.net.

___

Proceeds from the sale of each copy of Between Us the Long Road will be donated to GraceWorks International, a charitable organization based in India, co-founded by Ralph (a Mangalore native), providing humanitarian outreach to countries in the developing world. Structured on a less intermediated basis than most other non-profits, 100 percent of donations go directly to people in need.

Managing Coolness And The Echoes Of Old Applause

For followers of Connecticut Public Radio or Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe, listeners to the Thursday, May 31 broadcast of his self-titled program were treated to guest co-host PoemAlley’s Ralph Nazareth as part of the CMS 2012 Poetry Show (click here to listen to it in the CPR archives).

Reading from his 2005 collection Ferrying Secrets, Ralph and Colin touched on everything from the tempting possibilities of Homeland Security’s new list of terrorist watch words and Connecticut's leading poetry events, to the ties between creativity and mortality and the re-emergence of poetry’s relevance since the late 1980s.

So wide in his appeal that even farmers would stop working their fields to gather and listen to Pablo Neruda read, Ralph observed how poetry, once consigned to the static critiques of academia, is "changing lives” anew by addressing social issues via slams, multimedia performances and other dramatic outlets.

As PoemAlley moderator for many years, Ralph talked of witnessing how the form’s inviting capacity for personal expression has blossomed into a renewed yearning for exercising one’s voice both for oneself and on behalf of those who have none (not to mention the spontaneous capacity to do so through the compositional capabilities afforded by cell phone technology).

Nick Flynn

Richard Wilbur

Calling into the show from near the end and the prime of their respective careers, guest poets Richard Wilbur and popular memoirist Nick Flynn shared their complementary drives as students, readers, writers and performers.


First published in 1947, Wilbur as poet (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems; Things of This World, 1956), children’s book author, prolific translator and collection editor, could not overemphasize the power of outspoken, unabashed delivery, reminding writers that “poetry began as song.” Perhaps a natural sensitivity, given the National Book and T.S. Eliot Awards-winner's work as French translator and librettist on the Leonard Bernstein 1963 musical production of Tartuffe, which yielded numerous actors’ interpretations of his interpretation of Moliere’s comedy--an experience he found uniformly enjoyable, as opposed to the translation process, which Richard found both “slavish and lively”. For a taste of the Nobel Laureate’s own work, enjoy Wilbur’s reading from the 1994 Riverwood Poetry Festival:

Part of a generation of longer-lived writers like the recently-passed Adrienne Rich, Wilbur, now 91, is philosophical about his remaining output, referring to his latest collection, Anterooms (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and his June 2 appearance at this summer’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival probably his last. Wilbur prefers to pull back before giving a disappointing showing, either in print or before the microphone. The video below adapts Canadian rock trio Rush's affecting lamentation on the inevitable transition from virtuosity to the Void:

Interestingly, Ralph and Colin observed how, of all forms of writing, poetry’s intellectually and physically compact character confers a rare and intimate immortality.


For instance, Ralph confessed to often keeping small pieces in his wallet to re-read when in need of support. Of continued utility is Wilbur's "A Wedding Toast," which Ralph has had many opportunities to share with nervous fathers-of-the-bride (Ralph closes the program with a reading of his similarly-themed "Lightning Bugs" from Ferrying). McEnroe attested to his own obsessive muttering of the line “fresh linen for the backs of thieves” from “Love Calls Us To Things of This World” (1963’s The Poems of Richard Wilbur).

The line’s paradoxical generosity is mirrored in the work of Indian poet Reddy Shankreti, who challenges the reader in his 2011 collection Voyager (University of California Press) by using the figure of Kurt Waldheim--one-time UN Secretary General and former Nazi--to highlight the moral complexity of being human.

A poetry instructor at Green Haven Prison for many years, Ralph believes similar exercises, such as Colin's and other's gleefully defiant competitions to write poetry based on Homeland Security’s newly-released list of terrorism “trigger” words (scroll here for the complete list) are further ways where poetry can serve to examine ethical issues by divorcing them from emotionally-controlling contexts.

Context regarding the craft of poetry, itself, is a different matter for Nick Flynn, whom, while informally serving as an “ambassador” for poetry to the mainstream due to the success, in particular, of his memoirs The Ticking is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2010, 2004, Norton, respectively) spoke on learning not just how to write it, but about its history and feeling privileged to have studied with older practitioners like Allen Dugan as an aid to “finding your tribe” within the field. The PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning author of three poetry collections, including The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands and Some Ether (Graywolf, 2011, 2000, respectively) will be reading this evening from 7 to 9 pm at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford as part of the Riverwood Poetry Festival. If you can't make it, here's his reading of "Haiku (failed)" from The Captain Asks:

Wary of his perceived “coolness” by mainstream culture, given that the majority of poets work in obscurity, Flynn expressed a mild disorientation--in contrast to Wilbur’s delight--regarding seeing his efforts filtered through others' performances. Previewing re-enactments of episodes from his life in the forthcoming Julianne Moore/Robert DeNiro feature adapted from Another Bullshit Night “can be an eerie experience.” See how faithful the production of Being Flynn is for yourself here:

The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival began June 1-3 at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington and continues on Wednesdays through August 1. Graced in past seasons with readings by Billy Collins, Maxine Lumin, Grace Paley and other celebrated poets, Sunken Garden has been regaling audiences with verse and music among the garden's fragrant blooms for twenty years and offers workshops and opportunities for one-to-one discussions with poets. Learn about Theodata, Sunken Garden's new online journal here. Here's a sampling from the current season:

Ralph joins Antoinette Brim, Randal Horton and Doug Anderson this Sunday, June 24, from 2 to 4 pm in reading poetry of social justice at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center as part of the Riverwood Poetry Festival, a four-day celebration which began June 21, now in its fourth year, taking place in several sites throughout the Hartford area. Other participants, including Maggie Kearney, Sonya Huber, Walter Butts, Janet Bowdan and Tony Fusco, round out a program incorporating readings by up-and-comers, live music and a panel discussion with poetry journal editors. Click here for full details; email: riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com.

Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Hill-Stead Museum

35 Mountain Road

Farmington, CT 06032

860-677-4787 ext.134

poetry@hillstead.org

Riverwood Poetry Festival (six venues)

Asylum Hill Congregational Church

814 Asylum Avenue

Hartford, CT 06105

860-525-5696

http://www.ahcc.org/

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

77 Forest Street

Hartford, CT 06105

860-522-9258

City Steam Brewery

942 Main Street

Hartford, CT 06103

860-525-1600

http://www.citysteambrewerycafe.com

Connecticut Science Center

250 Columbus Boulevard

Hartford, CT

860-724-3623

http://www.ctsciencecenter.org/

Connecticut Science Center

250 Columbus Boulevard

Hartford, CT

860-724-3623

http://www.ctsciencecenter.org/

The Wadsworth Atheneum

600 Main Street

Hartford, CT 06103

860-278-2670

http://www.thewadsworth.org/