Looking Back To Look Forward With Van Hartmann

Dr. Van Hartmann, tomorrow night’s featured poet at Curley’s, has placed work in numerous literary journals and has released two books through Texture Press: the redemption-themed collection Shiva Dancing (2007) and Riptide, as well as Between What Is and What Is Not, a chapbook published in 2010 by The Last Automat Press. 

In his most recent title, Riptide (released in 2016), Van uses natural imagery to explore the ambiguity embodied in human affairs both on the intimate and the global scale, typified, according to Sheila Squillante (Editor-in-Chief, The Fourth River literary journal), in Van’s contrast between “a batch of succulent fiddleheads plucked from the forest and offered to a lover” and “an atom bomb test that blooms like a chrysanthemum against a childhood sky”. Click here for a preview of two pieces from this collection.

John Hoppenthaler’s (Domestic Garden) praise of Van’s sensually adroit and often elegiac work in its ability to “look back to look forward” is echoed in Van’s own observations in the 2016 interview on Life Edge 030 in affirmation of reading and literature as enduring guides to truth and what it means to be human in a time warped as much by competing political solipsistic outlooks as by a fast-paced culture with little patience for introspection: 

Originally interested in studying medicine (where he found the art of storytelling was considered part of an engaged physician's repertoire), Van gravitated toward English at the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D., following an A.B in History from Stanford. Currently, he teaches literature, film studies and conducts poetry workshops at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

He resides in Norwalk, Connecticut with his wife, Laurel Peterson, Poet Laureate of Norwalk (who has organized readings at Norwalk Community College, where she is Professor of English) and their yellow lab, Calder, who revels in whimsy, patience, and persistence. Van can be contacted at Van.Hartmann@mville.edu or at van.hartmann@gmail.com.

The Velvet, The Variegated & The Visceral: An Evening With Laurel S. Peterson

Norwalk’s poet laureate, Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor who writes alternatively in assorted venues and forms, ranging from poetry, academic critique and history, branching out last year into mystery fiction with Shadow Notes (Barking Rain Press, 2016). PA members and area poets will recall she co-organized the popular Writers Resist reading held last month at Norwalk Community College.

This Tuesday she will be reading from Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? (FutureCycle Press, 2017), an ekphrastic collection (inspired by a visit to the Whitney Biennial in New York), which embodies a comparable eclecticism delivered via “sledgehammer poems wrapped in velvet… of confession and affirmation."

The following piece, which originally ran in Gin Bender Poetry Review in 2006, lives up to Dan Masterson's quote with its carefully-chosen language, metaphoric subjectivity, contrasted with a "we've-all-been-there" visceralism that lingers in the mind:

What We Are

It's like pulling dry skin off lips,
irresistible until you taste blood,
and even then,
one last pull and the last
translucent slip is free.

The blood rises, nerve endings
tickling the air like
exposed wires.

More and more, this is how I feel

in our space.

All that's dead we're peeling back,

where we can,

the layers of ex-husband,

ex-wife, parents,the word "sheep" or "click"

or "pie", perhaps--that brings

another word cracked

like a leather belt,

like a branch in a blizzard.

We try, but the
n we pull back,

let the scar form, that

toughened bit of leather

that next time will take a knife,

more than plucking at least.

Besides placing her work in numerous literary journals, Lauren has also served as editor of Inkwell and managed a local history column with Gannett Suburban Newspapers. In 2006, she was a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry for her manuscript Mud Never Forgets.

Her first chapbook, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line Press) appeared in 2008, followed by Talking to the Mirror (The Last Automat Press, 2010). She also co-edited a collection of essays on the state of women’s justice in patriarchal society across language, religion, war, sex trafficking, and medicine titled (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Laurel and her husband live in Connecticut and Vermont. An avid Tweeter (@laurelwriter49), she also posts on Facebook; find out more at her website, LaurelPeterson.com.