A Conversation with Four Poets: Janet Krauss, Faith Vicinanza, Duane Esposito and Kathryn Fazio. March 22, 2012.

On Saturday, April 28, at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford, CT,  The Mysteries of Light poetry reading will honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of 1979 Nobel Laureate Odysseas Elytis and a creative career spanning over 40 years. That afternoon the list of guest poets will include: Pramila Venkateswaran, Robert Roth, Mar Walker, along with the four I’ll be speaking to this evening: Janet Krauss, Faith Vicinanza, Duane Esposito and Kathryn Fazio.

This is the first of three programs I’ll be doing in support of this event. On Thursday, April 5, I’ll be reading the poetry of Odysseas Elytis, then on Thursday, April 19 I’ll be speaking to Nick Samaras who will be the featured poet at the event.

But let’s start with tonight’s program. Here are a few notes on the four poets I’ll speak to tonight.

–Janet Krauss was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has two books of poetry published Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press) and Through the Trees of Autumn (Spartina Press and the Faculty Development Fund Committee  of St. Basil College). She teaches English at Fairfield University.

Click here for a vlog of Janet reading her poetry.

Click here for more information about her book Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press).

–Faith Vicinanza is a poet, photographer, information technologies consultant, grandmother of twelve, and house renovator, her own that is, which never seems to end.

–Duane Esposito is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, N.Y.  He has an M.A. from SUNY Brockport and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona.  In 1994, Diane Glancy selected his work for an Academy of American Poets Award.  In 2003 & 2009, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  His poems have appeared in dozens of  publications.  He has published three books of poetry: The Book of Bubba (Brown Dog Press,1998), & Cadillac Battleship (Broken Tribe Press, 2005) and Declaration For Your Bones (Yuganta Press).  He lives on Long Island with his wife & children.

Click here for access to Duane’s Facebook page.

Click here for a vlog of Duane reading his poetry.

Click here for more information about his book Declaration For Your Bones (Yuganta Press).

–Kathryn M. Fazio is an international prize-winning poet and fine artist. She is the author of, A Taste of Hybrid Vigor: new poems of War, Passion, and Social Significance. Her poem, War, from the collection won her the First Ed-Rehberg Prize for poetry, which was then translated into French and televised in Haiti. She was named Poet Laureate of The College of Staten Island. Her poems are published in anthologies including, Bowery Women, En Compass, Long Island Sounds Anthologies and, Writing Works: a Resource Handbook for Therapeutic Writing Workshops and Activities.

A Taste of Hybrid Vigor: new poems of War, Passion, and Social Significance can be acquired by e-mailing the poet directly at katebiz@earthlink.net.

The Mysteries of Light: A Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Nobel Laureate Odysseas Elytis. Nick Samaras, Featured Poet Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford, 20 Forest Street, Stamford, CT. Saturday, April 28, 2012 between 3-5pm.

 

Click here to listen to the interview.

 

Elegy

for Anthony Shadid

by Janet Krauss

I look out my window,

the creek flows on

and when it’s stippled with mud

I wait, know the water will

fill up again

and I can take comfort

in the leisure of light

changing colors

and fingering the small waves

as I think of a writer

who restored his ancestral home,

his bayt, olive trees securing

his roots, his wish to stay

and pat firm the fresh loam

but he left to return

to the war zone

of flying shrapnel and grit

to survive capture

only to lean against a boulder

to collapse in silence

to be carried away

by the same horse

whose dander snatched his breath

and it’s best to remember

him smiling aglow

amidst his friends

eating a cheese dessert

soaked in sweet syrup

as I watch the creek

leap in the sun.

Limbo & The Rain

by Duane Esposito

These days, being here is just another day,

& most things seem a little low & sad.

A voice is all we have to reconcile history,

but there’s little song.

Do you feel, like I do,

the panic that disfigures?

Do you know, like I do,

love cannot survive?

These days, being here is just another day,

& most things seem a little low & sad.

The blank, blank, blank.

It’s love’s scattered wound.

It’s end of winter snow,

blue humiliation, the new moon.

Do you feel, like I do,

the panic that disfigures?

Do you know, like I do,

love cannot survive?

A pin stuck into the skin

insists attention.

Limbo’s not the birds–

they don’t make our sadness.

Heaven’s not the one dove

heard beyond the rain.

These cries, these inky

songs, belong to limbo.

It’s a kind of dying, less a melody

& more the act of singing.

Harmony In Yellow

by Kathryn M. Fazio

When I see the color yellow placed in crevices I’ll never know I get the urge to chase

butterflies.

Your eyes take the shape of wings and I fly, buckling the wind as I go.

Only a rose could know the torment of an absent bee, or the hue the sun kneads

to twist her arms green.

I am winter falling through a hole in the spectrum, and you a wild fan to catch me.

I land hard at the neck bending antenna in two directions, clutching silk springs

that come between us.

And me with all my kite-like flesh, fall again unable to fit the door your mat offers me.

I knew you in another time. You picked caterpillars off corn for me.

Although Shakespeare knew the hoot of eyes, they were never strapped to a plane your

size, that has the nerve to toot at me, between the ground and God knows where, like

a chauffeur blowing a tractor horn between the squash and ears of corn I must have

husked only yesterday.

I look at what I lack in hue and swoop to put you in my hand.

Landing on my heels (almost), I sit there jumping up and down.

No smile about my beaded head, just the gut-skin drum of an Eskimo face, sagging

profusely at the neck by the awful, gaudy, belching sound, a necktie pulled too tight

might make.

But a frog that swallows a butterfly hasn’t really swallowed hue.

I sniff at your bones scattered like pollen by the wind and my neck bloats.

And all the while I cup my hand to catch-you in my jerky hands, so that I could know

that you are there, some sign of you that I could count like the number of times

you banged your head, creasing impressed walls of onion skin, against my sweaty

palm.

I tumble in the hay chest the meadow offers me. Your eyes like nipples erect themselves,

and in the current whirl me up to entertain a pine I twirl, between splits of teeth

and leaky sap, sticky like a little girl twirling a baton at a football game, the music

of the band long gone, playing Yankee Doodle.

In fall you are everything to me. I stick my feet in you and know I’m alive by the sound.

Your memory bites my leg like a wild dog chasing a boy through fields of golden happy

hue ( a butterfly the size of New Orleans between us.)

I trip over a Ball hopper and in falling look up stiff necked to match the casualty I had

only yesterday picking tennis balls up like frozen seeds that should have been sown

years ago, but are put in a basket and carted away, by chance, or choice, or laziness.

The cool cave eyes you drop at me, sewed by a hat, are tufts of smoke you blow from me.

I catch your breath for magic and my own.