Dreams by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams


For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field


Frozen with snow.

...most popular choice for the African-American Read-In 2010
 
I keep thinking of all those kids in the Olympics who have captured our imaginations and TV screens this week.  I think about their moms and dads, too, staying up all night so that the kid could practice at the Mennen Arena (or the Idaho equivalent) and paying for all that equipment and ice time.  An Olympic dream has Homeric proportions and involves the support of more than spandex.
Get a gold medal for yourself in something. Focus your energy.  Do the hard work and earn it.  Say thanks to your team, too.
 
Keep writing,
 
Maureen

Homage to Someone Hip...

Some sons.

i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes

and clots like you

wouldn't believe. let the

flashes come when they

meet someone special.

let the clots come

when they want to.

let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them to gynecologists

not unlike themselves.

...
"Wishes for Sons" by Lucille Clifton

What a wonderful testament to literacy it is to be able to have a "favorite poet," especially in these days of Jersey Shore and Sean Hannity, but Lucille Clifton, who passed away yesterday, was one of my favorite poets.  She was not afraid to talk about her hips or tampons or racism or blessings.  Thank you, Lucille, for bringing it home.

Keep writing,

Maureen

Today, Like Every Other Day

Poets like us, baby, we were born to run.

In the strange quiet that hangs over city streets

in early morning, we hold hands and run across


wrinkled sidewalk, hollering at bakers, leaping over

stacks of newspapers left for sleeping store owners.


The dark runs through us, propels our hands

and feet like the breeze, tossing loose our hair

and drying out our eyes, our bodies dashing blind

over each hill, falling forward into the wind.


Next time, let's run away for good. We can leave

with nothing but necessities, meet beneath

sycamore trees—pick the street and we’ll push


this earth into motion with the soles of our feet.



I'll bring fresh coffee beans, and every morning

will be brighter than the last.

.....Stacey Balkun, from Piscataway, but extending her reach these days

This is a new poem from Stacey, whose coffee addiction continues to manifest itself in her writing.  "Today, Like Every Day" is featured in the current issue of Chantarelle's Notebook, an online poetry magazine. Kendall & Christinia Bell are two innovative members of the NJ poetry community who have been working hard on this e-zine.
Kendall A. Bell is a native of Bergen County, NJ who transplanted to Burlington County in early 2001. His poetry deals with the frustration of everyday life, teetering dangerously on sanity's edge and the hope of better days. His work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, most recently Zygote In My Coffee and Decompression. He was nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net collection in 2007 and 2009. His current chapbook, his eleventh, is called The Forgotten. He is a football and music fanatic and a self-proclaimed curmudgeon 
Christinia Bell is the co-editor of Chantarelle's Notebook. She normally does not write, but does a fair amount of critiquing casually. This is her first editorial position. By day, she is a residential team leader/wrap around coordinator
Let's bring some Valentine's Day love to these supporters of verse, these Jersey editors of enjambment.

See you at the Poetry OutLoud Regional Finals this week at the Two Rivers Theatre in Red Bank.

Keep writing,

Maureen

Patroling Barnegat...

WILD, wild the storm, and the sea high running,

Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,

Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,

Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,

Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,

On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,

Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,

Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,

(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)


Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,

Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,

Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,

A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,

That savage trinity warily watching.

...Walt Whitman


After a stormy couple of days in New Jersey, we are reminded that it was ever thus.  There have always been weird forms confronting the night here.  Sometimes they are on over-rated MTV reality shows.  Sometimes they are hiding their faces as they leave federal courthouses.  They are even scooping up mounds of snow at the mall so that we can walk and spend aimlessly on a Sunday.  They're out there, and they bear wary watching.
Visit the Walt Whitman House in Camden.  Are you a scholar/teacher?  Visit the Walt Whitman Archive or sing the Classroom Electric with this great resource for Whitman, Dickinson, and American culture.


Keep writing,

Maureen

You can't make up New Jersey stories like this...

"Her name was Hope Diamond, "the Gem of the Exotics."
She was a shapely, dark-haired burlesque queen, performing through the 1950s and ’60s from Buffalo to Toledo, as a headliner in places like Union City’s old Hudson Theater.
This week she will be on a different stage with a different name — accused of taking cash that did not go into a garter belt, but rather into Jersey City’s tumultuous mayoral campaign."

Ah, burlesque!  "New Jersey was once a hotbed of girlie shows, benefiting from the exodus of performers leaving New York after striptease was banned by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1942. The Garden State was one of the last holdouts as burlesque gave way to strip clubs, with local theaters continuing to offer old school comedy into the early '70s.

The famed Minsky Brothers produced elaborate spectacles featuring a cast of 40 at the Adams Theatre in Newark. The city was also home to the Empire Theatre, a vaudeville house that had been presenting racy entertainment since 1912.

(Want more about Asbury Park scandals, scoundrels, and successes?)

Other haunts included the Hudson Theatre in Union City and the Savoy Theatre in Asbury Park.
Venues were usually in immigrant neighborhoods and ethnic stereotypes were joke fodder, laughs springing from the misadventures of Irish cops and German butchers. Burlesque was racially segregated, dying out just as the civil rights movement was beginning to take hold.


The word burlesque is a French term for caricature and it also links to burla, Italian for joke. The etymology may have foreign roots, but the American style is an original, a mix of glitz and satire with costumes as colorful as the language."

Fun stuff from today's Star-Ledger.  Unfortunately, the people of Jersey City resented being stripped by this once-titilatting burlesque queen.

Keep writing,

Maureen

Just Bragging about Someone Who Graduated from St. Joe's in West New York...

Photographer and videographer Mauro Altamura received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and his BA from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine and La Recherche Photographique. Altamura is also a short story writer and an Assistant Professor of Photography at New Jersey City University.

This particular series of his work has been created by scanning well-known, historical photographs from textbooks, and cropping out all information except the solitary individual. Altamura explains, “The person stands alone, isolated from his/her context and any intended meaning. These anonymous people may be in a picture that is famous, but in that relationship their image exists solely as the non-identified bystander or a figure that is part of the overall composition and form of a photograph. They have become, in essence, non-persons. By physically dissecting the image to reverse the figure/ground relation, by making the anonymous person the sole occupier of the picture plane, I am attempting to deconstruct and flip the hierarchical authority of the image. The issue, therefore, is to construct a model that reveals the unacknowledged and by extension (and metaphor) considers alternate histories and people. These people, who have been unknowingly photographed, who are part of the photographer’s ‘composition’ are the anonymous and the unrecognized. This work is an attempt to prioritize their individual existence.”

His work has appeared in shows at City Without Walls in Newark and VertexList in Brooklyn, NY, as well as solo exhibits at the State Museum of New Jersey and the Jersey City Museum, where his work is part of their collections. Mauro Altamura's work also appears in many other public and private collections including those of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Polytechnic Institute in Tokyo, Japan

Keep writing, Mauro, et. al.,

Maureen

Photographer and videographer Mauro Altamura received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and his BA from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine and La Recherche Photographique. Altamura is also a short story writer and an Assistant Professor of Photography at New Jersey City University.

This particular series of his work has been created by scanning well-known, historical photographs from textbooks, and cropping out all information except the solitary individual. Altamura explains, “The person stands alone, isolated from his/her context and any intended meaning. These anonymous people may be in a picture that is famous, but in that relationship their image exists solely as the non-identified bystander or a figure that is part of the overall composition and form of a photograph. They have become, in essence, non-persons. By physically dissecting the image to reverse the figure/ground relation, by making the anonymous person the sole occupier of the picture plane, I am attempting to deconstruct and flip the hierarchical authority of the image. The issue, therefore, is to construct a model that reveals the unacknowledged and by extension (and metaphor) considers alternate histories and people. These people, who have been unknowingly photographed, who are part of the photographer’s ‘composition’ are the anonymous and the unrecognized. This work is an attempt to prioritize their individual existence.”

His work has appeared in shows at City Without Walls in Newark and VertexList in Brooklyn, NY, as well as solo exhibits at the State Museum of New Jersey and the Jersey City Museum, where his work is part of their collections. Mauro Altamura's work also appears in many other public and private collections including those of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Polytechnic Institute in Tokyo, Japan.