Saturday, January 30, 2010

My First Lucille Clifton

I knew I was in love when my out-of-town-boo sent me this poem in email. It was the first I had read of Lucille Clifton, but now I'm hooked. What can I say...I'm a sucker for a guy with appreciates the beauty of words. At least he's not a poet. I think I'm done with those for a while:-) Enjoy this very sassy piece and remember that you are some.damn.BODY!

luv!

What the Mirror Said
BY Lucille Clifton,

listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a no place
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body!

Friday, January 29, 2010

Brave New Voices, Indeed


For someone who is all poetry, all the time, I did not give this show the love and attention that it deserved. ::le sigh:: Other than a tiny little blog post ten months ago, I really did not show HBO's Brave New Voices sufficient lovin.

So, here is my sad attempt at redemption. I found the full first episode on YouTube and decided to share it with all of you lovely people. This may, quite possibly, be illegal but...that is how passionate I am about spreading the BNV gospel. These kids are so freaking talented and have the most inspiring stories. If they can go through some of the junk they've seen and still write with such hope and poise, what the hell is our excuse?!?!

Hope this inspires you to stop slacking and write...you know who you are:-)

Enjoy!

ps...check out HBO for more background on the show and such. They're also on Twitter . I'm going to try and find out if there are plans for a second season. I promise I'll watch...or at least DVR...

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Quote of the WEEK

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

- Oscar Wilde

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Need Another Reason to LOVE Chicago?



So, my friend and I were talking about taking a spontaneous trip to Chicago this weekend and, instead of just closing my eyes and saying heck yeah, I went into full OCD mode. THis evening, I started researching hotels rates and things to do and the weather...all very non-spontaneous things. I know. I'm a nerd.

There was one surprising and fun that came out of my not-so-spontaneous planning session - I discovered The Chicago Poetry Tour. JACKPOT!



Gwendolyn Brooks’s neighborhood library. Union Stock Yards, where Chicago became Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World.” The Green Mill, home of slam poetry. Maxwell Street and Chess Records, inspirations for bluesy poets. Haymarket Square, memorial to the labor movement.


I didn't realize that Chicago had such a strong poetry history, but it does. As if I need another reason to love the windy city:-) Not sure if we'll go this weekend (it's gonna be 15 degrees and snowy...and I'm a total wimp when it comes to cold), but I'll mos def put this on my list for future trips. Can't wait!

Wanna find out more? I've included a quick snippet below, or you can check out the Poetry Foundation Site. I'll be sure to post a full review when I go.

Stay warm lovelies!


Say What?
The Chicago Poetry Tour, produced by the Poetry Foundation, is a chance to explore the history of the city through poetry. The online version of the tour features archival and contemporary recordings of poets and scholars, local music, and historic photographs. You can take the tour in numbered order, starting downtown, or jump around from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Or, if you’re in Chicago, let us take you on a guided tour: download the downtown portion, tour stops 1-6, hosted by NPR’s Scott Simon, into your MP3 player and take the walking tour beginning at the Chicago Cultural Center and ending at Harold Washington Library.

Whether virtual or actual, the Chicago Poetry Tour is a unique new way to introduce yourself to the Windy City and its great poetry.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Love a Good Scandal!

Nothing like a steamy, secret love affair to get your week started off right:-)



The Cook and the Lady
BY David Bruzina

The cook and the lady must be more than friends.
Notice he keeps glancing through the swinging double doors?
Notice how his Chicken Curry Special makes her grin?

Later, at her house, he’ll slip off her dress, whispering
something in her ear about her complicated breath—
for which she’ll credit (in part) him and his spices.

Already, she’s anticipating the sixteen paradises.
And how she’ll fall asleep at last, beneath the wet silk covers,
her body indistinguishable from her lover’s.

If I could, I’d release the cook from his kitchen.
I’d let the lady take him home. I’d cook our chicken.
But my chicken always lacks precisely that necessary something.


hungry for more?

Sunday, January 24, 2010

::HEART::Write::Bloody::


This time last year, I got the most amazing surprise - a book of love poems. And it was no ordinary book of mushy poetry. NO! This book, The Last American Valentine, the self-proclimned collection of "illustrated poems to seduce and destroy," was an collection of off-beat poems and "flash poetry." It was also the start of my great love affair with Write Bloody Publishers.

So, of course you could only imagine my glee when my secret Santa, again, surprised me with a Write Bloody book. This time, Taylor Mali's The Last Time as We Are. They just keep rolling out with the hottness and, since I'm on a bit of a Taylor Mali kick right now, I wanted to put in my own little plug for this book. I just started reading it and absolutely cannot put it down...but I must...to eat. and shower. and work...but, you get the point.
I've included a quick snap of one of my fav - "Ars Poetica." Funny and clever. The best combination!



Check out these and other great poetry collections today at Write Bloody's online store . Full time poets gotta eat too:-)

More about Write Bloody from Write Bloody
We publish and promote great books of fiction, poetry and art every year. We are a small press with a snappy look dedicated to quality literature. We have offices in LA, NYC and Murfreesboro, TN. Our design team has been pulled from all over America. We are proud of our unique style by utilizing modern painters, photographers and rock album designers for all our book cover art. We publish and promote 8-12 tour savvy authors per year. We are grass roots, DIY, boot strap believers . Our employees are authors and artists so we call ourselves a family.

Friday, January 22, 2010

What Can Make You Jump

US Poet Laureate Billy Collins once said, "Not since Taylor Mali has there been a poet of the likes of Taylor Mali"

Oh so true! Mali translates his academic mastery of the English lanaguage into a highly polished and accessible delivery. He writes about things we all can relate to in a way that we all wish that we could. This is one cool cat!!

Anyway...while listening to some old poetry podcasts, I found this oldie but goodie that always makes me tear up. A poem about his late wife...


Depression, too, is a kind of fire
BY Taylor Mali


...and I was going to write a poem
about how fire is the only thing
that can make a person jump out a window.

And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—
call me her knight in shattered armor—
could have loved her more,
or told the truth about children.

But depression, too, is a kind of fire.
And I know nothing of either.

Text from Spindle Magazine

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Can Poetry Matter? YES.IT.CAN

Poetry, like all things, must evolve and adapt in order to remain relevant and to guarantee its on-going survival. Yesterday, Dana Gioia told us why. Today, she tells us how.

Enjoy!


How Poets Can Be Heard
Excerpt from Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.

All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people's work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author's work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications.

They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Like priests in a town of agnostics...


I can’t imagine a world without poetry. I am that girl who likes to read poems aloud, to myself, and is often moved to tears by prose…Go figure…I started a poetry blog:-) Not surprising, though, I am not the majority. In fact, I belong to a marginal group of Americans that is shrinking by the day. While poets are still regarded with an almost papal degree of respect, poetry as a literary art, has become more fodder for literary journals and academic analysis than an active art is truly relevant to most Americans.

15 years ago, Dana Gioia laid out the challenges of this poetry subculture in the powerful title essay of her 1992 book Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Since then, the slam movement has gotten so big that even cities like Cincinnati host a number of poetry nights. National and global poetry competitions have cropped up. HBO's Def Poetry Jam has become a hit. And (thanks to YouTube) you can access poetry performance from all over the world.

But, how much has really changed? How much farther does the poetry movement need to go to push beyond the fringes and into mainstream culture? Is that even the right goal?

Although a bit outdated, Gioia's essay is extremely thought-provoking and left me with many questions about the future of the art I love so much. Fantastic read!

Enjoy:)

Can Poetry Matter?
Excerpt from Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.
American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture.
more

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

I Am Asia-America

I love hearing other people's "children-of-immigrants" stories. Although or stories are different, there is so much commonality in our experiences...the cultural tightrope walking, the desire to assimilate- followed by the need to cling to our native history, the inevitable miscommunication that occurs between our parents and ourselves.

We have all gone "searching for a city that would be home"...a place to belong to, without shame or obligation. Through beautiful prose, Alvin Lau captures all of this emotion in his poem Asia-America, Where Have You Gone?

Enjoy the video below and check out his bio under that.


Asia-America, Where Have You Gone?
BY Alvin Lau


My mandarin fell from my mouth and it drowned inside this poem
I can't find it in my broken Chinese or my father's dusty notebook
So Asia America, you need to call me
Let me know where you've been hiding
I've torn apart too many paper cranes
Trying to find you in their wings
And I have gone searching
I've scoured every inch of every city
Looking for the hints and trails and clues
The black ink
The passports
The photographs
Whatever would lead me back to you
I've followed the smell of cooking rice and fish
Searching for a city that would be home to me
But all I've found is MSG impostors and gold Buddha statues waving greedily...


ps...I found his bio on the Asian Rap Worldwide blog. This dude has been a staple in the slam poetry scene for at least a decade, so I'm pretty disappointed in myself for just now discovering him. Well, better late than never:-)
Alvin Lau is a spoken word poet from Chicago, Illinois. He is of Chinese ancestry and the son of immigrant parents. He has placed 7th place at the Individual World Poetry Slam and 6th place at the National Poetry Slam when he was 20 years old. He is also Amnesty International's "Poet of Conscience". He is very active in the poetry slam scene and also an activist for social justice.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Let’s open our fists and drop them.

Found this great poem after stumbling upon the Poem of the Day blog. It's a beautiful piece that tells us to throw off all that hinders and dare to become our better selves. There are just too many great lines here!!

Enjoy:-)


A Kol Nidrei
BY Mark Belletini

Let’s set it all down, you and me.
The disappointments.
Little and large.
The frustrations.
Let’s open our fists and drop them.

The useless waiting.
The obsession with what we cannot have.
The focus on foolish things.
The pin-wheeling worry which wears us out.
The fretting.
Let’s throw them down.

The comparisons of ourselves with others.
The competition, as if Domination
was the best name we could give to God.
The cynical assumptions.
The unspoken, shelved anger.
Let’s toss them.

The inarticulate suspicions.
The self-doubt.
The pre-emptive self-dumping.
The numbing bouts of self-pity.
Let’s sink them all like stones.

Like stones in the pool of this gift of silence.
Let’s drop them like hot rocks
into the cool silence.

And when they’re gone,
let’s lay back gently, and float,
float on the calm surface of the silence.

Let’s be supported in this still cradle
of the world, new-born, ready for anything.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

i don’t understand you God



Although we know that we are anything but, it is tempting to live our lives as if we are invincible. Despite constant reminders of the frailty of life, it is easy to believe that our technology and law enforcement and all-around street smarts are enough to sustain us. There is nothing like a natural disaster to shatter that idea. In just a moment, the earth can turn turns against us, its feeble captors, and reminds us that we are small.

As I watched footage of Tuesday's massive earthquake in Haiti, I couldn't help but be hit by the magnitude of the damage and perplexed by the problem of recovery. Even the US, with all of its wealth and prestige buckled and bowed low under the weight of Hurricane Katrina. Much less a country with an annual per capita income of less than $400 and an average life expectancy of 53. How will they recover...tomorrow and in the years to come?

Anyway, all of this deep thought reminded of a fabulous piece that Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai wrote after the quake and tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean and claimed more than 200,000 lives. Another tragedy that left me with so many questions for God. ::le sigh:: Tsai gives voice to my confusion, but also leaves me with a sense of hope.

Enjoy the piece below and remember that life is too short. Don't let a grudge keep you from telling someone you love them. Tomorrow, it might be too late.

ps...if you're looking for an easy way to help, you can send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999. The charge will be tacked on to your monthly cell phone bill.
Aftershock
BY Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

the week the tsunami hit
i started reading the Bible again
for the first time
since I was five years old




so cried CNN, the Associated Press,
Reuters, and the BBC
so cried the Red Cross
and nations across the world
glaring at each other
to up the ante
to loosen their purse strings

i turn on the morning radio
and there is so much laughter
the mouths are huge
monstrous

as prayers and exhausted sighs of relief
sounded from every phone call,
every family member:
i am alive
i survived
i can hear you

a sober vision

as i close Bible pages
take it by the spine
and throw it against the wall

it breaks open
leaves trembling like lips

i don’t understand you God
but i do understand that
it’s not your fault

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Quote of the WEEK

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Decade in Books



Want to find out more about the hottest books and most fabulous authors of the past 10 years, check out the Guardian's "Decade in Books." I found some new gems to add to my reading list:-) Let me know what you think.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Slightly Stalkerish, but Still Lovely



I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair
BY Pablo Neruda

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Hard Working Words

Evey year, hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words. Wise words. Hard working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.

Today, 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words

you can change that. help save the words.


That is the central message of Oxford Dictionary's Save The Words site. It's a very tongue in cheek spin on the ever-popular "word a day" trend and I love it!! The words literally call out to you. Beg for you to adopt them. lol. I chose "xenization"...something that i hope to experience more of in the coming years. Check it out for yourself. Thanks baby bro for getting me hip to this:-)



Why are words important?

"Words are the cornerstone of language. The more words we have, the richer our vocabulary. Words allow us to communicate precisely. Without the right words to describe something, well...we'd be speechless.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Ni$$a Moments are Unpredictable...

We all have to confront and accept our inner forces...but sometimes, like in Daniel Beatty's Duality Duel, those inner forces confront us. Yup. His inner angry black man is straight up ready to kick his butt. Think Boondocks "Ni$$a moment." lol

This is a funny piece, but has a deep message nestled under all of that hilarity. Listen UP!

Friday, January 1, 2010

You Rock my Socks Off!!

Happy New Year Lovlies!

Thanks so much for reading and commenting and emailing and encouraging and being your all around awesome selves. Thanks for reminding me that I'm not just throwing out nonsense into cyberspace...that there are people on the receiving end who are listening and reading.

It's wonderful to be connected to such a great network of poets (famous and aspiring) and lovers of the art. You inspire me...more than you will ever know:-) And I will try my hardest to repay you all in kind.

Hope that 2010 is a blessing to you and yours!

Love.Learn.Teach
- sb