Who is Nordette Adams? - an excerpt from the Examiner
Nordette Adams, who is the New Orleans Literature Examiner and also a poet and fiction writer, rarely directs readers to her own literary works; however, given the interest she's seen recently in her poem "Oil," she makes an exception today. This disaster has endangered wetlands, marine life and other wildlife, including brown pelicans, the Louisiana state bird. Adams's poem focuses on just one bird as it examines humanity's creation of more problems while seeking to solve one.
Page Meets Stage is a monthly poetry series that pairs more page-oriented, academic poets with poets who come from a more spoken-word or performative background. Both poets are on stage at the same time and read back and forth, poem for poem, sometimes answering each other and other times taking the conversation in a different direction.- Excerpt from the website
The simple fact is that most women, myself included, have self esteem issues. Sometimes these are relatively small and interfere, only minimally, with our daily lives. But sometimes, our skewed sense of self is debilitating and makes us do things that our wiser selves would blush at...We go back to the men that hurt us because laying in the arms of even the wrong guy can feel like "love." We crave that false sense of uniqueness that even the wrong male attention brings...to remind us that we are not just another body roaming the planet. That, even if only for an hour or a day, we are somebody...desired and desirable.
And I say "we" because it has been me and at times still is. It's funny how, even with this sort of emotional clarity, I still fall for it. It's almost like I'm carrying my raw heart in my hands, waiting for someone to help me carry it the rest of the way...and before finding out if the guy is trustworthy or even simply worthy, I hand over my heart...all of my love...and pray that he will handle it with care. Most often, he does not. Whether it is because he cannot or chooses not to, I can never know for sure.
So there it is. It pretty much boils down to low self esteem and insecurity. On the bright side, I'm learning that the more I start believing that I deserve better, the less tolerant I become of anything less. Hence "the last booty call on earth" post. I'm also learning that I am lovely and lovable...internalizing that shit and making it my mantra...reminding myself that I was created for nothing less than true love, by a God that is so much more. -susanbaba
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean
During a lightening storm
Because I would rather be left for dead
Than left wondering what thunder sounds like
I'm not looking for someone who can save me
Life rafts might keep you afloat
But they rarely get you anywhere
And I've got places I want to go
....
Love is like sunshine
Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there
I wanna know that I'm here
Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.
“See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” - Isaiah 49:16
Love After Love
BY Dereck Walcott
The time will come, when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here.
Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.
Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life.
Writing Exercise #21
Ingredients:
1. Three "famous" physical characteristics of yours.
2. Describe the weather (past or present) inside your heart, using all five senses.
3. One place that is, for you, the epitome of "peace and quiet"
“My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
- Ms. Lena Horne at age 80
Alice Walker’s career has spanned four decades, from critically acclaimed novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, to influential essayist, poet, activist, spiritual mentor, and popular blogger.
In The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, the unique vision underpinning Walker’s extraordinary body of work is explored in a series of conversations between Walker and other significant literary and cultural figures, including Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, Pema Chodron, Claudia Tate, Margo Jefferson, William Ferris, Paula Giddings, and Amy Goodman.
Each conversation represents a different stage in Walker’s artistic and spiritual development; taken together, they offer an unprecedented angle of vision on her career as well as on her personal and political development. Noted literary scholar Rudolph Byrd sets Walker’s work into context with an introductory essay, as well as with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of her writings. The World Has Changed is a major new addition to the Walker canon and an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the life and writings of “a muse for our times” (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!).
Brooklyn born poet/playwright/actor Danny Hoch deserves inclusion here for his entire body of urban, urbane and fiery work. But all of his credentials can be boiled down to just one line from his poem, "PSA": "This is a public service announcement: This is Whitey, and I'm tellin' you, 'Yes, it's a conspiracy, motherfucker!'"
