Poets Speak Loud!, March 31

More Poetry! now back in Albany, back at McGeary’s for the open mic. It was supposed to be a “roast” of Mary Panza, but that was postponed until the Fall. But Mary was there to be the host & Ring Master of the open mic. It was a club-house reading with some long-time supporters & poets of the open mic scene, even A.C. Everson in her new role as videographer.

I was first on the sign-up sheet & read 2 new poems, “The Fence” (a product of a poetry workshop with Bernadette Mayer), then my entry to the Poetry Unites project, “Believe, Believe,” a tribute to the poem by Bob Kaufman. Julie Lomoe read an eco-poem written a few years ago, “Bi-Polar Gaia.” Joe Krausman pushed the format with a tour-de-force villanelle composed only of one-syllable words, then a cautionary tale of “The True Story of Jack & Jill.” Don Levy read a poem written many years ago, inspired by Edie Sedgwick & Gerard Malanga, “Mod Fashions,” then a more recent piece is his on-going commentary on homophobia, “No Gay Eating Here.” Tess Lecuyer began with a couple of old March haikus, then ended with a new March sonnet.

We’ve missed Kristen Day on the scene (she is reputed to have the world’s 2nd largest collection of photos of unknown poets); tonight she read the hysterical account of an conversation with her grandmother, “Four Fucking Dollars,” then “Everyday,” a list poem of the common phrases she says everyday. Anthony Bernini also made a rare appearance, all the way from Brunswick, with a poem based on a cartoon from The New Yorker magazine, “Sensible Pumps,” then a very new one, he said, “Desert Rivers.” Also with a new poem, written today, Adam Tedesco read “Molt” on the death of his mother’s friend, followed by the brutally ironic “Where I Lived & What I Lived For.” A late-arriving Algorhythm started by reciting one piece running off rhymes, on poetry & being down, then looses it, & does another piece in the same vein. It was all the same to us.

& that was it for this month, but if we all survive WordFest & our pens don’t run out of ink we’ll be back in McGeary’s back room on the next last Monday, about 7:30 — order dinner too. Check AlbanyPoets.com for a calendar of events.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Sunday March 30 — Featured Reading

The final reading of this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival, back one more time in the National Geographic Auditorium, on a rainy Sunday morning, tired & exhilarated, inspired & spurred on. Melissa Tuckey, member of the Split This Rock Board of Directors & Planning Committee was our tender host, began with a reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Big Buddy” from which the name “Split This Rock” came —

Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
and split it wide!
When I split this rock,
stand by my side.

Today we remembered poet Wanda Coleman (1946 - 2013) with a recording of her reading her poem “Angel Baby Blues.”

The first poet was a member of the DC Youth Slam Team Reina Privado reciting a moving, tender & bitter-sweet poem “How To Wear Your Mother’s Lipstick” — & her mother was there in the audience to greet Reina after her reading. It was difficult to take my eyes off them just 2 rows in front of me. Still another young poet “at the beginning of a great career” as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote to Walt Whitman.

Natalie Diaz greeted us in her Mojave language, then said she was going to read just love poems today. The poems she read were lush with images of fruits (apples & figs) & tasting & bodies, beginning with “Towards the Amaranth of Love or War,” then a sexy poem of watching her lover eat an apple, then “The Bells of Prague,” “These Hands If Not God’s” & “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” like bells, like songs, anatomy & fruit — after that we all needed a cigarette (even those of us who no longer smoke)!

Sheila Black began with an explanation of her disability, which I won’t even begin to write about except that it forms a backdrop to her poetry, sometimes distant, sometimes right up there. Her first poem, “Migrant,” was a portrait of a woman set in southern New Mexico. Frida Kahlo, she said, was her first “disability pin-up" & she read “Los Dos Fridas, or Script for the Erased” about “being welcomed into the club of people” after corrective surgery. “My Mission Is To Surprise & Delight” was a poem about her daughter working at the Apple store (the title from her daughter’s tee-shirt). “Borrowed Light Here in the 20th Century” was an anti-war piece, while “How to Influence Dreams” was a poem written to her “Capitalist alternative side.” She ended with a poem of little images of driving through Texas with her youngest daughter, “Travels with Eliza.”

Shailja Patel was introduced as a Kenyan poet & activist. Her first piece was a collage of quotes from news accounts of Obama joking about drones, & her reading the names of children killed by US drones in Pakistan, the names written on a styrofoam cup in the same manner that prisoners at Guantanamo prison passed around poems. Her 2nd poem had an equally ironic twist, based on Twitter posts on gay rights/human rights. She also read briefly from her poetry book Migritude, “First States in Utopia” then recited a piece mixing Kenyan politics & a love song to a beloved, “Offering.” She ended with a piece from her Slam period “For the Verbal Masturbators” mixing dick jargon & politics.

And suddenly (or not) that was it for Split This Rock 2014. Melissa ended with thanks to, well, everyone & words from our Elder Adrienne Rich while we all held hands & there were even tears, like the rain outside.

I’m already looking forward to the 2016 Split This Rock — come join us.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Saturday March 29 — Evening Featured Reading

“It’s Saturday Night!” Regie Cabico proclaimed as he pranced on stage to a disco beat in an iridescent silver clubbing outfit, setting his tone for evening. The tribute poet tonight was Jake Adam York (1972-2012) with a recording of him reading a civil rights poem.

The DC Youth Slam poet was Thomas Hill (aka, he said, “The Cinnamon Gentleman”). He did 2 pieces, the quietly stated “Sunday Morning,” read from his chapbook Chronophobia then performed a poem about reciting poetry on the DC Metro, filled with the characters & wild images of such a ride.

The venerable Yusef Komunyakaa read without intros to his poems, & without theatrics, just his rich expressive voice & the rich images of his lines. He read “Requiem” (New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), “Fortress,” then “Ode to the Oud” invoking the images & history of Africa. Then 2 poems filled with images of the sea, one beginning “If I am not Ulysses…” (& images of bed as well), & “Islands.” Like all good poetry, his poems were like serious music — one can sense what they are about, carried along by the sounds & images, but they can be difficult to paraphrase.

Both Franny Choi & later Wang Ping did their performance poems from the microphone. Franny Choi began reciting her poem from Poetry magazine, “To the Man Who Shouted 'I Like Pork Fried Rice' at Me on the Street” in what I think was an extended version. “The Mirror” was a poem in the 3rd person, then “Letter from the World to My Eyes/From My Eyes to the World.” Some she read, such as “Too Many Truths,” some, such as the elegy “Notes on the Existence of Ghosts,” she recited. Another political piece was about oppression, of any kind -- police, military, even individual oppression, naming names. Her last piece, “Pussy Monster,” was a deconstruction/re-arranging of the Lil Wayne song into a list of the words of the song in ascending order of occurrence — can you guess what word, the last word(s) of the poem, was used most often?

Wang Ping was the first of the Festival’s featured poets to perform with music with DC-based musician Van, with wooden flute, congas & a guitar as needed. Her first piece, “A Haca Man Farms Rare Earth in South China,” was a tale of sludge, acid fumes & greed. Similarly “Dust Angels” which she read first in Chinese, then in English, was dedicated to Chinese immigrant workers & was about the dangers of their work & their exploitation by factory owners. Changing continents “On the Play Ground in Park Slope…” was about watching an adopted Chinese girl being yelled at my her Nanny. She ended with a poem about the Iraq war, “Tsunami Chant,” dedicated to peace protestors.

Then Regie brought all the poets on stage to boogie with him, even the reluctant Komunyakaa -- dancing away to the end of night. After all it was Saturday night.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Saturday March 29 — Afternoon Featured Reading

2 — count ‘em: 2! — Featured Readings today! The first at 4:30, with Teri Cross Davis as the host, & the tribute poet Amiri Baraka (1934 - 2014), a recording of him humming (& me humming along) Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” & a poem, & the line “we are the Blues ourselves…” oh yeah.

The opening reader was DC Youth Slam Team Member Lauren May, who read from the podium a simply-stated poem beginning “I’m stuck in the middle of the ocean…” about seeking peace, being scared of the unknown & escaping her mother’s anger. It was an emotional reading without Slam stylizing.



Eduardo Corral stated that he freely mixes untranslated Spanish with the English in his poems, & began with a poem in which he did just that, a poem about the many jobs his undocumented father had. From a series of poems each titled “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” he read one about being a gay man worried about death, & later ended the reading with a little poem with the same title. In between he read “Watermark,” a poem for his mother, & “Caballero” about a lover. He dedicated his reading tonight to the memory of poet José Montoya (1932 - 2013).

Gayle Danley gave the most performance performance of the evening beginning with an over-the-top piece about attending a high school reunion, telling the story as much like a stand-up comic as a poet. She is a former National Slam Champion from the ‘90s & can still strut her stuff. Next she read her poem in Poetry about having “The Talk” with her daughter. Then on to an emotional poem rich in detail, a thank-you list about her daughter’s suicide attempt, read from her notebook. She ended with a piece about teaching in a juvenile detention center, “I Am Just Like You.” It was a loud, energetic Slam performance but often laced with modern black stereotypes such as are common on TV sit-coms that left me uncomfortable.

In stark contrast Claudia Rankin’s reading showed how powerful good poems can be just in the power of the words themselves without all the spit & acting out. She read her 2 poems from the podium, almost hidden behind the massive wooden structure, her words ringing loud. The first piece was a meditation on life (“you fighting off the weight of non-existence…”) in a quiet, pared down language, using repetition, echoes & playing on “you.” The second piece was a cinematic montage of a black man being arrested after a traffic stop, the poem twisting & turning in on itself, a quietly read, but powerful commentary on racism.

Myra Sklarew is a Jewish research scientist turned poet, who began her reading with a brief tribute to Sarah Browning & the her work for Split This Rock. The first poem she read was written 16 years ago she said, but still is apt, on the new Millennium & the uselessness of war. Then she read about freeing a stag whose antlers got caught in branches (“Pursuit”) & another anti-war poem “Infinite Regress of War.” “Violation” was a poem in questions about rape, while “Safety in Our National Parks” was a funny & ironic comment on permitting guns in our National Parks. Her poem “Exchange” was about children in a Greek village teasing her by giving her the wrong names for things. She ended with Sterling Brown’s “After Winter.”

Another fabulous reading by 5 poets new to me before this Festival — & there were 2 more readings to go!  Stay tuned for the rest -- & check out other photos from Split This Rock Poetry Festival here.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Saturday March 29 — Panel

Poet’s Forum: How Political Engagement Affects the Writing Process


I only made it to this one panel today, held in the Beacon Hotel in a packed conference room, first thing on a Saturday morning. The panel was moderated by Split This Rock Board Member Dan Vera & each participant read their poem(s) from the March 2014 Poetry, with some basic comments then the discussion was opened for the audience with questions & comments.

Eduardo Corral, Yusef Komunyakaa

Eduardo C. Corral read “To Juan Do #234,” explaining that he was raised in southern Arizona & that the newspaper stories he read about the bodies of undocumented immigrants sneaking into the US found dead in the desert used similar language to that used to describe cooking. Later, he commented that “one word can collapse Time & Space.”

Yusef Komunyakaa read “Envoy to Palestine” with its reference to the the late, great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The poem “relies on images, images are subversive” Koumunyakaa said. Later he also read “The African Burial Ground.” In remarks later he said “language is political,” that “the surprises in language is what spurs me on.” He talked about walking & dreaming at the same time, that it’s “a kind of beckoning.”

Claudia Rankine, Dunya Mikhail

In the March Poetry, Claudia Rankine is represented by 5 sections from a longer work, “Citizen.” At first she read just one section set in Starbucks, commenting that she is exploring “how we get a jury to say it’s OK to kill black men.” Later, Dan Vera asked her to read another section. Regarding the style of “Citizen” she said she wrote the poem thinking of ordinary speech, of dialogue, thus wrote it in prose format. She said, “the poetry is in the feeling.”

Dunya Mikhail’s “Tablets” was originally written in Arabic & in the Arabic printed version had illustrations, like the ancient Sumerian tablets. When it is printed in book form it will have the illustrations, she said. As a young person in Iraq she was warned daily by her mother not to talk politics. In Iraq, Mikhail explained “one word can cost your life.” She also pointed out that in Arabic the root of the word “feeling” & of the word “poetry” are the same.

Early in the comment period Split This Rock Director Sarah Browning praised the new editor of Poetry for printing this issue of Split This Rock poets & for honoring the diversity of style that has been an essential element of this Festival since the beginning. She urged us all to send them poetry & to keep the magazine pointed in this direction.

The modern technology of smart phones & tablets has added a new dimension to how the audience takes notes. Many of us still used pens notebooks of varying sizes & designs. I noticed a few poets with what looked like hand-made art notebooks; I used a tattered 5x7 spiral notebook my daughter had brought back from Shanghai a number of years ago. There were a number of folks with pocket-sized Moleskin notebooks, one woman using her tablet as a writing table as she wrote in her notebook. But the annoying aspect of new technology also raised its ugly little head — a woman across the aisle from me, who also sneezed & blew her nose loudly during the reading, took notes on a tablet with an audible click to the keyboard, visibly annoying the man in front of me who kept glaring at her. She was oblivious & self-absorbed in her note-taking & he did not say anything to her. It was like a high-tech version of someone loudly & incessantly clicking their ball-point pen.

At this point I was over-whelmed with notes & photos & wanted to get them at least on my computer, if not up online on my Blog & Flickr! site. So i took the next 2 sessions off, knowing full well there were 2 Featured Readings later in the afternoon & evening. Stay tuned for those reports.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Friday March 28 — Featured Reading

The MC of tonight’s reading was Dan Vera, Chair of the Board of Directors of Split This Rock, & tonight’s tribute was to poet Juan Gelman with a recording of Gelman reading, in Spanish, “On Poetry.”

Each year, even on non-Festival years, Split This Rock has a poetry contest & on the Festival year the winning poet gets to read her or his poem at a Featured Reading. The 2014 winner was Karen Skolfield for her poem “At the Mall, There’s a Machine That Tells You If You Are Racist.” The poem is also printed in the program & available, with all the winning poems, on the Split This Rock website. Karen teaches at UMass Amherst & I expect to have her read in Albany sometime this year.

This night’s DC Youth Slam Team poet was Malachi Byrd whose piece was about growing up in a fatherless home, recited from memory, Slam-style. At one point the finger-snapping from his fellow team mates (& others), sounding like a badly-rehearsed chorus of crickets began to get a bit intrusive.

But what followed, from the 3 Featured Poets, was a study in contrast as well as lessons on ways to present good poems while still maintaining a level of performance that supports the poem without overwhelming it in theatrics. I hope the members of the Youth Slam Team were paying attention.

After some trouble with her clip-on mic, Maria Melendez Kelson used the stationary mic to give a lively, energetic performance of her poems, without spit & attitude, beginning with the “blasphemous” (her term) “Good Friday,” printed in Poetry, followed by “ICE Agents Storm My Porch” (also in Poetry). Her other poems were equally politically engaged without becoming polemics, while keeping it close to the personal: “Money Mindset” with the riveting refrain “spend it if you got it,” the troubling “Knot of Prayer” about moving next door to a registered sex-offender, & “For Light So Loved the World She Gave It More” about the Sun’s cycle of energy.

That last poem was a perhaps a fortunate little bit of synchronicity since Tim Seibles’ poem was titled “One Turn Around the Sun.” In fact this was the only poem he read, it was a 21at Century Whitmanesque tour-de-force meditation on Time, Memory, with rich images going back to his youth, the poem carried ahead by the flow of words, associations, not overly performed, but read expressively, using his resonant voice to full advantage, slickly combining rant & humor & tenderness. Much to be learned from this performance by the young poets in the audience (& us older poets too).

Anne Waldman has a characteristic performance style that I have tried to capture over the years in my photos (one of my shots from her performance at the QE2 in Albany is included in her massive collection of poems In the Room of Never Grieve, New and Selected Poems 1985 - 2003 (Coffee House Press, 2003). She began with a selection from Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009), a “sub-atomic Buddhist” eco-poem, delivered, as was much of her reading, in her trademark excited rant. Her poem for Amiri Baraka, with the message to fight back, “Allegorical Baraka” was delivered in a style that be best described as “Shamanistic,” while a section from her “Gossamurmur Project” took on identify theft & then gay marriage by playing & declaiming manic word strings & language twists.

A brilliant work of programming by the Split This Rock committee.  More photos can be found at my Flickr! site.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Friday March 28 — Political Action & Panels

A regular feature of the Split This Rock festival is a political action at one of the (smelly) seats of government for the creation of a cento, a collaborative, poem made up of random lines of poetry, each no more than 12 words, a group poem of protest. Today’s theme was “Stop the Spying! End the Surveillance State!”

It was a drizzly morning, what the Irish call a “soft rain” as I walked over to Lafayette Park in front of the White House. The poets & the press were gathering, even a couple of folks from Code Pink joined us. We all took our turns at the mic to read our lines, the serious, the spurious, the humorous, the magical, from the famous to the unknowns & kids joining in for fun. I’m sure we were being watched — I mean, that’s the point.

My contribution was from my poem “Now, Listen” which is also a tribute to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:

we can’t trust poets
we must listen
it makes us safer —
right?

Then we wandered back up to M Street & the day’s panels & workshop.

Re-Imagining the Nature Poem: Post-Pastoral, Post-Colonial, Eco-Spectacle, Eco-Justice Poetry

Natalie Diaz, Ravi Shankar, Greg Pardlo, Maria Kelson

Back to the Wilderness Society conference room, but first a few minutes to take in the large exhibit of Ansel Adams photos in the gallery. I was attending this panel in my ongoing exploration of what I call “urban nature poems.” While I enjoy wooded walks to the lake or poking around in the sand or the water at the ocean I spend most of my time in urban settings; are my walks around Lark St. any less “hiking” than climbing the paths in the foothills of the Berkshires? The panelist had varying approaches to the topic, as much from their personal aesthetics & their place in academe as from where they came from.

Natalie Diaz, perhaps because she is Mojave, had the most immediate/direct connection to the land, focusing on how violence has shaped the land & our bodies, quoting the Native concept, “Body is Land, Land is Body.” As an example she said in the Mojave language “amat” is the word for land, “emat” is the word for body. She also read her poem from Poetry “It Was the Animals.”

Ravi Shankar had the most academic approach, reading excerpts from a prepared paper (& he still went too long) about “the post-pastoral.” He traced the history of the pastoral from Hesiod to the modern age, then read a couple poems (“Fireflies” & “Mohican Sun”) from one of his chapbooks.

Gregory Pardlo (who is a visiting poet at the College of St. Rose MFA program in writing in Albany) began with comments about “in-between-ness” & the false dichotomy between Man & Nature, & wondered if anything can be external to anything else. The 2 poems he read, “Brooklyn Parakeets” & one about a whale caught in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn were the closest to what I think of as “urban nature poems.”

Maria Melendez Kelson read the most poems of the group, using as her theme “the Mother is the first environment.” She read a mother & daughter poem, “Green Corn Season” by Deeane Garcia, then her own poem, another mother/child piece “In the Early Month of Snow Melt 1997,” followed by Pat Moira’s “A River of Women,” & ended with a new poem of own addressed to her children, about not being a “perfect” mother, “A Nest in Thorns.”

The panel facilitator, Melissa Tuckey, discussed “eco-justice poetry,” citing the 19th Century English poet John Clare’s writing about the enclosure of the English countryside. She developed the link from agrarian capitalism through colonialism & commodification. In her discussion she cited, among others, Mahmoud Darwish & Margaret Walker, & talked about “alienation from the natural world,” causing me to wonder if urban life is part of the natural world? Her poems that she read were the anti-war nature poem “Times Arrow” & “The Wheel” based on Buddhist texts.

An interesting thread of ideas from yesterday’s panel through this panel today.

Women and War/Women and Peace II

Lisa Suhair Majaj, Kim Jensen, Samiya Bashir

So for something entirely different I attended this panel, a continuation (thus the “II”) from a similar panel held 2 years ago, also facilitated by Kim Jensen. This one focused as much on “cultural policing” as it did on other forms of violence against women. The present panel members were Samiya Bahir & Lisa Suhair Majaj, while absent members Melanie Graham & Robin Coste Lewis were represented by Kim reading their poems. Among the poems read by Lisa were sad poems about escaping Beirut during the fighting, “Good-Bye” & “Asphodels.” Samiya’s poem “Transparent to Invisible Life” was about family trip to Kenya to visit family members who had escaped the killing in Somalia; she also read sections from a longer piece where the clit is on trial, “Clitagation.”

Perhaps the most compelling poem, the woman that elicited the most comments, was Melanie Graham’s “Many Happy Returns” where sections from a US Air Force guide for families of returning military personnel from war zones were poignantly juxtaposed with accounts of violence by ex-servicemen. Kin Jensen was also persuaded to read some of her poems, “Northward,” “The Mystery” (with its images of sequins & snowflakes) & “Shutdown.” It was the kind of panel that generated a lot of informal conversations afterwards, & exchanges of business cards.

[Just a word on the workshop/panel schedule so that you don’t get the wrong idea about the range of subjects: there were over 50 separate panels during the Festival & I attended 5. At any one time there were 6, or 7 or as many as 9 panels going on at once. To fully appreciate the range of subjects please check out the Split This Rock website for a full list of the events, as well as bios of each of the presenters. I did get to all the Featured Readings, but the late night open mics Thursday & Friday nights were just too much for this (aging) body; besides there are plenty of open mics where I come from.]

More photos can be found at my Flickr! site.