Archive for the ‘Poetry Out Loud’ Category
Camille Dungy
Not finished yet
Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)
The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away. Pride, for some, is over and done. But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives. Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.
Camille Dungy
Poetry is making things happen! Installment #2 (Help Him Woo Sarah Silverman)
Can poetry help this man woo the woman of his dreams (and support at-risk youth in the process)?
Camille Dungy
Sound makes sense
Yesterday a student came into my office with a guitar, and he sang me a song. He did so because he had realized the music could convey more than his words could. He wanted a boost behind the piece he’d written for our meeting. I listened to his song (with pleasure: he plays guitar well and has a pleasant voice), but afterwards we talked about how he could bring some of the power he sought from music into his own writing. To help him understand this better, I read him a few poems. I told him to pay attention to what he understood from the poems’ sounds.
For many of us, the fact that poets can orchestrate their poems is not news. Plenty of us know that sound can be used, in poetry, to manipulate emotional responses. Still, it was awfully fun to witness my student’s initiation into the joys of poetic sound. Therefore, because I believe there are always people for whom these joys will be news, I’m dedicating today’s post to a few of the poems I love to hear.
Ada Limón
Feliz Cinco de Mayo & Louder ARTS
Feliz Cinco de Mayo
First let me start with a brief description of this day. Being of Mexican heritage, I’ve had to explain it on a regular basis. So, I thought I’d just give a quick rambling, if only to say: This day is not just about margaritas and tortilla chips (although I find nothing wrong with either of those things and hope to partake in both shortly).
The first thing that I find myself reminding people of is this: Cinco de Mayo is NOT Mexico’s Independence Day (which is actually September 16th or midnight of the 15th depending one what you’re reading). Instead, it is in celebration of the day, May 5th, 1862, when 4,000 members of the Mexican Militia defeated 8,000 members of the French army in the town of Puebla. (Napoleon wanted to take over and install Maximilian as ruler of Mexico).
Daisy Fried
On the Floor With Kitschy Rumi
I didn’t have one of those blissed out pregnancies that some women do, but I did love my pre-natal yoga class. Besides the fact that it was good exercise and good relaxation, I got to go be pregnant with a bunch of other pregnant ladies. The first part of the class was spent saying how we felt, so the teacher could gear the class to what ailed us. One time everybody started saying what they refused to give up. The woman with tattoos wasn’t giving up sushi. The carpenter wasn’t giving up manicures. I refused to give up soft cheese. Camembert every day was my motto. (I also drank coffee and a glass of wine a day, and Maisie came out fine, of course.) Then we did the poses and vinyasas modified to accommodate our large bellies and got lots of energy and the kinks in our necks dekinked.
The only drawback of the class for me was that during the final relaxation, the teacher would read a poem. She’d let us commune with our fetuses, our third eyes and our narcissistic tendencies to our heart’s content for five minutes, and then, out with the poem, after which we were supposed to zone out again. Everyone else loved this part, but it drove me nuts. Prior to the poem I’d be going, “oh, no, here it comes.” Then she’d read Rumi. And my brain would start up. “Is that a good poem?” “Is that a good translation?” “What about the syntax?” “I wonder if you just switched those two words if it would work better.” We were supposed to meditate on what the poem said, and so of course I’d get onto my little mental soap-box and start railing against people who think of poems as mini-philosophy lectures. It was even worse if she picked a poem I liked. One time she read something by Wendell Berry which seemed perfectly made, a poem of great clarity. I was pleased by it. And when I hear a poem I like, I want to sit up, square my shoulders and get to work, not lie there melting into the ground.
I never relaxed until I got out of the room of warm soothing colors, away from the gentle supportive voice of the yoga teacher, the mystical truths of the poet, down into the street and the everyday world of bitchy, blissful prose.
Daisy Fried
Why Actors Stink
Commenting on my post on Paradise Lost below, Bill Knott wrote
“…I used to listen via a walkperson to a tape of the
first couple books of PL as read by the British actor Anthony
Quayle,
but irritatingly he didn’t read the linebreaks which
made me usually snatch the earphones out in exasp.”
Yes, why are actors so often lousy readers of poetry?
Christian Bök
UbuWeb at AWP
I, too, have returned from AWP, exhausted by the experience. I fear that I have little to report of interest beyond the social gossip that such an occasion usually affords—but in the interest of generating some comments about audio-works of the avant-garde, I am going to include the links to the works on my playlist for the panel entitled “Listen to This”—a panel originally advertised to include Kenneth Goldsmith, the proprietor of UbuWeb, but that instead has included me, serving as his avatar. I believe that my selections evoke the spirit of his website, and I encourage you to check them out….
—————–
Rigoberto González
Girlstory!
Last Friday I had the privilege of sitting as one of the guest judges at the final round of the All Girl Poetry Slam. Sponsored by Girlstory, a multi-cultural, multi-generational women’s writing collective (and an organization created out a residency at another important arts organization, Community Word Project), this venue is all about fostering girl power, and the December 14 event determined the poetry slam team on its way to the Brave New Voices Poetry Slam this summer in Washington D.C.
Christian Bök
The Audiatur Festival 2007
Approximately a month ago, around the end of September, I flew to Bergen, Norway, in order to perform at the Audiatur Festival—a multilingual extravaganza for the avant-garde, at which many celebrated performers of both phonically-based poetry and constraint-based poetry attended, including the likes of Tomomi Adachi (from Japan), Caroline Bergvall (from Britain), Leevi Lehto (from Finland), and Jacques Roubaud (from France).
Organizers of the event have now made available, online, many of the audiovisual recordings from the event….
Patricia Smith
dead poets.
I try not to think about dying much.
Whenever I do, naive as it may be, I dismiss it as something that happens to other people, usually in very spectacular ways. A longago plague sweeps through eastern Europe. A car bomb explodes in a crowded bazaar. A distraught lover climbs over a rail and leaps into the drink. Splashy demises always seem so far away, so detached from the realm.
Then there’s what I consider “regular” dying, which pretty much consists of extremely old people who smile in their sleep and just drift away..or obscenely attractive people with broken hearts, dwindling to mere air, surrounded by a loving beside circle of family and friends. This type of dying is usually accompanied by music.
I never think of poets succumbing. I can’t wrap my head around notebooks of unfinished stanzas, empty stages, slim volumes with blank pages. The poets I grew up with and around are so utterly necessary, so vital. I’m not sure how I’d process my life without their help. I never thought I’d have to.
But lately poets have been dying, just like ordinary people.
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RECENT COMMENTS
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A thoughtful blog. To be honest, however, I've never much been worried by Auden's ... MORE »
Terreson | 11.07.09 -
Interesting post. I need to pick poems for two readings next week and I always ... MORE »
Jessie Carty | 11.07.09 -
"and if the robbers of PZ’s copyright justify their theft by asserting it’s beneficial because ... MORE »
Gary B. Fitzgerald | 11.07.09 -
Nice tune, nice arrangement, nice playing, beautiful voice -- thanks for posting it.
For two semesters ... MORE »
john | 11.06.09 -
Nature is a cannibal. MORE »
Gary B. Fitzgerald | 11.06.09
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