Performance Info

Poem #1: Etheridge Knight's "Belly Song"

Poem #2: Poem from Seurat's Points series, "Breaking Point"

Artist Bio: Always near abstraction and obscurity. 

Potluck: Bringing a cake!!!

Poem #2 for zine:

Breaking Point

Further loss to change

No longer viewed a problem

People, it doesn’t make sense

On a drug

That may not happen –if at all

Created awareness specialist

On it from the beginning, no one challenged them

New concerns, long-term safety

The current looking with critical eye

Method used been called into question

How and how?

Is it, even?

The years keep evolving

Once diagnosed

A fragility fracture

A meeting of experts

Defined by density

One measure available

“Normal” were those of a deviated standard

Anyone who fell in between had a condition

A disease somewhat arbitrary

An independent prevention

Density helped her avoid

Density is only one part of the picture

Determined by other components, its capacity for self-repair

Tangible Echoes

Like an organic form or mold or a shadow one can capture with one’s hands there is a solid tangibility in Khaled Mattawa’s hyper distinction of being and one’s environment.

How is an artist shaped? I think Mattawa exemplifies the raw realness of how the reactionary part of the artist and the work that comes out into affect. 

Recently he wrote this in Kenyon Review about Libya’s Day of Liberation: One Year On (Oct. 24, 2012):

What makes these developments bitter sweet, yet again, is that it is indeed unreasonable to celebrate situations that may bring about more violence in the future. This goes along with my conviction that it is indeed inhumane to celebrate any war victory.

The great poet philosopher Laozi wrote:

The killing of many people should create sorrow and grief.
A great victory is a funeral ceremony.

Laozi also wrote:

Weapons always turn back against themselves.
Encamp an army today;
the campground is all thorns and brambles tomorrow.
Make war for a month; there will be famine for years.
Do what needs to be done, but do not rejoice in victory.
Make war, if necessary, and win,
but without arrogance, without hostility, without pride,
without needless violence.
War, victory, and the rest do not last.

What will last I hope are the memories of real accomplishments, the moments when the nation in duress acted in peace to further the wellbeing of its citizens. We’ve had a few of those here in Libya this past year. I hope we will begin to celebrate them instead.

There's softness and caution to his words and work and such a deep deep connection to Laozi's ethos as well. I'm still sitting here trying to digest Mattawa. 

Blues on pages

Booming thunders through the pages of The Essential Etheridge Knight was definitely expected but I found even more dimensionality in his short memos and haikus that packed so much emotion into such small words and space. Though I was familiar with Etheridge's seminal Poems in Prison through the loose pages handed out in my English classes, I found beauty in the abstraction of the set of memos and haikus presented in this particular volume.

His acute observations and a sense of hyper-awareness strikes as he creates emotive physical wrenching  on the pages because he's not afraid to speak about the things he's known and seen. You can't help but flux through a wide range of emotions while reading Etheridge; tears on one page, laughter on the next page, awe and shock on another.

I'm interested in the Etheridge's roots and how he was shaped by his environment as a poet and heavily influenced he was by his time not only in prison but also his time in the Korean War, Indianapolis, Corinth, Minneapolis, Memphis and what culminated into his body of work.

Now, I know I need to find Born of a Woman, as soon as possible to really understand his range and form.

The shaping of a poet is something I always enjoy researching especially when it's someone like Etheridge Knight.

During my Etheridge Knight binge/research I found a recording of him reading, "Feeling Fucked Up" and with that I look forward to the first group presentation this week!!!

Eve and her forms in Diwata

There's a balance in the duality presented by Barbara Jane Reyes in Diwata as she delves into the archaic and the contemporary. Thick layers of Filipino poetics based in the lamentations of Eve. Voices and forms that dance among the pages without hesitation. When reading Diwata there's a certain confidence that doesn't hesitate to draw stories through precision.

How I No Longer Believe in Pious Women  vs. Aswang

whore-red lipstick
G-stringed putas
gold-toothed criminals
sticky night clubs

black pig
dirt
mushrooms
dark-hued bitch 
shaper of death masks

Spectrums!!!

Also, the juxtaposition of the female figures that come from different histories: Eve and Aswang.

I became enraptured in the idea of Reyes' ending with a poem titled: Aswang

An Aswang is a female creature in Filipino folklore, often stories of Aswangs are told by the mother to their children so they stay home at night. The Aswang is oddly fierce and gothic in nature, feeding off fetuses and being this amorphous female figure that served as a scape goat for inexplicable miscarriages and maladies. Similar to how Eve fulfills the time old archetype of the female role being a readily available scapegoat.

May be it's because Reyes ends Diwata with "Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me."

poets and their memory

How is a poet shaped? How do you shape any artist?

I feel as though there is an organic quality to the art of shaping and growing.

Immediately, when I think about the qualities of shaping and growing and the process of I somehow relate it to one's youth and childhood memories. How does a second-generation upbringing and memories of that affect the poet's work and how is it exemplified in the work we read?

There's a connection between Sheryl Luna and Kevin A. Gonzalez and their "shaping" that really stuck with me as they both touched base through shifting memories.

Richness of vignettes and photo like imagery of their memories seem to jump within the line breaks. Stoic lines of celebration and moments where innocence dissipates through observation and realization.

Gonzalez's Cultural Stakes; or, How to Learn English as a Second Language

"When your father gives you a Coke
with two cherries in it, bite the sem
& bite the stem & swallow the juicy red wounds."

 "When your mother asks what you did,
tell her you watched baseball all weekend
& bury your smoke-swamped shirts
in the bottom of the laundry."

The poem is one breathe; one swift recollection that creates a cinematic quality!

Luna's Two Girls from Juarez

"I am bitten. The girls want to know
about Plath's gasps, about her white

eyes in darkness. One wears an electronic
bracelet around her ankle.

The other's cheeks red with too much rogue.
I imagine they live nights dangerously"

How one grows up seeing the things that one sees and how it becomes solidified into poetry. How one sees/perceives experiences as a first, second, third, etc. generation poet and how the variations of the generations affect the shaping of a poet. The how and the process of the poet that is shaped constantly by different experiences. These are all things on my mind.
 

Cárdenas and Williams (and I like it)

Spatially representing voice...It's hard to spatially represent a voice when you have to create a space from the ground up for a voice to hold. 

It's easy for some because their forefathers are the canons that paved ways and created spaces for their voices to fill, not mine. 

When you're grow up and looking up to people who don't really look like you or come from the same background you're never really explicitly told that what they're doing is something you can also do. 

Artists who don't adhere to normative standards have to go through tedious filters of being asked "what is it like being a ______ artist/poet/performer/etc.?" Like it's some qualifier as to why you're a poet or that it's some kind of privilege you have that makes you "stand out" from your colleagues. 

It's challenging to create a space when you're not sure how you're voice will be heard. 

Through Cárdenas and Williams, two poets who differently explore and represent their voice I resonated with the sentiments even though I can interpret, "your mojado butt from the fontera to the fields," I will surely never know how to create space to correctly define mojado butt like Cárdenas does. 

Williams' House Party had physical representations of space and measurement juxtaposed with the nuance subtleties of the theme and his not so subtle lines. 

He juxtaposes the Eurocentric paradigm and not being afraid to say he's into a sista's attitude amongst many other attributes. 

"ain't waiting no return from vogue or cosmopolitan

to emaciate her self-esteem

or mold her into a european model of beauty with bilemic backhands

cause serena she thick

thick like sistas sposed to be

thick lips, thick thighs

mostly a thick attitude

(and I like it)"

Williams also immediately made me think of the conversation we had in the previous class where Llesenia was saying how much she appreciated black flirting because it's often things one doesn't see in the mainstream media, arts, etc. 

Brenda Cárdenas' Cartoon Coyote Goes Po-Mo explored culture clash and illustrated a very weird visual take on postmodern musings. The constant of the Coyote and the variable of the characters take on creating imagery of cyberpunks, Ginsberg, and Lucky Charms.

"Coyote, he don't quite get it, 

applies queer theory to his reading 

of Burroughs riding freight train."

Talks of queer theory, deconstruction, performance art provocateurs, post-sturcturalist world, auto-deconstruct all created vivid points of imagery but it was the attitude of "How's that for signification theory?" that left me going boom shaka laka Cárdenas you are all kinds of crazy and amazing. 

Mornings with you were always my favorite...

I come to the realization of how people are grouped together in readings always interests me and how the order of reading certain poets affects the way I react in an anthology. This week's especially.

Voices from Leimart Park has become one of my favorite anthologies (after AAP of course) due to it's diverse nature and vivid coloring of Los Angeles. I think about home and how beautifully different each poet paints their home, but then I came upon Imani Tolliver.

Tolliver in her piece, "Mudcloth" explored something I rather not have explored. It may be she only had "Mudcloth" as her selection in the anthology, but I was lost as to how to contextualize the "who" broader with only one poem of hers.

While reading Jerry Quickley, Nancy Padron and watching the video of The Last Poets, I felt the duality and layered affect wich led to the richly developed work they created and I read Tolliver last and it just flopped for me. The inertia created by Quickley, Padron, and the video of the Last Poets dissipated into thin air.

The dull saccharine lines full of "Mornings with you were always my favorite,"  or the last lines of "Mudcloth"

notice the soil finger painting

of how we found each other 

how we loved

how we forever stained a story

we are still telling

Some parts of the poem I felt as though I was reading a melancholic post on missed connections on Craigslist. Immediately a song came into mind:

I think about the "who" and I think about the broader context, but I can't get over the fact that this is indulgent in ways so different to how I imagine all the other poets I read and visualized for this week's readings.