Tribute to raulrsalinas @ Galería de la Raza

Homenaje al XicanindioIt’s always a loss when an elder poet leaves us. A few years back, Pedro Pietri became gravely ill and the NYC community responded with a series of benefit readings to help raise money for his treatment. These readings were an opportunity for a whole new generation of writers to experience the breadth of Pietri‘s work as friends, poets, and activists were more than happy to read from his oeuvre. Not only sharing his work but also stories of the man who was a poet 24/7, who was able to inspire in all kinds of way, who was a living monument to poetry. Sadly, Pietri would be overcome by cancer soon after the first group of readings, but there would be more readings following his passing that didn’t mourn the man but celebrated his legacy, and the fact that the legacy would continue to (re)inspire writers to get their work out into the world any way possible, to let the work go on long after the poet who wrote it.

This same sense of celebration, renewal and inspiration was present at the Homenaje al Xicanindio: Un Poetic Viaje con las Palabras de raúlrsalinas at the Mission district’s Galería de la Raza. Even though a thunderstorm and high winds was making travel din San Francisco ifficult, a nice crowd braved through the rain for the reading.

Alejandro MurguíaMC and fellow Pocho Ché poet Alejandro Murguía put the weather into perspective: “In the African traditions, when a great person dies it rains. At Raúl’s funeral in Texas, it rainded, and now it rains again. But I can feel him in the thunder, it is the dead banging the drum. It is Raúl.“

Murguía would go on to continue sharing memories as he asked invited readers to share their own recollections of Raúl, the fabled “Cockroach Poet.”

We heard from Darren de Leon of Los Delicados spoke on Salinas’s effect on his generation as he read from “Aloud and Proud;” SF Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman, reading Raúl’s “Rifts 2” and a new tribute poem “raulrsalinas presente;” Oakland poet Nina Serrano, sharing Raúl’s love of plants and exemplifying his ability to change minds as she read “El Tecato: Side 2,” a poem she initially hated for the way it humanized the criminal mind, a poem she has grown to appreciate and understand; Aztlán poet laureate Lorna Dee Cervantes spoke on how Raúl would fill the libraries of San José with books from his own press and prison literature, Cervantes then read/performed/evoked Salinas with a reading from his masterwork “Un Trip through the Mind Jail;” Leticia Hernández-Linares offered song and light as she read from “On Your Leaving;” Naomi Quiñones read “Music for the Masses” and praised Salinas the historian for the ways he documented his work and those of others to create awareness and raise consciousness, how he transformed societal poison and made community medicine; the Galería’s own Marc Pinate spoke of how Raúl was a living bridge between the Bebop and Hiphop generations and how he learned the value of oral tradition from Salinas while reading from Raúl’s book East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi Pueblo.

More testimony came from Daniel who read his own ode to Machu Picchu. An SF muralist (whose name I didn’t catch) reminding us of Raúl’s love for all art, she mentioned a life size mural of Salinas on the corner of Masonic and Hayes, art she knows Raúl would have loved. Teacher, photographer and poet Francisco J. Dominguez spoke more on Raúl’s prison activism, how he came to read for the prisoners of Folsom, Salinas’s conviction to the political palabra. Most touching was a woman named Erica who thanked Raúl for being there when she was “searching for a voice,” for offering encouragement and guidance, for being a true mentor.

Tomás RileyAnother highlight was seeing Tomás Riley bring out the sage he had collected at his son’s birth and light it in praise of Raúl. Tomás spoke of travelling to Tejas with his compañeros = the Taco Shop Poets – and performing for food at a San Antonio diner. How they were planning to march on the Alamo with plans for a poetic takeover, but Salinas overheard their plans and offered some words of wisdom (“You do know the Texas Rangers guard the Alamo, right?”) which likely saved the Taco Shop Poets. “He was protecting us,” recalled Riley who then leapt into one of Raul’s poem with his own signature reading style. The mix of Raúl’s words with the author’s own speaking style was another constant of the evening, the way the two shared room on the mic never crowding each other out, working together to bring the intent of the poem to the listener.

The final poem of the night came from Alejandro Murguía, as he read “Liner Notes for Los Pinkys” from East of the Freeway. Throughout the celebration, Murguía kept bringing the focus back to Salinas and the range of his work. How Raúl’s work travelled from cramped prison into music ballrooms, the respect for nature and man, Salinas’s ability to bring a face to the outcasts of American society, his tireless efforts to preserve history in word. How Salinas’s prison literature gives the hardened criminal make peace with himself, his family, his upbringing, his culture, as happens in “Un Trip through the Mind Jail” with the line- mi barrio, i bear you no grudge.

The last words for the night go to Murguía and his despedida to raulrsalinas, “Long live the Cockroach poet!”

Javier Huerta @ Maud Fife Hall


Javier Huerta
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

I am glad that Javier invited Barb and me to come out and hear him read with Jasper Bernes and Jessica Fisher at the Triple J reading.

Javier’s first book, Some Clarifications y Otros Poemas, is a great read. He showcases his mastery in English, Spanish and Spanglish poetics in a collection that invited the reader along without handholding through the linguistics leaps. While many other poets feel the need to contextual and/or defend their mixed language at every turn, Huerta offers only an introductory poem to set the tempo for the collection.

from “Advertisement”
“the author never intended for half of the poems to be in English and the other half to be in Spanish”

This simple statement rings so true in the daily language of immigrants and their descendants; our bilinigualism doesn’t come with an on-off switch, it adapts to the situation at hand.

Huerta started the reading with “Advertisment” which not only alerts the reader to his code-switching but also provides other acceptable mispronunciations of the author’s name (this theme reminds me of Pedro Pietri’s Traffic Violations and how Pietri continually chides Anglos for not getting it “right” with 70s Nuyoricans).

From there we went to “Días neolaredenses.” A beautiful lyric poem whose meter and refrain can be appreciated in any language, Días just happens to do it in Spanish.

“Mythic Lovers” builds on a new meter and refrain but this time in English. Breathing new life into the trope of long distance romance with tight lines and rhythm.

I was very happy to hear Javier read “Blasphemous Elegy for May 14, 2003.” This poem breathes life back into the names, dates, and places of those who died trying to cross the border that day. So many poems try to dance around such issues, add metaphor and draw analogies to try to add some literary shine to daily events. Here we have no such gloss, Huerta’s staccato litany evokes the desperation of suffocation and then takes us to an imagined final thought of those lost “ella me espera en Houston.” This “she” who men are willing to risk their lives on, this “she” who will not be there for these men. These men who Huerta names by name, unafraid to bring the reader face-to-face with the dead, the all too often-nameless dead lumped into the category of “illegal immigrants.”

Huerta ends the reading with selections from “American Copia.” (Bits are also collected in the latest Achiote Seeds and on Javier’s blog.) What I’m diggin most in this poem is how Huerta mingles his poetic process with everyday occurrences, in this case “going to the grocery store.” So even in the day to day, Huerta encounters other poets from various worlds – the American and Chicano canon and his colleagues from Cal – all who aid in his journey toward poetic greatness (citing how “his biographers” might interpret these events). Adding other figures from his life in this everyday poetics, Huerta dismisses the stereotype that poetry only happens in certain hallowed halls and insists that poetics happen in every hall– Fife Hall, Albertson’s, the express checkout line, MFA parties, etc.

Huerta delivers all these poems with a humor and wit that doesn’t mask the seriousness of the content or the high level of craft in the work.

More Javier Huerta:
Three Poems at Three Candles Journal
Rigoberto González shouts out Some Clarifications

Dagoberto Gilb @ Modern Times Bookstore


Modern Times Display
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

I’ve been living in the Bay for almost two years now and have not had a chance to visit Modern Times Bookstore. So when I heard that Dagoberto Gilb was going to be reading there, I thought it was high time to correct that oversight.

First off, Modern Times is all you could want from a bookstore: high ceilings, plenty of space, a kick ass poetry section, and a nice area for readings. They also contribute 10% of event sales to local community groups, a great way to get local folks more involved in contemporary local lit. (Tonight’s 10% went to HOMEY (Homies Organizing The Mission To Empower Youth).)

Before reading from his new book, Gilb invoked the memory of raúlrsalinas and his work at Austin, TX’s Resistencia Bookstore. A shoutout also went to Alejandro Murguía and his SFSU students.

From the Gilb talked about some of the issues that came up in the publication of the new book and that even an established writer, like himself, still has to deal with old stereotypes when it comes to getting literary work out into the world. “We have more trouble than others, it seems.”

Even the title of the book was a source of contention since it was originally titled “Los Flores,” a play on how American landmarks, towns and structures incorrectly borrow from the Spanish. All this is explained on page 19 of the book. Gilb jokingly tried to add to that disclaimer to the cover image that initially was to include a Flamenco dancer, a Spaniard cultural image as opposed to a Mexican one. (These misrepresentations are nothing new to Latinos who don’t fit into Anglo stereotypes.)

Reading from “The Flowers” opening, Gilb introduces us to a 15 year old who is testing the borders of his neighborhood and his identity. Our protagonist breaks into his neighbor’s homes, not to steal but to watch how other people live. He goes in and walks through their lives, still very unsure where his own will lead. Soon enough, the police get involved. Not for any crime our 15 year old may have actually committed, but instead busting him for laughing at a farting cop.

Gilb is an awesome reader who lets the fiction text do the work of setting up theme and atmosphere in out surroundings, then adding just enough personality to the dialogue.

During the Q&A session Gilb answered questions regarding the Spanglish in the novel (“I use the community’s language and place it in a context that allows the meaning to be acquired quickly.”), how long it took him to write the novel (“I wrote the opening five years ago but that is the conceptual age of the novel.”) and why he chose a teenager’s voice.

This last question set off an interesting response about how ‘young adult’ is the genre most literary agents are pushing their clients to write since it is a profitable genre. However, Gilb wonders about the underlying racism in this push. Are agents and intellectuals gravitating toward ‘young adult’ writing in order to lower the author’s scope to fit a less mature (read: dumber) image of Latinos?
If the protagonist is a young adult, then is that a young adult book? Is Melville’s “Billy Budd” taught as a young adult book? Is Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” a book for children?

Professor Murguía took it one step further and asked the audience, “If publishers are asking Latino writers for ‘young adult’ books, is it because they believe our community only has a young adult reading level?”

Gilb himself wondered if this means that Latinos are viewed as eternal adolescents with the dominant Anglo culture as the adults in the equation?

I asked Gilb if he ever considered self-publishing his work as a means to sidestep these racist overtones in publishing. He thought that self-publishing might be more the domain of poets but not novelists.

The night closed with a reading from “Gritos” and the short story Pride. Set in El Paso, it speaks to the nobilities shared among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as they live their lives day-by-day with joy and honor.
“Pride is working a job as if it were as important as art or war”

A great reading, informative Q&A, and excellent prose that challenges Anglo stereotypes while pushing Latino writers to get more noteworthy literature into the canon of American letters means that I am definitely looking forward to reading “The Flowers.”

More Dagoberto Gilb:
Author’s website
The LA Times reviews “The Flowers”
Excerpt from “The Flowers”
Books by Dagoberto Gilb

Wanda Coleman @ Mills College’s Contemporary Writers Series


Wanda Coleman
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

A few months back I got to hear Wanda Coleman do an impromptu guest feature at Muddy Waters in the Mission. She only read three poems but in those three poems she embodied something that many poetry students in the audience were seeking- the Voice.

Normally when I mention a poet’s Voice I go by my own personal definition of “If I cover the byline to this poem, I would still know who wrote it.” Voice speaks to tempo and rhythms, points of origin and departure, and common themes. I can think of a lot of master and emerging poets who fit well into this category. They write into a personal form that never becomes a bland or sterile form(ula) and from this they develop their own Style which becomes the Voice when the body takes that written word and channels it out into the world.

Coleman decided to start the reading at her origin point in writing- the Watts Riot of ’65. She tells the audience that sometime after the Riots, she decided to take a writing class with Budd Schulberg at 103rd Street but instead of taking the class she makes a turn somewhere along the path and that this then leads to that. What exactly “this” and “that” are is left unclear as Coleman goes into her first poem “Letter to My Older Sister.”

With lines like “I give her my name,” “have I lived you well,” and “you had mom’s hair/I have Dad’s hair;” I wonder who is this older sister? Is she missing, did she pass early, is she a metaphor for Coleman’s non-writer self? The poet herself can not even finish the letter as she is “demanded elsewhere.”

That elsewhere brings us to first love (Outside My Sphere), fast love (I Remember Romance), and poetic crush love (Neruda, A Few Quiet Hours). Forgive me if the titles are a bit off, Coleman is so ON when it comes to her poetry reading that you never really know when the poem begins and end. Halfway through the first poem, Coleman delivers an aside that comments directly on the poem but the voice never loses its rhythm or punch.

This unwavering voice comes at us full blast in a short but direct poem that not only personifies various negative emotions (pain, fear, etc.) but gives them jazz instruments and puts them to play their tunes. “What to do?/Whatever’s cool.” Even if that cool leads us right into human tragedy.

The meeting of voice and tragedy occurs again in “Boy Wounded One Sunday Morning” where Coleman’s speaker is so distraught over the senselessness of a random drive-by’s 10 year-old victim, a child who is not her child, but the speaker shares such grief she actually becomes the victim’s mother both as the speaker and in her reading of the work. With poems and performances like this I always wonder if the poet is going just a little too far. Is this direct performance with extra lilt that isn’t indicated on the page too much? Should a writer be faulted for having a big voice that can carry a proper note? I wonder all these things and then see Coleman, at one point in her reading, turning her body slightly away from the crowd and showing us a glimpse of the text she is reading. I see a writer showing us that the word is there, she has put it down, how it’s read is a personal choice and this writer has decided to read it with every tool she has at her disposal.

Coleman passes on some of her experiences as a writer through the work itself, offering opinions on common themes (“as for tropejacking, don’t’ be a victim”), writing oneself out of circumstance (“so by sending these letters, I escape”), and the fantastic (“the squirrels have eaten the plumber”).

Coleman closes with two new poems (New Sh*t!) one in the musical voice of “Coltrane” where Coleman seeks to evoke the fabled composer not just in text and meter but in actual spirit as well. “A good jazz poem resurrects,” says Coleman.

The last poem is a love poem paying tribute to poetry impresario Bob Holman and acclaimed painter Elizabeth Murray. Murray recently passed away adding a bittersweet aura to this poem that still comes at us all “blood and reason” mixed with “rude kisses” celebrating the “lavish with the ravish.”

Coleman was gracious and open in the post reading Q&A, speaking in detail about her upbringing, ethnic past, dealings with LA police, how Larry Hagman messed up her play for the sake of his own career, revision and the fugue. For me, I was very interested in how she challenges her students to take a single subject and write it into poetry, fiction, essay and play form at the same time. I also got to ask her about the “Retro Rogue Anthology” section in her book Mecurochrome. This one section is 58 poems written after 50 or so poets. Some of it is homage, some of it is was to do better than the original, is how I remember her response. Coleman comments that some poets don’t have a “lock” on their language and that she can come into those openings and “cop their licks” to take over the language. Coleman did say that the only poet she couldn’t cover was Sylvia Plath. She had a Plath cover all done and ready but went and deleted it at the end.

This all goes and debunks the idea of voice I started this reading review with, as Coleman says she doesn’t rely on any singular voice or form but instead is a “Style of Styles.”

More Wanda Coleman:
Bio and Poem on Poets.org
Books by Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman reads live on Salon.com

Nathaniel Mackey with Craig Santos Perez @ The Holloway Series


Craig Santos Perez
Originally uploaded by bjanepr

Bummed out that I couldn’t go to Lunch Poems and check out Arthur Sze’s reading. Barb has told me so much about his work and it would have been great to hear his work. The UC library where the series is held is also a dope place for poetry. On the plus side, I did get to check out Craig Santos Perez and Nathaniel Mackey read tonight.

Hillary Gravendyk dropped an awesome intro for Craig that highlighted his hard work as an author, critic, and editor; and how these roles all come together in the service and promotion of poetry. Hillary went on to speak of Craig’s ability to co-opt the text of the co-opter and from that weaves a new text that “gently resists the urge to speak for the group.”

Craig read poems from four of his 11 chapbooks, the first a set of poems from Informant where Craig updates Williams Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” to speak on the violations of the Hearst Museum, and the refusal of the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand to acknowledge indigenous rights.

From there we heard the tales of Juan Malo, a mythical figure in Chamorro resistance literature, the commoner who is able to out wit and befuddle his oppressor at every turn. The two poems (Juan Malo and the Tip of the Spear & Juan Malo and Where America’s Day Begins) highlight some key areas in Craig’s poetics: effective satire, conversational tone, and historic backdrop amidst the individual speaker’s perspective. Craig’s poem don’t seek to overthrown the establishment as much as they seek to point out the establishment’s very visible cracks.

Another shift in tone occurs when Craig reads from Pre-Touring as the We comes to the forefront of the poems. This We shifts back to a very immediate I in his last poem “Achoite” where respect for nature (the things that came before us and will live on after us) is taught through the ritual of cultivating achiote seeds with his grandmother.

All these tones and sceneries delivered without rush or hyperbole, the poems practically speaking for themselves.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow, more on Nathaniel Mackey and the intersection of history and memory, and how Sze and Mackey both take the delicate word and craft it into fine materials that seek to outlast time.