I write like
Edgar Allan Poe

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I inputted the last series of CantoMundo write ups and this is what I got. Ok, note to self, time to actually read some Poe. Yeah, I know the hits but reading a broader range of his work couldn’t hurt, especially since Poe is a Bronx poet.

Shout out to Scott Keith for putting me on to I Write Like.

Ok, who do YOU write like?

I haven’t had a chance to visit Kepler’s but the documentary sure did make me want to hop in the hooptie and pay em a visit.

As for Cody’s, I was lucky enough to have visited the iconic Telegraph Ave store and even got to catch a poetry reading there before they closed up shop. The old space on Telegraph has yet to be filled so when ever I pass by a part of me hopes to see a sign saying that Cody’s will be back.

Back to Paperback Dreams, the documentary is able to put the cultural importance of both bookstores into historical perspective while also maintaining a pragmatic edge by showing us how hard it is to keep an indy bookstore financially solvent in current times. It’s not just the economy that threatens the corner bookshop but also community apathy—we all love our institutions when they’re about the close their doors but can we love em while they’re still strugglin’ to survive?

A more focused series of questions for this blog’s audience (which I imagine is poetry authors and aficionados): Will Amazon host our poetry readings? Will Barnes and Noble carry our chapbooks? Will Borders order our favorite titles based on community demand? For those multidisciplinary poets: Will any of the big chains carry your CDs and/or videos of live performance? Can we continue to survive as poet authors if the independent bookstore fades away?

Exactly one week ago, I was getting ready to deliver my first ever panel presentation for AWP. Lemme tell ya, it was nerve wrackin’. I just spent the last few days listening and learning from a variety of writers sharing some expert advice is a variety of topics including: Poetry in the Age of Obama, Teaching Bilingual Workshops, Identity & Aesthetics in Multi-Cultural Poetry and the Building of the Republic of Poetry, to name just a few. The common denominator: all the presenters were authors with full-length poetry collections. I’m not tryin’ to knock mahself down, just acknowledging that AWP is not all about the institution (read: graduate level writing programs) that there is room for a variety of voices.

Is that room easy to make? No. Is it easy to just walk into this room and claim your space? No. Is that room a given for all writers who are doing work in spaces outside the institution? Hell no.  Can you be easily dismissed if you don’t bring your A game?  Of course.

That pressure to deliver my very best and show that a writer without a full-length collection who is not presently associated with a graduate level writing program can contribute and broaden the AWP conversation had me stressed out a bit but I knew that sooner or later, someone would say something dismissive about writers in community and  that would set off my presentation.  Sure enough, that’s pretty much how it went down.

The key moment happened at the very excellent Republic of Poetry panel.  In a packed room, after Martín Espada, Tara Betts and David Mura gave dynamic presentations demonstrating the power and possibility of modern poetics to shape our present society into a more just union through community, a man asks, “But what can we do to generate interest in the creation of poetry in other communities? There is so much disinterest in poetry in outside communities.”

Oh, no, he, didn’t.

I already had an outline for a presentation written the night before but that comment was the fuel I needed to make my notes and thoughts into a piece of writing I can really be proud of.

So is it a poem? No, it doesn’t have any metaphor or concerns for music or language. And, yes, since it wouldn’t be possible without poetry in my life and I was able to transfer nine years of recitation experience into one of the best performances I’ve ever had in front of a mic.

Also, I was not the only person who rocked it at this panel. All my co-panelists (Barbara Jane Reyes, Jan Beatty, Tim Kahl and Susan Kelly-DeWitt) were equally passionate about their belief that poetry is not a single-faced monolith; poetry is its own vibrant, magnificent, myriad creature of many names. And many thanks to Camille Norton for bringing us all together.

Thank you to everyone on this panel especially Camille for bringing us all together.

Building Diverse Communities

I’ll be speaking today about leading independent poetry centers and set it off with a quote from Walt Whitman: “This is the city and I am one of the citizens, whatever interests the rest interests me”

Right now, I am in the city of AWP and the interest is poetry but I do not live in the city of AWP on a regular basis so know I must share this interest in my regular city, which is outside the AWP/MFA path.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a tirade about the pros and cons of MFA, I’m talking about writers for whom MFA is not even an options–writers like myself who only attended a semester of college and then went out into the workforce; writers who come to poetry in high school or even grade school; writers in prisons; writers who have all the credentials to attend graduate school but achieved those credentials in other countries; writers who have already completed, or are in the middle, of their post graduate studies in law, medicine, education and don’t have the desire to return to school. There may more scenarios but these are some I know about firsthand. These aren’t hypothetical situations, these are real stories of people who would love to become better writers but have to do it through another path than the MFA.

My own path to poetry was through a variety of roads and intersections: open mics, slams, community sponsored workshops, local arts workshops and just kicking it with friends over brunch, either talking about our work or the poets who we recently encountered (both in print and in person).

The last combination I just mentioned may have been the magic bullet for me, a writer with no connection to an MFA program. The exposure to a variety of voices was key and any writer who has access to a local venue that can bring in an eclectic mix of voices will benefit immensely and most likely develop into a poet with a unique voice. I say this knowing I’ve been lucky to live in two of the U.S.’s strongest poetry hubs, New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Places where there is so much live poetry happening I’ve had to make hard choices on different nights and choose to attend one poetry event over another. Even the act of making those choices forced me to make clear aesthetic choices and develop poetic priorities early in my writing life.

I say to any one in this audience who seems to see the same faces come through to the same readings with the same poems: reach out to the community around you and invite in poets from as many different backgrounds as possible, variety in programming will lead to variety in your own poetic community. Go radical, have one poet with a strong background in printed work come in one week and then have a poet who primarily works in performance come in the next; even better, have them read together, you’d be surprised how often the line between page and stage begins to blur.

Do not be afraid to be a curator, mentor, trusted listener and honest reader. Embrace those titles and live up to what they really mean: be a leader for your community. Not a gatekeeper, or single leader of the pack, true leadership in diverse community is shared. I think of Seth Godin’s excellent book, Tribes, and how he challenges his readers to find a road and stick to it, how this commitment will bring others onto our same path, how to share your victories with your own group, and take personal responsibilities for any failures.

This week at AWP, I heard someone ask: “But what can we do to generate interest in the creation of poetry in other communities? There is so much disinterest in poetry.”

I don’t think there is disinterest in community poetry. I think the disinterest is in taking leadership to create that new poetry. There are so many potential writers out there who are looking for that leadership, looking for the chance for something different, looking for a chance to share their stories. Give them that chance. Find the opportunity to agitate by bringing in the diversity all true writers seek, because if you don’t then those writers will not disappear quietly–they will gravitate to those communities models of the past or their current incarnations. I see Hip-Hop, Macondo, Cave Canem, Kearny Street Workshop, Kundiman, the Basement Writers, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Intersection for the Arts, Acentos, louderARTS, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Bowery Poetry Club, Bronx Writers’ Center, Tia Chucha, The Affrilachian Poets, Prison University Project, Poetry for the People, the National Poetry Slam, Youth Speaks, Urban Word, Girls Write, La Casita, Flor y Canto, VONA, Spanic Attack, Amiri Baraka’s basement, California Poets in the School, PAWA* and AWP.

Yes, you AWP writers, you have the privilege of writing, the privilege of time and travel, the privilege of knowledge, and now you have the opportunity to share it and fulfill your obligation as poet citizens.

For those of you who think sharing this knowledge outside this convention or the conventions of your institutions, is just a dream. Or that the dream to create new institutions is to daunting; I leave you with the words of famed Nuyorican poet, el Revernedo Pedro Pietri: “Do not dream, if you want your dreams to come true.”

Thank you.

* For the sake of time, I listed only a few community programs. I know many more exist and to those organizations I did not to get mention, my for-real apologies. If you are connected with a program I did not list or would like to alert me about one: Please leave some information about your community program in the comments section.

Mark your calendars: We’re having a release party for issue eight, featuring the awesome and exquisite Charlie Anders, Oscar Bermeo and Daphne Gottlieb.

Where? Adobe Bookshop, 3166 16th Street San Francisco, CA
When? Saturday night, April 3, 2010 from 7-9 PM.

See you there!

Mark it on your Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=107811689236871&ref=mf

The 2000s have been good to me and it’s good to see this decade pass into some good memories.  Of course, not everything was flamenco guitars and endless tapas with some rocky spots I could have avoided with some foresight but you know how that goes.

The most notable event of my 30s (Yeah, I’m a decade baby so as 2010 comes in so do my 40s… Good times!) was my introduction to poetry.  This is a good thing to remember cuz ten years back I wouldn’t know a good poem if it came up and smacked me in the back of the head.  Today, I do have a good idea what a good poem is to me and it doesn’t have to hit me in the head to be good.  I also have some sense of what a bad poem is and I’m very ready to smack it upside the head. The trick is to keep myself writing more of the good poems and less of the bad poems while developing a personal rubric that balances the technical and evocative elements I enjoy in poetry.

I’m trying to stay positive as the ball drops tonight cuz my relationship to my own poems has been seriously rocky lately. This coincides with my lack of blogging since the internet has not been doing much to improve my writing lately.  All I seem to keep finding is negativity and finger pointing, nameless bashing and a general focus on what’s wrong with US Poetry over what’s good.  And, seriously, who wants to be a part of that?

Now I gotta look at the man in the mirror (C’mon, no end of the year post is complete without a Michael reference) and stick to a game plan that steps up my own game by comparing my new work to my old work, submit more, read more fiction and keep working towards my AA and do it with a smile, style and a fly fedora.

Palabra.

Yesterday’s Emerging Writers Panel at the SFPL was a great event-solid turnout, lots of information and a diverse group of opinions regarding the pros and cons of various writing programs.  It was an honor to be one of the panelists and share out some of my experiences.  For more info and links on some different writing programs, check out the PAWA Inc blog.

And here is the text of my presentation:

I came into poetry in my early thirties and jumped right into the thick of it by frequenting a local open mic in New York City with little preparation except reading a few passages of Neruda and Eliot, and listening to the poetry of my fellow open micers.  As you might imagine, my first attempts at poetry were horrific.  Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, because I was lucky enough to receive the encouragement and direction from the resident poets of the A Lil Bit Louder reading series. The organizers kept encouraging me to read my poems aloud to develop a connection between the verse I was writing and how it was connecting with a live audience.  Over time, as I was beginning to get an ear for what I liked to write, I would be given suggestions on what authors I should be reading and getting to know and so I was introduced to the books of Willie Perdomo, Patricia Smith, Junot Díaz and the Aloud anthology of poets from the Nuyorican Café.  I didn’t know it but this was my first community workshop, after a good reading I would get direct feedback from audience members about the lines they felt resonated with them and if I had a poor reading, which still happened more times than I care to admit, a poet would take me to the side and point it out to me. When the opportunity to take a series of formal workshops with these poets, who were now collectively known as the louderARTS Project, came up, I jumped at the chance.

More than just learning the language and norms of a workshop setting, both in a formal classroom and informal live reading setting, I was also learning that the first lesson of community is to take your knowledge and pass it down to the next aspiring open micer.

Since those first workshops with louderARTS I’ve continue to seek out various community workshops, partially for the challenge of sharing a class with poets in various stages of development but mostly out of necessity.  While some poets debate the merits and drawbacks of an MFA in creative writing, I don’t really have a choice in the matter since I’ve yet to complete an AA much less think about a post-graduate degree.

With that said, I still feel that community workshops have afforded me a space to broaden my own poetic aspirations with the ability to take classes with writers who, and I know this is gonna sound corny, are my heroes.  Not only that but most of those classes have been fairly low-cost and in some cases even free.

This isn’t to say that the community workshop experience is a poetic paradise.  I find myself often having to grapple with instructors who view poetry as a therapeutic form of expression with no rubric set in place for what makes a poem successful other than it should have an ethereal quality of power, emotion and purpose.  Too often this kind of workshops seeks to open the world of poetry by validating anything that has been penned down with line breaks.  Thinking back to my first experiences, if I had been told everything I was writing/reciting was the new hotness I would still be cranking out ambiguous, florid, morality fables to tepid, polite applause instead of trying to reach a higher level of creative language for myself.

A call to higher figurative language is one of the hallmarks of the instructors who have pushed me the most in my poetic development—informally, the advice and example of Roger Bonair-Agard kept me moving to the next different poem while also delving and identifying what the emotional core(s) of the poem were in recitation; in a more formal setting, the guidance of Willie Perdomo and Truong Tran has made me look back over my work to refine points of syntax and word choice that can both broaden the language while condensing it at the same time.

And, in the most informal sense, I think of the poetic conversations I engage in daily with my wife, Barbara Jane Reyes, who also happens to be the first reader/listener of all my poems.  Whether we are discussing a literary event we attended, how I’m going to structure a new chapbook or just what exactly is the definition of poetry—we are constantly going over the points of craft and how it can be expanded for the sake of a better line, tighter stanza, finer poem, worthwhile manuscript.

All to say, whether your path is a community workshop or an MFA program, talking about your poems over drinks at a slam or analyzing the linebreaks of your favorite verse, the emphasis should always be on where your work is today, what you would like to see for it tomorrow and what is your game plan to get it there.  They say there is no such thing as a dumb question and I think in poetry there is no such thing as a dumb poetry conversation.  The only question is where will you be having that conversation and with which community.

My father hands me back some pretty good feedback on a six-part poem I’ve sent his way. He says, “Es tiempo de parar soñando y comenzar trabajando.” Palabra, pops.

All this to ponder how long is it going to take me to become real good at poetry. Not, a lil good. Not, that was one nice poem. Not, do you do spoken word? Not, hey can ya make it rhyme for the kids? Not, be sure to get angry and make a point. No, I’m talking really good.

A few months back Claire Light posted on the “10,000 hours” theory. In short, you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice in order to master an art. This also came up at VONA with instructor Steven Barnes, another advocate of the 10,000 hours theory. Barnes was so gung-ho on it that he challenged anyone who thought they were good enough to be a writer to lay it all on the line. Write. Every day. Find what makes you hyper-productive: music, tea, exercise, yoga, whatever, and rush right into it. Enter a hyper-productive zone as soon as possible and jam out as much writing as you can in the 30 mins, one hour, two hours that you can.

Something I have not been doing at all much lately or, to get to the nitty gritty, really at all in my writing life.

I realized this over a guys-day-out jaunt to AT&T Park. During the pre-game tailgate party, I meet a friend-of-a-friend and the subject of my writing comes up. To my surprise, dude is seriously interested and starts asking me a ton of questions about my work. “So what’s your daily routine? How exactly do you write poetry?” And this is where I ended up sounding like one of those quasi-mystic, poetry-is-self-expression pendejos I privately rag on. “Well, I just keep an idea in my head, listen to a lot of language, read what I can, and when the time’s right; I put it down on paper.”

Ok, so three-quarters of that is pretty sound but the last part makes me sound like I should be an extra in the video for Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon.”

Yeah, I’m extra harsh on myself today and, quite frankly, I’m pretty harsh all the time. All I keep thinking is I got to read more poetry, study more theory, read more blogs about writing, contact more folks who know how to writer, connect with more authors, and, oh yeah-when fate comes up against my will, write more poems.

Well, maybe it’s time to change tactics a little and go back to the 10,000 hours theory. I know I already have a jump start on this but I’m going to actually start from today and ask this question on the daily: Have I contributed one solid hour to my writing today?

For today the answer is no. Too much day-job work. (Uhmm, can I say how happy I am to just have a job and how lucky I am to have one that lets me contribute to youth education? Yeah. And it’s not fun all the time but that’s why it’s called work and not What I do for fun and get a paycheck for. Nebulous rant: Done.) Where was I? Yeah, too much day work. Too much social media. And too much blogging. Not that I plan to quit blogging since it’s something I actually enjoy. But blogging doesn’t always contribute to my poetry so less blogging. Maybe more critical write-ups, more process, more I Speak of the City, more rough drafts and more edits.

Well, time’s moving on and I mean to catch up with it.

Or, as my father would say, “Less dreaming, more working.”

Good news from the folks at Cypher Books:
Cypher Books is pleased to announce that breaking poems by Suheir Hammad has been nominated for an American Book Award!

Add that to the Arab American Book Award and to the fact that breaking poems and ZaatarDiva has been at the top of Small Press Distribution’s Best Sellers list for the last few months. Nice.

At VONA, Suheir made it a point to thank all everyone for their support in spreading the word about breaking poems and helping a small press with a select few authors keep coming out on top. This despite the fact that Cypher Books runs a very tight operation with little means to promote books other than promising they will continue “publishing today’s most necessary poetry.” It’s a promise that is resulting in true grassroots support and serious award recognition.

So what ya waitin for? Keep spreadin the word, y’all.

What I’m really diggin from this visual art piece is how it’s the city without people but not an empty city. Silhouettes in the widows, buildings leaning on each other and the critter running unchecked (and pretty damn happy about it) through the streets. Reminds me of walking through the City late at night or just after a deep snowstorm as most folks take refuge in their apartments. Me, I would be the one walking around and trying to notice the details that slip by as you’re rushing from place to place.

Example: While I was living in Brooklyn (Bedstuy, Do or Die) I was able to see the constellation of Orion on a pretty frequent basis. This meant I had to actually pause while walking down Franklin Ave and take a long hard look at the sky. Maybe not the wisest idea as shady characters were out and about at all hours of the night doing whatever business it is to do at 2am on Eastern Parkway. So, yeah, the expected norm is to get from the train station to your crib in a straight line; if you do see people, don’t look em in the eye; don’t look away but also don’t try to grill anyone, either. That’s the norm and here I am taking time to actually plot the stars, note that Orion is right over Medgar Evers College and ponder what that might mean. Which made me look either extremely brave, downright foolish or quasi-mystical, like said critter above.