MiPOesiasVolume 23, Issue 4October 2010

Many thanks to Editor Didi Menendez for including work from To the Break of Dawn for the latest issue of MiPOesias.

You can preview and purchase the issue at MagCloud. Here’s some info:

MiPOesias (October 2010)
Edited by Didi Menendez and featuring work by GRACE CAVALIERI, SCOT SIEGEL, OSCAR BERMEO, KIMBERLY ALIDIO, MIRANDA MERKLEIN, DONAVON DAVIDSON, JASON RYBERG, MARTIN WILLITTS JR., GREGORY SHERL, MELISSA ELEFTHERION, KRISTINA MARIE DARLING, JEFFERY BERG, CHRISTINA MURPHY, DARYL ROGERS, MAGDALAWIT MAKONNEN, COLEEN SHIN, AMANDA GENTRY, KARINA BOROWICZ, MICHAEL BROEK, MARIA MIRANDA MALONEY, KIRK CURNUTT, MELISSA MCEWEN, JEFF FRIEDMAN, and art by AMY HUDDLESTON.

I’m also thankful for editors, like Didi, who are always looking for new work to include in their publications.  It’s been keeping me on my toes when it comes to having my cover letters and poems ready to go when a publishing opportunity comes around.  In short, I’m trying to do my best to keep my work out in the world and keep momentum going strong on my new chapbook and my developing manuscript.  It feels like I’m working three jobs: my normal 9-5, my work as an aspiring author and being my own PR team. Yeah, it has been a little draining as of late but it’s either work hard to get published or crawl away and I don’t plan on leaving.  End personal pep talk.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Editor Edith Heal does a great job of capturing Williams’ honest reflections of his entire body of work from the beginning of his career up to the time of the interviews. Williams is open and honest and consistent on his desire to capture the American Idiom in both prose and verse.

Even more insightful are the commentaries from Florence Herman Williams, aka Flossie, the poet’s wife. An astute reader and honest voice, these interviews cement her role as the key collaborator behind all of Williams’ work.

A must read for any poet who is struggling to find the balance between working full time, fulfilling family obligations, and crafting a body of enduring work.

View all my reviews

I’m getting ready for my feature at Writers with Drinks tonight and I can’t remember the last time I was so nervous for a feature.

If you’ve been to a Writers with Drinks, then you know what I’m talking about. The energy is incredibly kinetic and the caliber of writers is always top notch so I’m feeling some serious pressure on what I should read. I can go with the set that I’ve been used to doing the last couple of readings or go with all new stuff. The way I’m talking about this, you’d think I was doing these same poems for five years or sumthin.

Segue: Watching the National Poetry Slam finals recently through live internet stream was a nice experience cuz even if I didn’t like the poems per se, I do appreciate the spirit of competition. What I didn’t appreciate was the asshattery in the chat room. Way too many internet jerks saying things you know they would never say in real life. But, one comment did crack me up, as a poet came up and did a poem they’ve been doing in competition for a long time, and one of the commentators types “This is their Stairway to Heaven!” And as someone who used to have his own Stairway to Heaven I cracked up. End segue.

Ok, time to really get ready and I do want to try to add at least one really new poem to the mix because I don’t ever want to be that poet that does all the same things at all the same places. Been there, when I was younger, and done with it. I know all the reasons poets do the “hits” all the time but I really don’t care if there is “at least one person” in the room who has never heard that poem before. You know, that poem guaranteed to change lives. What I most care about is that the only way I can write that poem—the one that if I’m extremely lucky might get remembered 100 years from now—is by writing new stuff.

Speaking of new stuff. Here’s the latest revision of a poem I started at Martín Espada’s CantoMundo workshop. There’s at least three good stories behind this poem but that’ll have to wait for latah. See ya at the Make Out Room!

The Neighborhood and Tenant Association of Tremont Avenue, The Bronx, Gather to Erect a Statue for Robert Moses

They’ve all returned home from forced exile
some from New Jersey, Far Rockaway, Long Island;
others cross the street from the nearby Projects.

Congregate under the arch of the Crossbronx Expressway,
the dragon who—with asphalt scales, concrete wings,
shatter proof glass eyes, and burnt tar smoldering
from its manhole nostrils—slithered from the cave
of the George Washington Bridge, and then coiled
and stretched its six-lane body over the garden
boxes, back yard swings, and open porches
of the Bronx to suffocate the moss woods,
grass fields and sand lots beneath.

But, today, the Neighborhood and Tenant Association
gather not to remember the beast but its master—
Robert Moses.

The night before, in the shadows they’ve grown
to know so well, they dug up the bones of Robert Moses
and returned Moses to the site of his proudest moment.

The bones placed in a discarded milk crate,
the crate pedestaled on a forgotten tire,
the tire adorned with a lost license plate,
the back of the plate etched with bottle shards,
the monument dedicated for all to see—

Erected for Robert Moses:
Usurper of Farm Lands
Desecrator of Rivers
Enemy of Clean Air

May he finally serve
the people of the Bronx,
as a bucket for bird
droppings, leaking
oil and cigarette butts.
In this service,
may the willows
of Williamsbridge,
the oaks of Olinville,
and the anonymous
of Anywhere Avenue
know Moses’ penance
will last as long
as his highway.

Many thanks to Red Room for choosing To the Break of Dawn as their “Book of the Day” for August 6th.  It’s quite an honor and validates my decision to continue collecting my poems in chapbook form; partly to just get the poems out of my system, partly to get the attention of editors, but mostly to the share them among my personal network via gift economy.

With that said, I’ve already started to receive quite the bounty of artistic trade from the new chapbook.  Here’s what I’ve gotten so far:

• Adolescents on the Edge, Jimmy Santiago Baca
• Bocas Palabras, Liliana Valenzuela
• Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas, Martín Espada
• Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
• Everything is Everything, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
• Find Your Own Voice: Poetry and Music (1982-2003), Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters with Special Guests
• Glow of Our Sweat, Francisco Aragón
• Heredities, J. Michael Martinez
• La Primera Voz Que Oí, Brenda Nettles Riojas
• Mujer Frontera, Mujer Maliche, Liliana Valenzuela
• Stories from the Edge, Jimmy Santiago Baca
• “Summer Day” by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Art Card by MiPOesias
• The Poetry of Rice Fields, Liliana Valenzuela
• Wind Chimes, Gloria Amescua

I’m very grateful to all the folks who have shared these items from their libraries.  It’s always a great treat to have a peer share his/her work with me.  It’s also fun to see what folks are willing to swap when they either don’t have a book in print or I already have all their work.  One of my favorite exchanges was with a non-writer who really wanted to support my work and was looking for a copy of Heaven Below. They dug through their whole backpack and emerged with a copy of John Legend’s Evolver. “Is this ok?” Hell yeah, I said, and happily traded with ‘em.

The call is still out, anyone interested in trading something from your media library for a copy of one of my chapbooks— Holler at me!

Many thanks to Francisco X. Alarcón and all the editors at Facebook’s Poets Responding to SB 1070 for including my poem “By the Time I Get to Arizona” in their online anthology. It’s an honor to be included in such a diverse and populous list of voices who continue to speak up against the terror legislation of Gov Jan Brewer. Even as key parts of the law are being struck down by the Federal government, the fight against SB 1070 goes on and the voices continue to ring.

Speaking of a multitude of voices, La Bloga’s On-Line Floricanto is reprinting select poems from the Facebook anthology and are also including my work. Mil gracias to Michael Sedano and all the gente at La Bloga for providing another opportunity to declare our hope that Arizona can take care of all her children equally and justly.

An extra shout out to Francisco Aragón for passing on my poem to Señor Alarcón and helping creating more poetry bridges.

Do any of you keep a secret notepad of venues you want to feature at?  I do. And Writers with Drinks was one of those places I would visit and say, “One day, I’ll write some stuff fly enough to get me up in here.”

it also happends to be one of those spots that people who are not writers know about.  Proof?  Peep the Jet Blue write up: Writers with Drinks: One Part Alcohol, One Part Art.

Enough hype, here’s the 411:

Date: Saturday, August 14, 2010, 7:30 to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM
What: WRITERS WITH DRINKS
Featuring: Janine Brito, Alice Sola Kim, Justine Sharrock, Monica Nolan and Oscar Bermeo
Location: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia, San Francisco
Admission: $5 to $10 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit the CSC

About the readers/performers
• Justine Sharrock is the author of Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad
Things. She’s a former staffer with Mother Jones Magazine.
• Alice Sola Kim’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, StrangeHorizons.com and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
• Oscar Bermeo’s poetry chapbooks include To The Break of Dawn, Heaven Below, Palimpsest and Anywhere Avenue.
• Monica Nolan is the author of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary and Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher. Her films include Ashley, 22, Chuckie or Ben-Hur in Five Minutes, World of Women, and Lesbians Who Date Men.
• Janine Brito won the San Francisco Women’s Comedy competition and has performed at the Purple Onion.

About Writers With Drinks
Writers With Drinks has won “Best Literary Night” from the SF Bay Guardian readers’ poll five years in a row and was named “Best Literary Drinking” by the SF Weekly. The spoken word “variety show” mixes genres to raise money for local worthy causes. The award-winning show includes poetry, stand-up comedy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, literary fiction, erotica, memoir, zines and blogs in a freewheeling format.

Hostess Charlie Jane Anders blogs about science fiction and futurism at io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.” She’s the author of the Lambda Award-winning Choir Boy (2005 Soft Skull Press) and the co-editor, with Annalee Newitz, of She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press 2007). She also published other magazine, which is on hiatus. Follow her on Twitter as charliejane.

August is here and it’s a real crunch time for me. I’m working on a couple of different projects right now and managing my 9-5. The good news, right now I feel like I have a pretty good handle on everything. The bad news is that my day job gets real hectic come September and doesn’t let up for a couple of months. Meaning I’ve got to make some hard choices soon because the bottom line is that I can’t make it through life on just poetry.

No need to throw a pity party just yet, just time to take advantage of some of this down summer time and make some moves while I can.  Number one priority for this month:  rehaul the manuscript. The last time I looked over the ms it was just coming in at 44 pages or so.  A bunch of poems that were saying the same thing had to get the axe and order was a serious priority.  A couple of people had looked at it and the feedback was encouraging.

So the challenge now is to fold into the ms the new poems from To the Break of Dawn.  Poems that a few months back I thought wouldn’t make it into my ms.  Not because I didn’t think the poems were any good but because I had this ideal theme for my manuscript that revolved around writing about growing up in the South Bronx just as hip-hop was forming with the manuscript ending just as the first commercial hip-hop records were coming out.  Sounds good, heh?  And then come the new poems which I like and actually serve the manuscript very well, if I extend out my original idea.

The question becomes: Do I stick to my guns and just write into the idea of the ms or do I open myself into this new pathway?

Answer:  Let’s not fall in love with an idea, let’s go forward with the concrete.

Going with the concrete also opens me up to adding even more mix to the ms by trying to also incorporate some poems from last year’s NaPoWriMo.   These poems were part of a series called Anything to Declare, all variations on a theme of folklore, orature vs literature, and migration. Very dark and circuitous poems I thought would one day be my second manuscript.  They might still be but I think some of them might serve as a good prelude to what will be going down on Anywhere Avenue.

The plan now is to break up my manuscript into five sections:

• Relaciónes (immigration, fractured language, voices of my parents)
• Anywhere Avenue (poems of people and place)
• Palimpsest (deconstruction, arson, forced movement)
• Heaven Below (praise, negotiation, resolve)
• To the Break of Dawn (art for cultural survival’s sake)

Each section would have its own internal arc (beginning, middle, end) but would connect to the next section.  Now I have to actually layout the poems, read the aloud, and see if it makes sense to both my eye and ear.  Then, time to write query letters. And do it all in 30 days.

Wish me luck, y’all.

Even though U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton has blocked most of the provisions in SB 1070, the law is still in effect. For activists, this means there is little time to celebrate this victory since folks like Sheriff Joe Arpaio are all set to put as much of the law into effect. With Sheriff Joe’s record, that means he’ll probably go past the letter and spirit of the law and continue his efforts to make Arizona a police state where brown folks are the siege targets.

I can’t think of a more prophetic poem than Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “So Mexicans are Taking Jobs from Americans.” I remember reading this poem back in 2001 and loving the directness of the poem. In fact, the directness of the poem is so jarring that the end of the poem completely took me off guard and for years it was a great poetic mystery for me. Where was the metaphor? Where was the open ended ambiguous mystery of poetry? What, no gift wrapping and shiny bow at the end to summarize the poem for me?

I’m not sure when I finally got it but when this poem finally clicked for me, it was like a hammer upside my head and cemented a key concept of poetry for me—the purpose of poetic language isn’t to dance around a touchy subject with smart line breaks and clever simile. No, the purpose of poetic language is to lure people into uncomfortable situations and show them the truth in the world around them.

In this case, it’s the after effects of short sighted policies like SB 1070 and other legislation that seeks to demonize any segment of US society. The end of his poem eschews flowery language and transforms directly into the voice of Sheriff Joe with all his vitriol and hypocrisy in full display for the reader to judge.

And like SB1070, the readers judge in all kinds of ways. I’ve heard as much praise for this poem as I’ve heard disdain. I’ve heard this poem called racist, that it paints all gringos in a negative light, and outrage that the poet uses the word gringo. And, in the name of poetic dialogue, these are all good things. It’s better to know what is in the heart of people around you and nothing brings that heart out faster than a good poem.

So Mexicans are Taking Jobs from Americans

O Yes? Do they come on horses
with rifles, and say,
                         Ese gringo, gimmee your job?

And do you, gringo, take off your ring,
drop your wallet into a blanket
spread over the ground, and walk away?

I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.
Do they sneak into town at night,
and as you’re walking home with a whore,
do they mug you, a knife at your throat,
saying, I want your job?

Even on TV, an asthmatic leader
crawls turtle heavy, leaning on an assistant,
and from a nest of wrinkles on his face,
a tongue paddles through flashing waves
of lightbulbs, of cameramen, rasping
“They’re taking our jobs away.”

Well, I’ve gone about trying to find them,
asking just where the hell are these fighters.

The rifles I hear sound in the night
are white farmers shooting blacks and browns
whose ribs I see jutting out
and starving children,
I see the poor marching for a little work,
I see small white farmers selling out
to clean-suited farmers living in New York,
who’ve never been on a farm,
don’t know the look of a hoof or the smell
of a woman’s body bending all day long in fields.

I see this, and I hear only a few people
got all the money in this world, the rest
count their pennies to buy bread and butter.

Below that cool green sea of money,
millions and millions of people fight to live,
search for pearls in the darkest depths
of their dreams, hold their breath for years
trying to cross poverty to just having something.

The children are dead already. We are killing them,
that is what America should be saying;
on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying,
          “We aren’t giving the children a chance to live.”

          Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.
          What they really say is, let them die,
          and the children too.

© Jimmy Santiago Baca
Reprinted with permission of the author.

Cover Image Courtesy of Pro-Zak

My new chapbook To the Break of Dawn is available now for trade or purchase.

I will ship you a copy for FREE if you would like to swap a copy of your own chapbook. If you don’t have a chapbook of your own, I am willing to swap a copy for a book, journal, CD, or used book from your personal library. For more details about trading books, contact me at oscar-at-oscarbermeo-dot-com.

Many thanks to Barbara for being the first listener of all these poem, Tara Betts for her blurb, and Pro-Zak for the use of his photography.

More shout outs are in the book but I’d like to also send thanks to Raphael Cohen & the editorial team of 580 Split, Avotcja y La Palabra Musical at Rebecca’s Books in Berkeley, Nick Whittington & the staff of Bird & Beckett Books and Records, and Michelle Wallace & the folks at the Kaleidoscope Reading Series for the opportunity to read at your venues while these poems were developing. The chance to recite these poems for your audiences was key in the revision process of this manuscript.

Palabra.

NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN
by Kevin Powell; Soft Skull Press, 2008.

Poetry and politics. Politics and poetry. Where do the two meet? Should they meet? Who is the most political poet? Who is the most poetic politician? It feels like I hear these kinds of questions all around poetry e-world and, more often than not, the resulting answer seems to be: Let’s throw a round table discussion around it!

Whack.

Especially when there are poets who are able to shift seamlessly between the two worlds. Maybe because they realize that there are two worlds and the way you interact in each should be based upon what end product you wish to see. I think back to the elections of 2008 and how I saw writer Helen Zia out in front of an Oakland Chinatown polling station with a “Say No to Prop 8″ sign. No metaphor, no simile, no conceit. Just the citizen and her opinion in clear terms.

This brings me to poet Kevin Powell and his run for political office. This is Powell’s third attempt to represent the people of Brooklyn in Congress and he does so in very concrete and articulate terms as you can read for yourself at his website.

This isn’t an endorsement of Powell. I am not a resident of Brooklyn and would be hard pressed to tell anyone living there who they should and shouldn’t vote for. Again, check Powell’s record and agenda for yourself.

This is an endorsement for political/poetry with the divide firmly between the two because every poet must be a citizen of some state. Even if you don’t wish to make it a geographic center point, there must still be some origin point for your poetics and, hopefully, an end point in the horizon where you wish your words to be heard, read and felt. If that end point is to create a shift in the political consciousness of the United States of America, more power to you. If that end point is to create a shift in the political workings of the United States of America, then the pen and pad is not enough, the stage and microphone is not enough, a press and distribution is not enough—you need to actually move and shake the system itself.

Props to writers like Kevin Powell, Helen Zia, and everyone else who knows the distinction, can step outside of the writing world, and ventures to take that intense political risk.