Intuitive Intertextuality

Many thanks to Charlie Jane Anders for inviting me to read at the next edition of Writers with Drinks.

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.

Deadline
Originally uploaded by Moonrhino

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.
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Minneapolis protest against Arizona
immigrant law SB 1070
Originally uploaded by Fibonacci Blue

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?
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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.