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.

Intuitive Intertextuality - The online poetics journal of Oscar Bermeo

And when in doubt, I return to the vatic words of Kanye West.

Before I start detailing the changes to my current manuscript, I have a question: Why is it that for every other art form folks can easily tell the difference between an amateur and a professional but refuse to do the same in poetry?  Case in point: I can’t sing.  Punto.  Now, if I went to tryout for American Idol, I’d probably end up on the blooper reel or that cruel episode where everyone makes fun of the fact that the people on the episode can’t hold a note to save their lives.

Meanwhile, back at the poetry ranch, folks write trite shit and it passes as Powerful or Creative Expression or Truly Moving.  Not that I’m saying folks need to be mean and dismissive (like say when poets from political situations write about–drum roll, please–political situations and it cast aside as being too ghetto) but I am saying you can learn more from a good editor than from a pack of cheerleaders.  Which is my remix of the Kanye quote with a little Saeed Jones added for good meaure.

All of this to say that thanks to Barb for looking over my manuscript and helping give it a new shine.  And how did this happen?  Easy, we took a big ax to it.

I say ax but what I really mean is scalpel cuz the cutting happening here is not some clunky chopping for chopping’s sake. No, it was time to cut through the fat and excess of the manuscript so that the truest intent of the work could shine through.  For that, you need not only a sharp instrument but a purpose behind said cutlery.  In this case, I had to remember the origins of my manuscript.

Anywhere Avenue is an exploration of the 70s era South Bronx through the lenses of migration, the early history of hip-hop and the politics of benign neglect; how these forces affected my family, relation to place and formation of language; and the effect city has on spirituality.

This is what I’ve spent the last three years of my poetic life putting together with a single-mindedness that feels like after three major revisions is only now starting to really come together.

The first version of the manuscript was still mostly chronological with the poems going in pretty much the order I wrote them.  The second version had some more variance but also had a lot of poems that weren’t quite ready, poems I was praising for their rawness but not for their artistry.  Or, I was just editing instead of revising.  (For a clear difference between the two, please peep Robert Vasquez’s excellent blog post.)

This latest version of the manuscript is the tightest yet, less poems (I’m just coming in at the bare minimum 48 pages) but clearer focus.  This focus is going to help me construct poems that address or expand the central theme without getting repetitive.

For the visual learner, you can take a peek at the last Table of Contents and compare it to the one here for a better look see:

• I’m Jus Askin
• Urban Relación
• Tricking the Eye
• The Story of How Pigeon Came to Live in City
• The View from the Stoop
• Skelsies
• Mami’s Ghazal
• Tumbaron Tres Torres
• The Blackout
• A Personal History and Reflection on Sixty Years in the City from the Reverend JT
• B-Boy Primer
• The Trouble with Poverty
• After Working the Times Square Late Shift Again, Two Latinos Compose Separate Responses Concerning the Myth of Racism
• Psalm for Public Housing
• Nomenclature
• The Pope Takes the #4 Train to Yankee Stadium
• Orchard Beach: Section Four
• Zuihitsu
• How Much for the Building? Tenants Optional.
• Getting Ronald Reagan to Visit the South Bronx
• Is Congruent To
• Sonnet for the Lexington Avenue Express—Mt Eden Ave Stop
• Psalm for Anywhere Avenue
• A Bodega on Anywhere Avenue
• In the City, You Can’t Help but Think of God
• Both a Place and a Scare-Word
• About B-Boys in the Boogie Down
• Unsolved Crimes Perpetrated by Invisible Men as Reported by an Unreliable Witness
• Fire Escape
• Sonnet for my B-Boys
• The True Story of How Sneakers Got on Telephone Wires
• Inventing the Remix
• Make Me a City
• Epistle Written at the #4 Train–Woodlawn Station, 4:30am
• We, Spoken Here
• Heaven Below
• The Break

We’ll see where the next fork in the road takes us but for now I’m feeling good about the future of my work.  Word.

Intuitive Intertextuality - The online poetics journal of Oscar Bermeo

If only code was poetry, I’d be the most prolific jibaro on the block right now with my acclimation to the WordPress interface and adding new bells and whistles to the website.

Some of the changes, messing with text layouts and adding the right amount of sidebar content, is a lot easier to do than others, like messing with the widget codes to appear exactly as I would like.  Sometimes I hunger for the days of coding out the HTML also entirely by hand and knowing the purpose behind all the lines of code.  I think that was my inner 12-year-old talking and remembering what it was like to put together a graphic display with BASIC on his shiny new Commodore VIC-20.  Yeah, those were the good old days of block text.

Today, all I need to do is drag-and-drop a widget here, mess with some settings there, and Poof! instant layout.  Clean, simple and leaving me no smarter than when I started.  So that’s what I really miss about knowing my website inside-and-out, even when there is a tiny mistake, one that I’m sure no one else can see, I know it can be fixed if I plug away at it hard enough.  With all this “easy” code, I have to wait for an upgrade to come along or just suck it.

I’m guessing I have the same mentality when it comes to some of the more difficult aspects of my writing life.  I’d rather tough out writing a review or putting together a deep lesson plan in favor of making things easier by looking at some pre-established models.  Same with manuscript revision, I’ve been stuck on a chronological layout of poems instead of seeing what makes the most sense thematically.   This is usually around the time I think I’ll go back to the drawing board and start all over but maybe the wiser move might be to just stop where I’m at and be honest about what is and isn’t working in the manuscript.  It would sure be quicker than going all the way back to square one.

I’m bringing this up because it’s time to submit to a new poetry contest and I really need to get my ass in gear like now. So I’m going to stop being stubborn and pretend like everything I do has to be original and borrow a page from Barb’s play book:  Here is the current table of contents to Anywhere Avenue, the manuscript:

• The Poet is Like a Guerilla
• Viewing the World from the Back of a Turtle
• An Atlas of Nationalism
• Urban Relación #13
• Sepia
• Urban Relación #17
• About B-Boys in the Boogie Down
• Skelsies
• pa•limp•sest
• My Father’s Accent Speaks
• Both a Place and a Scare-word
• B-Boy Primer
• Psalm for Public Housing
• After Working the Late Shift Again, a Young Boricua on Times Square Composes a Response to a White Co-worker Concerning the Myth of Racism
• The Truth (and Some Lies) About the Bronx
• My Father, a Cabdriver, Chimes in with His Own Response on the Myth of Racism as He Drives by Times Square
• A Personal History and Reflection on Sixty Years in the City from the Reverend JT
• God Loves a Liar
• In the City, You Can’t Help but Think of God
• Epistle Written at the #4 Train—Woodlawn Station, 4:30am
• Tricking the Eye
• Poem Written to the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun”
• Getting Ronald Reagan to Visit the South Bronx
• Antipoema
• Palimpsest
• Zuihitsu
• Unsolved Crimes Perpetrated by Invisible Men as Reported by an Unreliable Witness
• Congruence
• And God Said “Vaya”
• The Blackout
• Cucaracha
• Cockroach
• How Much for the Building? Tenants Optional.
• What the Landlord Said…
• Tumbaron Tres Torres
• Three Towers Toppled
• Ash Wednesday
• Heaven Below
• Mami’s Ghazal
• I’m Jus Askin
• We, Spoken Here
• Psalm for Anywhere Avenue
• Orchard Beach: Section Four
• The View from the Stoop
• The Pope Takes the #4 Train
• Ode to a Whiteboy
• Dedication
• The Trouble with Poverty
• Sonnet for the Lexington Avenue Express—Mt Eden Ave Stop
• How to be a Street Poet
• A Bodega on Anywhere Avenue
• Fire Escape
• The Story of How Pigeon Came to Live in City
• Inventing the Remix
• The Break

There ya go.  It all equals to about 70 pages on paper which seriously blows my mind.  Especially since my mission now is to turn this into about 50 pages of really tight manuscript.  A manuscript that much like the new web applications I’m using should be intuitive and practical to my reader without making them scratch their heads and wonder what exactly is going on in the text.  Leaving me, the code developer, with some serious concerns: I want it to be Anywhere Avenue but that place has to be in the Bronx.  I want to engage the early spirit of hip-hop without actually invoking hip-hop (after all, we didn’t know what to call it then), and I want to be true to my own urban experience without recycling tropes.

There ya have it.  Now let’s see what this manuscript looks like a week from now.

Intuitive Intertextuality - The online poetics journal of Oscar Bermeo

well here ya go. the result of a good year of work, give or take. now that this bad boy is done i can start working on the next group of (dis)placement poems.

oh yeah, if you would like a copy hit me up on email and we’ll see what we can figure out. (sold out)

Anywhere Avenue

- Viewing the world from the back of a turtle
- an atlas of nationalism
- The Hue of Ripened Fruit
- Sepia
- About B-Boys in the Boogie Down
- tricking the eye
- Canto del Niño Pobre
- both a place and a scare-word
- The Truth (and some Lies) about the Bronx
- After Working The Late Shift Again, A Young Boricua On Times Square Composes a Response To a White Co-Worker Concerning The Myth of Racism
- My Father, A Cabdriver, Chimes In With A Few Words of His Own on The Myth of Racism as He Drives by Times Square
- The Blackout
- Dedication
- Sonnet for the Lexington Avenue Express—Mt Eden Ave Stop
- Poem written to the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun”

Intuitive Intertextuality - The online poetics journal of Oscar Bermeo