Starting a new series of poetry workshops with Truong Tran tonight. Last year’s workshop set off a tangent of work that has since become the bedrock for Anywhere Avenue.
Really looking forward to developing another crop of work to add to the IWL and VONA poems which I will soon be forming into Another View of Anywhere Avenue (or somethin like that).
In the last week, I read through Eugene V Mohr’s The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority. Written in 1982 by a Puerto Rican Professor it takes a critical look at the works of Miguel Piñero, Piri Thomas, Nicolasa Mohr (no relation to the author), the poets of the original Nuyorican Poets Café (on Sixth Street) and many others, highlighting where the work succeeds and fails from a literary standpoint. If you are interested in Nuyorican lit, you should really pick this up or check it out of your library like I did.
Currently reading Reginald Lockett’s The Party Crashers of Paradise and Juna Felipe Herrera’s Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream with snippets of Victor Hernández Cruz’s Mainlands (a first edition(!) Barb found in a used bookstore). All three of these volumes have me getting as Low-Riding-West-Side-Gum-Snappin-Slick-Rappin as it can get.