Author Archives: Oscar Bermeo

La ciudad sin gente


La ciudad sin gente by ~LuMaGa on deviantART

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.

On Manong Al


Manong Al Robles
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

Barb has started her tenure at the Harriet Blog with a post celebrating the life, activism and poetry of Manong Al Robles.

San Francisco Poet Al Robles (1930-2009)

Al Robles was an activist, at the forefront of the movement to stop the demolition of the I-Hotel, which housed elderly and low income tenants, many of whom we’ve come to know as the “Manongs,” elder Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, who spent their youths as migrant labor in West Coast agriculture and canneries, and as US veterans who fought in WWII. He brought young activists and artists to Agbayani Village in Delano, a rural settlement of these Manongs, and to the WWII Japanese American internment camps at Tule Lake and Manzanar. He believed it was important for young activists and artists to see these places with their own eyes, to hear the stories of these places firsthand. Robles’s activism was closely tied to his poetic work; in fact, his activism and poetry were one and the same. He believed poets should bring themselves into the world.

Complete article is here.

Manong Al’s passing was sudden and intense. You could feel the vacuum in the community as the question (spoken and unspoken) came around again: Who will tell our stories now?

Then, just as fast, I could see folks like Tony Robles and Kuya Phil start to be called Manong by the community.

And that was just like Al’s poetry, rolling like a stream over a rock, nature moving through and creating change. With Al’s jazz meter, his steady cadence, unflappable stage presence, improvisational abilities and stories of deep human sorrow paving the way for the joy of human endurance to shine through. Al’s voice was clearly the splash of stream and that made it both the river and the rock at the same time. Elements of chaotic change and sure bedrock all rolled together in one distinct sound.

Al’s lost reminded me of the passing of New York’s own maestro of locura and verse, el Reverendo Pedro Pietri. Another maverick who defined his own poetics and never let the river of current public opinion change the measure of his poetry.

I’m glad Barb has a chance to share the message of Al’s work and spirit with the community over at Poetry Foundation and let his words shine in the continuum of American Poetry.

At the Movies: District 9


District 9 mnu sign
Originally uploaded by district9pics

If there is any justice in the universe, “District 9” will gross double the box office bank of “Transformers 2.” This is one of the best movies of this summer, it’s also rich enough in backstory and sequel possibilities to insure a continued fan mythos.

As is my way, I avoided spoilers like the plague coming into this movie and it paid off as writer/director Neill Blomkamp brings the viewer right into his own alternate reality where an alien mothership lands over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989 creating worldwide interest and, apparently, allowing Apartheid to continue unchecked. Thus establishing that humans in this reimagined history will be indifferent to a singular injustice if the welfare of the planet is at stake. So with the threat of an alien invasion at the world’s doorstep, you can just imagine how the leaders of the world gathered and decided that it would be best to let the ruling political party of South Africa deal with the aliens in any way they saw fit. You can also imagine the the Apartheid regime skyrocketing the rents for J’burg office space to all the mutlinationals wanting to get close to the aliens and Sun City enjoying record tourism. Yeah, in “District 9” timeline, the idea of strict borders, undocumented immigration and homeland security is at the highest levels of xenophobic paranoia.

Which, like most great sci-fi morality fables, is not very different from our actual reality.

Back to “District 9” the movie: Blomkamp does a remix of “The Blair Witch Project,” “Alien Nation,” and the classic “The Fly” with some elements of “Battlestar Galactica” to produce a docu-fiction telling us everything we need to know about the aliens (who are not even officially named but nicknamed as “the prawns”) and our history with them. Like a good documentary, it tries to show all the sides of the argument it wants to win. The aliens came but without the heraldry of new technology, world peace or even a good flying car. Worse, they’re ugly. No sexy tights suits, no androgynous sex appeal and no desire to share their deep philosophy. No, they look like big insects who communicate in clicks and gurgles and the first human impulse is to spray em with the biggest can of Raid we can find.

Worse, the alien mothership is parked in earth’s precious sky which (in gov’t mentality) means we have to go, assess their needs and drop em in a ghetto. Multi-National United (MNU) has been put in charge of the aliens relocation needs which amounts to little more than putting the aliens in the most of the way location they can. Blomkamp liberally overlaps South African history here for incredible effect.

All is going well in MNU’s world until Wikus van der Merwe, a mid-level cog in the corporate machine, gets too close to the aliens and inadvertently discovers the next step in both the aliens’ and MNU’s plans. I’ll stop here with the storyline because I hate giving away the film and the strength in Blomkamp’s film isn’t the plot but how he manages to twist our percpetions on what’s right and wrong about survivalism.

The action scenes are amazing with an incredible body count and more gore than you can imagine but without the overwrought soundscape of “Terminator Salvation” and minimal sci-fi exposition. Blomkamp doesn’t inundate us with useless techno-babble or meandering speeches, we know the aliens are here, we know they don’t look like us, and we hate them for it. Period. Now how can we explore that and find out what is really human about us and what, if anything, is really alien about a species that just wants to live their lives.

“District 9” is packed with all the requisite sci-fi shoot-em-up tropes (the Gundam armor is a joy to behold), the alien-human communication foibles (the interactions between Wikus and the aliens effortlessly transforms from overlord to necessary allies to comradery to friendship), and the look at human behavior from the outside in but does so with compassionate acting performance, amazing CGI and a strong storyline that is destined to be our next great myth.

More “District 9”
• Barb’s write-up
• Roger Ebert’s review
• IO9’s thoughts

I Speak of the City: Ernesto Cardenal

It doesn’t take long to get from Grand Central Station to 125th on the Metro-North and the brisk elevated run from the heart of Midtown up to Harlem can be real pretty at times. But if you’ve ever hung around Park & E96, what in my recollection of Manhattan was the Mason-Dixon line between the Upper East Side and El Barrio, it goes from pretty to pretty-fucked-up real quick. Again, this is the NYC of the 80s and 90s, right before the ole dilapidated brownstones became fixer uppers and Harlem started getting carved up by the real estate speculators.

Still, I’m thinking the areas around the Metro-North tracks probable haven’t changed much. Walking trough the narrow granite pathways under the tunnels was always an adventure for me. If an unfriendly face popped up on the other side, do you quicken your pace or try to mug a mean face? And if you start hearing more footsteps behind ya, do you look back in fear or just get ready to bolt at the first sound of real trouble?

The closer ya got to 125, past the remnants of the Marqueta of better community times, the worse it would get as seedy motels would start poppin up and the few homes still left around looked like crack dens.

So I’m wondering if times have changed or is it still the way Ernesto Cardenal brilliantly portrays it in this poem? Does so much history happen and wash away in the same second? Do folks still prefer to walk past the scene of the crime and wait to read about it later? Do we let the lights of Midtown wash out what’s right in front of us? And if we stop and look, do we really want to see what’s around us?

It’s always tough asking these “we” questions when I know I won’t be returning to NYC anytime soon but I think about the BART and how its shadow hides so much. Those spots where it’s tunnels find their way back into the ground and how in my rush to get to where I need to be, I seem to be missing out on the real Bay Area.

Star Found Dead on Park Avenue

The bolts of lightning woke me up
like the noise of furniture being moved and rolled across a floor upstairs
and later like millions of radios
or subway trains
or bomber planes
and it seemed that all the thunderbolts in the world
were hitting the lightning rods of the skyscrapers in New York
and they stretched from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to the Times Building
                Speak not to us, Lord. Speak not to us lest we die
from the Woolworth Tower to the Chrysler Building
and the flashes were lighting up the skyscrapers like photographers
                Let Moses speak to us.
                Speak not to us, Lord, lest we die
“He probably died last night around 3 a.m.”
the New York Times later said.
I was awake then. The lightning woke me up.
The sky made starry by apartments and bathrooms
the lights of lawful and illicit love affairs
and of people praying, or robbing a safe right upstairs
or raping a girl as a radio plays full blast
or masturbating, or not being able to sleep
and people getting undressed (and drawing their curtains)
And the noise from the 3rd Avenue El
and the trains that come out of the ground at 125th Street
and go back down again,
a bus stopping and starting at a corner
(in the rain), the scream, perhaps, of a woman in the park,
and the wailing of ambulances in the empty streets
or the red fire engines for all we know speeding to our own address
“…His body was found by Max Hilton, the artist,
who told police he found him on the bathroom floor,
the floor’s pattern pressed into his wet cheek
and he was still clutching a vial of white pills in his hand,
and in the bathroom a radio was playing full blast
no station at all.”

© Ernesto Cardenal
from With Walker in Nicaragua and Other Early Poems, 1949-1954 translated by Jonathan Cohen

Asian Pacific American & Latin@ Poetry Night at The Nest (Oakland)


Asian Pacific American & Latin@ Poetry Night
Illustration and design by Kenji Liu
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN & LATIN@ POETRY NIGHT
August 20th
8-10 pm
The Nest
200 2nd St
Oakland, CA
FREE!

—–

Mochi cuernos? Horchata boba? Soy chicken adobo? Tapatio maguro sushi? Teka ceviche?

What happens when we bring together 5 great Asian Pacific American and Latina/o poets in one room?

Find out as we enter the linguistic worlds of:

OSCAR BERMEO
MAI DOAN
KENJI C. LIU
BARBARA JANE REYES
VICKIE VÉRTIZ

Join us in The Nest with artist ADIA MILLETT, whose latest brilliant installation will be our environment.

—–

BIOS

OSCAR BERMEO is the author of the poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest and Heaven Below. Recent poems appear in BorderSenses, In the Grove and Spindle, among others. Oscar is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own), IWL (Intergenerational Writers Lab) and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) poetry fellow. He lives in Oakland with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

MAI DOAN likes mangoes and sticky things wrapped in banana leaves. Her experiences growing up Vietnamese/Mexican in and out of a Californian suburb known for its white supremacy has deeply influence the intent and content of her writing. She finds voice through her poetry and with it, seeks to break down borders and recreate connection, within and outside of herself. Her work can be found in the Spring 2009 Cipactli: La Raza Arts and Literature Journal as well as the 2009 Intergenerational Writers Workshop online anthology Flick of My Tongue.

KENJI LIU is a 1.5 generation Japanese-born Taiwanese American expatriate of New Jersey suburbia. He holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Arising from his work as an activist, educator and cultural worker, his writing explores the politics of identity, migration, race, gender, memory, history, mourning, joy and everyday small occurrences. Kenji’s poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. His writing has also appeared in Tea Party Magazine, Kartika Review, and the 2009 Intergenerational Writer’s Workshop Anthology called Flick of My Tongue.

ADIA MILLET: Deeply embedded in a series of metaphors and dark visual poetry, Adia Millett’ s changing installations suggest a story of a delicate transition from loss to potential love. Her works examine the beauty of impermanence, the power of the unknown, and the inevitable illusion of innocence. In the artist’s studio, symbolic gestures, objects and sounds convey an abstracted reality where the viewer is asked to fill in the blanks. Millett will be working on a short film project and a series of installations over the course of her two-month residency.

Adia Millett has been included in numerous national and international exhibitions at venues. She earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 2000; and a BFA from the University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

BARBARA JANE REYES was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Reyes is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications. She is adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at USF, and she lives with her husband, the poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

VICKIE VÉRTIZ is a writer, born and raised in Los Angeles, whose work is largely informed by the urban magical. Vickie’s poems can be found in Mujeres de Maiz and in the 2008 Intergenerational Writer’s Workshop Anthology called, “I Saw My Ex at a Party.” She lives in San Francisco.