a petri dish of faces

last night’s amiri baraka reading has me still in a loop. i want to blog as quick as i can here before heading to another reading in order to try to see what (if anything) is different from this reading.

sadly, amiri only read a bit of his work (two short stories from his new collection and an older poem). the readings were beautiful, nuanced, savvy, authentic all befitting the amount of literaryt effort that went into them.

then we move on to the q&a which was the bulk of the evening. while there were a few questions of a literary nature most of them revolved around political currents.

i can indict a whole bunch of fools here, and i will later, but the biggest culprit was me. instead of asking this man about poetics & the rigors of a writer’s life i asked a very naïve question regarding us politics. something that i should reserve for a local alderman or the like. i aint happy with myself about it but its a lesson learned. a hard lesson.

Like Humans Do

The last couple of blog entries make it seem like my poetic life is absolutely stellar but the truth is that I am just as lost as I have ever been. Answers are coming easily. The equations that once seemed like concrete algebra are turning into a complex quantum formula full of imaginary numbers.

Case in point: I was asked to write a poem for a professional development meeting. The parameters were pretty well defined, or as well defined as they could be; something inspirational regarding persistence over time, the value of hard work and its not so immediate rewards and place the poem in an educational setting. Well, after a bit of research and a restless night that had bits of lines running through my head, I woke up early and enjoyed a real long shower but had no poem to show. All was good as I was asked to read a poem from a book. Pretty good one, too. (Note to self: Look up said poem.) And while I know “a poem is not a pop tart” I was still highly disappointed in myself.

The day was not a complete poetic waste as I was able to produce a sonnet based on Pablo Neruda’s Soneto LXXV, which speaks of home and emptiness. For my sonnet I added more about silence and laughter because, well, life is all kinds of good like that despite small disappointments.

Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

party people, i am happy to let y’all know that i have been accepted to this year’s intergenerational writers lab!

many thanks to the review committee, intersection for the arts and galería de la raza but an extra special shout to the folks at kearny street workshop and my beautiful wife for pushing me in all the right ways. (when did this blog entry turn into an acceptance speech?)

for the record, my record, here are the poems i submitted as writing samples:
– About B-Boys in the Boogie Down
– Poem written to the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun”
– Soneta de Mi Musa

now that i’ve been accepted it’s time to switch gears and put in the work of developing new kick ass writing to match.

my god! what have i done?!