recently overheard

M: Do you think Bono is a poet?
RM: Hell no!
M: C’mon! Do you ever listen to him…like really listen?

i say that bono can throw down with the metaphor whenever he wants to… and does it without hitting people over the head with it… Mysterious Ways— uhmm, thats god hes talkin bout when he says “She’ll be there when you hit the ground”… but my time is almost up as the piano intro hits and we send this out…

U2- RUNNING TO STAND STILL

And so she woke up
Woke up from where she was
Lying still
Said I gotta do something
About where we’re going

Step on a steam train
Step out of the driving rain, maybe
Run from the darkness in the night
Singing ha, ah la la la de day
Ah la la la de day
Ah la la de day

Sweet the sin
Bitter taste in my mouth
I see seven towers
But I only see one way out

You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice

You know I took the poison
From the poison stream
Then I floated out of here
Singing…ha la la la de day
Ha la la la de day
Ha la la de day

She runs through the streets
With her eyes painted red
Under black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me
White gold and pearls stolen from the sea
She is raging
She is raging
And the storm blows up in her eyes
She will…

Suffer the needle chill
She’s running to stand…

Still.

i am very bummed that i can;t make this reading but the rest of you should heed the words from the brooklyn ethical & cultural center– Run! Don’t Walk! (ding! ding! inside joke bell times two)

Folks, join me for this great event and launch of a
new reading series. The Quetzal Quill is on a mission
to connect poets and/or small press authors to an
audience that seeks out and appreciates exceptional
contemporary literature. This series will have
satellite venues across the country including Chicago,
Seattle, Austin and Los Angeles. Venues will be
available for writers of all colors (hence that name,
Quetzal–the most colorful bird of the Americas).
–Rigoberto

The Quetzal Quill
@ The Cornelia Street Café

Thursday, July 14, 6-8 pm
(admission $6, includes drink)
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, The Last Time I Saw Amelia
Earhart
Peter Covino, Cut Off the Ears of Winter
Matthew Thorburn, Subject to Change
Michelle Yasmine Valladares, Nortada, The North Wind

Gabrielle Calvocoressi
has received a 2002 Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award, a
Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where she was also a
Jones Lecturer in poetry, and The Paris Review’s
Bernard F. Connors Prize for her poem “Circus Fire,
1944.” Her work has recently appeared in Literary
Imagination.

Peter Covino
was born in Italy and educated there and in the
States, where he earned an M.S. degree from the
Columbia School of Social Work and a PhD in English
from the University of Utah. He received the 2001
Frank O’Hara Chapbook Prize and is a founding editor
of Barrow Street and Barrow Street Press.

Matthew Thorburn
‘s first book Subject to Change was selected by Brenda
Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. His other
honors include the Mississippi Review Prize and a
fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the
Arts. His website is www.mathewthorburn.com. He lives
and works in New York City.

Michelle Yasmine Valladares
was born in India and grew up in Kuwait and Arizona.
She has produced award-winning films in Brazil, Mexico
and on Native American Reservations. She lives in
Brooklyn and teaches writing and literature at The
City College of New York.

Your Host: Rigoberto González

THE QUETZAL QUILL @ CORNELIA
Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St between Bleecker
and W 4th Sts (212-989-9319). Subway: A, C, E, B, D,
F, V to W 4th St. 7pm, $6 includes one drink. Host
Rigoberto Gonzalez welcomes poets Gabrielle
Calvocoressi (The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart),
Peter Covino (Cut Off the Ears of Winter), Matthew
Thorburn (Subject to Change), and Michelle Yasmine
Valladares (Nortada, the North Wind).

NOTE: All time postings on this blog entry will be in MST (Minority Standard Time)

I start the day by seeing the sunrise over the city which is not an altogether unfamiliar sight for me but it usually means that I best get to sleep. I am at work all kinds of early and doing my thing like a proper trooper since I want to leave for Acentos with plenty of time to spare. Todo bien, right? Sure but then one thing leads to another at the jay.oh.bee and I can’t get out when I wanted to. No worries. A lil late is par for the course with me.

It’s about 6:30 MST when I get word that we don’t have a PA system. No worries. In fact, it helps me out cuz Fish comes out to help me with our emergency backup system. Now I’m back on regular time!

7:00 MST finds us at the Bruckner Bar & Grill with our usual low turn out in the early part of the night. Ok, this shit falls dead on my shoulders. I like to try to start the reading with some folks in the crowd and that mean that I will sacrifice punctuality in the name of entertainment. Sue a brother!

7:30 MST Barbara Jane reminds me that it’s Neruda’s birthday and I start plotting from that point. The last Acentos saw me put up a new voice in the lead off spot and with all the music from the competing party and such, I don’t think he got the best end of the deal. Again, I fucked up but as long as people keep visiting us I know that I can make reparations for just about any offense. Back to the ranch, Maria Nieves kindly agrees to kick off the night with a Neruda poem. This is a real blessing as we can pay Pablo tribute, drop some Español on the peeps and let a veteran voice warm up the spot. Aight… let’s do this!

8:15 MST A nice size Open Mic that is chock full of ladies (nice!) and a mix of vets and returning faces but not too many new names (boo! hiss!). Things are running pretty smooth and my hosting is going well except for the fact that I am squeezing every last drop out of every intro and announcement due to the fact that we have no feature as of yet. Yep. Closing in on the end of the open mic and we may just be in reading series hell. At one point, I go off on a rather dumb math tangent to mix it up with the crowd. Note to self: Poets don’t really vibe well with Calculus terms.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve been in this quandary. A couple of features have strolled in on mega MST so I’m kinda used to it. I mean what else to do? Scour the Bronx for them? Bring in the cops? Call Ghostbusters?

8:30 MST This is when the Open Mic is supposed to always end but rarely does. Irony can be really ironic, y’all. I call for the break and go to chill outside. Rich and Fish are on full—What are we gonna do?! mode. AMBER ALERT! And my reflexive attitude says, We gonna chill and wait. Man, I am walking with a serial killer’s conscious at this point. Acting like there aint a damn thing wrong in the world. Marty wonders why the break is going on for so long. “Feature aint here yet.” But you kept talking about him on the mic like he was here. “Yep.”

8:45 MST This is the official call time for the feature to be at the spot and I am getting really worried at this point so, of course, I start cracking wise. I’m joking that we are very close to having either Mateo Carlos or Rogelio as a feature when Rigoberto strolls by. Another bullet for me to take as he has an email in hand with the old address but mea culpas will have to wait as Rigoberto is ready to read.

9:30 MST Actually, 9:30 real time. Show ends on time with Rigoberto rocking out. Not only did he drop a hot set but it only took him five minutes to feel the whole Acentos vibe, calling for not just minority themed readings but for work that can handle the Anglo brush off.
“It’s a good poem for a Latino. No, it’s a good poem, period.”

For the record, Rigoberto is a man of his word. He was one of the easiest bookings I have ever put together. I approached him humbly (That inside joke is for the songbird) and he was a gentleman throughout. Sure there was one major fuck up but that’s what it made perfect.

So Amber Alert quickly dissipated as the band came back together with a plethora of inside jokes shared over beer and cola.

Tune in next time to see what else can happen…

aka Pablo Neruda born July 12, 1904

Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays–
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

EDIT: you can add to this mix, my all time favorite sonnet

SONETO XLV

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.

Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,

porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

on sunday, i decided to give the day a color. as soon as i did it felt like the whole world was with me and responded in kind. the color kept leaping out at me in the most unexpected places and with an incredible regularity. for a sec i thought that i was staright buggin out till i realized that i have been doing this for a long time already except i was using grayscale all the time.

it feels good to drop the varying shades of gray and actually commit to a bright color. there is a recipe for disaster snuck in the middle of this. you may want your day to desperately be ______ and the universe says (                    ) instead but i am learning to slapbox fate and even better, willing to call a draw everyonce in a while.

i dont know what color today will be yet. i have been up since 6 with about three hours of sleep. i read recently that drunk people have better concentration than i do right now but i’ve been able to blog about it so that must mean something.

ah, fuk it. i think that today will be a deep blue like the kind you find in southwest corn. yeah, lets see what the universe has to say bout dat.

tonight is acentos with rigoberto gonzález and i am truly excited. hope y’all can come down and share in the fun cuz it is gonna be a partay. promise you dat.

lovbe ya like bob ross loves phthalo blue