Category Archives: features

I’m breathin in/I’m breathin out

Last night’s IWL reading was all kinds of wonderful. Different voices, different styles, maximum effort with an audience full of attentive listeners. It was my first time reading at Intersection for the Arts and lemme say, as both a reader and an audience member, its a dope space for poetry.

When I walked in the door they told me I was gonna be the first reader of the night which (for some strange reason) did not come as a surprise.

SET LIST
– Sepia
– Revelation & Anywhere Avenue
– Dedication
РCanto del Ni̱o Pobre
– 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
– Sonnet for the Lexington Avenue Express—Mt Eden Ave Stop

Much newness present here with five of the seven poems being read for the first time and all of these poems written in the last three weeks.

Full disclosure time… Sepia was written as part of a collaborative writing exercise at one of the first IWL workshops. The piece read last night is a highly edited version of the lines I contributed. Dedication is a translation exercise which I was playing around with over a month ago but it didn’t come together until just yesterday afternoon. This piece is also in speed-edit mode thanks to the input of my amazing wife who also helped give shape to Sepia in record time.

All of this bodes very well for Sunday’s Achiote Press reading where I will be reading alongside some fly poetas and unveil a surprise or two. Ding- The Nebulous Bell!

More info on the Achiote Press reading at Craig’s blog or you can download a PDF flyer here.

IWL 2007 Night 2


IWL 2007
Originally uploaded by geminipoet.

The second public IWL 2007 event is on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007, at Intersection for the Arts, and features readings and performances from playwright and poet Octavio Solis, poet and performer Genny Lim, playwright and performer Prince Gomolvilas, and IWL 2007 participants Maile Arvin, Oscar Bermeo, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Carlo Sciammas, Jaime Omar Yassin, and Debbie Yee.

Date: Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Time: 7pm

Location: Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia Street, @ 16th street, san francisco

Cost: $7 – 15 sliding scale.

More information here

Canessa Gallery Reading Series presents Achiote Press’s Spring Release Reading featuring:

Oscar Bermeo
Barbara Jane Reyes
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
Todd Melicker
& Alfred Arteaga

APRIL 29!!!
708 montgomery (x street Columbus) at the Canessa Park Gallery at 3PM. $3-5 donation for the gallery. In gratitude for your donation, our chapbooks will be sold at DISCOUNT PRICES!!!! Refreshments also!!!

READER BIOS:

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Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, educator, literary events coordinator who now makes his home in Oakland, Califas, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party Magazine. When not writing, Oscar devotes his time and energy towards new culinary experiments, working admin at a local charter school and enjoying the bliss of married life with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

*
Todd Melicker is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francsico. His poems have appeared in Switchback, Five Fingers Review, Volt, and the Colorado Review. He currently lives in Santa Rosa, California.

*
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.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including 2nd Avenue Poetry, Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Interlope, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

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Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor received her MA degree in English with honors from Western Washington University in 2003 for her thesis “Notes from the Margins,” a mixed work of memoir and fiction. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Katipunan Literary Magazine and the online magazine Haruah. In addition, she has served as a freelance writer and editor for several trade journals. Currently she is working on her first novel, tentatively titled Maganda’s Comb, and she performs regularly as a storyteller in her local area. Her blog Binding Wor(l)ds Together can be found at http://wordbinder.blogspot.com.

Ghost in the Machine

The reading at the Mission Cultural Center was amazing! It’s been more than a year since I have had more than 10 minutes to do mah thing and I made sure to take advantage of the longer feature time.

SET LIST

In the “Put Up O Shut Up” Dept: Recent posts regarding form have definitely inspired me to embrace the décima and sonnet even though I didn’t follow the correct rhyme scheme for Décima del Pobre Niño so have since renamed it Canto pare el Niño Pobre. On the flip side, Sonnet for the #4 Line is in pentameter and does follow a very classic formula. Many thanks again to Jack Agüeros’s Sonnets from the Puerto Rican for helping me to understand and engage the sonnet in a more personal way.

In the “New Shit!” Dept: I wrote both the sonnet and the décima only a few hours before the feature. A fact I didn’t share at the reading cuz I was short on time and while it is cool to bring the new hotness announcing it can sometimes be a crutch and, besides, to this audience just about everything I read was New Shit.

In the “Subtle Segue Way” Dept: Speaking of audience, I have been thinking a bit about just how much I have audience in my head when I write.

Straight up– Yes, I do think about audience when I write because one of my poetic concerns is bringing poetry to as many different communities as possible. However, I do NOT write thinking that I want to please any specific community since I know that will trigger a very harsh inner editor that will not allow me to write anything that challenges me or my “audience.”

The in-between is this apparition of an audience whose faces I can sort of make out but can’t quite make out. This “audience” shifts as I write line to line and also morphs from reading to reading allowing me to always try to come up with New Shit while still working out the kinks from old pieces.

Am I thinking about this way too much? Maybe. I have heard of poets who claim to write with no audience in mind and if that is what works for them then more power to em but I gotta work with what drives me so there’s that.

Mad love to all the poetas of the evening (a true highlight was the work, and conviction, of Yosimar Reyes) and Paul Flores for bringing us all together.