Category Archives: readings

Paul Flores reads from Saul Williams’ The Dead Emcee Scrolls

Paul Flores had a great talk at USF today- THE LEGACY OF AUTHENTICITY: From the Anti-establishment Beat Movement to the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop. The time line he presented, making a direct correlation from Ginsberg’s Howl to Saul Williams’ The Dead Emcee Scrolls, was a well presented study of the complexities of Hip-Hop. For me, the time line is more jazz fuels Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, which then fuels Bob Kaufman, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, which then fuels Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, right to to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” which is where hip-hop poetry (even before the term hip-hop comes to be) is born.

Previous to this talk, I considered Saul a mutli-genre performance artist who used slam poetry to launch his acting and music career and then never looked back. This is no hate, you can hear Saul say as much in the film Slam Nation and also find similar comments in his interview in Words in Your Face. After Paul’s talk and his reading of the passages in the videos below, I think I will be looking for The Dead Emcees Scrolls next time I’m in a good used bookstore.

Scenes from a book launch

I love me a good book launch party! Especially one that has a great book to celebrate, good food, fine company, and an excellent Q&A. Ok, the Q&A isn’t absolutely necessary and I would substitute some fine guest readers with varying styles that (in a timely fashion) compliment the main reader.

The first official reading from Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory definitely had yummy treats, cool peeps, a great reading and process talk on a complex and brave literary project, and one of the most intelligent, concrete, and emotional Q&A’s I’ve ever witnessed.

I’ll let the picture say the rest but this is a book you want to get and a reading (if it should come to a mic stand near you) that you don’t want to miss.

from Unincorporated Territory

Reading from Unincorporated Territory

Signing Books

Barb, Craig, and Oscar

Junot Díaz at Barnes & Noble (Jack London Square)

The only thing better than a reading/Q&A that effectively teaches about the literature process is a reading/Q&A that informs about how tapping into one’s own humanity aids the literature process (as writer and reader). Junot Díaz’s reading in Oakland covered a lot about novel writing and contemporary American literature, but it also spoke volumes on how being a real person and staying true to your community can help crash the wall between the authoritative narrative and true storytelling.

Junot started the reading with some introductions (Big shout outs went out to Elmaz Abinader and the VONA alumni in the house), friendly banter (More shouts to the Bay Area and its non-suckitude), family histories (How the courage of his sisters helped shaped and define his perceptions of personal courage), and then jumped into the reading of his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He read from the opening of “Wildwood,” where his narrator, in the second person (“A pain in the ass form,” Díaz described it), discovers a lump in her mother’s breast. This discovery changes the narrator’s life and leads to her running away from her Jersey home which doesn’t last for long as we find out when Díaz hops over to the middle section of this chapter and details how the narrator, Lola, is pulled back home. To make time for more Q&A, Junot selected two brief passages but they both delivered great impact and highlighted his mix of accessible human themes laid out in the distinct backdrop of NYC/NJ with English, Spanish, and Nerd as the lingua franca.

On to the Q&A as Díaz was happy and open to answer a variety of questions, even ones that didn’t have to do with the book. I started off by asking about how writing his novel over an extended time period (Junot’s last work, the acclaimed short story collection Drown, was published in 1996) affected his relationship with the characters in Oscar Wao. Junot credited a strong internal narrator that always maintained a stable fixed position to the characters and their own development for helping keep a lock on where his narrative traveled.

Elmaz then asked if he was starting a footnote trend to which Díaz noted that he picked up the use of footnotes from Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco: A Novel. He also commented on how the footnote typically reinforces the narrator’s authority but he uses it as a kind of literary bonchinche machine that seeks to undermine the narrative.

Another question revolved around his use of Spanglish. “There is no Spanglish in this book,” Díaz answered, “but you will find a lot of code-switching, which is the great American idiom.” Junot also mentioned that he does monitor his use of code-switching to make sure that the language of the novel never dissolves down to the point a reader will zone out.

The topics then bounced from nerd culture (It is some of the most marginalized text out there and the text that speaks the truest to our human condition), to the impact of the Pulitzer (Other than doing more readings, not much of an impact, but it does get the novel in more hands), to getting people to talk about living through a dictatorial regime (My family’s background and position helped. So did my male privilege.), to the different Spanish versions (There is an American Latino version, Iberian version, and Dominican version. The one that best follows the language of the original is the Dominican one. It’s bananas.), his families thoughts on his novel (My family ran out to buy the Dominican language version and then asked, “Who are these people?” That’s because this novel is complete fiction.)

The theme of writing as a human being became a theme throughout the Q&A. Díaz noted that the act of reading requires not just empathy, the reader putting themselves in the character’s shoes, it also requires compassion—the desire to have a character’s fate be better. And if we want the reader to feel compassion, then the author must write with compassion and never use the truth as an act of aggression. Díaz says he threw away whole chapters because he knew he was using the “truth” about his community against them and that even in his highest disdain for parts of his Dominican-American upbringing he still loves the family that raised him. Bringing that love out in his work is a high priority for a writer like Díaz, “People will read your stuff and they will know if you hate your community.”

“I’ve never thought of my life as a line in a book. How little would I understand if I wrote stuff down,” Junot notes when making the division between being a writer and a community member. And that act of putting the pen down and really listening to the stories around you to get to the truth of a community is what made Drown such a powerful read. I haven’t read The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao yet but I am anticipating it to be an even stronger read filled with true nerdiness, rich code-switching, and a narrator that puts people before story.

More Junot Díaz:
The author’s website
Interview at identitytheory.com
Podcast interview at mercurynews.com

Breakdown on Small Press Traffic’s Aggression Conference or "Mama, Don’t let your babies grow up to be po-bloggers"

The Premise

AGGRESSION: A CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY POETICS AND POLITICAL ANTAGONISM
PRESENTED BY SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC

While a triumphalist rhetoric of community and collectivity has frequently accompanied the narratives of alternative literary scenes and practices, the purpose of this conference is to instead explore the myriad ways in which consensus and community become challenged and/or untenable, and to produce fresh opportunities for rethinking poetic theory and practice.

The Panel

The Internet
Moderator: Stephanie Young

Panelists (Jasper Bernes, Craig Santos Perez, and Erika Staiti) will address the perils and possibilities of technologically mediated public spaces, specifically focusing on how new technologies may mystify, reproduce, or intensify existing racial, gender, and class divisions.

The Breakdown
I went to this panel hoping to find ways to better navigate all the information out there on contemporary poetics. I am sure I was not looking for a clear answer to the perils of po-blogging because I honestly don’t feel there is anything perilous about poet blogs. I subscribe to the ones I enjoy reading, comment on the ones I find interesting, and unsubscribe when I think a particular blog is a waste of my time. Like I said, no real peril here for me.

I did want to open myself up to the possibilities of improving conversation on poet-blogs and how to improve dialogue between poet-bloggers and, hopefully, the rest of the world.

So what did I get out of the panel? A lot of rehash, a sense that my current practice is right on target, and the premise that the Internet itself is the aggressor we should fear.

Erica Staiti started off by reading various blog entries and comments regarding Michael Magee’s poetics and the Numbers Trouble essay. The Magee online debate has been something that I have never had interest in because it felt too much like the self-inflated storm in a bottle controversies I participated in when I was in New York where the NYC poetry slam community would gather and deride how a particular slammer’s one poem was the bane of all poetry and how it shed an evil light on everything wonderful and good about the page. One non-poet friend who happened to over hear this conversation turned to me and said, “This poet must be the most important poet ever because all your other poet friends can’t seem to stop talking about that poem.” My friend might as well have been talking about Magee because within some poetry circles it seems Magee is the true Apocalypse of poetry- he who will start or end everything. Well, at least if you read the blogs about him, which I don’t and so my own poetry world will have to wait for a different apocalyptic harbinger.

Stati’s recap of the Number Trouble essay, a po-blogger topic that I found more interesting, didn’t explore any new ground for me. I would have enjoyed a response as to why there was more talk about race than gender? What is the tone of these responses? Are there more comments from the ubiquitous and all-knowing “Anonymous” on race than gender? Without naming names, is the tone of response different on so-called public blogs (where the owner of the blog can be held accountable for meditation) versus less private forums such as list-serves or friend-only blogs?

Jasper Bernes was next up to bat and he decided to take a different stance on aggression, he directed it to the Internet itself. Bernes lists a number of ways the Internet falls short when it comes to live political activism, but many of these arguments easily transfer over to poetic practice, and so I found them hollow. Not that political activism is a hollow pursuit, but putting other forms of resistance like the creation, circulation, and organization of spaces for political poetry (all of which can be done with the help of the Internet) into a negative light doesn’t serve potential and current allies against the current political machine. See how quickly this changed from a talk about poetry to an indictment of the system? That’s how I felt during Bernes’ talk.

Another contradiction in Bernes’ essay revolved around identity. Where at one point he is mocking Kenneth Goldsmith’s idea of conceptual sans-identity poetry, he follows that up by deriding information distribution in poetry as a capitalist pursuit. Let me get this straight—we can have a poetic identity but we just can’t use it when getting our work out in the world? That concept doesn’t seem to vibe with me.

Craig Perez rounded out the panel presentation with a reading of different sections from his essay response to the Magee poem. As stated before, I have no interest in the online back-and-forth over this one poem, but I was interested enough to ask Craig for his essay a few months back to give me some insight as to what the whole brouhaha was about. Craig’s response uses Magee’s poem and previous writings as the strongest evidence that Magee is just an appropriator with a lack of perspective.

Perez’s personal response to the panel called for attention to ethnic po-bloggers who seek to shake up the status quo. He listed poeta y diwata (Barbara Jane Reyes), Unitedstatesean Notes (Javier Huerta), Letras Latinas (Institute for Latino Studies, Univ. of Notre Dame), Detainees (Linh Dinh), You Are Here (Lee Herrick) and this blog. as voices against the grain that can add some diversity to these discussions. Here’s a funny thing, I really don’t think of this blog as being that counter to the mainstream, but that’s because I usually don’t shout out the mainstream so much. Maybe I should do it more often.

My Takeway
I was presented a lot of information I already knew, which is OK considering I read a ton of po-blogs, but it felt like everybody else in the room had that same knowledge as well making this an exercise in redundancy. Jasper Bernes’ essay felt more like an assuaging of his problems with the world as opposed to his take on the problems with poetry communities on the Internet, and if he wants to talk about honest distribution of information, this isn’t the way to go about it.

However, I will thank SPT and the organizers for their efforts since the open atmosphere did allow me to say many of the things I am posting on the blog in the open to the whole room. But how did I find out about all this in the first place, get an opportunity to hear the varied opinions, and use my background in poetics to make a change in real time? That’s right- the evil Internet.

More Internet
Barb’s thoughts on the panel and more
Race & Gender
Jasper Bernes’ essay
Laura Moriarty’s take on the conference

Linda Hogan @ Stanford

Linda Hogan and Barbara Jane ReyesGood times last night as Barb and I traveled down to Stanford to hear Linda Hogan read for the Indigenous Identity in Diaspora series.

Traffic was a mess, and we got to the reading just as the intros were over and Ms. Hogan was coming up to the mic. Her work was great, with deep roots in memory and place, and populated with natural folk—people with flaws and aspirations and real texture. Hogan’s use of the word “human” struck me because I don’t feel I here it often enough in poetry. I know a lot of poems are filled with characters but I don’t know how often those characters are portrayed as actual human beings. More endemic is poems with no trace of humanity, not poems set in nature or science, but poems that feel like a post-apocalyptic set where we have buildings, highways, and structures but no evidence of the people who live there or who built them.

Hogan’s work lives in nature, presumably in the setting of her Oklahoma home, and it is alive with trees, quarries, rivers, and people who do not let the fact they drive cars and take airplanes separate them from that natural legacy. To borrow one of Hogan’s titles, it feels like her work is “Gentling the Human.”

Another highlight of the night was speaking to Zamora, one of the organizers of the reading. She deduced that Barb and I were not Stanford locals (She says our good fashion sense gave us away.) and thanked us for coming out from Oakland for the reading. She then introduced us to Cherie Moraga who was also welcoming and a pleasure to chat with. Just a few more human touches to a fine reading.

ETA: Barb’s thoughts on Linda Hogan’s reading

More Linda Hogan
Biblio
Artist Biography
Interview with John A. Murray