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“a boundary is an illogical concept”
– Linh Dinh

Evie Shockley & Barbara Jane Reyes
Sunday, April 15th, 7:30 pm
Pegasus Books Dowtown
2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
(510) 649-1320

Evie Shockley published a chapbook of poems, The Gorgon Goddess, with Carolina Wren Press in 2001. Her new collection, a half-red sea, will be released in Fall, 2006. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Hambone, HOW2 and Poetry Daily: Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website. She has also placed her prose-fiction and literary criticism-in such publications as Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, African American Review, North American Review, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry. Shockley is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

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. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

sad news over the weekend, finding out that phebus etienne passed away. all i can say is that every kundiman reading i was at she was there with a warm smile and amazing energy. from what i am hearing from other folks, she was all that and much more.

Maison Poupée by Phebus Etienne
“Au revoir,” my mother whispered to the lemon tree.

To the unfinished second bedroom,
she vowed completion and left Mahotier.
I was five, wishing my world motionless
as the airplanes sunning on the runway,
daydreaming of sleep close to my father’s belly,
between his breathing and my mother’s.

At my aunt’s house, I tried not to leave
footprints on the parlor floor,
stayed away from the porch after sunset
when she covered her boyfriend with perfumed kisses,
but I couldn’t avoid the unbreakable switch. Sundays,

my father visited, but never waited,
if I was next door playing. He’d leave
two silver coins for champagne cola, a promise
for a matinee at the El Dorado. He walked
with me when his women could admire
the holiday lace on my braids. School breaks,

pampered at grandmother’s home, a window
overlooked the cherry tree on a rocky mound.
A large appetite made her laugh, so I ate through summer.
The man who cured his swollen feet with leeches,
who made sure I saw him naked in the outdoor
shower was in my nightmares, but there were
no welts on my skin. When I turned eight,

grandmother gave me a solid house.
Its miniature wooden pieces were scented with shellac.
I imagined us, three, a family in it; mother
at the gate as I crossed the stream
carrying warm bread; father,
under the avocados with a morning cigarette.
Before returning to a room in my mother’s house, I left
the doll house behind, its walls unglued,
arms of one resident missing.
It, too, had been ephemeral, fragile as my first home.

More info over at Tara’s blog
Phebus’s poems at 2nd Ave Poetry

jus for the record, i am not a fan of any “month.” not latino awareness month, not hispanic heritage month (yeah, we get TWO months and i still cant figure out that one) and not national poetry month.

not-so-smooth-segue-way: c dale is collectin votes about poetry month on his blog. i am sure you can guess how i voted but its only cuz i’m one of those obtuse fuckers who think that every month should be poetry month.

not-so-smooth-segue-way-2: brian highlights the Cinquain

i will follow suit and leave you some info on the Décima

Although evidence shows that the ten-line stanza decima existed in medieval Spain and northern Africa, Vincente Martinez de Espinel, a Spanish poet, novelist, and musician, has received credit for the decima that is performed today. The form is nicknamed “the little sonnet” and “the espinel” to recognize the interpretative pause that the poet added.

The decima is the most complex form of popular poetry and is most effective when written in Spanish, where specific rules apply to vowels and accented words. The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project has an excellent web page where a decima is written, clearly highlighting and counting syllables, marking line rhyme in the margin of the text, and explaining accents. The focal point is an online video of Ramito (1915-1900) performing “Up There in the Heights,” a decima about two trees that come together to make a cuarto (a stringed instrument used to accompany the singer). See resources at the end of this lesson plan for the web address.

The decima must follow this rhyme pattern: A/B/B/A (pause) A/C/C/D/D/C and consists of ten lines of 8 syllables–it is here that the form becomes complex:

* When a line or verse ends in with a word with an emphasized syllable, this counts as an extra syllable.
* When a verse or line ends with a word with its emphasized syllable being the antepenultimate one, one syllable is subtracted from the count for the line.
* When a word ends with a vowel and is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, in the Spanish language these flow together, so it counts as only one syllable.
* When a strong vowel (a, o, e) is combined in a word with a weak vowel (i or u) and the emphasis is on the weak vowel, an accent is placed over the weak vowel and it is counted as a separate syllable.

Definition and structure breakdown found here
Ejemplos de Décima se encuentra aquí