The Deaf Poets Society Manifesto

Here to Right Literature

Disability is the civil rights movement you’ve never heard of. That movement is the reason you can reliably find curb cuts in the sidewalk and elevators at the mall, for your strollers, for your bicycles, for your tired, tired feet. The bathroom stall in the airport large enough for your oversized suitcase and a sun salutation or two? The captions for the TV show you’re binge-watching on mute so your boss doesn’t hear over your cubicle wall? You’re welcome.

Disability rights affect everyone, disabled and able-bodied alike. These rights envision a free and appropriate public education for all children. The right to not have to crawl up courthouse steps in Tennessee. To not lose your job after chemo. De-institutionalization.

The vision of disability rights began in legislation, which resulted from significant advocacy and input on the part of people with disabilities and their allies. These laws — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act — articulate a vision at the level of society. These laws reflect a progressive vision aimed at reorienting and reorganizing and equalizing something huge, complex, and moving: for us, that motion was pushing against us. These laws righted a skewed trajectory. But we’ll leave law to the lawyers. We’re here to right literature.

“Constrained,” by Art Editor Janet Morrow. Four cement blocks with ropes tether a spotlighted and large, balloon-shaped blanket of plastic. In the background is a white wall with two black panels on both sides of the sculpture.

2.

Against Invisibility

Here at The Deaf Poets Society we are not all d/Deaf, and we’re not all poets. Some of us are sick as fuck; some of us used to be, which is to say, will always be, which is to say what Audre Lorde — patron saint of black queer sickness — already said in The Cancer Journals: “Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?” Lorde’s question is concerned with power and who wields it, with the story of the body and who tells it. We believe that the actual literature and art of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses cannot be constrained by the binary of life and death, or of doctor and patient, of temporarily able-bodied and weak, pitiful Other.

O dead white male able-bodied poets, O interviewers who ask us “If you had just one wish…”, O well-meaning friends and family and neighbors and lovers who assume that an absence of illness or disability is wholly synonymous with health: We have tired of your presence in our stories, poems, and art. We are not your dystopia, your travesty, your nightmare, your wet dream, your fantasy, your paradise. Don’t pray over us. Whatever prayers we seek will not be yours, and whatever we have to mourn, we will mourn it ourselves.

At The Deaf Poets Society, we aim to create a literature of a society with a different center, where the writer with a disability is not literally seated on the floor of the writing workshop while others are seated at the seminar table, where the writer with a disability does not spend years telling stories that make others comfortable, and themselves invisible. ‘Deaf poets’, as a descriptor, is as good as any. ‘Deaf poets’ understand what people with disabilities also understand, what Deaf poet (and Issue 1 contributor) Raymond Luczak means when he talks about orphans.

What we aim to incubate and amplify here is the literature of the movement that fights back against bigoted policies of sterilization and the racist, classist pseudoscience of eugenics. This literature fights the echoes of “three generations of imbeciles is enough” in the mocking of a physically disabled reporter by the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

We are the literature of the Martha’s Vineyard of the 1700s, where everyone on the island knew sign language, of the energized Gallaudet University students and alumni who shut down a campus to demand a Deaf President, and then, a generation later, protested again for a Deaf President who matched their diversity in race and culture. We are the literature of the movement that passed laws requiring all phone calls to work for all people and everything on the internet to work for all people — from the audio of the cat video your mother posted to Facebook to a JAWS-narrated description of a photograph of Mars. We are that literature on the internet, and the aim is always to be accessible to every reader. We are the literature of a people who understands the difficulty of managing physical pain. Of a people who spend days in the white rooms of hospitals, in the labyrinth of referrals and insurance company touchscreen menus that would dizzy Kafka. We are the literature of the recovery rooms, the psych ward, the hospice.

3.

This is a here for us to find us

Since we’re not in the canon, we began TDPS as a here, a here for you to find us. Or, more to the point: this is a here for us to find us. What does that mean in a practical sense? It means that the poetry, prose, art, and reviews we publish will be composed by people with disabilities, period. The benefit of this might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying them clearly: the existence of a platform will provide the opportunities that are harder to access elsewhere.

Because the voices of all the writers will be the voices of people with some disability or other, the collective voice will, in our ideal, showcase the wide spectrum of people who identify as having a disability. For our community, diversity involves a huge range of disabilities. In our community, diversity also involves a huge range of other facets of identity.

Incubating and amplifying the voices of writers, poets, and artists who are Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), queer, immigrant, working-class, women, or other people relegated to the margins of literature is a crucial part of our work. Our work must also create a space where writers with disabilities who are white will recognize their own complicity in white supremacist systems. Such systems have advantaged white people, including those with disabilities. The work of white writers with disabilities in our magazine needs to reflect an understanding of that historical injustice and, in the slant way that art can, consciously work to dismantle it going forward.

Beyond publishing and reviewing the work of underrepresented folks, allying with existing fights for social justice is essential. A disability-focused literary magazine can find ways to fight anti-Black racism and police violence, even in our small way. If we can do this often enough and effectively enough, disability can be centralized in discussions about social justice activism, rather than an afterthought. We will mirror the progress of the last half-century, with our concerns, our ideas, our words, our art, our stories, integrated into communities. We will help create access where there had been a barrier, language where there had been a void.

4.

No, We Have Not Met Before.

You may think you’ve met us in literature, in “Good Country People,” in The Miracle Worker, in “Idiots First.” Every damn Christmas you hear the pitiful rattle from Tiny Tim’s chest. At a barbecue your neighbor’s precocious middle schooler recounts to you the plot of The Fault in Our Stars, and you might think, “How tragic.” In an air-conditioned theater, you see a preview for Me Before You, you might think, “How sad.” Yes, sad, yes, tragic, but hardly for the reason you may think. You may think you’ve met us — people with disabilities — here, in the cliched first-thought, worst-thoughts that comprise too much of the imagined work from many an able-bodied brain. Here’s the truth: We’re not there. We have always been here, living boldly, in front of your able eyes, within your able earshot, just within your able reach.

Here at The Deaf Poets Society, all bodies are welcome at the table, with disabled artists and writers at center stage. If you are abled, come sit and listen to the voices and visions of Black, Asian, Arab, indigenous, Jewish individuals across the disability spectrum and across gender and LGBTQIA status. Understand that our work resists closure, resists bilateral ideology about disabled and abled bodies, resists simple delineation of complex bodies and lives. Understand that, if you’re a cisgendered, heterosexual, white person with a disability, you do benefit from privilege in a way that a person of color does not, and it is you who will determine whether the privileges bestowed on you via white supremacy, transphobia, and homophobia diminish the voices of your counterparts. Allies are key to systemic change and true disability justice; as long as someone is not free, nobody is free.

So come to our home, come in and sit. Marvel at how our work reveals the wide spectrum of experience across identities and at the intersections. Marvel at how alive we are, despite constant and implicit and complicit metaphorical arguments to the contrary. Marvel at how our language muscles through the page with verve and idiosyncrasy, at how our brushstrokes and pencil markings and photographs undo what you think you know about the body, what the narrow range of voices in the traditional canon thinks they have figured out, but never did and never will.

Originally posted June 29, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by The Deaf Poets Society.

Spit, Poet! 10 Trans*, Non-Binary, Gender Non-Conforming, Gender Fluid, and Genderqueer Poets You Need to Hear

The alternate title to this piece is: “15 Gender Non-Conforming Poets That Will Inspire You to Eat Glass With Your Hands,” a title that came about after a brilliant GNC poet (*cough*Linette*cough*) commented on the lack of gender-queerness on a plethora of recent “Top 10 Poets” lists. As a queer poet of color, I understand the frustration that accompanies a lack of visibility within an artform and community within which we fight to make ourselves seen and heard. I hope this list honors these poets, their work, and the wider non-cisgender poetry community.

1. Linette Reeman

 

They/Them/Theirs

Linette Inspires Me To

…hold fast to courage despite its spikes, re-member my adolescence and young adulthood with only my two good hands as blade. Writing through teenage angst, adult vices, and historical inconsistencies, Linette’s work is not only incredibly introspective, it speaks in conversation with itself, providing its reader access to a new lens with which to look at themselves. Often, their work asks itself to be held accountable, asks to be held, and understanding when the answer is “no.” In writing themselves a new mirror, they constantly create new worlds and re-imagine old ones.

What Linette Says

“Grand Theft (After Fall Out Boy)”

“Instructions on Spelling Me”

Linette’s Motto

Something my mother has said to me my whole life: “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”

2. Chrysanthemum Tran

 

They/Them/Theirs

Chrysanthemum Inspires Me To

…mold language into a shape that accepts mine, and that, if it won’t, to create a language of my own. Their work serves as both a call-out and a call-in, says, “World, your history erases me, which is cute or whatever, but I’m still here.” Their poetry is a testament to the beauty and pain that accompanies an inherited then fine-tuned resilience. Always powerful and devastating, always allowing room for heart and holy. They are an actual breath of fresh air. Breathe deep.

What Chrysanthemum Says

“Transplant”

“Discovery (For Jennifer Laude)”

Chrysanthemum’s Motto

My all-time favorite quote is Rita Repulsa: “After 10,000 years, I’m free! It’s time to conquer Earth!”

3. Justice Gaines

 

Xe/Xem/Xyr

Justice Inspires Me To

…love and honor all of my many selves with such tenacity that it can’t be undone, least of all by an ungiving world. Xyr work exemplifies what it means to be unafraid of truth, to be vocal about even those truths which can be fashioned into weapons against xem. It is impossible to leave xyr’s work without also having the hurt in you call for healing, healing that then calls for you to assess the hurt of the world and how you are responsible for healing that, too.

What Justice Says

“Letter from Xem”

2 Poems

Justice’s Motto

My favorite saying is from my grandpa: “It’s a poor dog that doesn’t wag its own tail”.

4. Miles Walser

 

He/Him/His

Miles Inspires Me To

…be unapologetic in retelling my story. My truth does not exist in a vacuum, it shape shifts, does not ask to be polite just to be remembered. His poetry is as much a brave and whole celebration of self as it is a learning of self through a series of awkward, blush-worthy, heart wrenching, cringe-worthy middle school-esque experiences. A perfect blend of humor and poignant analyses, Miles openly attempts to put the puzzle pieces together with patience and care.

What Miles Says

“Hierarchy”

“On Vanity”

Miles’ Motto

Right now I think it’s: “And if I hadn’t come now to the coast to disappear/I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears,” which tends to be my go-to before major life transitions.

5. Lee Mokobe

 

(photo cred: Daniel Schaefer)

He/Him/His

Lee Inspires Me To

…grace. Both in verb and adjective. A prodigal wordsmith at his core, Lee speaks on painful experiences with delicateness, yet spares no expense in being exacting. And, as cheesy and disingenuous as it might sound, when I watch Lee perform, it so evident that he loves this craft, that he finds home in it. His warmth and self-assuredness is inviting, which makes the gut-wrenching turns in his work that much more destabilizing and raw.

What Lee Says

TED Talk

“Seize Her”

Lee’s Motto

Fav line/motto: “Be like a spring, when pushed down, it bounces back up even higher” — something my mom always says to me 🙂

6. Francine Hendrickson

 

(photo cred: Valerie Jane Kwok)

Pronouns can fluctuate but neutral is always fine

Francine Inspires Me To

…rip my flesh off and prance around in all my still-existent beauty, in all my true ugliness. Francine’s work is without shame. They write sans intention to sound pretty, to just tell the real as it is, which creates kaleidoscopic images of the heart — so, pretty. Their work, often interrogating death, loss, and body, forces audiences to engage all of their senses and how they help us consume the world, create memories. What, then, do we do with these memories? Francine’s poetry screams at us, with love and softness, to figure it out.

What Francine Says

“Ode to the Male Gaze”

“Paper Crane”

Francine’s Motto

Ahhhh this is mad corny but as of right now, this Hamilton line has been saving my life: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” Cause the answer especially this week is: my time here can be taken from me at any moment, and I got to keep writing while I am still here and as a means to survive.

7. Venus Selenite

 

She/Her/Hers

Venus Inspires Me To

…meet pride at all of my identities’ intersections, to know that when I exclaim my right to take up space, I also mean my right to fill that space with a self-made joy. Her work — poetry, essays, performance art — is committed to making the experiences of marginalized communities visible. She demands more than her audience’s attention, but also their (dis)comfort; her writing challenges complacency and asks you how you are complicit in society’s failings. It asks you what you are going to do about it.

What Venus Says

“Love Letter to Raven Symone”

“A Night Spiritual”

Venus’ Motto

Motto, which is a small mission statement of mine: “I’m not here to make you comfortable. I’m here to f*** s*** up.”

8. Kevin Kantor

 

They/Them/Theirs

Kevin Inspires Me To

…dress myself in all that I have survived — be it mynx or the spoils of war — and strut. They write from the gut/the pit of the stomach/the grounded center, creating work that lives and breathes and extends itself ever outward. Their work is: a warm embrace at the end of a trying day; a smile that tells you they’ve been where you are, and if they made it to today, you’re capable of tomorrow; a laugh in the face of all your demons; a hand to hold your trauma.

What Kevin Says

“Dad Bought a Telescope”

“Honest Confession on Letting Go”

Kevin’s Motto

My tag: “Give love. Accept love” …

But also, for fun, an Oscar Wilde quote I really like: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

9. Cecily Schuler

 

(photo cred: Guangpyo Hong)

They/Them/Theirs

Cecily Inspires Me To

…active lifelong learning, failing, unlearning, learning anew. They encourage me to never accept that all we are is all we ever will be. Their writing is a constant dis-/re-membering of trauma, mental illness, and the ways our bodies and spirits interact with physical space. It disrupts, erupts, questions with childlike wonder, reassembles with adult fever and longing. A non-linear chronicling that invites readers to consider new ways to confront and examine their own histories, Cecily’s work serves as validation that all that fills us doesn’t have to have a name in order for it to deemed “real.”

What Cecily Says

“Close Enough”

“Use Your Words”

Cecily’s Motto

Despite its colonial origins, I have always found the following line to provide endless relief: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

OR “You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” — Mary Oliver

10. Cam Awkward-Rich

 

He/Him and They/Them

Cam Inspires Me To

…never mistake my quiet for anything less than a controlled roar, a buzz evolving into beckoning siren. He is able to capture monumental, weighty moments and contain them in such a way that readers might lose themselves in the words but always find themselves at home. Sometimes, that home is a seat in front of a crackling fireplace, often it is the good china slipping out of hands and shattering. Cam’s work is the lullaby that both hushes the broken in you and makes you aware of just how much body you have — for the better.

What Cam Says

“Break-Up Letters”

“Waiting in Line”

Cam’s Motto

Uh, well, if I’m honest there’s a line from Alex dimitrov’s poem “Lines for People After the Party” which is kind of my motto: ‘how long should I look at the world / before I go home?” But, I also just read Gwendolyn Brook’s The Second Sermon on the Warpland for the first time in a while so the words “Nevertheless, live” have been stuck in my head.

Originally posted June 21, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by Taylor Steele.

Peerings & Hearings

Occasional Musings on Arts in the City of Glass

 

image: Jay Banks

First thing we need to get straight is my qualifications. I’m a New Englander and not given to use phrases such as “arts scene.” I’m not particularly sensitive to social and political nuance. What I do care about is truth, justice, beauty, and community. These I see in great abundance and proliferation in our city of glass.

I use the possessive — Vancouver is my city, too — because, although I’ve lived in Vancouver for a mere 10 years, 11 months, and 20 days, it seems to me that everyone privileged to live, work, paint, sing, dance, and write in unceded Coast Salish Territory — aside from First Nations themselves — is a guest. On the other hand, outsiders have vantage, perspective gained by looking in from out. This outsider-guest likes moving in and out to get at what’s what.

That’s what this blog will be about — the ins and outs of Vancouver arts’ communities, truths, justices, and beauties.

These attributes do not exist independently of creators, actioners. The people and organizations I’ll be introducing you to are artists — most create with words — and are doing good, and what I call, “responsible,” acting for arts.

In order to not overwhelm either of us, I’ll cordon off this first post in this series with a focus on events that have taken place between May 1 and June 18 and the creators and actioners who’ve made these events happen. Away we go!

Lost + Found Cafe

May 5: Prism International, the literary arts journal at the University of British Columbia (UBC) launched its spring issue along with five local arts journals: Sad Magazine, a biannual ded­i­cated to “cov­er­ing Vancouver’s inde­pen­dent arts and cul­ture” through the work of emerg­ing writ­ers and artists; Geist, a quarterly, “sumptuous mix of fact and fiction, photography and comix, poetry, essays and reviews”; SubTerrain, a triannual offering “a stimulating fusion of fiction, poetry, photography and graphic illustration”; EVENT, a triannual where editors pride themselves on “finding and supporting fresh new voices” in poetry and prose; and Room, an independent quarterly “by and about women.” Prism International is in the good friend habit of joining with local journals to collaboratively host and celebrate the launch of journals’ issues. This most recent party focused on writers and artists in the various spring issues at the über cool and homey Lost + Found Cafe. “Inspired by art, travel, philanthropy and the love of fresh home-made food,” this cafe gives you a space to “come for coffee and stay for lunch.” During this evening, we heard the perspective-expanding poetry of Adele Barclay, author of forthcoming If I Were A Cage I’d Reach Out For You (Nightwood, 2016), creepy creative non-fiction by George K. Ilsley, and spiffy short fiction by Craig Takeuchi, among other provocative voices, while having our cake and eating it, too. For those of us who didn’t want cake, there was a marvelous wheel of fruit.

Prism international, 54:3 SPRING 2016

Prism international, established in 1959 and the oldest literary magazine in western Canada is a quarterly magazine, “whose mandate is to publish the best in contemporary writing and translation from Canada and around the world.” The spring issue, 54:3, the “non-fiction contest issue,” features a sci-fi fruit cover image: “African Horned Melon” by Maciek Jasik.

Room — Between Shadows, 39.2 SPRING 2016

“Room is a space where women can speak, connect, and showcase their creativity.” Supporting “literature, art and feminism since 1975,” issue, 39.2 Between Shadows, with cover art by “midwest-ish illustrator and wanderer” Tiffany Mallery. Her Blood Moon matches perfectly the mood of the writing therein, including poems by dear departed American poet and friend, Elise Partridge (1958–2015), who writes in Years On, “we can’t imagine/ our seedling gifts…/foresee our caches of memories/emptied at death/ like an old barn/ so careless of what it kept/ it tossed its roof to the storm.”

The Capilano Review Office & Event Space

May 13: On this auspicious Friday, The Capilano Review, along with co-sponsor Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Department of English, celebrated its winter issue by hosting “an aura-altering evening” with contributing and visiting poets CAConrad, somatic ritual king, and Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer Prize winner. We gathered in a large, long, and narrow industrial space, toasted each other with Sangria and nibbled on a beautiful spread of food prepared lovingly by local artist Derya Akay.

The next morning, we met in the “smaller event space” for multi-colored bagels

Play-Doh or food?

that looked to me like results from a Play-Doh frolic. This notion was disabused as we spread them with various cream cheeses and munched them with coffees and juices. The refreshments fueled our purpose: We were there to listen to, talk with, and write beside CAConrad, our morning’s grand Poobah. He’s opinionated, mad, funny, has a thing for children’s coffins, wears enormous (4 lb.s?) crystals around his neck, and cools himself with a Chinese fan like a mezzosoprano.

The Capilano Review, 3.28 WINTER 2016

Founded in 1972 by Pierre Coupey, The Capilano Review publishes “new and established Canadian writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts.” Along with Conrad, Armantrout, and local poets, Mercedes Eng, and Donato Mancini, issue 3.28 features cover art Under the Infinite Sky by Meryl McMaster. The issue creates a stunning and artistic openness and inclusiveness. Get yourself a copy!

Wayde Compton introduces a poet at Lunch Poems

May 18 & June 15: Simon Fraser University, where both I and my partner teach, also hosts Lunch Poems, readings held the third Wednesday of every month, noon to 1 pm, in the Teck Gallery at Harbour Centre (SFU’s Downtown Campus). Started in March 2012, the series “has hosted a wide range of poets and their works reflecting the rich diversity of the poetry scene in our community.” (Others do use “scene,” but it doesn’t change my mind.) I and my pal Sally Whitehead have lunched on words at two Lunch Poems readings recently — May 18 with Raoul Fernandes (Transmitter and Receiver, Nightwood Editions, 2015) and Elena Johnson (Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra, Gaspereau, 2015), and June 15 with Jeff Steudel (Foreign Park, Anvil Press, 2015) and Danielle LaFrance (Friendly + Fire, Talon, forthcoming fall, 2016). If you click on LaFrance’s name, you’ll see a vimeo of her shot by CAConrad. Both Fernandes and Steudel are writing students I’ve had the pleasure to be with in conversation and classes. So, it was particularly thrilling to hear their published work. The voices of Johnson and LaFrance are newer to me, but still elicited deep connection to feeling and thinking related to the great outdoors and feminist theory. The readings are followed by a Q & A, where listeners get to ask questions about what they heard. You, dear reader can listen to these readings and others by visiting Lunch Poems.

The Maynard SPRING 2016, image: Link Nicoll

One of the featured poets for Lunch Poems, Raoul Fernandes, is part of the editorial board, along with Mark Hoadley and Ram Randhawa for the online, biannual poetry journal, The Maynard (TM). I’m on the advisory and editorial board for this journal. The journal was born and raised in Vancouver in 2008 by another former student, Nicholas Hauck, with my advice and occasional kicks in the ass. Despite some 2010–2012 waning, the journal was revived in 2013 and has been going strong since. The spring issue went live mid-April and features cover art by Washington DC photographer and artist Link Nicoll.

All cover art for TM has to involve an orange. To make the long story short: Ron Padget wrote: “Eat an orange every day.” (from To Be Perfect). More on why oranges sometime — maybe in my next post. Let’s stick with the present. The Maynard offers poets’ work in print and via recording. You’re cordially invited to read and listen to the poems from current and back issues of The Maynard.

While there, read the new form of review — conducted in conversation between two readers — I conceived. Part of an initiative called Views, along with Reviews, there will also be Interviews, where the same set of questions is sent to two contributors and we publish their responses side by side. Views, both Re- and Inter-, complement spring and fall issues as dialogues on and with contemporary poetry. Page As Bone Ink Is Blood by Metis poet Jónína Kirton (Talon Books, 2015) is the subject of the first TM Review, conducted by yours truly and Nicholas Hauck, who is also on the advisory board.

Pandora’s Collective

May 26: One of my very favorite and highly respected community arts organizations in Vancouver, and anywhere, is Pandora’s Collective. This organization promotes literacy and self-expression in metro Vancouver while providing safe and inspiring environments for writers and readers of all ages. To pull this off takes a tireless director; meet Bonnie Nish and her inspiring crew, who offer poetry and creativity workshops; adult, teen, and child writers contests; scholarships to young writers; local and global outreach programs (think: 30,000 books to Zimbawe) all in the service of community, literacy, and creativity. Plus, these good people sponsor six literary events each month. Two of the monthly events are Word Whips and Twisted Poets Literary Salon. Word Whips is a two-hour generative session of writing, prompts provided, where writers see what they can “whip up.” Twisted Poets Literary Salon is a twice monthly reading series that showcases two writers and an open mic. I hosted Twisted Poets on May 26 when hullabaloo: Youth Spoken Word Festival organizers and spoken word poets RC Weslowski and Jillian Christmas presented their work. A veritable bonfire of words!

Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman (Dora Maar), 1938

June 11: Vancouver Art Gallery opened its latest exhibit — Picasso: The Artist and His Muses. This exhibit explores Picasso’s relationships with Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque, the six women who were principally inspirational to Picasso’s artistic expression and development. My partner and I were at the opening along with 500 or so others. Of it, he said, “Spectacular”! For me, it’s completely captivating. Even as I took my first stroll through the exhibit I was planning my next. I’ll be there often before the exhibit closes in early October.

Pear Pair

June 14: One of my favorite events in Vancouver and anywhere, ever, is produced by the aforementioned Pandora’s Collective’s and called Poetic Pairings, which I am honored to sometimes host. What the audience hears at the event are the fruits of two months’ collaborative efforts that took place between two poets who have not previously worked together. Each pairing has its own, unique way of conjoining their works. Some of the readers at this latest foray into poetic collaboration worked in ekphrasis, others in song. Here’s the June 14th menu of readings. I recommend you watch and listen to this one with singer Falcon O’Hara (auspicious last name!) and poet Leanne Boschman. You’ll be hearing more on Poetic Pairings in a coming blog where I interview its “mother,” Bonnie Nish.

Sepehr Samini Mask, image: John Welch

June 17: The 4th Annual LAUNCH! Festival, co-presented by 149 Arts Society and SFU Woodward’s  — this mission of this festival is to support Vancouver’s emerging artists in the genres of performance, media arts, and new forms from across Vancouver’s Lower Mainland. The artists apply to a mentorship program to work with professionals in their genre, get paid to present their work to a large audience, and receive live feedback from a panel of industry professionals. This is the second year my partner and I have attended this event. This year’s array of nine artists/groups included a dancer in head-to-toe blue glitter, a new jazz ensemble that toggles between New Orleans swing and New York bebop, and a slam poet. A stop-action film, Silence, by Jae Woo Kang, chronicles the lives of two drag queens, rendered in silicone negotiating their performances with a club owner. Remarkable! Jessica Johnson’s experimental film Einst has a long shot of a moving body of water; after five minutes of this single shot, a woman enters the shot and water, naked from the waist up and disappears beneath the water. The shot continued for another five minutes while I anxiously looked for the women, forgot about her, and felt guilty for doing so. A striking take on audience/viewer and powerlessness at the disappearance of women. Actress Ellen MacNevin and magician Travis Bernhardt gave us Empathy Theater, which blurred the lines between a magic show and theatrical performance, perhaps making it clear that magic is Stheater and theater is magic. Somehow, they correctly identified the name, date of birth, and question one woman wrote on a piece of paper, then tucked into an envelope that was sealed. Magic! The most striking performance of the night came from interdisciplinary artist, Sepehr Samini who gave us his interactive The Conformist. To engage with this piece, I entered a small room through a black curtain. Samini was seated at a small table with an open chair facing him. He beckoned me to sit down and commenced gazing into my eyes. After a while, he began plastering swaths of fabric on his face until it disappeared. Then, he switched to blacklighting, which illuminated six cups of glow-in-the-dark paint, and passed me a brush. After I adorned the mask and eased back in my chair, he contorted his face until the mask fell on the floor, and from there into my hands as a gift of our moment. This powerful piece spoke to me about identity, personality, impersonation, beauty, authenticity, and pretense. So, you can see why my partner and I find it thrilling to be a part of the early expressions of these artists. The artists gain exposure to us. And, us to them. With that, comes the feeling of getting exposure to such a freshness of artistic expression; it’s like being present at a birth.

Gathering of Poets: Evelyn Lau, Jeff Steudel, Leith Fernandes, Raoul Fernandes, Ali Blythe, Amber Dawn, Miranda Pearson, image: Kevin Spenst

June 18: Poetry in the Park with a Gathering of Poets — Vancouver Public Library and Vancouver Park Board hosted a Poetry in Parks special event to bring fresh, local poetry to Vancouver parks. Parks Board Commissioner, Catherine Evans, a liaison with the library, and the great champion for poetry in the parks was among the esteemed guests at this special event. Fellow poet Kevin Spenst and I were the poetry ambassadors for this event, which meant we enjoyed a tea leaf reading, made an erasure poem button, and schmoozed with other poets while listening to jolly accordion music and sipping homemade chai. Exhausting! As part of the event process, we composed an original poem, 12 Awesome Uses for Lemon/s and a cento, made from the lines of poems from each of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalists the Gathering of Poets showcased at the event.

Miranda Pearson, Ali Blythe, Jami Macarty, Catherine Evans, Kevin Spenst, Amber Dawn, image: Beverly Walker

Finalists Ali Blythe (Twoism, Goose Lane Editions, 2015), Amber Dawn (Where the words end and my body begins, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015), Raoul Fernandes (Transmitter and Receiver, Nightwood Editions,(2015) Miranda Pearson (The Fire Extinguisher, Oolichan Books, 2015) and Jeff Steudel (Foreign Park, Anvil Press, 2015) read from their nominated works along with the 2016 Hullabaloo slam poetry champions from Coquitlam’s Gleneagles Secondary and MC’d by local poet, novelist, and former Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau. Some of this event was meant to be held outdoors, but the rain changed that plan. Vancouver’s also know as the Raincity. The rain seemed a gift, as it cozied everyone inside the lamp and heart-lit space, where the most intimate of listening took place. As my library colleagues said, “Best event ever”!

OK, my dear readers, these are the events that have punctuated, highlighted, inspired, and affected me over the last two months in the Vancouver’s many-personalitied arts community. Thanks very much for giving me the chance to share them with you and for your kind and interested attention. It’s been my honor to introduce you to some of the makers and actioners in Vancouver.

By the way, each one of the journals I’ve mentioned is worth your reading time. Each is an inspiration. Use it to prepare and submit your work.

Originally posted June 20, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by Jami Macarty.

Notes on a Return to an Ever-Dying Land: Arturo Desimone’s series on Latin American poetry

Poems of Fierce Soul: Poems in Guaraní and in Spanish by Mario Castells/Juan Ignacio Cabrera

Mario Castells drinking his power-herb

Mario Castells (Rosario, 1975) is an Argentinian-Paraguayan poet who leads a dual existence — between Argentina and Paraguay, and between the Spanish and Guaraní languages.

Playing between the pseudonyms and persona of Juan Ignacio Cabrera and Miguel Ángel Soler, he wrote the poetry collections Blood Attorney (Fiscal de Sangre) and Ayvu Pochy Ñe-endy (Poems of Fierce Soul) in Guaraní and in Spanish (three of the Poems of Fierce Soul — Lopi Clemente, Horror-filled Land and Icho Laku — are published here, in Arturo Desimone’s English translation. (Be sure to click on the poem’s titles to hear the poet reciting in the beautiful Guaraní language!)

Mario is a tireless, militant-marxist agitator for the cause of agrarian reform. “Nothing compromises my intellectual militancy’’ Mario likes to say. We better believe him. Born in 1970s Argentina to parents who were politically exiled from neighboring Paraguay during the Stroessner regime, the poet spent some of his formative years in rural Paraguay. He still constantly crosses the border. His novella El Mosto y la Queresa “The larvae and the ripening wine”, generational tale about Paraguayan immigrants in Rosario’s working-class suburb of Villa Diego, won Rosario’s 2012 municipal literary prize. His articles treat Paraguayan cultural dilemmas. A new generation of young Guaraní poets and writers are emboldened by Castells’ translations, cultural and literary criticism.

The poems by Mario Castells are in the company of these haunting images, courtesy of Paraguayan painter Enrique Collar, a friend of the poet and of the translator.

3 poems from Ayvu pochy ñe-endy / Poemas de Alma Feroz, “Poems of Fierce Soul” by Juan Ignacio Cabrera / Mario Castells

Translated into English by Arturo Desimone

Lopi Clemente

Uncle Clemente

(to uncle Nelson Ortíz)

The solitary cross rises in the woodland

once more, its thin scream.

It will be another afternoon of bad weather

Right over there stands Don Clemente:

saintly man who prays

uninterruptible estuary orations

to his loved god.

His oxen at rest

in the timber-shade

and I think they may have drunk

more water

than what is prudent.

San Teio, by Enrique Collar, oil on linen, 95×70 cm. 1989, Paraguay.

Icho Laku

Inscription on the grave of María de la Cruz Cabrera

“Along the dark angles of their rooms lurks the pora-ghost…”

-ALEJANDRO GUANES

It is a closed-off night in the Neembucoo.

And, in effect, I see you

in the obscure calm

beneath the ruins

of my apartment decked in Saint Anthony’s winter…

You don’t walk, not enacting any bodily motion,

but I know

you are exhausted still.

You, the deceased, are neither my uncle nor my father

nor my grandfather

nor one of my newest dead.

Dead from the first planted rows of trees

in the pink of memory.

I revile that you bear a Cruz.

Silently risen on only one leg

emulate the swans on the Piraguasú lagoon.

I feel like an offshoot of myself…

as if I were carrier of your corpse upon my shoulders;

and even by throwing it at your ghost

still I fail to make your weight less.

I make myself shudder.

You did not recoil at fate.

You were an extraordinary soldier.

Mangled by the farm, yet you stayed on.

Those trembling creeks, lagoons and marshlands

count, in their names

the history of that massive misadventure

I wish we could have a conversation, that I may know your story.

This desire harasses me in dreams.

Perhaps an open-mouthed dream

Suspicious of the harness of the story-teller

Your opposite, as much as ours.

I cannot imagine your maimed returning to the valley, a paralytic,

survivor of only one single hillside-genocide.

Tigers, sickness, lobsters,

liberal forest militias, as recounted by aunt Maria

at the bonfire gathering,

they did not let you lift your head.

Many evil things, mi señor, they vandalized in vanity.

I need you to tell me

I, who am your progeny and your very same blood,

I need to locate your tremulous word.

The knowledge of how you ever managed to escape

the gruesome chasms of Tooyootee.

You are no longer in the world.

Rely, strongly on the tale,

on your eye-witness, my dear chief.

Use my throat, my heart.

Whatever you need to speak of this, faithfully, from inside me.

Three headed rooster / Gallo de tres Cabezas, oil on linen, 100×120 cm 1990 | Colección privada, Paraguay

Horror-filled Land

To Martin Arzamendia.

“What will become of us? culture of evil has devastated us and in the coop of death’s barn we remain without identity.” -ZENÓN BOGADO ROLÓN

A mighty force

domesticates all that is overpowering in these valleys;

as cathedrals

the woods are razed and the corpses of the trees carried off

in whining trucks,

pacing at the gait of cancer,

of a counterlife.

In the world’s eyes

there is closure-heart, storm-ready,

there is impenetrable thorn-brush,

there are spines, disarray

How come? Why this fatal mandate

to make these ramshackle ranches, precarious farms endure

so many penuries?

The cedars soak and store up heaven, measure storm

and make cushions from the time-fabric,

education by bamboo-stick

Tell me

How come no one ever extinguishes that sadness?

How come no one ever senses heavy silence

as if it were a skirt made of plant foliage?

The church bells stammer

and it is the call of the lazy-bones christian god,

call out to his faithful-grateful

back to the fold, fuse together.

Dying birds, shriek out your last chirp!

Shriek, the anima souls, push out your scream, spirits!

You got my permission, consent granted. And along with that

you can have my passionate puke.

Translator’s note on Icho Laku: As I interrogated Mario Castells about the meanings of words and places in his poem Icho Laku, he warned me ‘’’be careful translating the word for ghost, “Porã is pretty, beautiful; póra is a ghost, in Guaraní, not to confuse two, they sound very different.” I had first translated porã for the lurking ghost as ‘’ the wandering beautiful one’’ but then corrected it to ‘’the wandering ghost,’’ after contemplating phantom for little while.

The title of the poem Icho Laku remains in Guaraní in Castell’s/Cabrera’s own Spanish version of poem.

Icho is an intimate, tender way of saying to those of the same blood “Sir, Don, or karai (an authority in Guaraní) and Laku is the Guaraní bastardization of the Spanish surname “La Cruz’’, a surname of Castells family and his pseudonym.

The subject of this poem, Icho Laku, is Castell’s (Juan Cabrera de la Cruz’s) ancestor, a great-grandfather, lone survivor of a family of 10 brothers after the “Guasu War,’’ (“The Great War”) of the Triple-Alliance — in which Argentina, the Brazilian empire and Uruguay joined forces to decimate and plunder Paraguay, which had been until then one of the most affluent and self-sufficient states in the region. Paraguay lost nine tenths of its male population in what was tantamount to genocide. “My great-grandfather was left a cripple, after the second battle of Tuyutí, according to some accounts, or it was in the ambush of Humaitá, according to others. He was a devotee in the order of the mystic Saint Anthony of Padua, and a cattle-rancher of the ranks of the Lopez army, ranking amongst the cavalry of Captain Bado, his friend and his relative.

“After the war, when Icho Laku returned to the town where both he and his wife Maria del Pilar-Segovia were from, he founded a chapel to Saint Anthony. Today, there is a parish there with a little church called Saint Anthony of Laurels, it is where my mother’s family is from. My great-grandfather was named José de la Cruz Cabrera — named after the same Cabrera who founded the city of Córdoba, descendant of the Bishop of Asunción until the end-time of the colony. Despite a distant patrician past, our family is not moneyed in the slightest: it is a family of small cattle-herds, of the rural middle class at most.” Castells has no intention of leaving the shadows cast by his fascinating ancestors. It seems that within the deep solitude in which he writes he is able to do justice to his longing to better understand them.

Mario Castells, author of Poems of a Fierce Soul and Blood Attorney, showing leadership and a pleasant bronze visage at a Trotskyite-communist get-together.

Mario Castells poems read as blood-chronicles, inhabited by his longed-for and loved ancestors, and by the unmerciful history and the great beauty of Paraguay. He is a warrior- poet with a haunted universe, and with a pure red politics that seems, at times, as wholly uncompromising as his aesthetics.

~

About the translator/blogger behind “Notes on a Return to the Ever-Dying Lands” for Drunken Boat:

Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist, was born in 1984 on the island Aruba which he inhabited until the age of 22, when he emigrated to the Netherlands. He is currently based in Argentina (a country two of his ancestors left during the 1970s) while working on a long fiction project about childhoods, diasporas, islands and religion. Desimone’s articles, poetry and short fiction pieces have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía (Spanish) Acentos Review, New Orleans Review, DemocraciaAbierta, BIM Magazine, Knot-Lit. A play he wrote won a prize for young immigrant authors in Amsterdam in 2011, and published in the world-lit journal of University of Istanbul. His translations of poetry have appeared in the Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.

Originally posted June 14, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by Arturo Desimone.

Spotlight #2: Elizabeth Robinson

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

Author Statement

What writing is changes all the time. I think often of Bernadette Mayer’s statement that “Writing is a necessity, and, when there is time, a luxury.”

But there is no time. So writing is a necessity of the interstices. A mortar that would will in the gaps, and then crumble away.

In that sense, poems become the mortar that glues together the structures we imagine, those that don’t quite exist. Speculative and evanescent cement.

Sans time, I want space. I want durable space, a place to live, a home. The poem refuses that.

The poem refuses what it can imagine. What it refuses it alters. What it imagines, by virtue of the act of imagination, changes.

I feel the language changing beneath and through me. I imagine time in the poem that could bring back the lives of C.D. Wright and Beth Murray and Colleen Lookingbill. I imagine space in the poem that houses the unhoused people with whom I work each day.

The poem is inevitable transit: from transit to transitory. If we see what is fleeting as a betrayal, the poem refuses to do so.

To do away with things

Does

darkness initiate love —

as some lovers

turn out the light — what does

the beloved thing

do in its darkness, which

is to ask is darkness

a thing, is the act

of bodies conjoining

a thing, a verb a thing?

Things, they beset themselves

and must be given away, giving

away the punchline of

a wistful joke, bequeathing

memory to silence, tossing the clothes

to the floor.

Things are ambivalence, always

they practice themselves before

they run out of themselves. The

dissolution of presence being

presence’s surest marker. One

who loves it

removes it: yes,

the house, the garden,

the fruit trees, the quest,

the music of it, the image

of it, the

making of the made thing.

The less-visible

world is still visible

in its own darkness. It is not

the bird in the cage who

hovers near the mirror.

But it may turn away from meeting its own gaze.

A thing persevering

is indiscriminate of, or

to, itself, whether the

thing is an act, a seashell,

an object hidden at the base

of a tree, the thing professing

its attention to itself despite

all disappearance.

Eros and all disappearance

being their own stubborn

blessing.

Whatever that darkness, one wanders in it.

Stealthy

to what it wants, to whom it

speaks when it speaks, not

lost but absorbed in the

darkness and given away

by it.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta) and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing), as well as the chapbook Simplified Holy Passage (above/ground press). Her mixed genre book On Ghosts was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2016 Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation Fellowship.

PoemWritingLiteratureFeatured

Originally posted June 6, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by rob mclennan.

Blessed Be #1 with Hold: A Journal

Hold: A Journal Issue #1 cover art by Kate Robinson

This is the first of an interview series interested in discussing the significance of magic in contemporary writing and identity, specifically thinking about the ways that the occult is examined, subverted and politicized contemporarily through writing, making, daily practice and curation.

Hold: A Journal is an editorial collective and print journal that began in Oakland, CA and currently stretches from Oakland, CA to Northampton, MA. Hold’s inaugural theme was magic out in 2015 and was imagined and realized by Oakland based poet Cheena Marie Lo and fiction writer Marcus Lund along with poetry readers Zoe Tuck, Tessa Micaela, and fiction readers Davey Davis and Art Middleton.

Issue #2 is themed ‘kin’ and currently in the works with a new configuration of the editorial staff which is much smaller now but remains in the Hold family. The current editors/witches/empaths/healers/tarot practitioners are Cheena Marie Lo, Zoe Tuck and Tessa Micaela.

I sat down with the current Hold editors and we discussed the magical through queer space, elaboration, poetics of loving and living, high complexity and weird aesthetics, curation, kinship and the intuitive.

BBF: Tell me a little bit about Hold: A Journal; its origin story, its mission, how you all came to work together…

CML: I will start. Simply, Marcus Lund asked if I wanted to start this journal project. I was wrapping up Manifest Reading Series. I said yes because I was interested in engaging with the poetry community in a new way. Curating a reading series was awesome and I learned so much. I met so many people and became familiar with their work and I was interested in continuing this kind of engagement in a different format. I invited Tessa and Zoe to work on this project with me because they are two people whose work I really like. We are very aligned with our poetics, politics and aesthetics.

BBF: I just want to jump in and ask if you all can talk a little bit about the intersections of your poetics, aesthetics and politics since that is something that brought you together?

ZT: The poetics of Hold arose out of a certain social formation and transformed out of the transformation of a certain social formation. I don’t feel like that is all of what it is but I do feel like it is interesting to think about that as something…there are a couple of ways to read the way the poetic landscape falls along social lines. One way is in a critical way for instance, if it is just someone and their students or their friends there could be something really fucked up about that, something really coterie based out of that. Then on the other hand, there is also something to be said for the way that poetics aligns with a poetics of living, a poetics of loving, forming relationships and carrying through the whole capacity of those relationships beyond just like dancing with each other but where you are elaborating something more literary or something more political.

BBF: One of the questions I have that I think Zoe is starting to speak on here is what kind of space is Hold trying to create?

ZT: Cheena already talked about Manifest Reading Series and one of the things that felt so characteristic of that space was its openness to emerging poets and its commitment to not being a totally white and totally cis line up which was then reflected in its audience. There is the more ephemeral room of a reading series and then there is the more static frozen in time, photographic room of a journal.

TM: In this process of working on our 2nd issue we continue to reflect on who we are asking to participate, asking whose voices do we not hear and it seems like often you see folks in curatorial positions saying, “we want queer voices,” “we want POC voices” and something I think to be careful of in representation is the fetishizing of identity. We are interested in featuring voices that are not being put forth right now whether that means identity or weird aesthetics. We are interested in a moment that is highly complex and we are interested in working through these moments and representing work that is interested in working through complexities. We are not trying to say through this journal, yes we can hold complexity but we are actually dogmatic or yes we are dogmatic and trying to say something about complexity. Instead, we are trying to say, actually things are confusing and muddled. So, we are going to bring in identities, aesthetics, politics and publishing histories in particular that are really different than the way that we see diversity being expressed around us. It was interesting when putting together this issue, there was a pretty long prose piece relatively religiously situated in a way that its aesthetic and cultural and political lens wouldn’t necessarily find a clean home in a literary journal. We are interested in the way queer Judaism fits into a queer experimental journal for instance. That might not happen in another place where aesthetics or identity is forefronted.

BBF: So how do you choose work to put in your journal?

ZT: Tessa in particular pioneered the OkCupid system for assessing work…

CML: More like Tinder I think…

ZT: Oh right yes Tinder, like if it is not a FUCK YES then it is a Fuck NO!

BBF: I feel like what you are all saying and what Tessa said in particular maybe already answered my next question in some way. Is Hold a queer space and what does that mean to you and how does this inform your selection process?

TM: I think it is a queer space.

ZT: I hope so!

CML: It’s definitely not not a queer space.

TM: Partially we, the people running the journal, are queer and our mission I think touches on queerness. We know the history of publishing white cis male poets and we are pretty conscious of that representation here. We are asking, are there mostly cis voices/white voices or is there an assimilating to mostly cis and white perspectives? I think that is not always how we are explicitly thinking through the ways that we are reading but is inevitably an undercurrent of how we are reading. The queerness of our experiences and our visions and our hopes for the world politically, aesthetically and poetically show up in what we choose to publish.

CML: Going back to the sociality that Zoe mentioned, we are who we are and I feel like the way we are pushing this project outwards, we are extending it to our communities and I feel like the 3 of us inhabit both the same and differing communities and spaces.

BBF: So, it is innately queer in these various ways?

TM: It’s innately queer and it is also explicitly queer. We chose the second issue to be about kin specifically because we are not interested in normative family structures necessarily so we are curious about the questions around community and around affiliation and the way we chose to frame that was around kinship. Chosen family, queer family is explicitly part of what we’ve built with one another, the work we align with and the people we align with. It is innately part of the call for work we made but also explicitly working through people sending us really good work that is actually not in alignment with the conversations we are interested in having.

ZT: There is a way in which you can get work that is technically good in this way or that way or has some interesting ideas but again that is where the social is incredibly important. The social is where you can contextualize or see what is being decontextualized. I think there is this sort of citational practice particularly with essayistic work you can have these citations with out any personal connection to the histories that produced the works that you are citing. That’s the thing about this being a queer journal and us being queer editors, to not only have an orientation but a history and kinship with a certain lineage or series of lineages.

BBF: We’ve talked a lot about the 2nd issue being about kinship. I want to go back to the 1st issue. The theme of the 1st is magic. I’m interested in the way magic was defined in the first issue, “The strange, the everyday, the deep sea, outer space, witches, spells, the moon, sunsets, the unknown, science, mysteries, getting out of bed in the morning.” I’m curious about the relationship of the mundane and the fantastic. What is significant about that in defining and revealing the magical in writing?

TM: Cheena can you say a little bit about how you and Marcus came to choose the theme of magic?

CML: We would use the tarot to help guide our vison of this project. Magic was very present in our lives, something we were all thinking about and actively practicing.

BBF: I’m interested in the histories of magic these lineages are at times troubling, appropriative, gendered in a particularly heteronormative way. I think here in this conversation context and stakes are significant to the contemporary moment of queer culture and the occult as a site of potential reclamation. The active queering of magic in its various abstract formations and tangible formations…I wonder how that might manifest for you all in your daily practices or in more over arching ways…

CML: I have active magical practices when I am searching for something. For awhile I was pulling a tarot card every day and I carry crystals in my pocket from time to time. They feel good to hold onto.

ZT: I feel like this question is just about my whole life. Maybe this is too cliché to say but like from the minute I could read I was reading stories about, and mind you this was a pre-Harry Potter world, people who found out they were different or special in some kind of way. Then they found their way through a door in the wall or at a school with other special people like them and it is like the dream of being able to change your circumstances or to reorient your conception of the world so that you feel part of something. I feel like I have been looking for that since I was a little kid. The fact that I was finding it in literature means those things are inextricable at this point. There is magical practices in the carrying crystals way which is in my life too and I can enumerate that but I feel like the more profound magical relationship for me is that one, the idea of desperately wanting magic to be real. While at the same time being a sort of metaphor for identity and desire. That’s why magic to me, not a programmatic ritual magic, which I think can be extremely closed…I’m not going to knock it because it has its benefits for people but its like a traditional metrical form with rules and you have to repeat the end of line a on line d and each line has that 14 syllables. I think there is another conception of contemporary magic that’s very much akin to a Hejinian style open form. The page is this empty map that you can populate and be oriented to from multiple perspectives and that can be a spell too.

TM: There are all the things that you can say you do with your daily life. For instance, I take herbs or do sexual reproductive health or whatever are the things one can do in one’s own daily life. There is also the question, how does one think about community based interactions as a source of magic? Queer community as a place in which intuition happens, surprising events take place and with these occurrences comes a kindredness and that is magical somehow. There is that structured ritualistic practice Zoe references and that is related to the individualistic self healing kinds of magic that are in custom these days. I think the more important consideration is how are we as a much larger network of artists and queer folks and community members, how are we embodying intuitive resource building that is a part of resistance practices in general? The world we live in is deeply anti-intuitive, it’s capitalistic and takes down our membranes and cells and gives us cancer and all of these things. We are thinking through something that is a part of ourselves that is counter to what we have been taught to think through and that is some of the magic and kindredness that is around us and it can be called upon into tarot card pulling, into making a journal, into sitting around and doing whatever.

BBF: Any final thoughts?

TM: We love each other a lot!

ZT: Yes!

CML: We do love each other so much!

Originally posted June 1, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by bebillmeyerfinn.

Nayomi Munaweera’s Writing Life

Photo: Nathaneal F. Trimboli

When Nayomi Munaweera’s first novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was released in 2011, she threw a dance party at Club Baobab in San Francisco.

“There were probably a hundred or more of Nayomi’s friends and fans there,” said novelist Keenan Norris who met Munaweera in 2006.

Island’s coming out party was the best book event Norris has ever been to. “There were people who had passed away that we missed very much. And so we partied,” he said.

They danced in the red, warm light of the Senegalese club. Everything was open and beautiful before them, then, as new writers, said Norris.

And then the DJ cut the music.

“Nayomi walked to the front of the club and everybody sat down like kids around a classroom or a campfire and we listened to her read from her new novel, which was such a mysterious, underground thing at that moment.”

This was before Island came out in the U.S.; before it won the Regional Commonwealth Book Prize for Asia; before the rush and frenzy of book tours.

“Later,” said Norris, “she would sign with St. Martin’s and publish Island for the American audience. The book would become very popular and she would follow it with her new work, What Lies Between Us. But that was a special moment.”

__

Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka in May of 1973, but her family left three years later due to the civil war. They moved to Nigeria and lived there until 1984 when they decided to leave because of unrest in that country, too. They immigrated to the United States, when Munaweera was 12, settling in Los Angeles.

In her twenties, she began work on a PhD in South Asian Studies, but dropped out to move to Berkeley, where she taught at community college, and started writing Island of a Thousand Mirrors.

It wouldn’t be until ten years later, when Munaweera was 38, that Island was first published in Sri Lanka and India after being rejected by several U.S. publishers. Only after Island did well in Asia did U.S. publishers come calling.

Munaweera signed a two-book deal with St. Martin’s Press and Island came out in the US. Shortly thereafter, Island was the Commonwealth Regional Prize Winner in Asia. It has also been shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Sri Lanka forms the backbone of Munaweera’s first two books. She says her first book is the “story of a country trying to find itself.” With her second, she wanted to write something “deeply personal,” and be focused in on one point of view. She won’t talk about her third novel, even with close friends, since it is still being written.

__

Munaweera seems taller than she actually is — probably 5’1” or 5’2”. She doesn’t wear a lot of makeup, but often wears jewelry, including a hoop in her left nostril. Most days, her dark hair is loosely pulled up, away from her face. Her eyes are bright and attentive.

At one point, she was pursuing painting, as well as writing, but said she had to choose between the two art forms because she doesn’t think a person can be a serious artist with their time split between two passions. She chose her greater passion, which led her to write Island.

Since she was little, she always wanted to be a writer. She kept four books on her at all times. When she traveled with her younger sister, Namal Tantula  — something they did frequently — books made up half of Munaweera’s luggage. She would often only bring two pairs of pants, even for a four-week long trip.

Munaweera’s writing process involves extensive preparation — time spent talking to people, at the library, traveling.

“I’ve seen how much effort she puts into it,” said Tantula, who was one of the first readers of Island.

Munaweera doesn’t write in a straight line. She compiles pages in her draft — her goal is to get to 300 — and then she excavates the story from those pages: rearranging, cutting, adding, and, always, rewriting.

“Nayomi is a writer who creates worlds and complex relationships inside those scenarios,” said writer Elmaz Abinader. “Her portrayal of Sri Lanka in Island of a Thousand Mirrors is magical without pandering to the exotic.”

Island is written about the civil war in which Sri Lanka was embroiled from 1983 to 2009. Having grown up in America, Munaweera didn’t experience much of the conflict firsthand.

It took lots of research to get the book right.

“I was reading everything available about that specific conflict, and also about women in war, wartime atrocities upon women, etc. etc. — you know, light fun stuff!” she said. “About 80 percent of my research didn’t end up in the book, but it was essential that I know the world.”

Also, though Munaweera mainly grew up in Nigeria and then the United States, she and her family went back to Sri Lanka for a month every year.

“So, more than the research, I was living in the place, absorbing the stories, feeling and tasting the island.”

Munaweera finished Island in 2007 and sent it to her first agent, who said that it was unfinished.

“I wanted to kick him in the balls because at that point I had been working on it since 2001.”

But she also understood what he meant — the war in Sri Lanka was still going on.

“In 2007, I didn’t know how to end my book, and I didn’t know what would happen to my characters. The end I had written was unsatisfying because I myself couldn’t imagine how this war would end.”

When the war did end, she was able to write the final piece.

“It was a strange moment in 2009 — the war was over, people were rejoicing all over the island. But there was also this tremendous heartbreak about the 80,000 to 100,000 people we had lost in the course of those 26 years. A lot of conflicted emotion, but it was finally possible for me to actually finish the book.”

Island follows the lives of two families, one Tamil, one Sinhala. Munaweera is Sinhala, and, like her own family, the Sinhalese family in Island is forced by the war to immigrate to the United States. The book is told in two parts, beginning with the last British ship sailing away from Sri Lanka — then called Ceylon — in 1948.

The story progresses quickly, but in minute detail, carrying the reader forward into the present day and into the lives of the focal characters for Part I: Yasodara, and her sister Lanka, called “La”. The sisters come of age in LA, as Munaweera and her own sister did. Yasodara and La experience the frustration of being mistakenly labeled “Indian” and the painful adjustments to a new kind of body awareness that being a teenage girl in America requires. Though the family is removed from the island, it still consumes their collective conscience. Donations are made to the war effort, and news is sought of family members still there.

In Part II, we’re introduced to Saraswathi, whose family is from the northern part of the island and has remained in the country. Munaweera gets into the body of her Tamil characters, deftly telling their stories — a difficult thing to do, when writing about warring factions. Though Munaweera deals harshly with the leaders of the war, and doesn’t hide from the horrible actions some of her characters carry out, she is careful to preserve humanity in each of them.

With her second book, What Lies Between Us, which came out this February, Munaweera wanted to focus in and tell the story of one woman. This book tells the story of Ganga — who isn’t named until the second to last page of the epilogue — and of a crime she commits. From the beginning, we know Ganga has done something, but what that something is doesn’t become clear until the last few chapters of the novel.

“The walls of my cell are painted an industrial white,” the story begins. And though we are aware of this part of the book’s ending from the very beginning, it has the effect of heightening the climax. Munaweera doesn’t reveal her hand until she absolutely has to, until her readers are irretrievably invested in Ganga’s story.

As an author, Munaweera is like a benevolent but honest God, ruling her creations. As with her characters in Island, she depicts this convicted woman with love. Indeed, when the book comes to a close, and we see what Ganga has done, pity and care for her is elicited — not judgment.

Munaweera is clever enough to imply a harsh societal critique: that people with mental illnesses often don’t receive the help they need and, because of this, much worse things happen. She’s able to do this within her story, without impeding its momentum, or making her book into a polemic. Lies incites new ways of thinking about crime and punishment.

Her second book made the BBC’s list of ten best books of February and Buzzfeed’s 27 most exciting books of 2016.

__

Munaweera met her partner, Whit Missildine, when they became Craigslist roommates.

Missildine was born in Ohio and raised in Pennsylvania. When he met Munaweera, he had recently moved to California from New York City, where he went to school. They met to do a roommate interview, and she was late.

Munaweera was quiet, he said, going through a divorce, and “very hardcore into meditating.” They became friends and would often talk into the night.

Munaweera and Missildine, now 43 and 37, respectively, began dating and have been together for nine years. Though they started out as roommates, the two now choose to keep separate apartments, in the same building, his directly above hers.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Missildine. “A key aspect of our relationship is to respect each other’s space.”

He is the first reader for his wife’s work.

Before he saw Island, she had worked on it for five years. Missildine said he was committed to liking whatever she showed him, and that it was such a relief and “so awesome” that he could really enjoy it.

The couple has decided against having kids. They talk openly about the fact that Missildine recently had a vasectomy. Munaweera has never wanted children. Missildine hadn’t either, but he’d been open to the idea if the person he was with had wanted them.

Once the idea was definitely off the table it became unfathomable that they would have ever had children.

“The world’s overpopulated,” said Missildine. “Maybe we should all be reconsidering it, since it’s a huge environmental burden.”

Munaweera said the decision “should be taken as celebratory.”

Environmental concern went into this decision, but Munaweera’s razor-sharp passion for her work and non-parental life was also behind it.

Her friends speak of her big heart, of her willingness to help — all of their examples of her personality are active. Many of them said that she often brings the people in her life together around homemade Sri Lankan food.

Munaweera met her friend Ajesh Shah while out dancing one night.

She is the reason that Shah was able to move last year, helping him to recover from a broken heart and rebuild his life. She wrote his recommendation letter and suggested he move into her building.

“Effortlessly, she will inspire and help people that are in her life. She is extremely modest about it and won’t acknowledge or even realize the positive impact she can have,” Shah said. “At various points in my life, she has been my Florence Nightingale.”

Munaweera’s friend, Candi Martinez, said Munaweera has taught her how to honor her vulnerabilities, and acknowledge her discomforts and fears.

“A few summers back, she was visiting me in Hawai’i. I am an avid open ocean swimmer, so when at the beach with friends, I tend to forget that the ocean can stir up a lot of fear for people,” said Martinez. “We were visiting Kua Bay, a gorgeous white sand beach along the Kona Coast of the Big Island.”

It’s popular, there, to swim out to the rocks, climb to their peaks, and jump back into the ocean. Munaweera swam out with Martinez and they climbed to the top.

“When it came time to jump back in the water, her reservations kicked in,” said Martinez. “Soon, she was shaking. The rest of us were in the water, explaining why it was safe for her to jump back in.”

This was the first time Martinez saw Munaweera visibly scared.

“Here, this super goddess of a woman was showing me the fragile side of her human-ness. She received loving applause once she finally decided to make the jump,” said Martinez. “Nayomi is reflective, thoughtful, genuine and knows that life requires a leap of faith sometimes.”

Munaweera’s reach goes beyond her friends and out into communities across the world, through activism. Munaweera has regularly volunteered in a soup kitchen in San Francisco for years, serving food.

She also takes part in Write to Reconcile in Sri Lanka, a project begun in 2012 by Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai. Write to Reconcile brings together Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim kids who want to write, so that they might address issues of conflict, peace, reconciliation, memory, and trauma.

__

Munaweera’s home is colorfully decorated. Fabric drapes across the ceiling. Books abound: on shelves, the wooden coffee table, next to her bed. Her home is warm and welcoming, like its inhabitant. She’ll often turn the oven on, prop the door open, and sit in front of it — after all these years in the U.S., she still finds the cold of the Bay Area oppressive. Her bed is the hub of her writing life; the place where her research, her thoughts, and her experiences can come together to form her vivid novels.

For her friends and family, Munaweera is the center. They revolve around her, are inspired by her. She does interesting things, invites fellowship, incites new experiences.

And all the while, she writes. She doesn’t get hung up on her success or on how her books are being perceived. As soon as something is finished, she moves on to the next project.

It was a revelation to Munaweera that being a paid artist was possible in the U.S. Though she’s not a shy person, the legwork of functioning as an author exhausts her — on top of the writing, there’s the travel and the publicity, her teaching job.

“Any kind of outward stuff is draining,” she said.

When put this way, it makes sense that she seeks the solitude and intimacy of her bed as a workspace.

Munaweera says, sometimes, from a distance, she’s really proud of her work. At other times, she’s aware of its flaws. She avoids opening her published books unless she has to do readings.

“It’s always in the feedback,” she said. That’s when she knows what her work means in the world.

Munaweera left Sri Lanka when she was very young. Yet she was able to insert herself firmly into the Sri Lankan world, bringing in the folktales, landscape, class tensions, and political concerns. It was scary for her, writing about a war she hadn’t directly experienced and, at times, she felt very unsafe.

“People who talked about the war — journalists, activists, writers — they were disappearing,” she said.

Because she’s so compassionate towards both sides of the conflict, she was considered a “race traitor”.

In America, she is relatively safe. Some people have taken issue with her work, but that is bound to happen to any writer who engages with divisive topics like war and family, religion and nationalism. Overwhelmingly, the response to her work has been positive. She wrote — as Toni Morrison instructs — the book that she wanted to read. And now she has published her second and is deep into the writing of her third. Her readership will grow with each. Hers are the sort of books that you pass onto friends and family, the sort you read again. The truths and sweeping histories that cradle her characters are addictive dreamscapes, exercises in imagination not quickly forgotten.

Originally posted May 26, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by Sarah Hoenicke.

Spotlight #1: Amanda Earl

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series will appear the first Monday of every month beginning in June.

STATEMENT

First of a series of poems that takes language & imagery from the work of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton. Dealing with the physical & mental effects of entering menopause: hot flashes, cold flashes, temper tantrums, menstruation, sex drive, sleep troubles, creativity. Subjects a woman is not supposed to talk about.

two poems from “MacEwen’s Electric Garden”

Certain Dark Things*

she will drag the moon
from the midnight ink
of its sky, hurl it across
fields & plunge it into
unfathomable seas
holding it down
holding it down
this intensity is fermented
in the red depths of
self

electric, a garden
every rose she
tends will crackle
wither shiver
after her heat
has passed

she is a lover, yes she is
a lover of these flowers
but her clench stunts
their growth shreds their
leaves

entangled in the
gargantuan vines
of old fairy tales
that led skyward
she, a young girl
had different dreams
of lightning of thunder

& how she didn’t want the
handsome tulip w/ vacuous
smile but rather the stinging
nettle its wild brambles
to tear at her flesh to stir
her nature to match her
thorn for thorn

*Title from Neruda’s Sonnet XVII

Peri — shed

“Self, I want you now to be violent,
and without history,”
Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Thing is Violent

this bloody paradox destroyer
of the pet elled body resistor
to harmonies of egg &
cell if a lack but river
courses through a gush
monthly of wrath a poison
of platelets eye of temper
pinch of bitchery bubble bubble
toil & trouble stirs up
a boiling ocean of highs
& lows a two-year old’s
tantrum reborn in the shredded
violet the mulch of scarlet a mad
symphony of string instruments
competing w/ sobs a cacophony
hysteria inferno of the heart

Amanda Earl is a Canadian poet, publisher & pornographer who likes to think of herself as a trouble-maker. Her books are Kiki (long poems: Chaudiere Books, 2014); Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl (smutty short fiction: Coming Together, 2014); A World of Yes (an erotic novella: DevilHouse, 2015). Her latest chapbooks are firstwalks of the year (In/Words Press, 2015) & A Book of Saints (above/ground press, 2015). Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca & the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. For more information: AmandaEarl.com.

Originally posted May 23, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by rob mclennan.

Spit, Poet! 5 Spoken Word Collectives You Should Know

Spit, Poet! is a monthly series written by Taylor Steele that identifies the different and emerging trends, artists, and events in the slam community.

Though on the outside it looks as though spoken word and slam poetry are solitary ventures, there are actually quite a few ways in which poets can get together to share their art with the world. One of which is by slamming to be on a team representing a city/slam venue at Poetry Slam Inc.’s annual National Poetry Slam. These teams are comprised of a region’s top scoring poets. And though not necessarily inorganic, these teams only really exist for a few months out of the year, and might not band together to make work after the tournament. Another way poets create together is by putting together poetry collectives. What’s beautiful about the collectives that exist and tour and teach worldwide, is that they were created not only out of love for the medium but also out of these poets’ desire to work and create with one another. Simply put, they chose each other. Here are 5 collectives you should get to know:

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divine fabrics collective

photo: http://divinefabrics.tumblr.com/

Who They Are

divine fabrics collective (DFC) was founded in the fall of 2012 at an iHop on the Lower East Side. Safia Elhillo, Camonghne Felix, Sean Des Vignes and Aziza Barnes make up this crew of young blk poets, whose aim is to write with nuance, artfully shit-talk and deliver new work at high octane levels.

What They Say

Divine Fabrics Collective Interview

Safia Elhillo — Self Portrait With a Yellow Dress

Camonghne Felix — Meat: A Reflection on Street Harassment

Sean Des Vignes — Mother

Aziza Barnes — Aunt Jemima

Why I Like Them

These young blk/brown poets are inspirational, how they hold fast to their truths and speak them unapologetically.

Where To Find Them

http://divinefabricscollective.tumblr.com

http://thestriversrow.com/divine-fabrics-collective/

Dark Noise Collective

photo: https://fatimahasghar.com/projects/

Who They Are

Dark Noise Collective is a nationwide, multiracial, multi-genre collective featuring some of the most exciting, insightful, and powerful poets writing today. Dark Noise is comprised of Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, and Jamila Woods. These poets, diverse in content and form, find common ground in their commitment to using art as a site for radical truth telling. They explore themes of identity, intersectionality, trauma, and healing in accessible forms without sacrificing the highest standards of poetic craft. Dark Noise explodes archaic notions of page vs. stage with their dynamism in all arenas of verse. Dark Noise poets have been featured on film and television projects including HBO’s Brave New Voices, TV One’s Verses and Flow, and Louder than a Bomb. They are also well-published poets who have garnered honors such as Ruth Lilly Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowships, Pushcart nominations, and a host of publication awards.

What They Say

Fatimah Asghar — For Jonylah Watkins

Franny Choi — For Peter Liang

Nate Marshall — Prelude (R.I.P)

Aaron Samuels — Covered in Grass

Danez Smith — Genesissy

Jamila Woods — Black Girl Soldier

Why I Like Them

They’re like Avatars the way they genre-bend. From poetry, to prose, to music, they are killin’ the game.

Where To Find Them

https://www.facebook.com/TeamDarkNoise/

https://twitter.com/teamdarknoise

Reparations

Who They Are

Reparations is a poetic performance collective who will take over the world without the help of white folk. They don’t need you. Unless it’s monetary. Then, give it to them. These radical, black, queer poets perform and teach workshops around identity, activism, trauma, and healing. Reparations, comprised of Ashley August, Timothy DuWhite, Roya Marsh, and Taylor Steele (yours truly!), became a collective after winning the 2015 Northbeast Underground Tournament Slam.

Individually, they have performed at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Triad Broadway House, The Apollo, Cherry Lane Theatre, BAM, the United Nations, and many slam venues and universities across the nation. They have been published by such distinguished journals as Apogee Journal, Huffington Post, Blavity, The Body is Not an Apology, Blackberry: a magazine, The Rumpus, and many more. Their faces have been featured on Button Poetry, SlamFind, Def Jam, and “Orange is the New Black” — well, only one of them. They are ready to start a revolution. As a wise woman once said, “Pay me what you owe me!”

What They Say

Ashley August — The Game

Timothy DuWhite — Auntie Pearl

Roya Marsh — Blk Grl Puns

Taylor Steele — All These Bodies

Why I Like Them

I’m a little biased. So, I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Where To Find Them

teamreparations@gmail.com

Mayhem Poets

photo: mayhempoets.com

Who They Are

“Let’s go see a poetry show.” That is a sentence rarely proclaimed and usually responded to with cringes and excuses. The Mayhem Poets is comprised of writer/performers Mason Granger, Scott Raven, Mikumari Caiyhe, and Kyle Rapps. They are on a mission to change that. Having been dubbed “an amazing ride” by the New York Times, this mind boggling performance has been described as “The Simpsons meets Malcolm X at a Notorious B.I.G. concert”. These theatre-trained, comedically-gifted, lyrical virtuosos seamlessly blend raw elements of hip hop, theatre, improv and stand-up comedy to tell gut-wrenching truths that leave audiences forever changed.

What They Say

My Name Is

Martin Luther Queen

Mikumari Caiyhe — Sunshine

Why I Like Them

Their work transcends age. I’ll be laughing at them when I’m 50 and when, somehow, I’m 12 again.

Where To Find Them

http://www.mayhempoets.com/

https://www.facebook.com/MayhemPoets

The Other Black Girl

photo: http://www.otherblackgirl.com/Media

Who They Are

The Other Black Girl Collective is a Brooklyn-based black feminist poetry duo comprised of nationally acclaimed award winning authors Angel Nafis and Morgan Parker. Despite popular belief, we are not actually the same person. We aim to celebrate black female expression and sisterhood, honor and highlight the multiplicity of the black female experience, and push against tropes and stereotypes that smother and limit us, from Pootie Tang to Olivia Pope. Our work, deeply personal and individual, explores 21st century black American womanhood and its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, pop culture, femininity, family and politics. With energy, brutal honesty, dark humor, anger and pride, we aim to create a new Black Girl mythology– one centered around possibility and freedom.

We are finished being the only black woman– or worse, the only person of color– in a lineup for a poetry reading. We’re finished being the alternative to each other. We want to be called by our names.

What They Say

Angel Nafis — Conspiracy: a Suite

Morgan Parker — Brooklyn Is Masquerading As The World

Why I Like Them

Black Girl Realness Factor: 100

Where To Find Them

http://www.otherblackgirl.com/

https://twitter.com/OtherBlackGirl

Originally posted May 23, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by Taylor Steele.

Poets Who Will Not Remain Silent: Dispatch from Split This Rock! Poetry Festival 2016

“silence / from our imagination / in wave upon
wave / in a shipping container & I love you
in a box of shock you love me / in a cemented
dream / we’re a happy family /
with a great big hug and chains that leave no mark
Won’t you say you love me too?”

-Philip Metres, Sand Opera

With these lines, Philip Metres juxtaposes U.S. military language from an interrogation conducted at Guantanamo with lyrics from the children’s show theme song “Barney is a Dinosaur,” and we read in the collection notes that this seemingly innocuous jingle was used in the interrogation. Political commentary forms a key element in the aesthetics and range of language registers which form and inform the collection Sand Opera. This interweaving of poetry and social justice characterizes the spirit of the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, during which Metres led the poetry reading “Writing Beneath War: The Middle East,” and co-facilitated the panel discussion “Now What? Everyday Experience and Resistance in the Middle East,” drawing on his experience teaching Israeli and Palestinian literatures. Split This Rock holds poetry festivals in even numbered years, promising poems of provocation and witness, from poetic action and young voices of slam poetry to documentary poetry and eco-justice. Four days of panels, roundtables, readings, and community building around themes of social justice took place in Washington D.C. from April 14–17, 2016. Offerings ranged from the local to the international, from educational and academic to leadership and activism, and everything in between. Featured readings included sign language interpreters as well as work by disability activist poets, queer poets, and poets from diverse activist communities.

Each featured reading began by introducing a young poet and remembering the work of pioneering activist poets. Members of the DC Youth Slam Team shared their work, and Split This Rock made available poetry chapbooks by team members as well. In the collection Learning to Forgive Gravity, poet Hannah Smallwood offers thoughtful meditations on navigating chronic illness and queer identity. In the poem “9 Things No One Ever Told Me About Coming Out” she asserts,

Bisexuals, asexuals, and pansexuals have closets too.
But ours are more like wardrobes to Narnia
Because no one ever believes us
When we come out.

With these few lines, we gain a sense of the frustrations of being mislabeled and having our experiences erased, as well as a powerful voice reclaiming the human right to self-determination.

These same themes found a unique and empowering vehicle in the poems of Lauren K. Alleyne, first place winner of the 2016 Split This Rock Annual Poetry Award. In the elegiac “The Hoodie Stands Witness” from the collection Difficult Fruit, Alleyne imagines the perspective of the hoodie worn by slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin:

That day, he was thinking
of nothing in particular.
He was quiet in his skin;
tucked into the shade of me,
he was an easy embrace
until an old ancestral fear
lay its white shadow
across us like an omen.

The poem offers a striking access point into the realm where the personal intersects with political events and institutions. The lyricism of the lines and the sense of calm belie the warning of the last few lines. Alleyne’s economy of words works to situate the horror present in everyday situations. In the poem “John White Defends,” the title character, based on a non-fiction account, attempts to protect his home from racist teens on a delusionary revenge mission, as he worries for his son who is their target:

I wanted
to spare him the burning
crosses
the dangerous
brotherhoods
the needle
the bullet
the shackles
the whip of a merciless law
I wanted to spare him
this

The terse lines and tight line breaks create a sense of tension that builds until the final line, when we know exactly the terrible meaning of “this,” from which White wishes to spare his son.

A similarly careful arranging of lines emerges in the work of Mahogany L. Browne, #BlackPoetsSpeakOut activist who led a panel discussion and reading with an open mike session with co-organizer Amanda Johnston. #BlackPoetsSpeakOut invited Black poets to read poems of social justice, and to assert, in the words of poet Jericho Brown, “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.” Black poets and allies were invited to learn the history of the movement and allies were encouraged to support the right of Black poets to be angry and embrace the value of speaking up for justice. Poet Amanda Johnston spoke about and demonstrated the power of community building, as well as emphasizing the importance of self-care for activists, and the value of basic life skills like sleeping, eating, and resting as strategies for maintaining energy for activism.

Mahogany L. Browne’s linguistic acrobatics and language registers assert themselves in the collection RedBone, which also foregrounds self-care and forms of resilience, as well as methods of surviving difficult family, social, and societal situations. In the poem “RedBone in Greek,” the narrator’s mother, RedBone, takes on the role of a Greek gorgon in defense against an ex-husband:

First Husband walk in
Let the light vanish
Whole room close like fist
Squeeze air from throat
Redbone legs shake
But Redbone eyes ain’t move
Redbone whisper
“I make him stone He can’t hurt me, I make him stone”
Her eyes become graveyards
Redbone’s First Husband ain’t but a man to Medusa

We see the incantatory effect of the whispered words and the way in which Redbone takes power through recourse to the legend of Medusa and the ability to turn men to stone. Browne offers a variety of registers of language and subtle shifts so that we register several different aspects of the scene — identifying with Redbone, hearing her voice, seeing her from her daughter’s viewpoint — hovering somewhere between first person, second person, and third person narrative.

While Browne presents views on the relationships between identity and family, featured poet Linda Hogan, who was unable to attend the festival, but very much there in spirit, offers a broad view of family in her recent collected works, Dark. Sweet. Poems from the collection were recited by featured poets Rigoberto González, Zeina Hashem Beck. In the poem “The Petrified Steps,” Hogan’s narrator illustrates generational and locational ties:

I am the translator of old trees.
You ask how I earn this job.
It is because my ancestors carried the bones of our dead
such distances on our backs
in bundles and bags.
I come from those who read the past, carry it with us,
and just now I abandon the future
because I also read the faces of people
and not just trees, not just histories
or the bones of the gone.

Hogan’s narrators concern themselves with the discourse between people and animals and the interconnections between human generations and those of natural spaces.

The event “Farm to Table to Poem: A Food Justice Poetry Workshop,” led by Craig Santos Perez and Aiko Yamashiro also located social justice at the intersection of people, social ties, and the natural world, with a focus on food and meal preparation as communal and ecological events. The organizers discussed activism and poetry based in Hawai’i centered on the Pacific food justice and sovereignty movement, including activism at the boundaries between traditional food and healthy food preparation, with one example being an effort to prepare homemade spam from scratch as a community building activity centered on healthier and more community centered food preparation. The workshop leaders invited participants to write about their relationship between food and family, eating and kinship.

Another locationally oriented event, “Writing Beneath War: The Middle East,” featured readings by poets Zeina Hashem Beck, Philip Metres, and Solmaz Sharif on the theme of struggle against Orientalist approaches to reading and writing the Middle East. Metres and Sharif presented work at the boundaries of United States military documents and the ways in which these documents attempt erasures of personal narratives from the region and its diaspora communities. Hashem Beck, who recently won the first Rattle chapbook contest, read from her collection To Live in Autumn, a series of love poems for an ever changing Beirut. In a particularly memorable passage on the pleasures and struggles of living in and away from the city, the narrator of the poem “Dance: Dubai 2012” relates,

I re-member you, Beirut,
the heat the traffic the craziness the cigarettes
the melting mascara the smeared rooftops
the garbage the godless god-full sky the rain,
and I dance as you explode again today
and I dance as I explode again today
(let it rain let it rain let it rain)
I dance on your balconies
here in this desert until
a faint female voice calls out
a question, says turn–
we carry cities, instead of angels,
on our shoulders, we trail them
behind us like old hurts.

The city appears as explosion, rain, dance, a shawl of memories and old wounds, a puzzle to be reconfigured in memory, put back together after falling apart. The narrator performs an uneasy dance with an imperfect, but much loved city from a far country.

In the work of Solmaz Sharif, distance takes on a different hue of meaning. Watching from a distance implicates the viewer in military surveillance and cognitive dissonances. In the poem “LOOK,” we feel the dangerous juxtaposition of the personal and the political:

Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat
sensors were trained on me, they could read
my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through
the wardrobe;

As Hannah Smallwood invites us into a world in which the story of a wardrobe stands for layers of personal identity and self-assertion in the face of erasure, here a wardrobe offers no resistance against military invasion of privacy in both the theoretical and very real senses. Split This Rock Poetry Festival provides attendees with just this kind of range in terms of the aesthetics and social justice elements of poetry. It serves as a welcome respite from a poetry world in which formal and artistic concerns often seem far removed from the role of the social justice activist. The festival provides a brief but thorough opportunity for self-care and community support for those of us at the crossroads between poetry and activism.

Originally posted May 11, 2016 on https://medium.com/drunken-boat by LynleyShimat Lys.