Local Poets Guild has tix to give away for Urban Verbs on Friday June 17th. Carlos Contreras says, “[For the tix giveaway,] How about [calling for submissions] something along the lines of a time when people “came back, or went to, music” we’ve all had those moments in the car, shower, after a break up, the day of a raise… that that song just makes sense! Music moves us! It flows through our lives’ and makes us all members of the same club….. we believe hip hop is a cultural dialogue that builds communities…. something that speaks to the heart of music being able to do that…”
This is how you can get free tix to Urban Verbs on Friday night: Write us and tell us how music moves you. Let us in on a particular instant or story. It’s a very loose prompt— a time when music mattered. And you can write in with poetry or prose. You can even tell us how music impacts your poetry. (I may do that myself for fun as Eminem inspired a pile of hard core geeky form poems from me.) Anyhow, the deal is simple. We have ten tickets to give away to Friday night’s performance. That’s right, 10!!! You can save yourself $12 dollars. You can simultaneously enter dialogue with your community on this website. Hope you’ll participate. Just email responses to localpoetsguild at yahoo dot com as soon as you can…. and the first ten responses get tix and we’ll set you up for Friday night the 17th. (We’ll also post responses online on the website.)
[Note: This prompt is for adults. Youth can get free tix direct for Sunday's show which is subsidized by various donors. If you need info on how to get tickets for youth, query me and I'll point you in the right direction.]
For more information on what Urban Verbs is, the official scoop, see previous post.
Here’s what Urban Verbs is to me: an example. A beautiful example of what happens when three people–Contreras, Bellamy, & Diles–come together and trust each other enough to tackle large subjects of disenfranchisement and reclamation. Urban Verbs is a triumph of spirit, an offering of sustenance to the community–all achieved through the hard work of collaboration. Not to mention, the show does what I’m most fond of: reap interdisciplinary bounty with music, film, performance, and poetry. It’s a joy to watch–and in many ways, Urban Verbs is an explicit call for more arts action from the community. Poets step up. Go see the show and get inspired to try what your own authentic voice requires.
LG
[Photos taken at the Projects 3614 High Street by Antonio Rael. Thanks!]
We’d like you to write about a paragraph–or more. I’ll keep you posted as people earn tix though there may be a mini delay. Remember to email your responses to localpoetsguild at yahoo dot com
It was the summer of 1961, and I was in summer school at Cal. Berkeley. I was taking German 102 at the time, and had dedicated myself to hearing the symphonies of Beethoven in the library at lunch. In German 102 we were reading a Cultural Graded Reader on the life of Beethoven. It seemed that late in life Beethoven had taken to pouring a bucket of water over his head while sitting at the piano composing the Fifth Symphony. It was in the summertime, he was nonetheless wearing his greatcoat, and in the throes of composition he must have overheated considerably. Doctors later attributed this habit of his to his increasing deafness, a deafness which may have contributed to the extreme difficulty musicians encountered in completing the later movements of the Fifth Symphony. The Cultural Reader called this his Abkuhlungsmethode, his cooling-off method. Reading this story, true or not, added to my enjoyment of hearing the Fifth that summer in the tower of Berkeley library. It did seem very hard to perform, I must say.
John Crawford
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