Manuel Gonzalez Features at East of Edith on Monday, May 7th!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s time for some more good poetry news! This coming Monday, May 7th, at 7:00 pm, at the Projects 3614 High Street NE is our open mic night known as East of Edith. This week you’ll get a chance to hear feature poet Manuel Gonzalez  share his work!

A refresher for you or if you’re new, about the East of Edith Open Mic at the Projects: all poets on the open mic are invited to share two poems, four minute limit (the poets can opt to either read their own work or works by other poets). The East of Edith Open Mic night has been very busy being awesome – have you been yet? You haven’t? How come? What’s up? Oh, really? That’s ok – you should still come to this and check it out. You should totally (for reals) come and listen or read or do BOTH. Please come early to get a cup of juice or coffee and some snacks and then enjoy on all the things happening at the microphone…and all for whatever you can offer for the hat pass. Which is to say, pay what you can if you can. Come, enjoy the poetry. So much good poetry, every Monday night, at East of Edith.

So. Here’s a little bit about Manuel:

Manuel is a performance poet who began his career in the poetry slam. He has represented Albuquerque many times on a national level as a member of the Albuquerque poetry slam team. Manuel has appeared on the PBS show, Colores, in “my word is my power.” He was one of the founding members of the poetry troupe The Angry Brown Poets. Manuel teaches workshops on self expression and poetry in high schools and youth detention centers. He also works with an art therapist to help incarcerated young men express themselves. He is one of the coaches and mentors for the Santa Fe High Poetry Slam team. Manuel is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother’s family is from Barelas. His father’s family is from a small town in Northern New Mexico called Anton Chico, and his father was the lead singer of the band Manny and the Casanovas. He identifies himself as being Chicano.The history, culture, and spirituality of his people are among his inspirations. “I’m proud to be from New Mexico, and to me it’s more than just green chile and desert. It’s seeing the value of famila and respect. It’s the Rio Grande valley and Santuario de Chimayo. It is feasts, dance, poetry and prayer.” His connection to his culture helps him connect to his students. Manuel teaches poetry as a means for self expression. Looking within oneself and examining ones roots is the essence of the type of poetry he works with. Emotions, feelings, experiences, and prose as an historical and cultural context is the goal of his workshops. Self esteem, finding something to say, figuring out how to say it eloquently, and letting your voice be heard are just some of the benchmarks in Manuel’s workshop.

***

The East of Edith Poetry Open Mic takes place every Monday night (yes, every Monday night!) at the Projects, 3614 High Street NE. Sign-up to read between 6:30 and 6:50 pm.

Hope to see you all on Monday night!

-Rich Boucher

…….and this just in! The First Annual Free Your Speech Poetry Party at the Harwood Art Center

This news comes to LPG from Aja Oishi:

 

This Friday, May 4, come celebrate the First Amendment with poetry!  The ACLU is holding its first annual Free Your Speech poetry party at the Harwood Art Center to benefit the law student ACLU chapter.  There will be a bake sale and silent auction, along with a reading from five fabulous Albuquerque poets: Lisa Gill, Tani Arness, Cathy Arellano, Damien Flores, and Erin Northern.  The featured poets will be reading from 8-9 pm, with an open mic to follow.

The law school chapter of the ACLU is raising funds to help bring Constitutional Law classes to local high schools; to send law student lobbyists toSanta Fe; and to provide a stipend for a summer position at the ACLU-NM.  We want to foster a strong alliance between progressive lawyers, activists and artists, and we believe in the power of the spoken word to build a progressive community.

Please come enjoy poetry and support the ACLU!

Date: Friday, May 4

Time: 8-10pm

Place: The Harwood Art Center, 7th and Mountain

Tickets: $5 suggested donation at the door

 

Dig it,

Rich Boucher

FYI: Next Duende Reading in Placitas March 18th

Carol Moscrip, Deborah Coy, Rich Boucher
Poetry Live Performance
March 18^th Sunday at 3pm
and Pamela Hirst will introduce the new Beatlick Press

the stunning trio Deborah Coy, Pamela Adams Hirst (publisher) & Carol Moscrip

Rich Boucher the amazing performance poet who will keep you in stitches

(don’t worry Anasazi Fields Winery will help get you out)

Let’s Celebrate, It’s March! And poetry is alive – it’s more than alive – it might save your life!

Duende Poetry Series, Anasazi Fields Winery,

Placitas, New Mexico

http://www.anasazifieldswinery.com/ To reach the winery, turn onto Camino de los Pueblitos from Highway 165 in the old village of Placitas, across from the Presbyterian Church. Drive past two stop signs and turn left into the winery parking lot. From outside Placitas, take I-25 to Exit 242, drive six miles to Placitas and follow Camino de los Pueblitos through two stop signs to the winery. Non-alcoholic drinks will be available!

A Free Event in Celebration of America’s Freedom of Speech

DONATIONS TO PERPETUATE THIS VERBAL FROLIC ARE GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED

FYI: March 18 Event–Deviant Moons

Hi so Zach Kluckman has this news:

“Good evening folks~

Exciting news to share with you all! Mark your calendars for Sunday March 18th because this one is beyond comprehension!

Deviant Moons: A PeaceLuck Gathering with Houston’s Premiere Spoken Word Artist, Seth Walker

The third in our new PeaceLuck Gathering art series is going to be the biggest, most irrepressible phenomenon yet!

Featuring the notorious poet Seth Walker, who is Houston’s premiere spoken word artist. His magnetic personality and electric humanism crackle in every performance, providing audiences with an incomparably exhilarating and uplifting poetic experience. For these reasons, he has become of the nation’s top touring acts!
is one of the top national acts

Joining Seth will be two of Albuquerque’s brightest musical lights, Reviva! and Bat Wings for Lab Rats. Undisputedly two of the most uplifting live acts you’ll ever see.

Also joining in the line-up are poetry icons Jessica Helen Lopez, Albuquerque’s 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam champ and local favorite Ben Bormann.

We’ll be having a limited open mic as well as a potluck community dinner to round out the evening, so please join us in celebrating community, change and the power of music and poetry to move the soul (and the booty)~

Admission is a suggested donation of $10 (student and bulk discounts available) and because this is a benefit event, a portion of the proceeds go to support the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, as well as the artists.”

Sunday, March 18
5 – 9 pm
Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice
202 Harvard SE
$10 admission

Kenneth P. Gurney Features at East of Edith on Monday, November 7th!

Hey! *taps the mic…….*

It’s time for some more good poetry news! This coming Monday, November 7th, at 7:00 pm, at the Projects 3614 High Street NE is our open mic night known as  East of Edith. This week you’ll get a chance to hear feature poet Kenneth P. Gurney share his poetry!

A refresher for you or if you’re new, about the East of Edith Open Mic at the Projects: all poets on the open mic are invited to share two poems, four minute limit (the poets can opt to either read their own work or works by other poets).  The East of Edith Open Mic night has been very busy being awesome – have you been yet? You should come. You should totally come and listen or read or do both. Please come early to get a cup of juice or coffee and some snacks and then dig on all the things happening at the microphone…and all for whatever you can offer for the hat pass. Which is to say,  pay what you can if you can. Come, enjoy the poetry. So much good poetry, every Monday night, at East of Edith.

A little bit about Ken:

Kenneth P. Gurney grew up outside of Chicago in the town of Glen Ellyn, IL.  Currently he lives in Albuquerque, NM, USA with his beloved Dianne.  During the “in between” he lived in 7 different US states: either near family or national parks.

He started writing poetry in 1993 after 17 years as a visual artist.  He picked up the poetry bug in Milwaukee, WI where he participated in the slam scene with little success at slams (1 win in 408 attempts).  Gurney’s poems appear on line and in print by publications in the USA, England, Ireland, Austraillia and Canada.  Over the years he’s garnered 3 nominations for pushcart prizes, though there are no wins tucked into is belt.

Gurney’s latest book is titled This is not Black & White.  There are four other collections published and available to the public.

His first adventure in publishing poetry occurred in Milwaukee, WI with Hodge Podge Poetry, which went from 1995 to 1998.  The second publication he edited was Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry from 1998 to 2006 that lead him to the internet and the web.  He had a short stint as editor of Origami Condom in 2007 & 2008.  In 2010 he started up the anthology Adobe Walls which contains the poetry of New Mexico.  He is very proud of the 60+ issues of the magazines and anthologies he helped place into the literary world.

Over the years Gurney has hosted open mics in Milwaukee; WI, Frederick, MD; Port Angeles, WA; and Albuquerque, NM.  He has greatly enjoyed the Soup Bowl poetry parties he hosted in past homes, as well as the living room salon in Albuquerque.

Although he has won several minor prizes for his poetry, he is most please with one of his poems being selected to be spray painted on an anonymous wall by a graffiti artist somewhere in New Jersey.

For a list of publication credits and links for book purchases please visit  http://www.kpgurney.me/Poet/Welcome.html

***

The East of Edith Poetry Open Mic takes place every Monday night at the Projects, 3614 High Street NE. Sign-up to read between 6:30 and 6:50 pm.

Hope to see you all on Monday night!

-Rich Boucher

Look Who Is Coming to East of Edith This Week! Lucky Us…

Last week was a stellar, moving, grounded, intense performance by Beata Tsosie-Pena at East of Edith, and Local Poets Guild Monday open mic continues its magnificent run of features with Olivia Gatwood.

Olivia is already a renowned performer and poet! And she’s just getting started. The bio on her FB poetry page says, too modestly:

 ”Olivia Gatwood is a young poet who currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After moving out of the country at age 10, she discovered writing as a new past time. What was once short stories, soon became short poems and eventually she ventured into the world of slam poetry. Olivia has been a part of the Albuquerque Youth Slam team for the past two years and was featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices in October of 2010.  In the future, Olivia hopes to move to a larger city and will publish a book by 2015.”

If you’re unfamiliar with East of Edith, it’s a pretty hot open mic. “Hot” meaning “literary”…. everybody’s working and writing. Each person on the open mic is invited to share two poems, four minute limit, and often they share one of their own and one classic. It’s a rollicking good time, with a serious edge, serious listeners, good fun, happy chatter. Arrive early to get coffee and snacks, read, listen, catch an outstanding feature…  and all for whatever you can put into the hat. Meaning: pay what you can if you can. Come, enjoy poetry.

We also have a fabulous rotating cast of hosts who are usually up to a wee bit of something, like sharing classics between, or offering writing prompts.

Enjoy! Hope to see you Monday!

–LG

L.A./L.A. Land: Weave your way to the Roost

After you attend the world class Friday/Saturday world music festival globalquerque at NHCC and have caught Hand-to-Tongue during the free Global Fiesta, you’ll want to wild your brain into yet another fully flush synapse-firing groove with an L.A. quartet and L.A Poet. Yes, Sunday night at 7:30 pm for a mere minimum donation of $5, you can seat yourself in a cozy sofa at The Projects (3614 High St. NE) and kick back for an evening of SLUMGUM that opens with poet Brendan Constantine. And you may also get to hear from his Write Bloody Touring Partner….

This is a big one. Not only is it the second-to-last, but Brendan’s back in ABQ to do more word-slinging…. AND each of the members of SLUMGUM has individually composed a piece of music that involves poetry or text in some way. A superb show that truly will capture the spirit of the collaboration between tuba-player/Roost-curator Mark Weaver and Local Poets Guild.

And don’t forget. There are only two more weeks left in the Roost. The last Sunday in September, I’m up as “replacement poet” to perform with DJ Duo with Joseph Sabella and J.A.Deane (whom I have an album with along with CK Barlow—there’s one track actually up in our audio archive here). Really looking forward to these last two weeks of the Roost–won’t miss them for anything and hoping you’ll come out and help celebrate and enjoy… It’s time.

–lg

Hand-To-Tongue: Reed, Tanaya, Teresa

This Saturday at 1 pm in the Wells Fargo Theater at the National Hispanic Culture Center, Local Poets Guild presents Hand-to-Tongue: A Celebration of Threatened Languages with Reed Adair Bobroff, Tanaya Winder, and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. This showcase is our collaboration with the amazing world music festival Globalquerque, takes place during the free daytime programming of the Global Fiesta, and is going to be powerful: a look at the loss of Native languages, the work of preservation of Navajo, the joy and intimacy of American Sign Language—with sign language and vocal interpreters on site to make everything accessible. Poet Sari Krosinsky has written a nice article for UNM today which gives a bit more background and information.

Reed, at 17, has already been featured on HBO as part of their look at Brave New Voices, the national Youth Slam. Tanaya, still in progress with her MFA at UNM, has been winning prestigious awards left and right for poems, including one from AROHO. Teresa might well be the first deaf woman in this country to earn her PhD in Philosophy. Me, I’ll be the proud host, eager to take in everything they have to say–or sign!

Please join us. And remember, the Global Fiesta runs from 10:30 to 4:oo with all kinds of amazing events and languages. See this link for the schedule.

And you won’t want to miss all the world music festivities of Friday and Saturday night either, so check out the schedule and affordable pricing here at this link.

Big weekend. More posts forthcoming.

–LG

The Beat of a Different Trumm

 

 

 

 

 

So, I’m going to be hosting the East of Edith open mic this coming Monday, September 5th, and I am absolutely ready to leap out of my chair and rocket into the night sky; I’m so charged up for it! As you may have read earlier, if you’ve been keeping up, Albuquerque poet Aaron Trumm and his band are going to be the featured poet (yes, I intentionally phrased it that way) on the 5th. I recently paid a visit to Aaron’s practice space to get myself a little sneak preview of what he and his band are going to be bringing to the table, and I can honestly tell you all that you should prepare yourselves for a good, solid, intense FLOORING. And I don’t mean this kind of flooring, either.

It was a total pleasure to meet the band:

Aaron Trumm – lead vocals, piano/keys
Nathan Menhorn – drums
Mike “Dr. Thunda” Clifford – bass
Shanti Thomas – guitar

This line-up, Aaron informed me, has been “slowly working up stuff for about six months – this Monday will be our first gig as a config”, but you will find that very hard to believe when you hear what Aaron and Co. have put together. I would attempt to describe the sound/artform/genre for you, based upon what I heard at the rehearsal, but I feel it would be an insane thing to do, since what I heard is comprised of so many diverse influences and musical/poetic schools of thought. Brace yourselves, is what I really want to say.

I’d also like to ask for your help this Monday night. We (Lisa and I and all of the other guest hosts) are trying to streamline and smooth out the running of the open mic, and, in furtherance of that, I want to ask that if you are planning on coming out to the reading and you have an announcement you would like to make, please either bring it with you written out so that I can announce it at the beginning of the show (we’re looking to have all the announcements made at the very beginning of the show) or you can email me any announcement that you would like me to make at my email, which is rabbitinvasion (at) gmail (dot) com. It would really be a huge help to the EofE reading’s flow. And I don’t mean this kind of flow, either.

So, to reiterate:

– I like Black Raspberry ice cream

– Aaron Trumm and his awesome band are going to be the featured poet

– Please bring any announcements with you, so that I can get them all to the mic before we kick off the night

When? This Monday night, September 5, 2011 at 7 pm

Where? the Projects, 3614 High Street NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico

I hope to see you all there!

- Rich Boucher

Brian Hendrickson: The Roost Playback OOT Style

A Sense of Play: On the OOT Trio’s 8/14 Performance at The Roost’s 8x8x8 Series, Sundays at The Projects

It began imperceptibly, a jangling from saxophonist Tracy McMullen rummaging through a tin lunch pail of random metal objects; drummer Rob Wallace adjusting, readjusting his stool, arranging his incomplete skeleton of a set—snare drum, hi-hat, a disassembled bass(?); Hal Onserud’s double bass rising quietly in the background to yawn as if just

waking up. All the mundane chaos of musicians finding their bearings on the stage. Which is exactly what the OOT Trio wanted the audience to think. Then rethink.

As something bordering on organized chaos—undeniably intentional, for lack of a better word; momentous—arose from the various cranking and ratcheting apparati, foot shuffling, bells, I found myself uncontrollably giddy. That’s right. I do my best to wear my masculinity on my sleeve, but I was giddy—maybe not schoolgirl giddy, but pre-sexual kindergartener loose on the playground giddy. I glanced over my shoulder through the dark deepened by The Projects’ pitch black walls, accented only by graffiti catching stage light, at the audience around me, all grinning as foolishly as I was. How could we refrain? We were watching grownups lost in play. Organized chaos, wherein the only perceptible organizing force was the occasional refrain from McMullen’s saxophone, or often an incomprehensible mantra muttered by Wallace through a vuvuzela. But mostly the “organization” was an intuitive fluidity negotiated between musicians, each riffing off the other. Like teenagers flying in a stolen car through the midnight streets of a dead town, they were testing what the rest of us would let them get away with. Where our ears would let them take us. And the audience’s foolish grins were all telling them, “Drive.”

I am not an aficionado of improvisational or experimental jazz. As a poet, I live and die by the integrity of the line. And when I play, I play seriously. I demand your attention. I will make you work. But on Sunday night, listening to, watching, relishing the OOT Trio at play, I was reminded that experimentation isn’t always pretentious. Be it a song or a poem, we often brush off what doesn’t immediately make sense to us, assuming the composer is intentionally talking over our heads—as if we’re being forced to listen to some elite club’s inside joke, and we’re the butt of it. Much of the false dichotomy of stage/page poetry arises from this central insecurity. We demand to “feel” the words, sounds, images right away, meaning we demand that they make the kind of sense to us that we are conditioned to expect. But the end result of such an unwavering demand is your-way, right-away, fast food art. And what could be more pretentious than demanding that everything always make sense to you? On the other hand, what could be less pretentious than pure, unadulterated play?

I’m not saying meaning-, sense- and music-making have no place in art. Sometimes we just have to tell it like it is. Truth must be spoken to power. The curse must be thrown, the lie given to the liar. And the latent energy of form must be harnessed through a devotion to craft—not just when we resist, but also when we celebrate. “To every thing there is a season,” says the author of Ecclesiastes. Personally, I’d like to more often give myself permission to play with abandon, knowing by watching the OOT Trio that all my years of seriously studying craft should sufficiently inform the choices I intuitively make. I want my audience, whether stage or page, to be reminded of what it’s like to be children again, to find value in harnessing their full creative potentials unbounded by the need to make themselves understood, but also to appreciate the almost imperceptible intonations of a very adult devotion to craft underlying my seemingly unbridled commitment to the moment and all its possibilities. I don’t know how in the hell I’m going to do this with any success. The OOT Trio made it look and sound easy, but that’s all part of the illusion. Regardless, I’d like to give it a try.

Even the littlest bit of the OOT Trio’s adventurous sense of play would go a long way in shaking up our various poetry scenes here in Albuquerque (my poetry included), and the current partnership between the Local Poets Guild and The Roost in hosting the 8x8x8 series is the perfect catalyst for just such a shake-up.

–Brian Hendrickson

(Thanks Brian for this!!! Brian was also the featured poet kicking off the OOT performance… Next week Bob Reeves and Sari Krosinsky open for THin Air Trio at 7:30 pm on Sunday August 21 $5 cover and venue is The Projects at 3614 High STreet NE, just east of edith, north of candelaria, through the garage doors…)