Writers Out Loud: An Evening of Prose – Wednesday, June 13th!

On Wednesday night, June 13th, at 7:30 pm, the Local Poets Guild welcomes the organizers and participants of the city of Albuquerque’s Dime Stories Project to the stage at The Projects for a special evening of prose called Writers Out Loud: An Evening of Prose. This is going to be a very special night and for the literary community of Albuquerque! The featured readers for the night will include Molly Beer, Dan Darling, Suzanne Richardson, and Susan Sherman.

Included here for your information are the bios of the participants for the night:

 Molly Beer, a regular contributor to Velamagazine--a literary travel journal written by women–is a terrible traveler. She reads books about Africa while camping in Tibet, prepares food she learned to make in Italy in her Mexican kitchen, or writes obsessively about El Salvador while living on a rooftop in Ecuador. Worse still, she can’t pack, she suffers from motion sickness, she is terrified of volcanoes, and she once (three days into the Aldo Leopold wilderness) tore up the map IIf she couldn’t write her way to the sense of things, she would probably just stay home. Currently an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University, Molly Beer’s travel writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica,Perceptive Travel, Glimpse, and Best Women’s Travel Writing (2012), among others, and has been deemed “Notable” by Best American Travel Writing (2006). She is also the co-author of Singing Out (Oxford, 2010).

 Suzanne Richardson was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, where she received an alternative education at Carolina Friends School K-12. She then graduated from Bard College in 2005 with a degree in English and Creative Writing. Suzanne earned her MFA at the University of New Mexico and is currently the visiting assistant professor of Creative Nonfiction at Utica College in New York. She teaches English and creative writing there. Suzanne was editor-in-chief of Blue Mesa Review 2010-2012. Her nonfiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, issue 11 and is forthcoming in New Haven Review. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review, The Smoking Poet, and PANK Magazine. Her fiction is forthcoming in Front Porch, and has appeared in MAYDAY Magazine.

 Dan Darling is a native of Albuquerque. He spent the last twenty years wandering across the United States, Europe, China, and Australia, working as a circus performer, an IRS agent, a café manager, a bartender, a writer, and a magician. He earned his MFA in creative writing and now teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.

 Poet, playwright, and a founding editor of IKON magazine, Susan Sherman has published four collections of poetry; a poetry, essay and short fiction collection, The Color of the Heart, Writing from Struggle and Change (Curbstone, 1990) and a memoir, America’s Child: A Woman’s Journey through the Radical Sixties (Curbstone Press, 2007.) She has had twelve plays produced off-off Broadway. Her translation of Shango de Ima (Doubleday) won eleven AUDELCO awards for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe production in 1996. Among her many awards are a NYFA fellowship for creative nonfiction, a NYFA Fellowship in poetry and a Puffin Foundation Grant.

The reading will also include DimeStories, 3-minute stories read by
the author, from Merimee Moffitt, Lauren Baldwin, and Dee Cohen.

 Merimée Moffitt is the co-host of Duke City DimeStories– which hosts a monthly open mic on the Third Thursdays of every month. Merimée, pronounced like Desiree, arrived in NM from Portland in 1970 in a car full of men, her dog, her frying pan, cutting board, and a handful of baubles. She has an MA from UNM in English earned while teaching and raising four kids with her husband, Randy. Her first home in NM was a growers’ cabin in a valley below Vallecitos.

 Dee Cohen is a writer now living in the Albuquerque area. Her poems have been recently published in the New Mexico journals Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, andMas Tequila Review. She is a frequent participant in Albuquerque’s DimeStories Open Mic. Dee is also a photographer and has been showcasing photos–the beautiful, the intriguing, the curious and the quirky images of Albuquerque–on DukeCityFix.com.

To recap what’s going down for you -

The date and time: Wednesday, June 13th, 7:30 pm
The location: The Projects, 3614 High Street NE, Albuquerque NM
(Just East of Edith and North of Candelaria, through the open garage doors)

Hope you can make it!

- Rich Boucher

The Luck of Listening

From the pen of Don McIver:

I am a lucky guy.   Not only am I blessed with creativity, good friends, love, and more, but I live in a town that is conscious, thoughtful and creative.   Sometimes I forget this.  Sometimes I crawl up on my soapbox and want to proclaim that things would be better if this didn’t happen, or things would be better is they listened to me.   But sometimes, I’m lucky, and I decide to listen.  And though I was on the bill, I was lucky because I got to listen.  On Sunday, March 5th, 2012, at the Outpost Performance Space, John Crawford, Amanda Sutton, and others decided to put together a really great line-up of people who needed to to vent but also add their voices to the chorus of voices about the injustice, the short-sightedness, the racism of the Tucson Unified School Districts not only living up to the letter of HB 2281, but going even further by banning certain texts.   As a teacher, this strikes me as stupid.   As an American, it strikes me as counter to everything we say we value.  And as a human, it strikes me as, simply, wrong.   So a day after being so blessed to hear the thoughtful words of fellow poets, I’m humbled and grateful.  I’m humbled that my words were part of the show, were part of the gestalt that made this night one for the record books.   So thank you Richard Vargas, Margaret Randall, Levi Romero, Mary Oishi, Gary Brower, Andrea Serrano, Jessica Helen Lopez, Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras, Tanaya Winder, Yasmeen Najmi, and Brian Hendrickson.  In addition, thank you SWOP and Los Jardines Institute.  Words and ideas matter, and tonight they made the world…better.
Don McIver

beva sanchez-padilla Features at East of Edith on Monday, November 14th!

Good tidings to all!

It’s time for some more good poetry news! This coming Monday, November 14th, 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
beva sanchez-padilla share her 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 should come to this. 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 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 beva:

beva sanchez-padilla is a native new mexican, trained in film, a published poet and a produced playwright.  her film and theater work includes: el corrido de emma tenayuca, letty y su mama, la guadalupe que camina,  mali and maya: another story of malinche and de mujer a mujer.   she has worked as a producer, reporter,  videographer for six television stations, was an artist in residence for the san antonio independent district for seven years and now manages the gutierrez hubbell house history museum in the south valley of ‘burque.

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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

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…)

16 Poets at Edith of Edith Last Night – An Attempt At A Recap

My head is still a little dizzy from it. There’s still so much to think about after last night’s stellar East of Edith Open Mic at the Projects. I know that this word can easily be overused, but it was inspiring to see a full house on a Monday night for poetry; there were sixteen (yes, 16) poets on the open mic list last night, all of them reading intelligent, engaging and thought-provoking works of their own and poems by other authors, too. The flow of all the poems last night to me seemed quite remarkable; as the host, it was stunning to see how one poet’s contribution to the open mic seeming to perfectly complement the next poet’s contribution – this pattern carried out through the whole night and to me it almost seemed as if everyone was on the exact same wavelength – such a rare thing to witness and experience. And talk about range. The subjects for the poems last night were all over the map and just right. Survival of physical and emotional abuse, requiem,  current and topical rhapsodies in snark, Bob Dylan,  fantasy, terror, and fairy tales to name only a few of the places we were all taken to last night. There was so, so much range in the poems read last night; I have hosted hundreds of open mic nights in my time and I have to say that last night was one of the best.

It was (and is) an honor to host an event like this. I love how organically this reading is developing. It’s becoming quite strong, with its own characteristics fleshing themselves out week after week. In my experience it can take months, if not years, for a local poetry reading to begin to acquire the traits that this reading is already showing off. If you’re a poet and you’ve stopped by here for the first time today, reading this post, please come to the East of Edith and see for yourself what I’m describing here. A couple of quick words of thanks are in order here; thank you so much to all those who gave generously to the donation box; thank you to Mitch Rayes for hooking up the nice overhead fan and the new lights for the stage; thank you to Aaron Greenwood for bringing some nice fresh fruits for everyone, and thank you to Jules Nyquist for bringing some delicious pecans for everyone, as well!

Last night, in addition to the prize of getting to host East of Edith, I was also able to provide a (hopefully) fun prompt for the poets: share a phrase or a sentence, during your time at the mic, that you are sure no one could either begin a poem with or base a poem on. I’m anxious to learn (at some future point) what results may come of this. Here are the phrases I was able to collect, if you would like to try your hand at making a poem out of any of these results (if I missed a couple, I apologize; it was difficult to transcribe some of this as rapidly as they were delivered – I’m looking at YOU, Don McIver!):

“The Speaker of the House can be found on certain, but not all, beads of the Rosary.” – Reeves

“Literally nothing happened today.” – Krohn

“The road to salvation is a three-way with Palin and Beck.” – Greenwood

“When the doctors pulled the clarinet from my anus, I swore I’d have my revenge on that baboon.” – Maxson

“Great, I’m dead.” – Rayes

“The silly putty in his thong did not redound well upon the rebound.” – Crandall

“I ran into my grandmother at the orgy; my heart was a sinking galleon aboard the Titanic.” – Boucher

“A toast to Sir Edward Shakelton’s oldest bottle of whiskey, found buried & frozen at the South Pole.” – Nyquist

“Music goes up; music goes down; I speak but there is no sound.” – Dahvid

“Plutonium: I probably lit a candle – probably.” – Warren

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Thank you so much to Kenneth, Bob, Aaron, Teresa, Jules, Jennifer, Mitch, Nate, Sari, Stewart, Striving, Dahvid, Susy, Don, Eric, and Sirena. And thank you, Lisa Gill, for entrusting me with doing this thing last night.

All the best,

Rich Boucher

June 28, 2011 – Speak, Poet: Voz, Palabra y Sonido in Pictures

If you did not get a chance to make it out to the inaugural night of the newest once-a-month open mic night in Albuquerque, Speak, Poet: Voz, Palabra y Sonido, allow me to say that you missed out on one hell of a night. My apologies to those whose snaps I took that do not appear here; my camera did not cooperate with me very well that night and so these are the best, most usable shots I could glean from the entire batch of snaps. Speak, Poet: Voz, Palabra y Sonido, held at the gorgeous El Chante: Casa de Cultura, was an absolute wonder of an open mic night and the house was nearly standing-room-only for the entire evening. It bears stressing that Andrea Serrano, in her capacity as host and organizer of this event, did something quite cool and unique with the format of this open mic night: no poets on the open mic were permitted to offer up introductions to their poems. The rule was/is this: get up and speak your poem. Let your poem speak for you. The audience was encouraged to yell out, “Speak, poet!” if any poets should happen to run afoul of the rule and start prefacing their work. For this first night, everyone kept to the guideline and this made for a most compelling structure for an open mic. Being permitted to simply say what the title of your poem is and nothing more presents an attractive challenge to poets who may be accustomed to a lot of back-story leg room at other open mics. The open mic was stunningly complimented/balanced by the works of visiting feature poets Cathy Arellano and Ara Cruz, both of whom offered engaging and captivating sets of poetry covering a full range of topics emotions, forms and voicings. Mixed in throughout the breaks in the night were the talents of DJ Chachi. I could rave some more, but I will simply say that this is a must-attend open mic. I would like to offer my gratitude to Andrea Serrano, Cathy Arellano, Ara Cruz, all the open mic participants and everyone at El Chante: Casa de Cultura for a wonderful evening.

Please have a look and enjoy the shots.

P.S. – We recommend, if you’re on Facebook, that you like and/or bookmark the Facebook page for this event; this night was only the first in a new, regular series!

All the best,

Rich Boucher

Last Night At East of Edith…Le Recappe

We had a small, intimate group at the East of Edith Open Mic last night, with Merimee Moffitt, Aaron Greenwood, Teresa Gallion, Mitch Rayes and Deb Coy. It’s certainly not about the numbers, though, as was clear from the great quality of work shared last night – we heard great original work as well as poems by Thich Nhat Hanh, Charles Bukowski, Jeffrey McDaniel and Joy Harjo. We all went up once with two poems, took a nice break (during which time everyone was able to enjoy the numerous goodies and snacks and libations on offer at the bench in the back), and then came back for a second half with one more poem from each poet, as well as a little experiment I wanted to conduct. I offered up a haiku of mine, and fibbed that it was something I “found” online. I read out just lines 1 and 2 of the haiku, and asked the poets to complete the haiku by composing a third line and sharing the haiku along with their final poem for the night. It was fascinating to hear what each poet did to this haiku of mine:

“Crickets and frogs sing

To bring dawn from the evening

I’m a peeping tom“

This is probably needless to say, but folks offered up way, WAY better final lines than my juvenile “I’m a peeping tom”. It was a lot of fun and I think folks enjoyed it. I also donated a couple of gifts to the reading: we now have a dedicated ice cooler and Brita-filter water pitcher for the venue. I came away from last night’s reading feeling very heartened by the really “organic” growth happening with this series.

Hope to see you there next time,

-Rich B

(East of Edith is an open mic that takes place on Mondays at the Projects, 3614 High Street NE at 7pm)

Recap #2: Poetry/Truth/History

Next Richard Vargas raised issues of history and truth using this quote by Plato. “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

Joaquin jumped on that, saying he enjoys writing poems based and steeped in history, talked about finding out that a family member 7 generations earlier was Witchita, a Native American tribe in Texas. He likes looking at a subject from a distance and challenging himself to connect, and then he read a stunning poem called Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, which begins with an incident November 29, 1864, when three soldiers used an Apache child as target practice. The poem moves beautifully into language, redefining blanket, blood, skin and more. The word corpse transforms into chrysalis.

Jessica used to struggle with the idea of duty. She has learned that for her, writing deeply personal and “confessional” poetry is a way of speaking that also can speak for others. As a woman, a survivor of domestic violence and addictions, she says, quite simply, “Writing is revolution and completely altered for the positive my life and my daughter’s.” She talked about poetry as a vehicle that allows her to be part of community, even various communities. Through her writing, she tries to represent what needs to be said out loud.

Mary was passionate in the way she agreed with Plato. She said, “Poetry is always more true than history, because history has an agenda and is told by conquerors…” And then shortly she floored everyone with a poem about the firebombing of Tokyo, “Tokyo Untold,” from her book Spirit Birds They Told Me.

Seth almost subversively reclaimed the question. He told how since he’s been touring on the road (about three years) he’s developed a penchant for going to free art museums around the country. And one day he had an epiphany: Artists Make History. He also takes an “extreme stance on social responsibility” and talked about how people need to be thorough and authentic, and if writing beyond their own experience, they need to do the research deeply. As a poet who lived through Katrina, with seven feet of water in the house, he was troubled hearing non-survivors claim Katrina as a topic. He simply wants to see justice done to the subject, whether a personal or persona poem. Because, and I’ll just quote a line from the Adam and Eve persona poem he read, “We have a world to create.”

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There was another round, but it addressed questions of gender differences in writing and reading, and actually turned out to be too hilarious and gestural for me to capture. I’ll just say you missed a good one and thank everyone involved: that’s Mary Oishi, Seth Walker, Jessica Helen Lopez, Joaquin Zihuatanejo, moderator Richard Vargas, and everyone in attendance. Let me close this recap with a quote from Mary,

“I just can’t imagine a life without poetry.”

Thanks everyone.

LG

Recap: Packing A Lot in a Good Time

Hi everyone, so we had a really fine Verso Quatro tonight featuring Jessica Helen Lopez, Mary Oishi, Seth Walker and Joaquin Zihuatanejo with moderator Richard Vargas. We started off with about 14 people in the room and ended up with twenty…. an attentive group and a thought-provoking discussion. Here I’m gonna give you a few highlights and my take on summary below real quick for those  of you who missed it. I’ll try not to misquote or put words in anyone’s mouth–but reader, know, sometimes I’m paraphrasing what I got from listening.

Richard Vargas started by leading in with a quote from Quentin Tarantino. “You can’t write poetry on the computer.”  

Mary kind of took the cake with blunt logic: “The act of writing is like giving birth which I couldn’t do on a computer.” If she starts with pen and paper, she goes quickly to the “voice” and “ear”, often reading her poems as much as 80-90 times in a row to figure out if she’s got the right words. Later, she’ll move to the computer and perhaps edit one more time. As for technology though, she really values it. She loves accessibility and the exposure you can get from a computer, the way information (and art) can be accessed. As an example she said that she researched this event by checking out a bunch of videos of Joaquin Zihuatanejo on YouTube.

Seth goes with the pen. For him, the computer causes too much instant editing with spell check and auto correct etc. He likes raw human emotion and feels like staying connected to old ways of doing something can keep us connected to the purity of the art form. He’s also spoke, in varying ways through the night, about newness. His stance is anti-commercial. He firmly promotes challenging yourself to take risks and not simply repeat what’s known and worked for someone else. He differentiated between an architect and a builder who simply follows plans. He encourages people to push themselves into the very architecture and design of new creative expression. Another thing I took to heart: Write poetry to compete with but don’t write competition poetry.

Jessica approached this question from a variety of angles, from the pen to the computer. She encourages young poets she teaches to pay attention to the muse, and if inspiration strikes, get it on paper, or a napkin, anything, even if your hands are covered in dishwater and the poem gets wet, just try not to lose it.  While pen and paper got her going in her career, she says now she has written three poems at one time using tabs on word documents “because I’m a multitasking mother.” She also acknowledges that technology is a great boon for education and loves the accessibility that the internet provides—at which point she drew a mirror to the accessibility of the slam scene, how it’s open to everyone and makes a point of cultivating a an audience that is not exclusive. Then she read a poem “That Following Sunday,” about which she revealed, “I actually slept with this poem under my pillow… so I could look at it and revise it.” Writing is intimate.

Joaquin talked about teaching for seven years, how valuable it was to him, and how he asked each student to turn in a rough drafts of a research paper that was handwritten. The instructions were explicit: cross out what you want to change with one solitary line. He said that he liked to see in his student’s work, and also in his poetry, both the revisions and the original impulse — because sometimes the original might turn out to be better. Joaquin also talked about writing in unusual places: write at the top of a mountain, in a dirty laundromat, at Walmart. Going somewhere, and changing your environment and being open to what happens is a great way to access writing and push yourself, a way that seems to nurture his creative process.

Two more rounds and a closing happened, I’ll post one more in a separate post…

LG