Urban Verbs is Coming — (and tix giveaway starting tonight)

Last weekend, I had a chance to see the sneak preview of Urban Verbs, which was as fresh as it was the first time I saw the production at 516 ARTS. Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras, and Diles flat out wow and are not mistaken (in my mind) when equating god and art, music and love, life and poetry. Integrating hip-hop, documentary film, poetry, and performance, the show is thought-provoking and engaging–a very solid effort with community creativity at its heart. Urban Verbs is a collaborative effort with vision. I commend it heartily.

Local Poets Guild has garnered some tickets that we’re going to be giving away on the website—watch for my next post or come out tonight to Triptych where I’ll announce it. (We’ll ask you to do a little writing.) Later I’ll also tell you more about why I think this show is important.

Meanwhile, here’s the OFFICIAL SCOOP:

Urban Verbs is a video, audio, visceral performance piece that is dialogued entirely in poetic verse. Comprised of Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras, and Diles, the three are a collaborative of individual artists across many disciplines including literature, music, audio/sound engineering, film, visual art and theater. Urban Verbs is an alternative interpretation to the brainless, heartless, materialist, violent, sexist, homophobic, self-involved popular perception of Hip-Hop.  They aim to create a progressive narrative around Hip Hop culture and facilitate the practice of EVERYONE telling their story through Hip Hop as a form of love, a form of intelligence and a way of better living. To increase the respect and acceptance of Hip Hop as a legitimate and visionary art form and worthy of academic inquiry, to be an example of how one can feed their family and live their dream through Hip -Hop that builds rather than Hip-Hop that destroys – To fashion Hip Hop into the tools that bring people together, stops wars, makes babies and raises them!

All Shows at The Filling Station in the Barelas Neighborhood of Albuquerque (1024 4^th St. SW)

June 17^th 7pm Show Urban Verbs + Live Art Creation/Auction & DJ

June 18^th 8pm Show Urban Verbs + Live Keg & Musical Guests BrokenBreadWinner

June 19^th 1pm Show Urban Verbs (Curbside Classroom* Version feat. Q & A)    

For Fri. Tix

For Sat. Tix         

Thanks also to Antonio Rael who photographed the preview show at the Projects. You can find his photography page on FB. I just used one image here—but more coming as I let you know how to get tix and give my two cents on the project. Don’t forget to come to Triptych 7:00 pm at the Projects is where I’ll launch the getaway.

–LG

Two New Pages Added and Nice Choices

You can now check out Taryn Marie‘s page. (She is aka TeaSea Inc.) [Photo by Gina Marselle]

And under ABQ series you can now find proper information for Smokin Slam and a link to a full page. It’s a good event to check out today, as the Smokin Slam is one of your options for tonight. The Smokin Slam has host Carlos Contreras tonight and features Joaquin Zihuatanejo and the Off the Page and on a Tangent Tour (Katrina Guarascio pictured here in a photo by Mark Peevy, plus poets Zach Kluckman, and Jessica Helen Lopez.)

The other option is Triptych at the Projects 7:00 pm at 3614 High Street NE (east of Edith and North of Candelaria) with Sarah McKinstry Brown from Omaha, Jasmine Cuffee, and Sari Krosinsky.)

A difficult choice: you win either way.

Sari Krosinsky June 9th: How Fragments Create Echoes

Sari Krosinky says, “My poems most often start as fragments–as images or ideas or words come to me, I write them in a poetry journal I carry around. The fragments come both from random things that strike me and from whatever I’m obsessing about at the moment–most often something to do with death and/or relationships. When I’ve collected enough fragments, I start picking through them, cluster the ones that seem like they fit together, build on the individual pieces and draw out connections between them. I don’t really think about craft or what I’m trying to do in a poem until it’s done. Then I hope the poem communicates something that others will find either echoes their own experience or shows them a new perspective. But ultimately I just write whatever I feel driven to write. “

And one of her poems:

Hunger

I cook like my grandmother, whipping up a badass stew

from spare parts. Hers, variations on leached chicken

swimming in grease. Mine, resurrecting potatoes-on-the-edge

with a couple cans green chilé. I mince garlic as you read

to me, baritone against the percussion of popping oil.

Looking at you, I reach for the pot, char my finger.

I thrust my hand under the tap; you go on reading

as cold water seals the burn in a scar.

Like my grandmother, I cook to feed armies. She rallied

relatives, friends, strangers to divide the booty.

I have you. Like her, will I never learn

to cook for one? Or like Orpheus, would I follow you

to Hades and, failing, survive still? When you’re gone,

I’ll play your cd, seal my hunger in your voice.

You can hear Sari Krosinsky read at Triptych this Thursday at 7:00 pm at the Projects (3614 High Street NE, through the garage doors, North of Candelaria and East of Edith.) She’ll be featured alongside Sarah McKinstry-Brown and Jasmine Cuffee.

I’m really looking forward to this night!

lg

The Woman Who Could Cradle Monsoons June 9th & more

Guess who’s back in town? Sarah McKinstry Brown. She wowed Albuquerque for years and we were lucky to have her in our poetry scene. Now she lives in Nebraska and it’s great she’s trekked back for a visit. If you are unfamiliar with her work from her time in Albuquerque, you are in for a treat. You’ll even have a chance to study with her if you desire–see below…

Winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, Sarah McKinstry-Brown studied poetry at the University of New Mexico and the University of Sheffield, England. Published everywhere from West Virginia’s standardized tests to literary journals such as Chicago Quarterly Review, she earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Nebraska, and her first full-length collection of poetry, Cradling Monsoons, is out with Blue Light Press.  When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, you can find Sarah in Omaha with her husband, the poet Matt Mason, and their two beautiful, feisty daughters.

I had a chance and honor to blurb her new book. Here’s what I wrote:

Heaven, the black keys on a grand piano! This collection pits tension between reality and desire, cultivating a world rich with lived imagination. In Sarah McKinstry-Brown’s grasp, language tackles the world of marriage, pregnancies and family with a complex love capable of cradling frustrations and grief with a patience that can ride through any monsoons and still trust there will be air to breathe soon enough.

I’m really intrigued by a series in her book on imaginary heavens, think it’s delightful and surprising and moving. I am hoping you’ll get a chance to catch one of her events.

Here they are:

• Wednesday June 1 Mini Feature at Poetry and Beer Blackbird Buvette 8pm. Pass the hat.
• Sunday June 5th Writing Workshop 2-5 RSVP to me/lisa at localpoetsguild at yahoo dot com so I can know if there’s enough interest to do this. Donations.
  
• Thursday June 9th Triptych with Sari Krosinsky and Jasmine Cuffee at the Projects 3614 High Street NE  Pass the hat. 7:00 pm.
  
• June 12th 10:30 AM Church of Beethoven at the Kosmos  http://www.churchofbeethoven.org $15

Hope to see you at some events. I think Triptych promises to be rather mindblowingly good, and am hoping perhaps some people want to do the workshop also. Do let me know.

LG