Author Archives: Oscar Bermeo

Audio: CantoMundo 2011 Fellows Reading

CantoMundo 2011

Many thanks to Brenda Nettles Riojas of Corazón Bilingüe for this awesome clip of the CantoMundo 2011 Fellows Reading.

It was a real pleasure co-hosting this event with Amalia Ortiz and presenting the diverse work of all our fellow poetas to a packed house at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin. Looking forward to hearing the next part of the clip with the rest of the fellows.

For those keeping score at home, you can hear me read “Barry Bonds on the Witness Stand” at the 10:43 mark quickly followed up by Diego Báez doing a cover of my poem, “I’m Jus Askin.”

Photo Credit: The Center for Mexican American Studies

Acknowledgment: Generations Literary Magazine

More good news, folks! Many thanks to Kiala Givehand and all the folks at Generations Literary Magazine for including “Epistle to Kool Herc,” “Eulogy,” “Tribute,” and “Ode to My Clyde Pumas” in their second issue—Influences.

All these poems come from NaPoWriMo 2010 and are all special to me as they capture the spirit of hip-hop poetics that emerged from last year’s April poems.

Generations will be available in the next few weeks but you can be the most mac of all macs if you pre-purchase your copy now. Hit up this link for info on how you can be the first on your block with the new hotness.

Still on the fence? Peep the list of contributors and know this issue will be live when it hits.

Generations Literary Magazine: Issue Two

INFLUENCES: In this issue, we will explore what influences us. From role models to music to money. What influences your life? Your decisions? How have you been influenced by others? Are most of your influences from the generations before you or from your peers? What influences have you had on others?

Often, we are influenced by people, places, and events that we don’t realize until well after our interaction. We want to hear about the experiences that have shaped your life.

In keeping with the overall theme of the journal, we’d love to hear/see how other generations have influenced you. From one generation to the next, we impact and affect one another. We learn from or resist the influence of those before us. And whether we choose to or not, we also influence the generations behind us.

Your ideas and images can represent your neighborhood or the globe. You can share what is private or public, individual or universal. We want to see & read how you interpret the theme INFLUENCES.

This is a conversation — we are waiting to hear your voice.

FEATURING
• Elmaz Abinader
• Oscar Bermeo
• Cynthia Blank
• Michelle Brulé
• Aichlee Bushnell
• Valentina Cano
• William Cass
• Pam Carriker
• Macy Chadwick
• Kevin M. Chopson
• Emma Shaw Crane
• Lauren Crux
• Dave Davis
• Rick D’Elia
• Pat Falk
• Elizabeth Fishel
• Myrah Fisher
• Trina Gaynon
• Alisa Golden
• Becky Joy Hirsch
• Linda Lee Jaffe
• Samuel Levi Jones
• Kathamann
• Barbara Leon
• J.H. Martin
• Matt McGee
• Erica Minton
• George Northrup
• Tess Patalano
• Willie Perdomo
• Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha
• Samuel Sattin
• Katey Schultz
• M.E. Silverman
• Mica Valdez
• Amy Watkins
• July Westhale
• Christopher Woods
• Interview with Rachel McKibbens

Acknowledgment: The Acentos Review

Many thanks to poetry editor Raina Leon for including poems from my 2nd manuscript in the latest issue of The Acentos Review.

The poems included are from NaPoWriMo 2009 and it felt good to pull them off the shelf, read them with fresh eyes and revise them for Acentos. The poems are definitely a departure from the work in Anywhere Avenue as they have a more darker, serious tone dealing with an imagined mythos. Now that they’re out in the world, I will be definitely including them in future readings.

 

Bob Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986)

A Remembered Beat

We heard our beat faintly then,
When John Hoffman hitchhiked with enemy gods
And died in Mexicans’ land,
Choked on his dreams of blood and love,
Leaving his poems on dark other side of time,
And first slight hit of a beat.

When Parker, a poet in jazz,
Gave one hundred seventy pounds to a one-ounce needle.,
His music, his life,
Six hipsters from uptown
Called it a religious sacrifice
And wore turbans.
One poet wore lonely death,
Leaving his breath in a beat.

We remember when Max Bodenheim remembered Lorca
And challenged death nightly, with a port pint
Full of mixed-up crazy love and thirty years’ bitter
Memory in poet life,
Only to end as hero of a slaughtered poem
Written by a maniac, on a Third Avenue night of hell,
And we were there, lost in the sound of a beat.

We remember thin cafeteria Sanskrit scholars
Reading old telephone directories aloud,
Trying to find Buddha or Truth
Among columns of private detectives, private sanitariums
And committees of rehabilitation of bisexual Eskimos,
And the unlisted trace of a beat.

We remember when poets removed tangled brains
To save for a saner time,
When organization men in pink ties declared television love,
Opening the age of electrical stone
As all do-gooders shouted: Punch time clocks,
Or your neighbors, or your youngest boy,
While a warlord of young poets
Perished in Pusan’s swamp,
Drowned in a flood of matchbook covers from home.
Survivors hid themselves in the folds of a cocaine
          nighttime robe,
As pill time stretched across white powdered deserts
And roots of exotic cactus bloomed in caves of the mind,
As nirvana came dancing, prancing in time to the beat,
Leading new ways through friend-filled narcotic graveyards
To hidden Pacific, big hell, quiet peace of Big Sur
Where that proud pornographers smiles on a redwood throne
As birds pound the air with a beat.

— Bob Kaufman from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness

 

Acknowledgment: The Rumpus Poetry

“Let the wild rumpus start!”

Actually, it’s been going on for a minute at The Rumpus with some of the best writing on writing on the web and I’m honored to be down with that. I’m extra thrilled at the fact that they chose “Ode to Government Cheese” as part of their National Poetry Month Celebration. It’s one of my favorite poems because it encapsulates so much of what I want Anywhere Avenue to do, give insight and personal perspective to growing up in the Bronx on the underside of Reaganomics while maintaining integrity and, always, a sense of humor. It also allows for some interesting conversations with folks who also remember what it was like to have that ole block of cheese staring back at them on the meal plate.