in the (what the F have i gotten myself into now?!) department:

i will be up in harlem for a TAP DANCERS OPEN MIC

the host, jason bernard, is a friend of mine

we’ll be doing a collaborative version of jayne cortez’s “tapping”
and then i’ll be dropping two poems later in the night (nothing new)

the thought of the TAP DANCERS OPEN MIC is pretty intriguing though

if any of ya happen to be in the area here is the info:

Tap Open Mic
Friday, March 4th @ 7pm
144 West 125th St
(bet Lenox & Adam Clayton Powell Blvd)
FREE!

love ya like sammy loved his glass eye

5 blogs I would pay money to see on the regular

Raymond Daniel :: it is really amazing how much poetry i get just from having a five minute convo with ray. not to mention the fact that his verbal deliveries, especially when it comes to cutting someone down, are always money. i’ve been lucky to have him as my zen guru for the last couple of years and im thinking EVERYBODY should have some online tao.
“all the love that can fit in a glove”

Angel :: this is my old running buddy from the bx thats currently livin in florida. easily, the best wingman i have ever had the pleasure of hangin with here in the states. my friends think i have good stripper stories? bolo (crew nickname) was the master of those stories and many more.
“you really don’t want to know why i don’t want to tip you”

UPHA :: where i scored my MFA in hateration. sure there have been many teachers but this is where it really became an art. UPHA approached me the same way Memphis lawyers approached Tom Cruise in “The Firm” with an offer to sink or swim in the ’chinche. i dont think america is ready.
“that was the saddest display of trite, insipid, overwrought verse my poor ears have ever been subjected to”

Bono :: its gotta be rough tryin to save the world as you also front a band that is destined for Hall of Fame status while still being a husband and father. i bet ya this man spits out #1.with.a.bullet song lyrics while he gargles in the morning. you know that question about who you would love to have dinner with alive or dead? bono tops the list.
“am i bugging you? i don’t mean to bug ya.”

the big heartbreak :: this was a toss up between her and the one that got away. a tie easily broken when you factor in that i can just hop on over to TOTGA’s house anytime i damn well please and sit down for sunday dinner. what the new hubby has to say about that is another story all together.

back to TBH, we left on piss poor terms which was really the only way that it could have ended. i was the rebound kid but that didn’t stop me for a second. back then i thought that there were still dragons to slay so i went right for it. we fell in crazy love from the get go. after spending an all night talk session in her kitchen, i stopped for a second to look around the room and noticed the sun coming up. i always fall in love at 4 am. the next week was an exercise in me trying to figure out how to tell this woman that i could no longer just hang with her as “a friend.” sure it sounds fucked up but to your own self be true and all that shit.

bottom line- i was not going to be able to spend five minutes in a room alone with her with out making a complete ass of mah self. up that timetable to about 20 minutes if other people are in the room.

the next saturday we spent a great night together with some mutual friends. we danced, ate at a diner, cracked silly jokes, dropped the other folks off and then watched the sun come up again. i knew that it was sink or swim time. time to tell her that i had real feelings for her and if she wasn’t cool with that, then so be it, but sorry, i can’t stick around for that. yeah! say that or something nicer where i don’t sound like such a jerk. i’m thinking this all the way up the stairs to drop her off at her door and when she cracks the door open and moves inside she turns to me with a look that you could put in a frame. if i didn’t say it then, i would never say it. so here goes and right there she kisses me like if she could read my mind and didn’t want to see me go.

i don’t know how i kept it so cool. looking back at her like if i knew that this is where the story would go. sure, you may not think i was acting cool but anything short of not passing out or jumping up & down while clapping my hands sayin “she likes me” was cool at that moment. we went inside and kissed some more, found a place on the sofa and fell in like two pillows. just holding each other like if somebody was gonna come busting through the door and ruin shit. maybe that was already in her head cuz that’s sure as hell how it ended.

personal quote- “all of these poems are about you/but none of them are for you”

how do we identify cliché?
in the roof of your mouth where the peanut butter hangs out since its
all just a question of taste.

where’s your border between that and pop culture?
pop culture is the flash bulb of the paparazzi
cliché is the things i read while in some waiting room

does the fact that it’s recognizably a pop culture icon render it cliché?
not necessarily, many people can live their whole lives their and remain interesting and topical (madonna comes readily to mind as does
the “revolution” both of which may be cliché but remain topical vis a vis someones desire to insure they do not fade away)

do you and if so, how do you use pop culture references in your poetry?
i avoid pop culture reference in my poetry for fear that it will date my work in an unflattering manner. i’ve seen folks make specific references to some things in their poems that automatically make me say “thats why i am not diggin this trip– its cuz its in black & white!” or sumthin like dat

do you feel them necessary or are they a crutch to avoid working to show meaning?
as a professional cane user, i would call them crutches

so i am off to take the red pill, find the mother to my child, see the revolution on HDTV and wonder if any of the burning bushes are speaking to me or at me

PERSONAL EDIT: some stuff i wanted to say but didnt get a chance to

a few acentos shows back, john rodriguez said something that really stuck with me about the langston hughes poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers “that some forever shit” werd!

and i guess thats one of the main reason why i avoid pop culture references in my work. i am out to try to write some forever shit and if i live to be triple digits, write every day of my life and can produce just ONE poem that goes down as some forever shit then you can feel free to carve a big ol’ smiley face on my grave.

i can see how writing about indivdual events and their effect on us can translate into sometbing that will outlast paper and memory but, for the serious life of me, i cant see how a mention of American Idol or the lastest fashion designer is going to do that (no disrespect on the Idol talk, guy). maybe it could be the fact that i am not very well read, maybe if i search the halls of the Library of Congress i can find something like that or maybe one of you can alert me to it but i just dont see it happening. better yet said, i dont see it happening with my work.

so yeah, its a lot to ask i know especially for someone that doesnt even have a real manuscript ready to think he can one day write some forever shit but a brothers gotta dream… ¿tu sabes?

dos sucres,
o.b.

conversations in poetry

currently, in the louderARTS project, we are tryin to have a conversation about various aspects of poetry. here are some of the questions lynne is throwing around and my responses…

(a) do you revise? do you edit? do you think that there’s a difference between the two?
yes to both.
i edit on the page and revise on the stage. for good or bad (and i think its leaning more towards the bad), any poem i write that i think has a half-decent chance to survive gets some mic time. when said poem does get read out loud, i try to notice my natural pauses (to eventually use as line/stanza breaks) and what words fit well in my mouth. sometimes i get to “smart” on the page and use nice SAT words that turn to mush when i have to use them in my poems– these words end up on the recycle bin.

editing involves much more of a butcher knife and usually happens before i hit the stage. it also involves a lot when it comes to the chronological delivery of my poems since i tend to write a lot in narrative.

(b) what do you look for in your revision process?
clarity, first and foremost. i’ve usually worked the poem (or some specific lines) quite a bit in my head before i even actually write it down. when revising the poems, i want to make sure that i am getting to the crux of the poem in as few words as possible.

side note- this can lead me to removing so many words that i start to strip the poem of any soul it may originally have had. when this happens, i know i have to back off and let the “mistakes” of the poem sit for a bit before i can return to editing it. these “mistakes” sometimes end up being the actual magic of the poem more often than not.
“There is no such thing as the flawless diamond, just the diamond with the fewest flaws.”

(c) when you hand your poems off to another writer or an editor for comments, what are you looking for? i know that this varies by poem in some ways, but you know yourself as a writer, you know your flaws and your foibles, so what are the pitfalls that you’re hoping to be pulled out of in asking for critique?

i know that i definitely want the other writer to tell me that it’s good but really only if it’s good because what the hell good does it do for me if you lie?

about 0.00025 seconds after that, i want them to tell me about what they see, what they don’t see, what absolutely doesn’t work, whether or not anything works, what balance i’ve struck between what works and what doesn’t. i tend to find that i treat first and even second draft as sketches for what the poem could be, testing grounds for an approach or a perspective. when i hand it off, i’m expecting some idea of how my ‘thing’ is working or not working. i’m prone to being far too clean in my choices so i’m looking for input that pushes me to break something messy over the head of the poem. in my own revision process, the one that goes on before, during and after I send a poem out hoping for comments, i sit around with the poem, reading it out loud, cutting it up into pieces (literally), looking at it in different fonts, reading sections of it as if they don’t have a whole poem on either end of them and i try to find out what poem might be doing (good or bad) that i’m not seeing or hearing. one of my goals with alot of my work is to have the chunks of the poem (stanzas or combinations thereof) stand independently and tell disticnt stories. sometimes i’m struggling with the metaphor of the poem which to my mind must tie to the idea or engine of the poem. i try to look at the metaphor, make sure that i’ve handled it delicately enough that people don’t look at it and go, ‘oh, you know that broken window poem, the one with glass breaking in every stanza and then the shattered shard falling from the opened window at the end’ and i try to pare it down a whole lot then i try to give it very specifically sculpted muscles. sometimes of course i suck at editing my own stuff but if i’ve really looked at it hard, by the time i get back a set of comments, I can accept them with an open mind and begin the harder work of actually making or remaking the poem.

some serious brutality. i need to hear more about what doesnt work than what does work. the people that i most trust are the ones that can say “ok, that was just you being lazy… take care of that” it doesnt have to be said in a cruel manner, cuz that will just get ya popped in the mouth, it just needs to be said as matter of factly as possible.

i tend to put a lot of value in the opinion of people that dont know my stage persona and are just goin by what the poem says. too often i find people edit more for what they feel the person can do with the words on the mic than with whats on the page.

the pitfall i keep avoiding is my simple bob-n-weave of my personal truths in my poetry. i’ve been gettin better over time but i still have the hardest time in the world saying simple things and personal things instead choosing to wrap those things up in the stories of others. it has helped me write some good narrative and some clever metaphors but i know its time to get more honest in my work. people that can spot these points in my poetry get extra bonus points from me.

and there you have it… not the most controversial talk on the planet, i know… i am sure it is more interesting to hate on whoever did whatever on the open mic last week but i am tryin to elevate from that… i want to start hatin on PUBLISHED poets… LOL

love ya like micheal jackson loves a sympathetic jury