high, fly ball… goin’ deep… and it’s

not going the yankees way at the moment

clearly, the sox have all the momentum with schilling comin’ thru like
a champ last night. makin me just a wee bit worried. i had every
confidence that the yanks would pull it out last night but we know
thats not how it went.

and this is what makes sports really fun… tonight, the new york
yankees will ground the curse dead into boston’s face and end
another season for the sox.

interestingly enough, over the past few weeks i have met quite the
number of bosox fans. of course, i always have a good time with them
because a fan is a fan and you can go over the good times and the bad
times (with boston fans there are more bad than good but who’s
counting?) while trying to one up the next person and makin the bold
declaration- this is the year.

yeah, this is the year… that the yanks could go down in history as
the only team to blow a 3-0 lead which would NOT be cool.

quote of the night- after the fans revolt when the umps call a.rod out
for interference
“dood, it looks like ACENTOS up in yankee stadium!”
thanks, rog ;-)

i dont know how they are going to do it and i dont know who will step
up tonight (i would like it to be matsui and have him continue the
quiet warrior tradition of the yanks) but all i know is that somebody
better make good cuz its one thing to lose (tips his hat to the
d.backs and marlins) but to lose to bah.stun? “ahhhhhhhh hell
nooooooooooooooo” (in best black muppet voice- ask me about it one
day- its really quite funny- Hell.No the Black Muppet, that is)

first though is synonymUS with rachel kann, rick pernod (who is really
truly amazing and if there was ever a vote for bronx poet laureate- he
is who i would check on my ballot), some high class jibaro
named rich villar and the wondrous ms jessica torres (who has leaped
all the way to #1 on google search in just a few short months
overtaking some teen porn princess by the same name)

and then, ah yeah, the yankees comin through and getting ready for the
series where we will take on the traitorous clemens and his astros

or sumthin like that…

love ya like mezzanine seating

last night i was reading through some passages from Nick Flynn’s book, Some Ether, and i was really blown away by not only his observations but also his poetic “arrogance” which i define as an ability to lay down universal truths in a voice that is so coherent and specific that it can not be denied.

for all the arrogance i enjoy in life it seems harder and harder to translate that to my work. i feel that i keep dancing around the issues and not attacking them full on. ima need to get a lil looser with mah work and see if i can nail down some of these questions and see what erupts. i may be wrong but that hasnt stopped me before.

speaking of which, eliel recently asked me about “being ready” for stuff. you know like features in local venues and such. i told him, “dude, i am the last one to tell anybody if they are or are not ready for an event” this coming from the fact that i was NOT ready for a lot of things early on in the game. sheet, i wasnt even ready for my first time on the mic. i applied all of two weeks of studying poets on stage combined that with zero formal writing training and hit the mic. some call this extremely brave and others call it extremely stupid, with the only difference being the end result. three years later, i am still at it so it must be quite brave but, as evidenced by the first paragraph, often time i feel like i have still not learned all that much. i was not ready for my first slam, not ready to help found a series, not ready for slammastering, and i can certainly say there was one feature that i was most definitely not ready for but i took all those experiences and made them work for me so that when a few other things came along later in the game- like Acentos, i was ready.

last week at Acentos, we had to fight off a good number of yankee fans to get through the night. if i was still the same host that jumped up one september at bar13 to help out, i would have gotten smoked! and with me, all the other poets that came to do their thing but i was able to blend it all together and make the magic happen. here’s something- do some of y’all know that Slam was created to help quiet down folks that happend to show up to the bars we are performing in, folks who have every right to get druck and yell at a TV screen since thats what the bar does 90% of the time? well, it’s true and even if you dont like Slam, it’s pretty naive to imagine that everyone loves poetry. rule one- they dont have to lsiten to you! it’s your job to keep them interested and not the other way around.

ph sheet, the arrogance is returning! let me go then, cuz thats rule two- always leave them wa…

POESÍA 100%: Espada, Komunyakaa, Zurita, Doty, Vicuña and more!

a public service annoucement y’all

ps- many of the blog.tribe will be in attendance and there will be an after party!

Dear Friends: please join us for this important poetry

reading.

October 16, 2004

8 p.m.

POESÍA 100%: Martín Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa, Raúl Zurita, Mark Doty, Cecilia Vicuña, Marie Ponsot & Cristóbal Bianchi with Casagrande.

The New School, Tishman Auditorium

66 West 12th St., New York City.

$5 donation to Casagrande.

Advance tickets: 212-229-5488.

Hosted by Rattapallax, New School Graduate Writing Program, louderARTS & Terra Incognita.

Hosted by Idra Novey.

http://www.rattapallax.com

Before the America’s 9/11, there was another one in Santiago, Chile when the dictator Augusto Pinochet used Hawker Jets to bomb the Presidential Palace on

September 11, 1973 to remove the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. As a counter reaction to the bombing, Casagrande, an underground literary organization of young poets born during Pinochet, rented a helicopter and dropped 100,000 poems on the Presidential Palace on March 23, 2001. They followed

with a bombing of Dubrovnik, Croatia and Gernika, Spain — both cities bombed in the past.