Category Archives: Uncategorized

Small Press Traffic Reading Series
Friday, October 24, 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
www.sptraffic.org

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He’s received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD Holy Kid, (Kill Rock Stars Records) is in the sound archives of The Whitney Museum for American Art. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax. His books include, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books) and I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said. His recent project is a collaboration with Spanic Attack (www.spanicattack.com) called NORICUA, a noh-boricua inspired non-movement gaining worldwide momentum, whose non-ideologies have been performed in the Bronx, Berlin, Loisaida and Puerto Rico.

Albert Flynn DeSilver has recently begun his tenure as Marin County’s very first poet laureate. He is the author, most recently of Letters to Early Street (La Alameda Press, 2007), and Walking Tooth & Cloud (French Connection Press, 2007). Andrei Codrescu has said about Letters to Early Street: “This is one of our poets and we stand behind him (or to his side) in any fight, physical or literary, he might be involved in. Except maybe the situation he describes thus: ‘A stuffed moose has just capsized in my bed.’” Albert has published more than one hundred poems in literary journals worldwide including Zyzzyva, New American Writing, Jubilat, Jacket (Australia), Poetry Kanto (Japan), Van Gogh’s Ear (France), Hanging Loose, Exquisite Corpse, and many others. Some of his letters in correspondence with the poet Paul Hoover will be featured in the new book Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008).

As we were leaving the Living Word Festival, I tell Barb that it feels like everything is happening in its proper order. Attending Paul Flores’ USF talk on the lineage of hip-hop, finding Nikki Giovanni’s interview on the connections between hip-hop and folk culture, and then having this festival go down right here in West Oakland’s own Lil Bobby Hutton Park (aka DeFermery Park).

Props to everyone at Youth Speaks for putting together a gathering that brought together so many of of the classic elements (MCing, DJing, and Graf) with the modern realities of urban survival (voter registration, grass roots lobbying, local sustainable produce, and affordable building materials) and all under the umbrella of arts awareness. The result was a general attitude of shared open knowledge, respect of individual experience, block party revelry, community outreach, and everyone looking out for their own personal good time.

One of the highlights was seeing Town Park in full effect with a wide array of skaters from every demo, age group, and ethnic makeup you could imagine. The only material requirement: bring your own board. The only non-participant requirement: Get your skate on or find a safe spot to watch.

From the distance I was viewing the skaters, I imagined that it didn’t matter how fancy or new your skateboard was, all that mattered is how hard you rode and your commitment to push yourself a little further to get to that next trick. More than anything, it reminded me of the real spirit of hip-hop’s origins, how you take what you got and turn it into an art form.

The tag line of the festival was red, black and GREEN in a nod to the Bay Area’s consistent commitment to diversity and environmentalism which was no big surprise but it was chill to find out that even the paint the graf artists were using were eco-friendly. Nice!

Sadly, we couldn’t stick around for the headliner of the festival, the mighty Mos Def, since we had already committed to attending the Korean Diaspora Reading at Eastwind with Lee Herrick and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, but we did get a chance to hear Los Rakas bring it with an infectious, carefree, and dynamic energy was well in line with the vibe of the festival. Their lyricals were on point with one MC acting as the sonorous sound canvas full of rolling Rs, booming echoes, and long drones as a frame for his partners crisp, staccato cadence. All the while paying homage to their roots in Panama, the Fruitvale, and sharing props with the woman providing their beats–DJ Leydis.

You better believe that we’re making plans for next year’s festival and doing our best to stick around for the whole day.

More Living Word Festival:
• Official Website
• Article at the Oakland Tribune
• More pictures from the Living Word Festival

Los Rakas at the Living Word Festival

Mos Def Live @ Defremery Park! Oakland, CA

The folks at LitQuake have managed to put together another fun, crazy, and eclectic series of pub events that is never perfect (rowdy crowds more interested in pubcrawlin than litcrawlin’, technical difficulties, venues never meant to host a reading) but perfect is not that the point. The point is to get that potential literary fan with some extra time on their hands, some extra cash in their ATM, and some desire to read more connected with a literary genre that will inspire them to patronize more lit events in the future.

I like it. And I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of getting that kind of person interested in contemporary poetics, even when that challenge involves dealing with far less than optimal conditions.

So for all of you who couldn’t come out, here are some pics of the events and then here is some video from the PAWA and the KSW readings. The vids are dark and grainy but I think the sound (from the readers and the hectic venues) comes out very well and that’s my main goal.

Speakin’ of goals, I hope to get in touch with some LitQuake folks about doing some Easy Bay events for next year and making damn sure that Oaktown is properly repped at next year’s LitCrawl.

Word.

Native American Studies Speaker Series, 2008-09
Indigenous Writing Across Time and Genre

Janet McAdams

Monday, Oct. 13
Open Mic with Janet McAdams
5-7 p.m. Morrison Library, UC Berkeley Campus
Co-sponsored by Lyric and Achiote Press

Tuesday, Oct. 14
Lecture: “The Poet-Critic, The Native Writer”
2 p.m. 554 Barrows Hall

Janet McAdams is the author of two collections of poetry, Feral (Salt, 2007) and The Island of Lost Luggage (Arizona, 2000), which won the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the American Book Award. With Geary Hobson and Kathryn Walkiewicz, she is editing the anthology, The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after the Removal (Oklahoma, in press). New projects include Red Weather, a novel about the sterilization of Indian women in the 1970s, a memoir, Not too Sane: Art and the Romance of Suffering, and a third collection of poetry, The Lookout Book. Janet edits Earthworks, a book series from Salt Publishing focusing on indigenous poetry. Her poems have been published in North American Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Women’s Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and other magazines. She teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry. In addition to teaching creative writing, environmental literature, and indigenous literature, she is a practitioner and teacher of Integral Yoga.

Big ups to C St Perez for the info on this reading.