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Yes, I know this video has been posted everywhere but there is so much more happening here than just some Iowa bashing.

I’m diggin the questions about the relevance of literature to low-income urban folks. The real real is this: a poem will not change the circumstances of life. Poets need to remember that a poem is a battle and not the war. You win some, you lose some. Folks listen and are moved, folks listen and are not moved. Folks read and are inspired, folks read and don’t care. And that’s just if you can actually get someone to read or listen to your work.

Back to the interview and Cisneros’ end comment of self-doubt and pressure from the community Yes, that same ‘community’ that’s supposed to always be there no matter what, but, way too often, becomes the same kind of institutional noose that stifles a writer if they seek to speak for themselves instead of the group that forced her to ask the big question: What do *I* really want?

The full interview can be found at WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show.

Tony Brown just did a poetry feature of all new poems, read them once, and then promptly discarded the poems–forever. He calls it a “rip up reading” and I like the idea.

The most intriguing thing is the idea of memory: what we witness, what we recall, and what we pass on as story. For me, this process of stitching memory is the heart of poetry. So what would we do, as the audience, at an event we are told will never be repeated? Listen real close, would be my best guess. Not just for our own personal memories but also to have something to pass on.

As a performer, this raises the stakes for a live poetry reading. Every pause, every enunciation, every silence has to be just right, cuz if you blow it, there’s no going back for the poet or the audience.

Yeah, I’m feeling this kind of challenge and would recommend it for any poet who feels they rely too much on performance to get their poems across. I would try this exercise out myself if I was still hitting a regular circuit of open mics with the same core group of listeners. But who knows, if I ever finished one manuscript and was looking for a jump start for the next project, I’d try this exercise out to see what I’d write, how’d I perform it, and then see what sticks around.

From Tony Brown’s Livejournal:
The rationale behind the rip up reading is two fold.

First and foremost, it is to create a heightened, ritualized sense of the fundamentally ephemeral nature of a live performance. (Hence, the secrecy beforehand and the volunteer, the no recording, etc. It’s a ritual process and requires ritual boundaries to work.) To emphasize that these moments between poet and audience are irreproducible, and that no amount of chapbook reading, video viewing, or listening to a recording can truly recapture what happens in the moment of the night, and that we need to seize the moment and give it our attention — and that goes for performer and audience.

Second, it’s to illustrate the importance of being willing to bring it all out there and then leave it all onstage — both for poet and audience. By its very nature, if you want to do this right, you have to deliver a set of work that has blood in it — personal, revealing work that stretches your own boundaries as writer and as performer. If you’re going to do this, you can’t bring weak shit up there to be destroyed. It has to hurt you to see it go, or letting it go means nothing at all. The audience needs to recognize that hurt in you without pitying you — a fine line to walk.

Read the full entry here.

“Dement, Jurne” Uploaded by Heart of Oak

Damn, I miss blogging. I know this isn’t the common sentiment and it’s more fashionable to compare the blog to Sisyphus’ boulder but I miss dropping my observations, sharing poems and tracking my current growth as a writer. On the flip side, I am enjoying this new material I’ve been working on and having my poems surprise me with a demand for new language and fresh scenarios stemming from my own experience and studies but branching out into some unexpected places.

It’s been a hectic April with some great highs including:
• Completing the 30/30 challenge! Yes, I was late and doubled-up on at least two days but the bottom line is there are thirty drafts to work on. (Twenty-nine, really, the first poem “Heaven Below” was in my head for almost a whole year before finally typing it out and hashing through it.) Anyways, now that I’ve completed the NaPoWriMo challenge, I don’t think I’ll do it again. If I can do it in April, I should be doing it all the time.
• Heaven Below. It feels good to have a new chapbook and move from the editing to the revision stage with this group of poems, some of which are two years old.
• Apply yourself. April saw me apply for two big time workshops. I was lucky to have a week off at the beginning of the month so I could get them both done without dropping the ball on the Poem-A-Day and the new chap.
• And the winner is… VONA! Yeah, party people, I have been accepted to Willie Perdomo’s Poetry Collection Workshop this summer for VONA’s 10th anniversary year. I can not wait to get my developing MS workshopped.
• Still waiting on the other mystery workshop. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
• ♪It takes two to make a thing go right/It takes two to make it outta sight♫ Barb and I featured for Eth-Noh-Tec and busted out some poetic dialogue that was off the chain. After we intro’ed ourselves, we just went right into the work in a call-and-response format where each poem “spoke” to the next poem. It ended with us doing a collab version of “About B-Boys” and “(t)here.” One of my happiest moments on stage, ever.
• Back to the Bx! Huge thanks to Tara Betts who brought her copy of Heaven Below to a writing workshop with a Pre-G.E.D. group at West Farms Library in the Bronx. Betts tells me they really dug the title poem and copies were made and passed out. People, this is a dream come true. My poems read and shared in a Bronx Library, read with folks from the neighborhoods I was raised in. Oh man, this is why I write and why I need to write more. Thanks, Tara.
• More Tara. Be on the lookout for Betts’ debut poetry collection coming out this year.
• What’s slam poetry? I spent my morning yesterday teaching 12th graders about slam. Well, that’s what the teacher asked me to do but it quickly went right into “Ok, there is slam and there is literature. Let’s talk about where they meet and talk about poetry.” I had my cliche moment where the teacher tells me kids who normally don’t write poems are producing some great work. Guess what? They did. And cliche be damned it felt good.

That’s the quick breakdown with more reading reports, I Speak of the City poems, and randomness coming back to the blog soon.

Every day is a miracle when you’re a poet. Every day. Word.

12:51pm: Ok, let’s give this a go. Barb and I are at the SFPL’s Koret Auditorium for the Northern California Book Awards. This is my first time here and my first time attempt at live blogging an event.

The Koret just got opened up and folks are streaming in from the outside and it looks to be a well attended event. Not bad considering that it is an absolutely perfect Bay Area weather day outside. I don’t know many of the nominees personally so I can’t tell you who’s here and who’s not but we’ll figure it out as we go along.

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12:55pm: Who is here: Richard Silberg of Poetry Flash; Childrens’ Lit nominee Yuyi Morales; Poetry nominee John Olivares Espinoza; John Oliver Simon of Poetry Inside Out, Olivia E. Sears, Executive Director, Center for Art in Translation; and many more are in the house.

And the awards are under way with Mark Andre Singer of the Northern California Book Reviewers is the MC for this afternoon.

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1:18pm: The Nominees for Children’s Literature are:
Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee (Feiwel & Friends), Just In Case: A Trickster Tale and Spanish Alphabet Book by Yuyi Morales (Roaring Brook Press), Facts of Life: Stories by
Gary Soto (Harcourt Children’s Books), A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and The Dragon’s Child:
A Story of Angel Island by Laurence Yep and Dr. Kathleen S. Yep (HarperCollins).

And the winner is: Pamela S. Turner for A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts

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1:24pm: The Nominees for Fiction are:
Lady Lazarus by Andrew Foster Altschul (Harcourt), Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg (Counterpoint), Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein by Molly Dwyer (Lost Coast Press), and
No One You Know by Michelle Richmond (Delacorte Press).

And the winner is: Sylvia Brownrigg for The Delivery Room.

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1:35pm: The Nominees for General Nonfiction are:
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines by Richard A. Muller (W.W. Norton), The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Island Press), A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano by Katie Hafner (Bloomsbury), Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named
Isaias Hellman Created California by Frances Dinkelspiel (St. Martin’s Press), and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press).

And the winner is: Richard A. Muller for Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.

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1:45pm: The Nominees for Creative Nonfiction are:
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life by John Adams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan (Voice), Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff (Houghton Mifflin), and Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen by Susan Griffin (Trumpeter).

And the winner is: John Adams for Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.

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1:50pm: The Nominees for Poetry are:
Lucky Break by Terry Ehret (Sixteen Rivers Press), The Date Fruit Elegies by John Olivares Espinoza (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe), Inverse Sky by John Isles (University of Iowa Press), Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, New & Selected by August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the true keeps calm biding its story by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press).

And the winner is: Rusty Morrison for the true keeps calm biding its story.

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2:00pm: The Nominees for Translation:
The Old Man’s Verses by Ivan Divis, Translated from Czech by Deborah Garfinkle (Host Publications); Odes and Elegies by Friedrich Hölderlin, Translated from German by Nick Hoff (Wesleyan University Press); State of Exile by Cristina Peri Rossi, Translated from Spanish
by Marilyn Buck (City Lights Publishers); Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions); and Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, Translated from Persian by Niloufar Talebi (North Atlantic Books).

And the winner is: Katherine Silver‘s translation of Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya.

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2:06pm: The final two awards are the Special Recognition Award given to Paintings in Proust:
A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles (Thames & Hudson) and the Fred Cody Award For Lifetime Achievement in Community & Literature awarded to novelist, publisher, and playwright–Dorothy Bryant.

More to come later but props to Mark Singer for being a great MC and keeping everything moving. We’re off to the after party. Later.

Congrats to the folks at AuthorScoop.com, a great site that stays focused on literary news, posting great videos, and really reaching out to other communities. Go check em out!

AuthorScoop Celebrates First Anniversary
Literary News Site Positions Itself as Premier Web Portal for Writers and Readers

Austin, Texas April 13, 2009 – Literary news site AuthorScoop.com marks its first anniversary on the Web this week after a debut year that saw consistent growth in both traffic and national media attention.

The site’s daily departments—Morning LitLinks, Afternoon Viewing and Evening Reviews—deliver the latest publishing news and reviews with links and embedded video from all corners of the Web. AuthorScoop also delivers exclusive content, including essays on the craft of writing and interviews with both established and up-and-coming authors.

“AuthorScoop began as a labor of love,” says Editor-in-Chief William Haskins, a digital media writer/producer and poet. “Our initial mission was to compile links and items of interest for a small community of writers and readers. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how that community has expanded over the past year, and we’ve endeavored to expand our content to fit our growing readership.”

Managing Editor and novelist Jamie Mason adds: “It started off simply enough, poke around every day to find bits of literary and publishing interest and herd them into one place. But what’s evolved is a nifty chronicling of the springy nature of the printed word. Literary content and access is expanding and contracting in ways that warrant watching. We come across both the brilliant and the dismal on a daily basis; it reminds me of – life. Overall, that feels like good news to me.”

AuthorScoop continues to forge relationships with both writers and publishers that will enable it to bring its readers the latest literary news and views for years to come.

About AuthorScoop:
With exclusive columns and author interviews—along with constantly updated links to the latest literary news and reviews, videos related to the craft and business of writing, author quotes and poetry—AuthorScoop is a one-stop shop for information and inspiration for both writer and readers.

On the Web: http://www.authorscoop.com
Contact: authorscoop@gmail.com