as i prepare for another weekend of domestic bliss, here is the rundown on the louderARTS year that was, ACENTOS & louderMONDAYS kick off shows and stay tuned for more news on synonymUS
love ya like tai shan loves bamboo
:: ACENTOS THIS TUESDAY!
Prospero Año y Felicidad…from the bottom of our hearts.
Boy that sounds awfully familiar.
Bueno, familia! Heartfelt thanks to all of you for making 2005 the best year yet for Acentos. We had our highs and lows, but through it all, POESIA reigned supreme!
Of course, all it means is that Acentos has to go out and make this year bigger than the last one, and it all starts next Tuesday at the Bruckner Bar & Grill with featured poet LIDIA TORRES!
And poetas, we have an inkling that the holidays have worked that last poetic bone down to the marrow. We just know you got the new stuff. Our suggestion? BRING IT.
Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 @ 7 p.m.
The Uptown’s Best Open Mic & Lidia Torres
Lidia Torres is the author of “A Weakness for Boleros.” A Puerto Rican poet born in New York City, Ms. Torres is a graduate of Hunter College and New York University and a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She lives in New York where she is currently working on a translation project.
Bruckner Bar & Grill
1 Bruckner Boulevard (Corner of 3rd Ave)
6 Train to 138th Street Station
Hosted by Rich Villar
FREE! ($5 Suggested Donation)
Coming from Manhattan: Exit by the last car on the 6. Take the exit to your left, go up the stairs to your right to exit at Lincoln Avenue. Walk down Lincoln to Bruckner Blvd, turn right on Bruckner past the bike shop. The Bruckner Bar & Grill is on the corner. For more directions, please call 718.665.2001
Paz,
Rich Villar
for the Acentos Crew
:: louderMONDAYS RETURNS!
louderMONDAYS
Monday, January 9th, 7:00 pm
Slam This! featuring Jai Chakrabarti + the louderCHAMP Slam!
Alright, folks! They’ve whooped some metaphorical booty in the last few months, and now it’s time to cheer on the eight poets who will compete in the louderCHAMP Slam: Roger Bonair-Agard, Fish Vargas, Ove, Danny, Marc Marcel, Darian, Rachel McKibbens and Rives will duke it out in four rounds of poetical mayhem!
Who will represent louderARTS at the Individual World Poetry Slam in Charlotte, North Carolina? Find our for yourself this Monday! And bring some towels, ’cause it’s gonna be a bloodbath!
And make sure you get there early to secure a seat for our first featured poet of 2006, Jai Chakrabarti! Jai’s work leaps from Calcutta to Brooklyn to the theory of Pi as the ultimate erotic number, leaning on rhythm and sound until transcendent algorithms of poem break free.
Be there, and bring a poem of your own to share on the year’s first open mic!
Open Mic sign-up @ 7pm sharp!
13 Bar Lounge
35 East 13th Street @ University Place 2nd Floor New York, NY 10003 * 212.979.6677 4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R, W to 14th Street/Union Square
$5 / $4 students
2 for 1 drinks
:: louderARTS RETROSPECT
Lynne Procope reporting on the year in review:
2005 was an amazing year for us at The louderARTS Project. We saw synonymUS kick into full gear with a year-long run at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Acentos come into its own with a new space and marvelous features, a series of great writing and performance workshops through our Breathing Poetry Branch, and louderMONDAYS reach new heights with features we’d never imagined could grace our humble stage.
synonymUS continues to spread its wings, incorporating music, poetry, movement, and visual art with multi-disciplinary features and showcased performers. With collaborations forged both spontaneously onstage at the Nuyo and through pre-show jam sessions, synonymUS is building a community of multi-talented artists ready to rock any audience.
We saw our Bronx-based series, Acentos, blossom as it moved to the inviting Bruckner Bar and Grill and filled an amazing summer/fall season with such poetry stars as Flaco Navaja, Rigoberto González, Edwin Torres, and the incomparable MartÃn Espada. This poetry community is sustained in no small part by the energy of curators like the team at Acentos, who extend themselves to the writers and audiences at the
series. The growth and success that comes from that kind of work is evident at every reading they host.
For the louderMONDAYS crew (Marty, Roger and me,) it was a full year as we pushed ourselves to see what we could accomplish with each reading and each format. We
wound up the Q2 series which now goes on tour with Cheryl Boyce Taylor and will be succeeded by the OUTloud series in 06. We solidified a partnership with Cave Canem for the GrooveNation Series which will see a bright new range of writers in 2006. We introduced the brand-new Pinion format which will bring to our stage exceptional and accomplished writers in the company of poets they’ve mentored or by whom they’ve been influenced.
All in all, it was an excellent year. We’ve hit a point where we wish there were more weeks in the year, or at least more hours in a Monday!
At the start of 2005, as we try to do every so often, we looked to our own for inspiration, with exceptional and deeply moving features from Marty McConnell and Oscar Bermeo (look out for 06’s louderEDGE with Rich Villar!) and then moved into spring with readings by BJ Ward, Ross Gay, Jason Schneiderman, Patrick Rosal and Jai Chakrabarti. Laura Moran, Hal Sirowitz, Raina Leon, Ishle Park, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ragan Fox took us through the Summer season.
By the time we hit fall, we were exhausted and, we thought, ready for a more low-key season — but instead we got rising stars Aaron Smith and Joseph Legaspi (curator of that other brilliant Monday night series, Kundiman), the truly legendary Amiri & Amina Baraka, long-time favorites Maya Azucena, Derrick Brown, rock star (no really!) John Condron, and national slam stars Geoff Trenchard and Regie Gibson.
That should be enough, but before we could catch our breath and start planning our holiday break, we suffered double strokes of luck and love.
After seven years as part of the curating team for Monday nights, it’s still almost impossible for me to imagine approaching certain poets, and incredible to imagine that they’ll even consider saying yes to us, the little reading-series-that-can. So when Aaron Smith suggested that I contact Jan Beatty, and when Oscar calmly approached Mark Doty at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, I never imagined that either or both of them would say yes, let alone read within a week of each other.
Jan Beatty’s reading was a wonder, full of her breath-stealing wit and deeply touching poems, read in her soft, precise voice. You could hear a pin drop in the room while she was on stage, and the reaction to her work belied any notion that so-called “slam style” performance is needed to emotionally engage and amaze an audience in a bar. Her poems spoke eloquently for themselves and drew us all in with each stanza.
When I asked Mark Doty if he would feature in the initial reading of our new format, Pinion, and also invite four writers whose work he’d mentored, I never thought I’d end up introducing Joel Whitney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tina Chang and Kathy Graber all on the same night. That’s a curator’s dream come true and somehow, that’s how it worked out. Each of the poets impressed us with the risks they took both on stage and in their writing and thrilled us with their gracious and individual poetic style. This was a night of distinctive writing and flawless craft with several of the features, including Mark, presenting fabulous “new shit” to the utter glee of our audience. I honestly never thought I’d sit in Bar 13 and hear our crowd doing the “New Shit!” holler back to Mark Doty!
We closed the year with a wild run of excellent writers, but (almost) more importantly, poets of such deep personal grace and generosity that they hung out with us on a Monday night and gave their all with readings of character, substance and intensity.
They’ve left us even more madly in love with poetry than we were before.
Each of the poets who joined us in 2005 left their mark on our souls and in our minds. They sent us home eager to write and desperate to read one more poem before bed. They made Tuesday morning a thing of wonder for us, sitting on the trains and in our taxis, standing on line at the coffee shop or squashed in the back of the elevator, reading their poems or just murmuring their words out loud.
Yours in poetry,
Lynne Procope
for the louderARTS Project
co-curator, louderMONDAYS
:: louderMONDAYS 2006
Marty McConnell checks in on the what’s up for 06 tip:
In a minute, I’m going to fill you in on our January plans and a few highlights of the coming season. But here’s a little new-year teaser for you: these are the initials of a just a few famous poetry folks we’re pursuing for 2006. MH, JL, SS, AR… oh, the surprise. The poetic tension!
Meanwhile, as we continue our metaphorical stalking of the women and men who craft the poems that keeps us going, we’ve locked in quite a season.
Monday, January 9 — according to slammaster Rachel McKibbens, this is what’s on deck:
Alright, folks! They’ve whooped some metaphorical booty in the last few months, and now it’s time to cheer on the eight poets who will compete in the louderCHAMP Slam! Don’t miss Roger Bonair-Agard, Fish Vargas, Ove, Danny, Marc Marcel, Darian, Rachel McKibbens and Rives as they duke it out in four rounds of poetical mayhem! Who will represent louderARTS at the Individual World Poetry Slam in Charlotte, North Carolina? Find our for yourself next Monday! And bring some towels, ’cause it’s gonna be a bloodbath!
And bring your own new-year new-poems to share on the OPEN MIC!
After this you have a mere FIVE SLAMS LEFT to qualify for the semi-final slams in April and from there for the slam finals in May. Word on the street is that the organizers of this year’s National Poetry Slam in Austin are threatening to host the best nationals yet, so gather those poems and get those points – remember that you have to slam at least twice in order to qualify!
January 16: It’s the return of GrooveNation, with Detroit’s own poet/singer/songwriter/man of mystery BLAIR, as well as Seattle’s own CHRISTA BELL. Bring a poem by a writer of the African Diaspora to share along with your own on the OPEN MIC!
January 23: Here it is, your first chance to SLAM in 2006! Get there early to grab a spot as folks start to get frantic for those points. Plus get a good seat for 2005 louderARTS National Poetry Slam team member Mahogany Browne! And of course, the OPEN MIC list fills up faster than fast.
January 30: Walking not the line but the louderEDGE is the inventive and ever surprising RICH VILLAR, sharing all new or envelope-destroying work… bring your freshest poems to share on the OPEN MIC and be prepared for a few surprises.
A few highlights for the rest of the season – mark your calendars!
February 13 – the launch of OUTloud, louderARTS’ new queer-celebrating series
February 27 – Pinion returns with Barbara Jane Reyes bringing us Jessica Hagedorn, Anthem Salgado and Bino Realuyo
March 6 – an Open Slam + Sarah Gambito featuring = anything can happen!
April 3 – louderMONDAYS 8-YEAR ANNIVERSARY featuring Kimiko Hahn and Thomas Sayres-Ellis
May 8 – Grand Slam Finals determines the team for 2006
We say it a lot, but it’s still true: we wouldn’t be anywhere without our audience. What you bring to the open mic, to the slams, and to the room’s incredible energy is a crucial part of what allows us to attract these amazing features – so thank you. And, see you Monday!
yours in poems,
Marty McConnell
for the louderARTS Project
co-curator, louderMONDAYS
:: THE LINEUP
louderMONDAYS
every Monday at 13 Bar/Lounge
35 E. 13th St., Union Square
7 p.m.
$5 ($4 for students)
2-for-1 drinks all night
presenting the best in NYC spoken word – open mics,
slams, and featured poets
Acentos
2nd and 4th Tuesdays at 7 p.m.
The Bruckner Bar & Grill
1 Bruckner Boulevard (Corner of Third Avenue)
Bronx, NY
4, 5, 6 Train to 138th Street
FREE ($5 Suggested Donation)
synonymUS • Poet’s Collaborative Open
Every 3rd Wednesday at 6:45 p.m.
Music, Movement, Image, Narrative — always an Open Mic
The Nuyorican Poets Café
236 East Third St (between Aves B & C)
F Train to 2nd Ave
$7 Cover
www.louderARTS.com
