ScryptKeeper

Just Breathe

2012-01-27T14:15:00.003-06:00

A pretty mesmerizing art installation posted on Drunken Boat. Ahhhh...

One Hundred and Eight – Interactive Installation from Nils Völker on Vimeo.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Beautiful Equations

2012-01-25T16:18:00.003-06:00

The LA Times gives it up for one of my all time favorite writers. Can we get a s-l-o-w c-l-a-p please? (thank ya)

Illustration of Percival Everett © Joe Linton

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Beautiful Equations:

Over the course of more than 20 books, Percival Everett has produced as rich a body of fiction as just about any contemporary American writer, but mainstream literary recognition has proved elusive. As an African-American writer deeply interested in the American West, and one with an experimentalist bent, he’s certainly no marketer’s dream. His books range so freely — from satire to absurdism, from realism to metafiction — that it’s difficult to get a fix on him. Then again, the same might be said of Cervantes, Sterne, or Twain.

Identity is the bedrock of the rational. Aristotle’s theory of identity holds that each entity has a specific nature. An owl cannot be a monkey; an elevator cannot be a marimba. Destabilize identity and the ground beneath our feet crumbles: We risk falling into madness. It’s no accident that Everett’s two variations on Greek myth, For Her Dark Skin (1990) and Frenzy (1997), bring readers inside the minds of Medea and Dionysus, those avatars of the irrational. Indeed, so thoroughly do his books complicate identity and undermine logic — in terms of both content and form — that they elude critical categories.

Click here to read the full piece.

Am I glad as hell that Greywolf is re-releasing Erasure. Yep. About a billion more people need to read that book. Also, it's hilarious. Also, read the piece. Want the rest? Good. Seriously: Click here to read the full piece.

Gospel's Hugin & Munin think this sledding crow is tight.

2012-01-23T13:48:00.004-06:00

Sledding Crow:

It is a remarkable demonstration of the intelligence of the crow, which sits on a smart branch in the animal tree within the family Corvidae. There is something so deliberate about this play: the crow uses a toy; it searches for the best sledding path; it repeats the adventure down the roof; it keeps upright with its feet planted on the lid when, as a bird, it could simply fly. The bird does not want to travel down the roof, it wants to slide down the roof.

While you're at it, check out Mischief the Talking Raven, Joe the Talking Crow, and definitely Gospel: poems for a whole lot of raveny goodness! Click the poem to the right for a taste!

Some sweet poets get the NBCC nod!

2012-01-22T09:43:00.001-06:00

National Book Critics Circle: Video: NBCC 2011 Finalists Annoucements at Artists Space, NYC - Critical Mass Blog

Congratulations to my beloved poets Laura Kasishke, Yusef Komunyaka, and Aracelis Girmay on this beautiful nod to their awesomeness:

Poetry finalists, all demonstrating a mastery of form while advancing their art, included Laura Kasischke (Space, in Chains, Copper Canyon Press) and Yusef Komunyakaa (The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), as well as relative newcomer Aracelis Girmay (Kingdom Animalia, BOA Editions). They were presented by 2010 finalist Kathleen Graber.

Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on Thursday, March 8, at 6:00 p.m. at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York.

Click here for the complete list of finalists and to read the full article.

Guernica / The Harmonizer

2012-01-20T10:54:00.001-06:00

A pretty schweet interview with Kwame Dawes by Camille Goodison in last month's Guernica:

The Harmonizer

Camille Goodison interviews Kwame Dawes December 2011

The Emmy Award–winning poet and crisis reporter on Haiti’s continuing struggles and Jamaica’sAIDS crisis, how Afro-Caribbean music has influenced the writing of V.S. Naipaul and Langston Hughes, and his new role as editor of Prairie Schooner.

... For nineteen years, home for Dawes was South Carolina, where he founded the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. One of his latest anthologies, Home Is Where presents the poetry of over two dozen poets from the Carolinas writing about the South as home. Two recent anthologies, Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry and Jubilation: An Anthology of Poetry Celebrating Fifty Years of Jamaican Independence continues this work featuring the writing of international poets from a variety of schools.
Dawes now teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he is also editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner.
—Camille Goodison for Guernica

Kwame Dawes: ... Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

Click here to read the rest.

Poet Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program

2012-01-17T10:46:00.002-06:00

Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program-Department of English - Carnegie Mellon University

Award-winning poet and Department of English ProfessorTerrance Hayes has been chosen to serve as a panelist for President Barack Obama's new National Student Poets Program (NSPP), the country's highest honor for young poets presenting original work. Hayes is one of four literary leaders who will judge students who received a National Scholastic Art & Writing Award for poetry. Five high school students will be selected to serve for a year as national poetry ambassadors.

"This is good exposure for CMU's Creative Writing Program to kids who are interested in writing," said Hayes, who won the2010 National Book Award for poetry. "Poetry seems to be becoming more popular in high school, but there's room to grow around what their sense of it is - from slam to hip hop and the relationship between page and stage."

NSPP was created by the President's Committee on the Arts & Humanities, which is chaired by First Lady Michelle Obama, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a partnership with the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. The winning student poets will receive college scholarships and opportunities to present their work at writing and poetry events. They also will be featured at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Read the rest.

Yum. More poems.

2012-01-11T10:04:00.005-06:00

Can't stop won't stop with the poems online.
That's not true. I'm stopping now. I've got work to do.
Before I do though, here's a good poem by a good poet who I also here is a pretty good person. The schweet trifecta.

Dear Empire [these are your temples]
by Oliver de la Paz

Dear Empire,

These are your temples. There are rows of stone countenances, pillar after pillar. As if walking through a forest filled with alabaster heads: here, the frown. The gaze. The luminous stare.

Smoke from the incense curls, shapes itself against the archways, rubs against the grooves of the columns. Only a few men press their heads to their hands.

Outside, archeologists excavate a stone torso. Bound in coils of fraying rope, it rises before us, pulled upwards by a backhoe. Its form momentarily hides the sun, though as it sways, the light strikes our eyes. Saying yes. Saying no.

I found an interesting poem today.

2012-01-11T09:42:00.002-06:00

So I've been thinking a lot about electronic access to literature since I've been reading Murakami on my Kindle. I read a great deal on my phone. My sister, Asli, has (completely accidentally) helped me to push past my audio-book blocks and I've been enjoying listening to audiobooks and podcasts more than ever--both through my phone, through the wireless connections all over my house, etc.

It was weird to have reached a point in my life where I was completely techy, yet absolutely in resistance to it simultaneously. I'm still there, but I've been learning to find the joy in the connections again, rather than the shackles. Getting away from Facebook for the past few weeks again (indefinitely--the freedom is delicious) has probably helped that quite a bit.

So one thing I've been enjoying is finding interesting poetry and artwork online--not just by folks who I love, but by folks whose work I don't know much or anything about. Discovering a new literary friend. I haven't been following The Storialist, but I do believe I'll start. This is an interesting poem, based on artwork. The couplets are quite effectively and beautifully employed here. The moments they capture, the litany of them, the rhythm. Nice. Enjoy!

The Storialist: Slow Yes

(inspired by--Slow Yes, by Matt Bollinger)

Let the objects and locations
around you grow stranger.

Let the road smack your foot
in the jaw when the cobblestone

is higher than you expected.
May the branches corkscrew

and twist as they reach away
from the trees that own them.

May you, a pedestrian, gesture
to cars to allow them to turn.

Doesn’t the insurance company
look bewitching in her bricks.

Doesn’t the nude light bulb
in the third floor of the vacant

building gleam with good health.
Keep trying tomato juice and olives

and whiskey (not together) in case
your taste buds reupholster themselves.

Keep hold of the year you were
born so you always know your age.

by Hannah Stephenson

Haruki Murakami: Making My Life Dance Fire

2012-01-10T14:21:00.003-06:00

So who knows. I am not a blogger as this blog makes manifest. I can never decide how I want to use this space. Perhaps I'll write a bit about the things I read. I may completely decide against that tomorrow.

Today, I've got to say that Haruki Murakami (increasingly one of my favorite writers of all time--every book of his I read cements his place more firmly) and 1Q84 has (as a child I once knew used to say) been "making my head pop off." In the best possible way.

I don't even almost want to write about the book. (See? I told you I'm contrary.) And anyway, I'm still only halfway through the 946-page masterpiece. But I'll let him speak for himself about it. And tell you to run, don't walk, to pick it up. Don't let the largesse of the novel scare you off. I'm actually (gasp) reading it on a Kindle. Makes it actually portable.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 182, Haruki Murakami:

"In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about."

**Fear not dear luddites, the Kindle was a gift. I'm not anti-e-reader. I'm likely going to be totally down with e-readers once they separate themselves from single-corporation means of content distribution. I will say that the more I travel, the more I feel like one of the few people on earth without an iPad. But I'm cool with it. The more technology we get (says me, who's a life-long tech girl) the less of it I want. Yep. That's happening. (takes out teeth to put in glass by the bed while looking for pencil and glasses both of which are stuck in my hair)

When good things happen to good poet-people

2012-01-10T11:26:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to Marilyn Nelson!!

Announcing the 2012 Frost Medalist, Marilyn Nelson - Poetry Society of America: Announcing the 2012 Frost Medalist, Marilyn Nelson
01/06/12 by PSA
The Poetry Society of America is honored to announce that Marilyn Nelson is the 2012 recipient of the organization's highest award, the Frost Medal, presented annually for "distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry." Previous winners of this award include Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, and Charles Simic, who was the 2011 recipient.

Habari Gani--Umoja!

2011-12-26T11:00:00.002-06:00

Gospel gets some Imani kinda love:

Real Reading Rainbow: Kwanzaa Edition 2011 from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.

Thank You, Writers, for a Great 2011!

2011-12-14T09:11:00.003-06:00

As the year winds down to the dawn of 2012, I want to use this space to say thank you to some wonderful writers who have made 2011 a much more beautiful and productive and loving world in which I may live.

I'm going to start with a project I have absolutely loved!

An amazing conversation between a poet and a novelist/essayist is coming to a close and I've loved it.

Writing? Philosophy? Buddhism? Blackness? Where on earth can you find thoughtful commentary on all of these things and their intersections on a daily basis? Right here.

Missed it?

Catch up now with E. Ethelbert Miller's fascinating year-long interview with scholar, essayist, novelist, and MacArthur "genius" Charles Johnson! You'll be glad you did:

http://ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com/

New Poem in Cura: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action

2011-12-01T21:51:00.004-06:00

There is some great work in the new issue of Cura!

I'm thrilled to be a part of it!

Thin Filament Pyrometry /or/ “Dag! We ain’t even in Detroit yet? Sheeeit. Stop here and lemme get me some chicken.”

-SAMIYA BASHIR-

— then two women one old and one young pulled aside

off the highway and into the poorly lit driveway of Popeye’s

off I-94 in a truck stop. They wanted to buy some fried chicken.

One had a five and the other three ones and together they purchased

a three piece two biscuits a leg and a thigh

and they let

the poor girl with the pockmarked-up face and the torn

lace from panties caught up in her apron just

keep the change.

so she did and she quietly squirreled away five

for herself

and then later that night after steaming in dark lint-lined slacks

made of fake polyester and worn to a shine smelling french

fried and coated in salt stains the dusty bill rose it emerged

from that pockmarked girl’s pocket and slid to the palm

of the man singing —

Newport! Five dollar! Five dollar!

who kept it aloft in his palm where the wind swept the frail

greasy paper up into the air far above where the man waved

his smokes

far above far above where a mother leaned out

of her window above to the baby who leaned sorta

safely up next to the grates. It fell right on his hand

which was sticky with Chef Boyardee or Spagetti’Os maybe

who cares. I mean really

who cares but the breeze

and the bill and the man selling smokes

because mama needs ‘ports so he’s one

lucky baby who finally gets

lifted down.

Nikky Finney - some real-time reasoning for our holiday seasoning

2011-11-25T16:30:00.002-06:00

Nikky Finney's 2011 National Book Awards in Poetry acceptance speech from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Mmmmm.... poems ....

2011-11-25T11:04:00.001-06:00

Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them

2011-10-31T17:10:00.002-05:00

Love Books?

Love Ghost Stories?

Love Michigan?

Love Wayne State University Press?

Love Crazy Amazing Literature Marketing?

If not, check this out. You will.

If so, well then Happy Halloween you freak!

You're welcome. ;-)

Some Sunday morning Love for #Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-30T09:33:00.002-05:00

Too often monumental moments in history are taught in our schools as so much rote. Too often we fail to connect the lessons learned from our history to the occasions happening right inside, or outside, of our own front doors.

This Sunday morning, employing no poetic license or finagling, I offer a bit of writing that sustains me in hope that it sustains all those who stand and sleep outside in the cold in my stead in Zuccotti Park.

Many of these recent days I have felt much like Whitman, too old and broken of body, too poor and tenuously employed as such that I dare not scoff such employment that so many of my peers so desperately seek. Much as Whitman, at the start of the Civil War, "vowed to live a 'purged' and 'cleansed' life," I have shut down many of my worst distractions and hunkered down to business.

It is my work that is all that I have, and all that I have to offer. So I busy myself to it, and play more rarely than I have these past few years. And hope that what bits of it I complete will be of service to some in any way that might meet that which so many have done which has been so dearly of service to me.

This Sunday morning, as we close another month and look forward to a new one that pushes us further on toward winter, I dig deeply back 148 years and offer a bit of prose, a slice of oratory so meaningful that it grounds me in my own dedication. I am no nationalist, being far more interested in what brings us, as humans, together than what serves to divide us. Yet I see in what is being created at Occupy Wall Street, the same push to bring us together in service of our individual and collective survival as I do in this speech which is well over a century old.

They are seeking, these few dissidents who speak for so many of us, "a new birth of freedom," where--even if we can not yet defeat the stranglehold of capital, we can at least demand that it behave more humanely. In the end, it can not. It is capital.

But we can. We can demand that we, humans, behave more humanely toward each other. And we can demand, at the very least, as has been demanded time and again, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

2011 Book #113: GOSPEL by Samiya Bashir - Blog - Matt Bell

2011-10-29T10:39:00.002-05:00

Extraordinary writer, teacher, and editor Matt Bell gives a little love to Gospel!

2011 Book #113: GOSPEL by Samiya Bashir - Blog - Matt Bell

2011 BOOK #113: GOSPEL BY SAMIYA BASHIR

...the silence that surrounds each carcass now: voided prayer: cold
arthritic grating: remembered notions of breath. saints: offer a hand to a
wheezing shadow: wish for someone to hold before the sure, sudden twilight.

—from "When the saints went" by Samiya Bashir, collected in Gospel

Hey! It's my birthday! And I got an award!

2011-10-27T12:52:00.005-05:00

Thanks Aquarius Press 'nem! :) What an honor to win this award with the lovely and brilliant Parneshia Jones!

Legacy Award Winners Announced Today and Other Updates

AQUARIUS PRESS

LEGACY AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED TODAY

Samiya Bashir

Aquarius Press/Willow Books is proud to announce that the 2011 Aquarius Press Legacy Award will be presented toSamiya Bashirand Parneshia Jones as co-winners. Both women received multiple nominations extolling their vast contributions to our field. We were extremely impressed with the caliber of all the nominees, and many thanks go out to those who submitted nominations.

Parneshia Jones

The Legacy Award honors a woman writer of color from the American Midwest actively involved in providing opportunities for other writers. The award recognizes the anniversary of the founding of Aquarius Press and the ongoing mission of its founder, Heather Buchanan. The 2011 prize consists of a tribute section in the 2012 edition of the acclaimed journal Reverie: Midwest African American Literature and a feature at the 2012 Willow Books Celebration during AWP in Chicago, IL.

About Samiya Bashir

Ann Arbor, Michigan native Samiya Bashir's work includes Gospel, Where the Apple Falls, and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. Bashir's poetry, stories, articles and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications and she is the recipient of awards, grants, and fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Soul Mountain Writers Colony, The Austin Project, Alma de Mujer, the James Dick Foundation for the Performing Arts, the Astraea Foundation, the National Association of Pen Women, and Cave Canem, among others. For over a decade, Bashir worked as a social justice communications professional and was owner and principal consultant of Lead Time Consulting, specializing in communications for non-profits and arts organizations. Currently, she is back home among the Ann Arbor trees, teaching writing at the University of Michigan.

To read an earlier feature interview with Samiya by Aquarius Press, visit www.WillowLit.com .

About Parneshia Jones

Parneshia Jones is a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Her awards include the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Margaret Walker Short Story Award. She has been published in several anthologies includingThe Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South and America! What's My Name? Her work at the Chicago-based TriQuarterly/NU Press includes securing a home for the Cave Canem Second Book Prize, publishing the new collection of poems by Nikky Finney and helping to ensure that there was a proper celebration of the recent anniversary of Chicago playwright Lorraine Hansberry's Broadway debut of A Raisin in the Sun. Ms. Jones has an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Details for the 2012 Willow Books reading in Chicago during AWP (Feb. 29-March 3, 2012) are forthcoming, but plan on a blockbuster event--watch our Willow Books Facebook page for announcements.

Shuttlesworth vs. Jobs? Seriously? Let's keep it together people. ("us" vs. "them" = everybody loses)

2011-10-06T11:26:00.005-05:00

Ooof. It's hard out here for a hybrid black woman.

What SHUTTLESWORTH & JOBS had in common: Vision. Action. Populist roots (also: colored daddies).
Faith in their cause. Faith their work.
...and a bad-ass way with a sledgehammer.

Lemme say this just one good time:

I refuse (refuse) to get into a pissing contest (w/ Facebook no less, nor the blogosphere, nor my friends thereon) about who's more important: The Black Preacher or The "White" Capitalist.

(And yes, I keep dropping the Syrian bomb not because Jobs' adoptive parents weren't his parents, but because I *will not* be complicit in the erasure of white supremacy--no one sees all the technological (& other) visionaries being wiped out as we continue to murder Arabs left and right like they aren't real people. This, to me, this is another kind of ethnic cleansing--if we can pass them off as white-white, let's do it so it doesn't complicate our illusion of intellectual superiority.)

Here's the thing: This is exactly the kind of divisive pseudo-politics that keeps the Left in our own damned way--we only have room for one kinda somebody, the "right" kinda (morally unassailable--whodat?) somebody, like we're the damned Tea Party or some mess.

Is there a difference between Civil Rights and the Right Not to be Blocked Out of Our Increasingly Technological Culture? Yep. (Especially as, like most of us who are non-white, and non-rich, access to technological education remains scarce and expensive, and/or as some of us are freakin' poets and wouldn't spend our lives writing code even if we could.)

Is there a difference between Liberal Christianity and Liberal Capitalism?

Yep. (And quiet as it's kept, they're both as fulla holes as a tether-ball.)

But, rather than embrace a hierarchical approach where one is good and one is bad, where one died and it's sad, and the other died and it's angering because he has "stolen the thunder" of the other's death I'd rather take the opportunity to find connection, rather than division.

If nothing else, I think they would both appreciate us using the occasion to bring each other together rather than push each other apart.

As someone who is neither Pro-Capitalism nor Pro-Christianity, I can still see the importance of their not-all-that-dissimilar visions. The idea that all children should have access to an equal (and excellent) public education, a well-lived life, and the idea that anyone (esp 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago) can and should be able to maneuver themselves in our increasingly divided technological world (despite, perhaps, having unequal educations, and/or techy inclinations) is *differently* visionary. I do not, however, see them (again, in their purest forms, and we rarely get to live in our purest forms) as in opposition with each other. In fact, I see more connections than divisions between the two.

People also thought I was crazy the day that both Jim Henson & Sammy Davis, Jr. died (May 16, 1990).

Why should I care about Jim Henson--who? The puppeteer?
And, to the same note, why should I care about Sammy Davis, Jr.?
Wasn't he an Uncle Tom anyway?

This is what they said.

What I said 20 years ago, and stand by today, was this: I can't imagine how I could have grown up even remotely sane in the whitewashed world of my childhood without the Muppets. Period. Thank god for Kermit, and Fozzy, for all those crazy creatures in whom I could see myself as in NO ONE ELSE ON TELEVISION (black, white, or brown--wasn't nobody on T.V. living like me). I know white folks who weren't allowed to watch Sesame Street growing up because it was "too colored," their parents didn't want their kids brainwashed by that ghetto trash madness. Me? That wasn't my life either, but I got it. I at least had a path of entry into a world peopled by folks who were … different. That "fucking white-ass" puppeteer saved my life. Period.

I continue to be grateful, not equally, but dually, to the visionary actions of both Shuttlesworth and Jobs.

Are they both flawed? Yep.

Were some of their methods … shall we say … not my own? Yep.

And yes, it sucks that they died on the same day. For their myriad loved ones, it sucks that they died at all. But I'd like to use that fact to highlight the similarities of the fight against the machine they inspired in many (not all, for sure, but many) like me.

Am I alone in this? I don't think so.

But, hell. I dunno. Ask Facebook.

(drops the mic and exists the stage)

His Name Be Witness: The Genius of Marvin K. White — Lambda Literary

2011-09-27T10:58:00.000-05:00

Now, Marvin K. White is my brother in many a way and many a name. Do I hate that he seems to get younger every year? Yep. More beautiful? Eh, nah. Who can help that. More brilliant? Nope, I'm just grateful.

His two (yep, two) new books are recently out from RedBone Press.

Need to know more so you don't sleep on the magic? Here ya go:

His Name Be Witness: The Genius of Marvin K. White

by STEVEN G. FULLWOOD on SEPTEMBER 25, 2011

in FEATURES, OPINION

The good news, girl is that you eat the heart first so you will
not love what you have to do next—divide up the brains. Do the
unthinkable. Swallowing pride is only practice for chewing on the
gristle of memory. Nothing tastes like it used to. And
fortunately the more you eat the less used to there is. Eat
the ears. The cartilage and bone, bending and snapping amongst
your teeth, the vibration of the tuning fork, pricking and picking up
the worst of what you will say to yourself to make it go down, the
worst of what will be said about you. Sopping up the juices with
the cochlear nerve is unnerving. There is no worst now. Lean in
and chew off the nose. The sinus offers us no signs. You can’t
know what the rest will smell or taste like until you taste it. You
can’t eat just any old body. One eye at a time. Kiss. Lick and bite
the lips. Keep your promise that they are exactly what you have a
taste for. Pray over this eucharist love. Leave nothing to chance or
waste.

Marvin K. White, from our name be witness

We are living in the age of Marvin K. White. Such pronouncements sound lofty when issued by anyone, particularly when he and I are running buddies dashing down our singular and collective paths to publication.But trust me, when you read this man’s work you’ll close your eyes and nod appreciatively to the gospel. He didn’t blink. Marvin’s works are significant contributions to American letters. His poetic insights are necessary places to lay your hat and rest your feet. For those seeking literature that pushes, pouts, praises and plays with language in soothing ways, you’ll find a very generous poet in Marvin. His seductive verse gently reminds us of our duty to be gracious, kind and vulnerable with each other.

Born in Oakland, California to Curley Joseph and Margaret White, Marvin was raised by a faithful mother and grandmother named Bessie. The baby of the family grew to be a skinny, delightful teenager whose eyes caught a lot of stories. Early on Marvin began to chronicle his life with words and not too few cakes. But I am getting ahead of myself.[1]

That one. Standing there on the verge of tears. That one. The one that stand out. That’s mine. Outstanding.[2]

Being a friend of Marvin’s, a brother in the word, the work and the way I’ve read drafts of his writings for years. I’ve had the honor of publishing him twice (Think Again[3] and To Be Left With the Body[4]) so I claim no impartiality, but this is not a traditional critique. Call it a public love letter to and about a brother who creates beautiful art deserving of praise. In light of his new publications, our name be witness (RedBone Press) and status (RedBone Press), I decided to sit with four of his books to celebrate. Thinking and rocking through his poems and essays I decided to write an essay that I hope highlights and embraces what this poet has to offer as a responsible witness.

1997: I met Marvin before I met him. That is, his first book, last rights got a hold of my heart and never let go. Sweet, deceptively simple verse illuminates the hard-to-hear stories of friends, lovers, family members in love and trouble. Readers always know where they are in these simple and supple poems; painful moments you may not want imagine or relive but you couldn’t ask for a better guide. Sometimes mournful, sometimes celebratory, the damaged are cleansed and made good. In “kevin the faggot,” Marvin asks readers to remember a boy, self-made, developing, clearly his own thing:

there’s a little boy on this block
where you live
he fights to wear little girl dresses
he likes the way it makes him feel
to tuck his penis between his legs
to imagine his sex an innie
he likes sitting on his uncles laps
digging through their bulging pockets
for change or other treats[5]

Homo men and boys from the neighborhood populate but, don’t overpower, the always moving, always charged, center of Marvin’s radical vision. People are loving and ridiculous—naked, butchered, shaking, yelling, dancing and leave their marks on a cunning conduit. For poems that propel and pop, last rightsstands as a remarkable debut for a promising writer.

Fast forward to Chicago 2002. Marvin, the man, shows up. He becomes my roommate[6] at the first Fire & Ink writers’ festival in Chicago. He’s an all-around handsome man who laughs easy, knows everybody and everything. And did I mention he can cook his arse off?[7]

Read the rest here:

His Name Be Witness: The Genius of Marvin K. White — Lambda Literary

This Weekend: Red Rover Series / Experiment #51

2011-09-26T20:22:00.001-05:00

the chicago poetry calendar: Red Rover Series / Experiment #51

Red Rover Series / Experiment #51

Red Rover Series
{readings that play with reading}

Experiment #51:
X-Ref = Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1st
5pm / doors lock 5:30pm
**please note change from usual time**

Featuring:
Samiya Bashir
Tisa Bryant
Gabrielle Civil
Carina Gia Ferro
Krista Franklin
John Keene

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
suggested donation $4

logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT was founded in 2006, and is edited and published by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis and Kate Schatz. The Encyclopedia Project is a hybrid publication that plays with the reference book, literary journal and arts catalogue, blending all into a hybrid series of cross-referenced hardcover volumes. Each book complicates categorical, genre and narrative expectations, while connecting seemingly disparate writers, artists and ideas within and among volumes. Encyclopedia Vol. 1 A-E was published to wide acclaim in 2006; Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K just launched new excitement in 2010. http://www.encyclopediaproject.org

SAMIYA BASHIR is the author of Gospel, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award, and Where the Apple Falls, a Poetry Foundation bestseller and finalist for the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. Bashir is editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. Bashir’s poetry, stories, articles and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications and granted several awards. For over a decade, Bashir worked as a social justice communications professional and was a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, a writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Most recently, she was owner and principal consultant of Lead Time Consulting, specializing in communications for non-profits and arts organizations. She currently lives amidst the Ann Arbor trees beneath which she teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

TISA BRYANT is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor/founder of The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor (with Ernest Hardy) of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and nominated for a LAMBDA Literary Award. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals 1913, Animal Shelter, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, Viz., in the ‘zine, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, and the solo exhibits of visual artists Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. A novel, The Curator, is forthcoming. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black woman poet, conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. Over the last ten years, she has premiered over twenty original performance works nationally (Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC) and internationally (Mexico, Puerto Rico, The Gambia).She is currently disseminating work from her 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellowship project “In and Out of Place: Making Black Feminist Performance Art in Mexico” and is circulating Swallow the Fish, her critical/creative text on race, body and performance art. She teaches at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. The aim of all her work is to open up space.

CARINA GIA FERRO, writer and interdisciplinary performer, received her BA from U.C. Berkeley, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a professor at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago. Her poems were most recently published or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Arsenic Lobster, The Encyclopedia Project and Windy City Queer.

KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam andCallaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K andGathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars, and a teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and numerous organizations in the city of Chicago.

JOHN KEENE is a writer, translator and Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He has a B.A. from Harvard and an M.F.A. from New York University. He was a longtime member of the Dark Room Collective, an organization that from 1988 to 1998 celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color. His first novel, Annotations, was published by New Directions in 1995. A new collection of poems entitled Seismosis, in collaboration with Christopher Stackkhouse, was published by 1913 Press in 2006.

THE CHICAGO CALLING ARTS FESTIVAL presents multi-disciplinary collaborations during Chicago Artists Month and collaborated with Red Rover Series on Experiment #51. For the 6th Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival, people in the Chicago area will work with others outside of Chicago — both in the U.S. and abroad; these collaborations include a range of art forms, such as music, dance, film, literature, and intermedia — prepared or improvised.http://www.chicagocalling.org

RED ROVER SERIES is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

Email ideas for reading experiments
to us at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com

The schedule for events is listed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

A Weekend of Reading Poetry in the Great Lakes

2011-09-22T21:34:00.004-05:00

Hey Folks,

I'll be taking some new poems out for a spin in the next few weeks with two upcoming events in Ypsilanti, Michigan & Chicago, Illinois:

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH

The Madhouse Poetry Series

Friday September 30, 2011 from 7:00pm - 9:00pm

The Ugly Mug Cafe

317 W. Cross Street
Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197 Get Directions

THE MADHOUSE POETRY SERIES

LIVE POETRY AND MUSIC

FEATURING THE WORK OF:
* KAT STEIH
* ELIZABETH MIKECSH
* JASON POWELL
* NICOLAS VANDERPOOL
* LEO JARRET
* ERIK STEIGER
* CONNOR MORRELL
* ERIC LEIGHTON

** AND VERY SPECIAL GUEST POET: SAMIYA BASHIR **

ART WORK BY ERIC STEIGER.

SEPTEMBER 30TH 2011

7-9 PM THE UGLY MUG
317 W. CROSS ST.
YPSILANTI, MI

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1ST

Experiment #51: Encyclopedia Volume 2 (F-K)
Saturday October 1, 2011 at 5:00pm
Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60642 Get Directions
Red Rover Series
"Readings that play with reading."

Experiment #51: Encyclopedia Volume 2 (F-K)

The readers/performers are Samiya Bashir, Tisa Bryant, Gabrielle Civil, Carina Farrero, Krista Franklin, and John Keene.

Price: $4 suggested donation

Outer Space Studio
WICKER PARK/BUCKTOWN
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Ticket Info: 4.00

2011-08-16T15:21:00.004-05:00

Yeah, so I clearly abandoned this blog long ago.

Wanna see what I'm doing and blabbing about now?

Check me out either on Twitter or at Tumblr.

Someday this web-life will keep up with actual life. But I'm not sure what all that crazy someday comes with, so let's just do what we can for now, huh?

It's National Poetry Month! Check out my new poem on The Rumpus!

2011-04-18T10:12:00.003-05:00

National Poetry Month, Day 18:

“Transparent to Visible Light”

by Samiya Bashir

Across the seas, and then across the

seas, an aircraft carried full and whole

a world: as far apart as their fair

hostess could achieve sat mother and

father and their little girl who sucked

a sulking, tortured, fraying curl she

wound from back of head to tip of tongue,

smacking strands against her lips like a

kiss. Yesterday’s newsprint sat unfurled

across her father’s lap. Read: football,

bombings, despots, plagues. His visage hung

a worrisome landscape; the contours

of his body, once young and poised and

tight in flight, followed the sun then. Now

he chases last night’s moon toward all he

had left behind. His girl swallows chunks

of hair. His wife flops the noon away

propped against the window, a pillow

strewn between shoulder, neck and vapor;

eyes closed to the sky blue blanket rough

hewn with tapering three o’clock stars.

As her husband stretched his long legs out

to the aisle away from his paper

everything he once knew warped and burned.

Whatcha doin on Friday Night?

2011-03-24T09:26:00.001-05:00

Chimurenga Newsroom › call for classifieds

2011-03-08T14:33:00.004-06:00

Hey Writers!

Take it back to the future, y'all.

(Don’t need money. don’t take fame. Don’t need no credit card to ride this train.)

Chimurenga Newsroom › call for classifieds

Chimurenga Magazine’s next publishing project is The Chimurenga Chronicle – a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.
Produced in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, it is a multi-section broadsheet with news, long-form journalism, comics, sport, art etc. and 100-page books magazine to be released in September 2011, in numerous African cities.
The current tools we have at our disposal, particularly in the area of knowledge production and dissemination, don’t help much to grasp contemporary reality. What we need is a Time Machine! A device that will allow us to understand the numerous different temporalities, dispersed entanglements and overlapping time-spaces that define today.
The Chimurenga Chronicle is one such machine. Back-dated to the week May 18-24 2008, it’s situated during the first week of the so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa, two years ago – but it focuses outward, covering the events, scenes and situations around the world during this period.
As part of the project we view the newspaper classifieds section as a literary and art platform; a public space that delights in prescience, precision, and provocation and uses wit as a formidable weapon against the tyranny of everyday banality. Yes, it sells out – it sells out big. It sells everything from undying love, to first editions of Fanon, from rhetorical job offers to shards of hope.
We therefore invite submission of nano-novels, micro-art works, flash poetry, philosophical aphorism, minima moralia, haikus of the heart, found objects and more, for sections including sales, wanted, services, jobs, personalsand obituaries.
All classifieds submitted should be no longer than 50 words and should relate to the week May 18

For Oscar Night: James Franco Talks Poetry

2011-02-27T11:09:00.004-06:00

James Franco Talks Poetry

(interviewed by Travis Nichols)

@ The Poetry Foundation

But I had been interested in Crane before I was at Warren Wilson and before I had even gone back to UCLA. I was doing a movie in New Orleans, a weird movie called Sonny, and I was reading a Harold Bloom book. I’m not quite sure which one, but he mentioned Hart Crane. And then I got Crane’s poems and Bloom wrote an introduction to the collection that I bought, and in that introduction he mentioned Paul Mariani’s book, The Broken Tower. So then I found that. I remember reading it and thinking, “Oh, this is a great character. I’d love to play this character.” Crane’s life was the life of the quintessential struggling artist. I mean, James Joyce, he’s a great writer, but it would be hard to make his life dramatic. You could, but it’s just not readily dramatic. I guess you could say, “Oh, well, he went to Paris and his daughter was kind of crazy and he hung out with Sylvia Beach, then the war came. . . .”

Something to [think/be/do/act/fart/sleep/puke/love/&] about... (maybe)

2011-02-24T12:11:00.001-06:00

Exhibition: ‘Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit’ at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA - Art Blart:

"Focusing on the theme of the body, the exhibition will revolve around several entirely new series while also incorporating little-known early work. Mann is admired for her passionate use of photography to address issues of love and loss, expressed in images of her children and southern landscapes. Her recent work uses obsolete photographic methods and nearly abstract images to push the limits of her medium and to dig deeper into themes of mortality and vulnerability."

From Poetry Daily - Afaa M. Weaver

2011-02-16T01:27:00.002-06:00

What Elizabeth Bishop Could Not Know

by Afaa M. Weaver

Black women keep secrets tied up in hankies
they stuff in their bras, secrets of how their necks
are connected to their spines in the precise gyration
of a jelly sweetened in nights they had to keep
to themselves, nights prowlers came in to change
the faces of their children, secrets like the good
googa mooga laughter they do with each other
when something affirms their suspicions, when
their eyes are made the prayerbooks of fate crafted
in the wisdom that knows there is no north or south
in black wandering, searching the new land, a song
they wrestle from black men, the broken ones
who had to be shown where and how to stand,
how to respect pain and the way it governs itself,
secrets, things made out of generations and not kept
in the glass selections of an old juke box.

Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Sometimes you find what you're not even looking for...

2011-02-15T13:18:00.007-06:00

Oooohhh

Pablo!

First because I love

this picture.

Then because I love

this poem

even more.

Injustice, Pablo Neruda (tr. Alastair Reid)

Whoever discovers the who of me will find out the who of you,
and the why, and the where.
Early on, I discovered the range of injustice.
Hunger was not just hunger,
but rather a measure of man.
cold and wind were also measures.
The proud man racked up a hundred hungers, then fell.
Pedro was buried at the hundredth frost.
The poor house endured a single wind.
And I learned that centimeter and gram,
spoon and tongue, were measures of greed,
and that the harassed man soon fell
in a hole, and knew no more.
Nothing more. That was the setting,
the real gift, the reward, light, life.
That was it, suffering cold and hunger,
not having shoes, feeling fear
in front of the judge, in front of the other one,
the other being with his sword or his inkwell,
and so, digging and cutting,
sewing, making bread, planting wheat,
hammering every nail the wood needed,
burrowing in the earth as in intestines
to drag out, blind, the cracking coal,
and, even more, going up rivers and mountains,
riding horses, tending to ships
baking tiles, blowing glass, washing clothes
in such a way as to make that seem
a kingdom newly brought into being,
grapes shining in their clusters,
when man set his mind on being content,
and was not, and was not so. I was discovering
the laws of misery,
the throne of bloodstained gold,
the whore freedom,
the land with no overcoat,
the wounded, worn-out heart,
and the sound of the dead, tearless,
dry, like falling stones.
And then I left off being a child
because I understood then that for my people
life was not allowed
and the grave has forbidden them.

Thanks P.A.P.-Blog for this!

Weekly Poem: 'Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink' | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

2011-02-14T21:48:00.000-06:00

Weekly Poem: 'Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink' | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Me @ AWP

2011-02-01T02:04:00.007-06:00

I'm looking forward to this year's AWP Conference in DC. Hoping everyone (me too!) gets there smoothly and safely.

Here's a quick list of some spots where you can find me.

Thursday, February 3 · 9:00 a.m.-10:15 p.m.

Thurgood Marshall West Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level

R111. Courting Risk: A Multicultural/Multi-Genre Reading. Natalie Diaz, L. Lamar Wilson, Susan Southard, Samiya Bashir, Ariel Robello, Khadijah Queen) Courting Risk is an annual reading series which promotes the work of emerging writers, particularly those who are women, LGBT, and/or of color. Focus is given also to writers who address difficult political or social issues in multiple genres and art forms. A brief introduction of the series will be followed by a reading from six powerful emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and cross-genre work, with time allotted at the end for Q&A.

Thursday, February 3 · Noon.-1:15 p.m

Delaware Suite Room
Marriott WardmanPark, Lobby Level

R146. The Poem as Ghost / Haunted Americas. (Camille Norton, Marilyn Nelson, Matthew Zapruder, Ramon Garcia, Samiya Bashir) What speaks through us when we speak of America? To what extent are certain poems ghosted or possessed by the past? This panel offers a poetic inquiry into a nation haunted by the wounds, silences, and the psychic return of history. We consider the ghosts of, among others, Emmett Till, Edgar Allan Poe, the war dead, the bodies of those displaced through migration, and the ghostly landscape of an America repressed by the strip-malls and freeways of our postmodern experience.

Thursday, February 3 · 7:30pm - 9:30pm

Mark Our Words: A Reading for Encyclopedia Project & War Diaries
Location: The DC Center for LGBT Community, 1318 U Street NW Washington, DC 20009
Cost: Free
Website: http://www.thedccenter.org
Description: Join us as we join forces to celebrate the publication of Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, and the arrival of War Diaries, the last in a series of arts-collaborative publications from AIDS Project Los Angeles, with some rowdy, smart, sexy and brave writers and artists who mean what they say, and say it with fire! Featuring Samiya Bashir, Amina Cain, Duriel Harris, Jen Hofer, A. Naomi Jackson, John R. Keene Jr., Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Robin Coste Lewis, Chana Morgenstern, Vanessa Place, Amarnath Ravva, Kevin Simmonds, Anna Joy Springer, Terese Svoboda, Bronwen Tate, Matias Viegener and Sarah Fran Wisby. Hosted by Tisa Bryant

Saturday, February 5 · 2:45pm - 3:00pm

Book Signing: Gospel: poems
Location: Cave Canem Table / Book Fair

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T20:38:00.001-06:00

2010 was filled with so much love and joy, friends and family, new people and old homies.

I am grateful to you all.

I'm wishing everyone all manner of goodness in 2011.

Let's create it.

Let's be it.

Let's share it.

♥

Twitter Poet Flattery

2010-12-30T11:05:00.000-06:00

Filed under Things That Are Weird:

seeing lines from your poems out of context.

twice. in one morning minute. :-)

(homage = awesome/schwee. still, it's a bit twilight zoney) :)

C E N T O R A M A: These Fine Things Which Separate Us from Beasts: "I would be assuming a great deal in saying I’d like to hold water in my cupped hands as we must hold all, swagger and lager and fully loaded..."

(note: title from "Waiting on the Reading" and a line from "Catch" - both in Gospel: poems)

right on: @centorama

I do love Tuesdays ...

2010-12-28T16:41:00.007-06:00

Thanks Black Bottom!

(and yes, I also love black bottoms ... so there's that.)

Something about poets and math ...

2010-11-30T18:42:00.003-06:00

So tonight Thylias said to me, "You are mathematical. You don't have to do math; you are math." Well. True.

Also -- here's a little math I can get with:

“A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls.” --Terry Pratchett quotes (English Writer, b.1948)

Also, I may consider a side-gig in thaumaturgy.

Yes. I think I may.

“I believe anything is possible.
Research into quantum physics
proves that a system changes
simply by someone observing it.
Therefore, all you have to do is be
awake and aware of your environment,
and that enables you to
transform everything around you.
It sounds like hocus pocus, but
scientists are coming to realize that
just thinking about something can
make it happen. Turns out maybe
faith can move mountains.”
--Christine Anderson

War Diaries is hitting the streets!

2010-08-16T20:26:00.011-05:00

Word on the streets is that War Diaries, the amazing new anthology edited by powerhouse writers and editors Tisa Bryant and Ernest Hardy, and published by APLA and MSMGF, is getting vast amounts of love from the international HIV/AIDS prevention communities.

Over 1,000 copies were recently distributed to great acclaim at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna and feedback was extremely enthusiastic, from diverse segments of the African diaspora as well as delegates from India, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, France, Eastern Europe and beyond.

War Diaries a collection of poems, short stories, essays, experimental writing, and photos that takes the collective pulse of Black SGL/gay/queer men around the globe; it deals with issues ranging from homophobia to HIV/AIDS to the struggles inherent in forging healthy relationships (with lovers, family, self...) and we were able to pull together extraordinary writers, men and women, from all over the world to contribute. Check out Ernest Hardy's story, Cold & Wet, Tired You Bet, here. Included in the volume is one of my own poems, which also appears in Gospel. I've reprinted it below to give you a taste of just one angle of what War Diaries has to offer:

Getting strong

Demons be gone!
So too the siren’s song.
Let there be breath and chosen memory.
Forgiveness and forgiveness.

Joy!
a little ha ha and
some wild guffaw
fresh corn and apples
hot baked good things
savored slowly with
all the time in the world—
we’ve got all the time
in the world

Yes!
we are lifting, curling
raising muscles and flesh
expelling anger and fear
with each out breath in sets
of twelve and fifteen and twenty
and sometimes we stack weight heavy
wear agony on our snotty sleeves
but not every day

Not every day will feel this way.
walking through molten air
and burning man burning
so hot we want a shot of anything
that promises to cool us down.

Demons and sirens are liars
of the most unscrupulous kind.
not simple-minded hustlers
trying to win a wary dime but cold-
hearted killers who’ll cover you in lime
build a house on your bones
and sell it to your left-behinds
at ten percent over market

Promise we won’t listen
to their songs. Promise
we’ll forgive ourselves
for days we sit woofer
to ear weeping and pounding.
Promise we’ll try not to kick
our bruised and swollen ankles
too hard let in a little joy
a bit of ha ha and some wild guffaw
and remember that not every day will
feel this way.
Promise.

© Samiya Bashir

Domestic distribution begins this month, and PDFs will also appear on the sites of both sponsoring organizations: www.apla.org and MSMGF. If you'd like a comp (that's right -- FREE!) copy of War Diaries, you can contact the great Pato Hebert at phebert@apla.org and he'll hook you up. Include your name and current maling address, and put War Diaries
in the subject line.

APLA also just launched the 2.0 version of MSMGF, reaching a global audience in full Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish capacities.

Check it!

Awwww ... Thanks Poetry House!

2010-08-10T21:46:00.005-05:00

The sweet, talented, incredibly amazing Reginald Harris, recently sent me this pic snatched from the Poets House's Annual Poetry Showcase.

Yep, that's Gospel prominently displayed right on the front shelf! Thanks, Poets House, for the showcasing joy and for inviting the world to rub itself all over my square-faced stone-puppy love.

(Swoon!)

Gospel Nominated for Hurston/Wright Legacy Award!

2010-08-08T23:40:00.003-05:00

Thanks to The Hurston/Wright Foundation for recognizing

Gospel as one of the best poetry books of 2009!

Selected from hundreds of books nominated for the 2010 Huston/Wright Legacy Award, Gospel was shortlisted for the prize alongside Cooling Board, by Mitchell L.H. Douglas; Sonata Mullatica, by Rita Dove; and Liberation Narratives, by Haki R. Madhubuti.

Earlier this year, Gospel was shortlisted as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Just this week, Gospel was shortlisted again, chosen this time by the larger community of Black writers as one of the best books of 2009.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation has a long, prestigious history of supporting African American emerging and established literary talent on all levels -- writers, agents, booksellers, publishing professionals and more.

"The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award, underwritten by Borders Books & Music, consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Debut Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry."

I am humbly grateful for the recognition of my peers and of the writers, editors, and others I so deeply admire. To be nominated alongside such truly beautiful work -- in every category -- is a gift I will carry with me for the rest of my working life and beyond.

Hear what people are saying about Gospel:

Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the dispossessed, Bashir’s poems [in Gospel] awaken a desire to caress the mundane, hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mosaic Magazine,
Summer 2009

… Gospel is, at heart, a collection of poems that suggest we are not alone in this mess of a world. … Many of the poems in this book are alive, sensual, sexual. … The use of the holy water to wet the hair, loosen the curls—this is not the kind of dance King David lost himself in when he had the Ark of the Covenant brought to Jerusalem. No, this speaker says “make me a holy chamber / and I’ll make you whole,” and this is more than just a spiritual union. This is a way of transcending religion.
—Brian Spears, therumpus.net, July 2009
In a voice stamped with her definitive, soul-drenched signature, Samiya Bashir blesses us with a roadmap for the living of our fractured and uprooted lives, forcing us to take an unflinching look at faith and the way it’s defined. [...] a book you'll constantly come back to for both beauty and guidance.
—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler
Luminous and deeply shadowed, at times gravely playful, and always intimate, Gospel sings through—and beyond—ancestral and personal terrains simultaneously mysterious and revealed, to achieve a richness that is both exhilarating and sublime. Here are movements that, through rhythm, language, and light, become exactly what the poet envisions: gospel.
—Thomas Glave, author of The Torturer’s Wife
If a volume of poetry can be a page-turner, Gospel is it. An ambitious storyteller, Samiya Bashir has created a four-part volume that grabs you and won’t let go. Her poetry is urgent and feverish, mournful, sexy and healing.
—Linda Villarosa, author of Passing for Black
Samiya Bashir’s Gospel builds a vibrant, ascending hum of wisdom around us, chronicling the life blood at the root of its making. Her poetic vision is limber and sensual, thriving amidst histories, love lessons and traditions at once singular and collective. To say, as she does, “I am not a fool who believes in things which hurt me,” is to be lyrically aware of what sustains her, from mythic messengers to the ever-present legacy of queer black family: poets and kin all. It is to know that understanding survival is work and joy; one must invent bold images and sly rhythms to shape that play. This is just the kind of poet Samiya Bashir is: attentive, passionate, artful. With each line, her Gospel urges us to seek a like power in ourselves, and share it.
—Tisa Bryant, author of Unexplained Presence

Poetry Foundation Reprints 3 Poems from Gospel

2010-08-02T12:18:00.005-05:00

Click "Poetry" below to check out three poetry selections from Gospel: poems recently published online by The Poetry Foundation:

In the summer of 2008, Where the Apple Falls found its way onto the Poetry Foundation Bestseller List three years after its publication. Steady sales, the dedication of readers, professors, students, teachers and poetry lovers have kept my first poetry collection in print year after year.

Last year, RedBone Press again showed their faith in my work by generously (and beautifully!) publishing my second collection, Gospel: poems and it was immediately met with a positive reception including positive reviews and continuously robust sales. Honestly, it's enough to make a girl positively faint with humble gratitude.

Today, The Poetry Foundation published three poems from Gospel on its highly trafficked website -- a popular resource for readers, educators, poets, artists, media professionals and lovers of language and literature the world over. It's always wonderful to get your work recognized and your professional life generously supported. When it comes from your peers and the poets and artist most admired it means even that much more.

Please check out the poems they've selected from the collection, "Catch," "Waiting on the Reading," and "When the saints went." Make sure the Poetry Foundation knows you appreciate their attention to a wide range of emerging and established poets, and if you haven't already, pick up a copy of Gospel. Supporting small presses and independent literary publishers is the best way we can ensure that they stay around to get even more work into our hearts and hands long into the future.

Thanks!

Ooooo. Ahhhh. Ohhhhh.

2010-07-05T11:00:00.005-05:00

Now this is fascinating, or, as Michael Byers said, "mesmerizing" -- Indeed.

So yeah, I stole it from his freakishly entertaining Finding Pluto blog. Once the hypnotism of watching the years go by wore off (if it actually has) I realized that I had to offer it here. Also, because then I knew I could always find it when I needed another hit.

So ... how many Saturnian years can you get through before that good good dizziness descends?

Poems on TORCH!

2010-04-14T21:30:00.002-05:00

Earlier versions of two poems from Gospel were recently published in the latest edition of Torch!

Check them all out -- great poems, great women, great editor in Amanda Johnston.

Austin, Gospel, and Lucille Clifton's Voices? Wow. Nice.

2010-04-03T11:38:00.005-05:00

Join Bookwoman's Book Group for National Poetry Month when they discuss Gospel and Voices! Me? I'm flattered. Thanks Austinites!

April is National Poetry Month, and the BookWoman Book Group will be celebrating with Lambda Literary Award-Finalist Samiya Bashir's Gospel. If you finish Gospel early, feel free to read Lucille Clifton's Voices (her final collection before her death on February 13th) as well; we can compare and contrast these two works during our discussion.

"Gospel is an ecumenical resistance song in four parts. In this passionate follow-up to 2005's Lambda Literary Award finalist, Where the Apple Falls, Bashir s poems challenge truth to stare down the power of fear and paralysis. "We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down-trodden," said gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey. "This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel." The good news, according to Bashir, is that we are neither alone in our mess, nor alone in our grasp of the tools to heal. In this pull-no-punches collection Bashir lays down a road map, a portable flashlight, and a shaky-legged escort to usher the way toward recovered sight and strength." --Amazon.com

"National Book Award–winner Clifton has long enjoyed national acclaim for her careful, colloquial, compact renditions of African-American voices, in memoirs, books for children and more than a dozen books of poems. This relatively short new collection excels in its opening pages, with wry comic verse in the voices of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and a devout raccoon: oh Master Of All Who Take and Wash/ And Eat lift me away. Cliftons more serious poems, where she speaks as herself, address her late parents, her delights as a grandmother and her mixed feelings about memory and her own body as she begins her eighth decade. A visionary sequence of very brief lyric works, A Meditation on Ten Oxherding Pictures, winds the volume up: i am lucille who masters ox/ ox is the one lucille masters/ hands caution me again/ what can be herded/ is not ox. Where Cliftons earlier poetry sought strength in African-American oral traditions, these poems look even further back, to the origin of writing (where a sketch of an ox became an aleph, then an A). Clifton (Mercy) retains an undeniable sincerity, an openness to her own emotions, and a rare warmth." --Publisher's Weekly

2010-03-16T13:52:00.005-05:00

Thank You to the Lambda Literary Awards for shortlisting Gospel: poems as a finalist! Congratulations to all of my co-finalists:

Bird Eating Bird, by Kristin Naca (HarperCollins)
Gospel: Poems, by Samiya Bashir (Red Bone Press)
Names, by Marilyn Hacker (W.W. Norton)
Stars of the Night Commute, by Ana Bozicevic (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Zero at the Bone, by Stacie Cassarino (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

And a special congratulations also goes to G. Winston James for the nomination of his Shaming the Devil. Grab it! It's another awesome book by a fantastic writer!

Finalists announced for the 22nd Annual
Lambda Literary Awards

by RICHARD LABONTÉ on MARCH 16, 2010 · 4 COMMENTS

in NEWS

The news you’ve been waiting for: after four months of reading, deliberating, and consulting, 87 dedicated (and eye-weary) judges, assessing 462 LGBT-interest titles nominated by almost 200 publishers and authors, have selected 112 finalists in 23 categories.

“This has been a record year for queer books,” said the 2009 Lambda Awards Administrator, Richard Labonté, who has been associated with the Lammys since their inception in 1989 as a judge and consultant. “The number of titles nominated and the number of publishers represented is in both cases about 10 per cent higher than last year.”

And, for the first time, the single catchall Bisexual category – after reaching a threshold of 10 nominated titles in both fiction and nonfiction – has matured into two distinct categories, Bisexual Fiction and Bisexual Nonfiction.

“In a year of challenge and change for writers and publishers – and for the Foundation – the hundreds of books submitted for nomination illustrate the continuing dynamism of our literature,” said Lambda Foundation Board President Katherine V. Forrest. “This year’s Lambda Literary Award Finalists and the quality of their work speak eloquently to the richness and range of our literature.”

Reflecting the impact of self-publishing and publish-on-demand technology, more titles from non-traditional sources than ever were nominated, and several were selected as finalists, said Labonté. In addition, the Lammy contenders for 2009 continue the tradition of celebrating the best of both our community’s specifically queer presses, and books from academic and more mainstream publishers.

Winners will be announced at the 22^nd Annual Awards, May 27 in New York at the School of Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23^rd Street. For tickets and information click here.

“To our finalists, I’m proud of your extraordinary talent and hard work,” said Lambda Executive Director Tony Valenzuela. “I hope to see you all at the Awards. And to all the readers out there wondering what LGBT books to buy next, take a look at this stellar list of nominees – or check out the new reviews that are being posted on the revised and expanded lambdaliterary.org web site – and go shopping. Support our authors and publishers: they are to be congratulated.”

There are cons, and then there are pros...

2010-03-15T12:01:00.004-05:00

See more 'toons here.

Thanks Jessica Young!

Yes, Francine. Absolutely yes.

2010-03-15T02:38:00.001-05:00

Spring!

2010-03-12T13:33:00.005-06:00

Springtime is at hand. When will you ever bloom if not here and now?

-- Angelus Silesius

So, this past weekend I saw the first buds breaking out of some tree branches on a sunny day. I can't come close to expressing how happy this made me. This was a day or two after this picture was taken. I took this shot right outside my door while willing Spring to come come come come come and hurry up!

Yes, the dreaded snow fatigue had indeed set in firmly by last week. Then this past weekend: a gift. New buds. New life. It's on its way.

So that has me thinking: what other gifts are right outside of our doors?

I can think of quite a few today. How about you? I think the best way to hasten the new life moments that springtime brings -- other than the blessed joy of daylight savings' return this weekend -- is to commit to our own growth and new life. So yeah. That's the word for today, for tomorrow, for this weekend, for next week, for this season. I'm on it. You?

Please share if you're of a mind to ... I'd love to hear it!

p.s. That quote from Angelus Silesius is an epigraph to the poem "Climate Change," in my new book, Gospel: Poems. Get it here!

Not So Fast (I agree.)

2010-03-09T22:42:00.003-06:00

Not So Fast

Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

By JOHN FREEMAN

...

Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Process ing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial- up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the cor poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the consum ing fires eventually come and force a starting over.

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

...

Click here to read the full article.

READY

2010-03-02T21:47:00.002-06:00

Dear Winter:
Loved you. Had a great time.
Gorgeous. Really. Gorgeous.

Um: Peace Out! See Ya!
(Thanks for the memories)

Learning to relax ...

2010-03-02T17:37:00.003-06:00

THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING TO RELAX:

So after nearly a decade of running running running (invoke all necessary “rat race,” “hamster wheel,” and “workaholic” analogies here) I have finally been redirecting my energy toward the things most important to me. It is feeling quite wonderful. Part of this is relearning how to relax (something I fear I'd completely lost touch with). Since I'm sure I'm not alone in being railroaded by the 21st century *do it all, do it now, don't stop, get it, get it* workaholic stress mania, I'll share what I'm figuring out. Not only is sliding into a more relaxed state good for health and well being, for happiness and good times, but:

“your attitude of relaxation and willingness to let your life flow without the tension of resistance. Many things are prevented from entering people's lives because they are too tense to let them in. At other times you might unconsciously alienate a potentially helpful person, or you might be too cautious or overlook an opportunity because of tension.”
-- Thanks Astro.com!

Think about it. True. Relax and go with the flow. Be. Chill. Do your work, but do it without stress. And as always, as ever: breathe.

Need more? There’s a wiki about it!

Taking it on ...

2010-02-07T13:05:00.002-06:00

This is care of my beloved Alpha Female friend, and outrageously gifted writer, Roohi Choudry -- way to mine the depths of YouTube Roohi:

Now get out there folks ... and do what you gotta do!

The Kenyon Review gives Gospel some love ...

2010-01-23T16:27:00.004-06:00

Check out the rather ironically intriguing parallels drawn between Gospel & Avatar in today's Kenyon Review blog:

“How is it done – / remolding body into / image of body,” writes Samiya Bashir in the poem “Topographic Shifts,” from her latest book, Gospel (Redbone Press, 2009).
The poem describes an amputation performed on a baby girl born with twelve fingers and toes, but these lines make me think, of course, about the pressure so many women feel to alter our bodies: how the “image of [the idealized] body” worries, haunts, maims.
What I love about Bashir’s work is how her poems work against this enforced correcting. Many of her poems thrum with the erotic joy of queer black bodies, and her work celebrates the lived experiences of bodies that resist “remolding.”
You see, ever since I watched the movie Avatar, I’ve been on a search for poems by queer women of color that gives us back our bodies.

Thanks Kenyon Review. Thanks Tamiko Beyer.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to read my own review of Avatar. Beyer and I are on quite the same page here. Nice.

Empire State of Mind

2010-01-12T21:12:00.008-06:00

People ask me from time to time what the hell I'm doing all the time. Why is it I'm so busy? What the hell is going on? First of all, I'm working on that. Being busy means you miss a whole lot of stuff in all that busyness. So cutting out the busy-ness is a 2010 thing. Hold me to it, please.

Case in point: tonight. Yeah. Today was a good day. How did it end? UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy + Jay Z (Jigga What?). Jay Z was not in person (although, really, what's the meta argument here).

The highlight of the last few hours? Sharing naked greens and baby carrots off of a tiny plate with the rather hilarious Duffy (no HRH needed, although she insists we'd all find the Queen delightful). Ok. The whole time was kinda fun. Spent the evening with a bunch of poets talking about 9/11 conspiracies, Reagan, Thatcher, war, post-apocalyptic cannibalism, oh, and yes, poetry. Kind of. Talked a bit about festivals, talked to CAD about Fire & Ink, and really just vibed with some folks.

That's how it always happens. The weird list of people I've had a weird list of conversations with (9/11 for me = stuck in Amsterdam = Sapphire (who was reading at the same lit fest) and for whom, other than the Park Slope Food Coop my most immediate memory of her was sitting (again, like tonight with Duffy, I had the salmon) having dinner in Den Hague before she was smart enough to fly back to NYC on 9/10 = damn, why can't I make myself sit through Precious (waiting for a sister-friend --ahem-- to post her "Ah! How Precious made me feel suddenly racist." bit) = what the hell happened to the Freedom of the Press = why isn't hashish more widely available in Ann Arbor like it was in the days of my youth?

Okay. I've said too much.

All I'm saying is that this is a very strange life I'm living. And I'm down. I'm totally down. These days, especially the ones where I'm not all caught up in busy-ness (yes, here's the moral of our story) are kind of fantastic. I might just be reaching for the sugar on the edge of the photo, but I'm having kind of a good time at the party anyway. If I can possibly keep up with the strangeness of it, I'm down.

Also: I believe that any interaction with the Brits should somehow involve Jay-Z. Maybe that's just my stick-and-move New Yorker speaking. But she's always so much cooler than the rest of me, so I'll probably do what she says.

Good food, Good folks!

2010-01-05T20:56:00.004-06:00

Hey!

Detroit!

Get your good old fashioned grub on!

My latest 5-star (according to me, and probably you if you head on out there) dining experience was at Detroit's newest, yummiest eatery: 1917 American Bistro (on Livernois @ Outer Drive). Here's what I had to share on Yelp after the best dinner I've had in weeks:

O.M.G. This place was an incredible find. I headed into Detroit to take my grandmother out to dinner. Was trying to find someplace that was going to be good food, reasonably price, and healthy at the same time (she has diabetes and has to watch her carbs). Neither of us was even remotely disappointed. I found out about the place because they'd recently gotten a wonderful write-up in the Metro Times. I talked to my mother and she said she'd just heard great things about the place too.

Let me tell you: whatever great things you hear are an understatement. The food was extremely reasonable (8-12 for an entree), clean and healthy and above all DELICIOUS. If I'd had room in my tummy I would have ordered everything. But all that means is that I have an excuse to come back. Even though I live in Ann Arbor (about 45 minutes away), I'll be back for dinner -- as often as possible.

The cherry on top is that the folks who own and run it are all sweet as pie. The owner (David Sudvent) is, well, gorgeous, but that doesn't count. (ok, it does!) He's also a kind, sweet, knowledgable chef who loves what he does and believes in doing it well. The wait staff and cooks (it's a faily place) are all invested in the restaurant doing well and it shows. Don't miss out! You won't be disappointed!

Nappy Headed Aliens

2010-01-03T19:38:00.000-06:00

SPOILER ALERT - IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT AND HAVE SOMEHOW AVOIDED ANY AND ALL INFO ABOUT THIS FILM, THEN GOOD FOR YOU FOR LIVING IN A LOVELY BUBBLE, I'D STAY OUT OF IT IF I WERE YOU, BUT IF YOU'RE GONNA DIP, BEWARE THERE MAY BE SPOILERS HERE.

Image Courtesy: http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2007/11/26/avatar-creature.jpg

Now let me start by saying that it's just not really in my nature to be a kill-joy. I realize that this is the most popular entertainment out right now. I realize lots of people really love this film and see no harm in it. I don't generally run around raging against the machine all day because that would honestly be exhausting. (White supremacy doesn't even try to hide itself anymore.) That said, since I couldn't avoid the film, though I tried -- I worked really hard not to see this movie -- then I can't avoid sharing my experience.

One reason I felt pretty comfortable living my life without seeing this film was that I had a pretty good feeling that Annalee Newitz had come pretty close to nailing my trouble with it in her io9.com review. Her main point:

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people.

So, I tried not to see it. But that proved more difficult than I thought. It's everywhere. People are writing, tweeting, facebooking, talking emailing, and who knows what else about it pretty feverishly and every day. My family has been wanting to see this moving constantly, and no matter how many other films I dragged folks too, this was the one they wanted to see. In the end, I'm a person who believes in an informed opinion, so here we go. My shit is mad informed now.

First off, I believe that Ehwe (the native's goddess in the film) was watching out for me because due to technical difficulties at the IMAX theater, me and the entire family got to see the regular 3D showing for free. $50 saved -- so my conflict about having paid them money for this film was quickly relieved. I bought some popcorn so that the theater owners didn't have to suffer from my own jacked up conscience. They make like nothing on the ticket price anyway, so all good.

Now, where to start. I'll leave the jacked writing alone (like, really, "unobtanium"? that's the best you could do?) we'll ignore the fact that the CGI folks apparently were given the maximum creative license for this flick and the writers were stripped pretty bare. We will also leave the low-hanging race-fantasy fruit alone as well -- that the colored folks were obviously cast to voice the aliens (in case we missed the point) and that there were nearly NO people of color left among the humans (the only 2 who make it -- the pilot and the on-board trusted guy -- amorphous brownness both). Pretty much only white folks as scientists, marines, well ... apparently the vast majority of the only humans left are white. No surprise, right? This majority-minority thing is really getting too close for comfort, eh? Something that needs to be righted, if only on film.

I'll make a bare and mere mention about the films own nod to the erasure of colored folks -- the jarheads speak of of surviving the recent and awful wars in Venezuela and Nigeria before coming to take on Pandora (the planet which is home to the Navi ... the tall, slender, nappy headed, cat-featured blue folks in the film). Okay, so we've clearly killed off the Latinos and the Africans, what's left? The film also tells us that the humans have completely killed off the natural world of earth -- "there is no green there ... they have killed their mother" -- well, what's always next. Colonization. Let's colonize the skies, and though we don't want to live on this other planet -- why should we when we can be skywalkers -- but we do need some of this "unobtanium" so our corporate sponsors can keep on doing whatever nastiness they are doing.

That leads us to why we have come to Pandora in the first place. To mine the largest deposit of unobtanium for light years or some shit. Of course, this deposit lies just under the massive "home tree" of the Navi people.

Avatar characteristically pits military / war mongerers against the scientists who are the only ones who understand the complexities of the new world before them. The scientists have a heart -- even when they don't necessarily believe in the Navi's spirituality, and are desperate for "samples" to prove it, they want peace. The war mongerers do not. Welcome to the beautifully simple binary world of American cinema. This also gives us space so that we do not have to identify with the colonizers -- we can find some people with heart in our own skin. Note, our own skin must be white for this to be easy, but since all colored folks have been conditioned from birth to identify with white skinned avatars of themselves onscreen, their vast audience (green is the only color that counts folks) remains assured.

So we are now in a world of double Avatars ... the first is the invisible one, where white men stand in for humanity. Again, this is what we are accustomed to, so we don't even need to notice this Avatar, nor is it named. The second Avatar is the Great White Hope, Jake Sully, who inhabits the skin of the Navi first to destroy them, then to save them.

I don't use the term Great White Hope lightly. Jake Sully's character is crucial to the film's white supremacist, colonialist fantasy for many reasons. First of all, as anyone who's seen Levi's "Go Forth" campaign, whereby they use a Walt Whitman poem to develop a modern-day romanticization of the age-old Manifest Destiny, knows it's pretty easy to erase colored people, empower white boys in a Nueva-Lord of the Rings fantasy, leave some hot colored "tail" - as it's wink-wink called in Avatar among everywhere else - so that the boys can be exotic-loving boys, and still take over the world.

But let's stick to the world of Pandora. The Jake Sully character must be as he is: a jarhead, who has been wounded, and who has "accidentally" been recruited into the side of the scientists, who then develops the same heart and love of the natives as the scientists do -- once he has assumed every role of Man (war monger, scientist, "big heart") then he can trade skins and become the warrier/leader that the natives need if they'll have any hope of survival.

Avatar - used w/o courtesy.

Jake can only want to change skins because his own human body has been broken. He's already been betrayed by his people, because although the spinal surgery he needs to walk again is widely available in this future world, it is - thanks be to capitalism - only available to those who can afford to pay the heavy price. Jake only becomes a scientist because his twin brother -- mind you, in every one of "us" there is the war-monger and the level headed scientists / twins within our own minds and skins, the filmmakers would have us believe -- has been killed (mugged for his wallet, presumably by some of the surviving "savages" on earth).

Jake is in no way supposed to be where he is. He should be an unreformable war-monger, but through Avatar we get to learn that even "our" worst sides can be redeemed -- well, at least through the love of a supermodel native hottie.

So here we are, in a world not unlike any other place on Earth that has been colonized -- a natural paradise full of face-painted, deity-worshiping, hair-braded and dredlocked, loin-cloth wearing, spear-chucking animal-ish colored people who are bigger than us, faster than us, and more connected to their world both spiritually and physically. So yes, we must destroy them so we can get our mineral to support our corporate (or imperial, whatevs) interests. But then our own white avatar, Jake, along with the "strong, wise woman" (Sigorney Weaver), tough Latina warrior (Michelle Rodriguez), and assorted outsiders (scientists mostly) falls in love and flips sides.

He understands, mostly because he is in love. But before he falls in love with Zoe Saldana (our lead foxy native -- sorry Spock, you're not the only alien she's hot for), he falls in love with his own body, which is working at full capacity for the first time.

Let's be clear, this isn't just a race thing either. This is about colonialism and imperialism. Jake is our white-boy avatar because of white supremacy. But he is not just an avatar for white folks, he is an avatar for all of us westerners (and let's just say it, Americans) who need to find an escapist route to absolve ourselves of our own neo-colonialist guilt.

I'm going to say it plain: we live in a country where we've gloriously elected the first black president who can absolve us of guilt in many ways, not least of which being that he can miraculously both win a Nobel Peace Prize, and ramp up the dogs of neo-colonialst war out there in that alien planet of the so-called middle east at the same time. and no one bats an eye cuz he's one of us ... one of the good guys.

We need a hero like we need someone to patch up this hole in our heads. We need this catharsis like we need to keep on watching tv shows that glorify nothing but rape and murder, like we need to then flip the TV switch and game about it. We need to fake-cleanse ourselves like we need keep our heads buried in the sands and continue "trusting our leaders" to wage war in hidden-yet-televised alien brown lands all over the planet while simultaneously destroying the planet which we can sit through and justify because by the time all that happens -- somehow we get to hold off for a hundred years or so before we suffocate from lack of water and oxygen -- then we'll get to leave this crappy planet and it's nasty savage natives behind and take off for the heavens for new worlds to destroy.

The major genocide scene is truly devastating. It felt like watching Roots, watching Schindler's List, watching Hotel Rwanda, watching not just people but "a people" destroyed for no reason other than hatred and/or profit (or both). Just awful and duly heartbreaking. But fortunately we have our Great White Hope who will come along to save the day. Jake gets to become the warrior that the Navi have apparently not seen in 5 generations -- the lead lady's grandfather's grandfather was such a warrior, none since -- until Jake Sully.

Really, the rest of this race-baiting, skin-switching, paradise-conquering fantasy is pretty predictable. Go ahead and see if if you'd like. I'd be interested in your opinion when you do.

So yeah. I hate to be a kill-joy. But this escapism is just that. I'm not even an anti-fan of escapism. I live here too and my brain feels like it's about to explode half of the time from the straight-up madness of it all. But to act like this catharsis is good for us -- fabulous CGI or not -- is going just a bit too far.

What we really need is some sanity. What we really need is for artists with a more clear-headed world view to have the time/energy/access to create work that is honest and real and true. James Cameron got ($500,000,000!) to make this movie. That's not counting the marketing budget. That's not counting the money invested in the companion videogames, and other products, that's not counting the obscene amount of actual above-500m-PROFIT that investors got for their trouble.

Imagine what poets could do with 1:1000th of that. Imagine what anti-colonialist filmmakers could do with 1:100th of that. Imagine what anti-white-supremacist musicians and theater folsk could do with 1:1000000th of that.

Well, we do it every day. Sadly, the lines outside the doors aren't nearly as long. I'd be interested in changing that. I've got my blue suit on. As always, I'm swinging from the nearest tree... I'm ready. So tell me -- where we headed and how are we gonna get there? Most importantly, how can we travel without killing some other people (even the flies, even he dogs which as the natives let us know, whose lives are sacred) all along our journey?

Thinking about form and function ...

2009-11-18T11:50:00.002-06:00

and thinking about the amazing work of Claudia Rankine, I stumbled across this interview on Poetry Daily. Check out an excerpt:

Where does the relationship of form and function begin for you?
Form has everything to do with content. We know this from Olson. I love the potential openness of the page – there is so much unspoken "underneath-ness" in language. I try to use the page to illustrate the mind's meanderings – to suggest silence, for example, and to represent all the ways the subject is approached in my own mind. The more I can open up the page to accommodate my own explorations, the more integrity the poem has for me.

In some of my earlier books, I experimented with ways to keep the text open. I was invested, perhaps crudely, in communicating the fact that the poem is a process without resolution. In order for me to begin, I need to come up with a form that accommodates an investigative poetics. For instance, the introduction of images in Don't Let Me Be Lonely was an attempt to acknowledge a total experience of being – to involve as many of our senses as possible.

All writing is a kind of performance, but modes that fabricate closure seem less authentic to me. When I was working on The End of the Alphabet, for example, which was in my mind about silence, about a darkness that felt crippling, the language had to be very different from the language in something like Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which is interested in mediated responses, the media, and the clarity or lack of clarity around our own connectedness.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Walking Home

2009-10-25T01:56:00.000-05:00

Gospel: poems gets some love ...

2009-10-06T21:26:00.003-05:00

Lambda Book Report recently reviewed my latest book, Gospel: poems.

Check it out:

Gospel, Samiya Bashir’s second book of poetry, begins “at the crossroads” where “[w]e argue as if Capulet or Montague./On neither red nor blue can we agree.” The opening lines reveal the tension and disagreement considered, literally and metaphorically, throughout the book. The reference to Shakespeare is the first in a long series of allusions that animate Bashir’s poems in this book. Bashir gathers stories and language from a range of cultural locations and weaves them into the imagistic and sonic qualities of the poems. The Norse gods make a dramatic and cacophonous appearance and, in one of her most effective rhetorical moves, Bashir utilizes a Ghanian call and response sequence that both effectively heightens the drama and energy in the poem and then brings it to rest at its conclusion. The poems of Gospel are rife with layered meanings while they immerse the reader in a landscape that is both familiar and reassuring as well as deeply unfamiliar and strange.

In “Topographic shifts,” for instance, Bashir deftly tells the story of a child born with “twelve fingers/twelve toes” which must be “corrected.” This deformity, described as “more common/than you’d think,” is one that seems to simultaneously exist in the present where it will be addressed with “precision” and “urgency” as well as in a world less known, where the body is remolded “into/image of body” with “a bit /of string” and “a tight bow/around each offending digit.//Pull.” In these lines, Bashir demonstrates her capacity to render the attention and focus of the reader to the painful and disturbing; this is one of Bashir’s gifts as a poet.

Click here to read Julie R. Enszer's full review.

Poem of the day ... for Homecoming

2009-09-15T00:53:00.000-05:00

Dusting
by Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

Oiling my Pistons

2009-09-13T08:58:00.001-05:00

Ahhhhhh. Beautiful morning. Movement. River Rat track team quaking the
bridge. Kidney Walks. Sun on the water. Vociferous ducks: quacking.
Nice. Nice.

Back Home

2009-08-28T11:00:00.001-05:00

This where I'm from. Like Sankofa, the bird, the marshy waters, the
rain is welcoming me back. Wondering how long, this time, I'll stay...

Gospel: poems a bestseller at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival!

2009-08-06T18:02:00.006-05:00

Saints and Sinners News:

The 2009 Festival was a great success ...

The 2009 Saints and Sinners Literary Festival was a tremendous success. Participants came from as far away as Slovenia to celebrate a love of writing and of literature and to support writers and artists within the LGBT community. Panels and Master Classes provided audiences with ample notes about the tools of the trade, from the importance of revision to how to write effectively with a full-time job, and attendees discovered great voices, both old and new.

But participants took away more than just great memories from the 2009 Festival. The book fair provided by Barnes and Noble offered Fest attendees a chance to discover new voices, and learn more about those presenting authors who intrigued them. While lots of books were sold, a few managed to make their mark as the weekend's Bestsellers.

Here's the top-selling titles at Saints and Sinners, 2009:

Mysterious Skin and We Disappear by: Scott Heim

My Diva by Michael Montlack (editor )

Death in Key West by Jeffrey Round

Death of a Dying Man by J. M. Redmann

Gospel: poems by Samiya Bashir

Risk by Elana Dykewomon

“Stabilimentum,” New Poem published on The Rumpus

2009-07-30T16:51:00.001-05:00

“Stabilimentum,” A Rumpus Original Poem By Samiya Bashir - The Rumpus.net:

Stabilimentum

Bend into my mouth
before frost ends us.

This long year
I’ve lumbered: spin,
devour, spin. Paced this crest

impatient for the tumble
of your nest upon my nest,

the hum of your dulcet strum.
And when I must bear you, maw

each strand still between my teeth,
bend into my mouth

impatient for the tumble.
I’ll weave of you the dust
of a thousand thousand more of us,

lace the absence of your touch,
weep our bulbous clutch.

–Samiya Bashir

Read the Rumpus Review of Samiya Bashir’s "Gospel."

Fingers Through Holy Water - The Rumpus reviews Gospel

2009-07-30T16:50:00.003-05:00

Fingers Through Holy Water - The Rumpus.net

Gospel music, like its secular cousin the blues, never wallows in pity, but instead seeks to transcend pain and reach glory. Bashir’s book makes the same trip.

Gospel, the word Samiya Bashir chose to title her second collection of poems, is one laden with connotations. It echoes the cadence of the pulpit, the call and response of preacher and congregation, songs of joy and praise and reliance on a higher power. It even claims the notion of a singular truth. But it’s the word’s original meaning that I think Bashir best exemplifies in this book—good story or message—because Gospel is, at heart, a collection of poems that suggest we are not alone in this mess of a world.

...

Click here to read the full review!

Flora

2009-07-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

I don't know what kind of flower bush this is, but she's angry, she
smokes like a chimney (clearly) and I like her.

VOD: Forkergirl's Chapter 3 -- Limited Fork Theory Explained -- sorta

2009-07-29T15:13:00.001-05:00

The inexorably brilliant Thylias B. Moss (B inserted by me) takes it to the previous level!

word. healthy, nonbuttery, word.

Good morning, mountains!

2009-07-19T11:56:00.000-05:00

Squaw Valley, Day one
Time to let my ghazal fly...

Who reads these?

2009-07-17T17:19:00.000-05:00

Leaving Oakland City Hall and thinking of good governance practices, I
stumble upon row after row of "posted" public notices about important
meetings, votes, etc. But I wonder: who knows these are here? Posted
for whom: city workers? Who, honestly, reads these?

VOD: "Samiya Never Folds"

2009-07-17T00:07:00.001-05:00

You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can't take the Hold 'Em out of the girl!

The incongruous joy of plantation fun!

2009-07-16T19:27:00.002-05:00

Missing all of my peeps from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts ... here are some pictures from our days of love (see you at the poker table, suckas! LOL):

Things I love: Jasmine bushes filling the air with sweetness

2009-07-16T17:51:00.001-05:00

VOD: hidden dimensions

2009-07-02T19:38:00.001-05:00

just sayin...

2009-07-02T18:52:00.003-05:00

Something I'm thinking about today:

"You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and."

-- Sufi teaching story

Re: VCCA

2009-06-30T02:04:00.001-05:00

Or: v-ca-ca-caaah --

Thank you thank you thankyouthankyouthankuthankuthanku

Hard to say good bye. So instead: fare well friends. See you soon.

Goodbye Peter Cottontail

2009-06-29T19:10:00.000-05:00

I saved walking the glassbox labyrinth for last. My way out of the
forest and back into the world.

The world includes you, dear readers, who informed me clearly that
abandoning this space is not an option for me.

So pack it up, kiddos! Next stop: we're going to New Yawk City!

I'm hoping it's restaurant week when I get there. After all, dear
cottontail, I hear you are simply delicious.

Blackademics Review Gospel

2009-05-20T16:14:00.005-05:00

In Alexis Pauline Gumbs' new Blackademics.org review of Gospel: poems, the issues and themes lovingly treated in the book get serious consideration and a rave response:

"Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the dispossessed, Bashir’s poems awaken a desire to caress the mundane," said Gumbs, "hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation."

"Bashir’s project, inhabiting the tradition of black gospel music’s straddling contradiction, standing in the sacred and the profane, is timely," continued Gumbs in her review. "In a moment when the question of the relationship between faith and sexuality has been put in the media limelight through the discourse of marriage amendments, this project takes a step back, redefining both sexuality and salvation with a close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence."

Want more? Click here to read the rest of the review, comment, share and join the discussion!

Order your copy of Gospel: poems here!

Missing Pënz | Pënz Lives On!

2009-05-12T17:48:00.005-05:00

Awwww!

So I just got off the phone with an academic genius I know up at University of Pittsburgh who just informed me that she's doing her disssertation on -- you guessed it -- Pënz (it's pronounced pants)!!

"It was my church," she said. And yes. I agreed. Mine too. And then The Good Rev came in and she agreed too. It's so so exciting her approach to the work, it's all deep and intriguing and I can't wait to read it!

So then of course, I went to review The Art Year that was 2008 due to Pënz. And then I watched Good Night Pënz, the video. It gets me all verklempt every time. Sigh.

Thank you Pënz, and thank you Morning (Feeler), Noon (Materialist), Twilight (Conceptualist) and The Good Rev, for making 2008 an Art Year indeed.

Love,
Night (Linguist)

Some great pictures from the debut performance of Gospel: The Reading

2009-04-29T12:16:00.002-05:00

Much love and thanks to the inspiration, direction and support of Sharon Bridgforth, the delicate eyes and fingers of Lydia Martes of love and camera, the boutit boutit of Kiyana Horton on love and stuff-management, Matt Richardson who is featured as Crow, Dr. Omi Oshun Olomo / Joni Jones, The Austin Project, and the University of Texas' Warfield Center for African & African American Studies for their support in making this performance happen.

Don't Sleep: 2009 Cave Canem Award Judged by Yusef Komunyakaa

2009-04-29T11:21:00.003-05:00

2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Award: Winner receives $1,000, publication by Graywolf Press, 15 copies of the book and a feature reading. Two finalists receive introductory readings.

Final Judge: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Judge reserves the right not to select a winner.

Eligibility: African American writers who have not had a full‐length book of poetry published by a professional press. Authors of chapbooks and self‐published books with a maximum print run of 500 may apply. Simultaneous submission to other awards should be noted: immediate notice upon winning an award is required.

Deadline: Reading period begins March 16, 2009. Manuscripts must be postmarked no later
than April 30, 2009, and received in Cave Canem’s office no later than May 8, 2009, 5 pm. To be notified that your manuscript has been received, enclose a stamped, self‐addressed postcard.

Winner announced in September 2009.

Entry Fee: $15. Enclose check with submission, made payable to Cave Canem Foundation. Entry fees are non‐refundable.

Direct packet to:

Cave Canem Foundation
Cave Canem Poetry Prize
584 Broadway, Suite 508
New York, New York 10012

VOD: Go Alexis Page!

2009-04-27T20:34:00.001-05:00

"The reward from courage ... is that you get more courage!"
--Wendy Hilliard

Now that's what I'm talking about. Support the Wendy Hilliard Foundation, and make sure that more kids like this get a shot at their dreams!

VOD! Performance - Moonlight Brew: Time to get ready for love

2009-04-20T16:49:00.006-05:00

The preceding was a portion of a performance of The Austin Project: Jam Sessions Performance/Poetry/Movement with:

Samiya Bashir
Stephanie Lang
Lidia Marte
Senalka McDonald
Elvia Mendoza
Matt Richardson
Jacqueline Smith
Czarina Thelen

TAP performed with the legendary Laurie Carlos who presented her show, Washed, on April 18, 2009, at the University of Texas @ Austin

Producer: Joni L. Jones/Omi Osun Olomo
Anchor Artist: Sharon Bridgforth
Director: Florinda Bryant

Thanks to Sharon Bridgforth for her simply gorgeous photos of the evening of performance -- from set up to strike! Check out her slideshow and try not to get all green if you weren't there. Nothing but love!

Don't Sleep: Fire & Ink opens its doors to Cotillion!

2009-04-16T18:55:00.008-05:00

Fire & Ink III: Cotillion Registration Now Open!

Writers and readers and lovers
of the word take note:
Shake out your finest words.
Get ready to shimmy
’til your line breaks.
Fire & Ink III: Cotillion
is almost here!

Go here to register securely online; debit and credit cards accepted.

Then go here to book your rooms at the Hilton Austin, Fire & Ink's conference hotel for Cotillion. We encourage you to come on out with a friend.

Stay tuned for more info in the next couple of weeks about our exciting program of events, schedule details and more.

Fire & Ink: Cotillion is bringing you some of the best workshops, panels, roundtables, readings and performances a writer/reader/teacher/student/librarian/thinker/performer/culture lover could stand.

Don't Sleep Atlanta! Check out tonight's fiery event

2009-04-16T16:49:00.006-05:00

Okay, so yes. I'm a little jealous of you, Hotlanta, because tonight you're getting just a li'l bit hotter.

Some of the stunning poets, artists, and writers who have contributed to this feee-rce new journal, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor will be reading at tonight's launch party. I'd like to especially shout out the stunningly beautiful cover art of poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and the work of my sisterfolk Francine Harris, Ashaki Jackson, Juliet Howard, Nandi Comer, & Anastacia Tolbert.

As if that weren't enough (cuz really, it is) Cave Canem founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady will read and discuss the inception of their foundation. Poets Kevin Vaughn and Allison Joseph will also read from their work.

If you're in town, don't sleep, don't trip, and don't miss the word:

Come celebrate the launch of inaugural issue of Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor:
Thursday, April 16
6:30 pm
Cosby Auditorium
Spelman College
Atlanta, GA
[MAP IT]

Free and open to the public.

Don't Sleep: Tune in Tonight on Sippin on Ink | BlogTalkRadio

2009-04-15T11:11:00.005-05:00

Listen up!

Tonight I'll be on Sippin On Ink, BlogTalk Radio's funky fierce, deliciously queer literary radio show.

Tune in, call in, ask questions, join the discussion or just bend your ear -- and please spread the word - we love interactive realness!

Wednesday, April 15th
8:00pm Eastern
Call-in Number: (646) 378-0402

Can't wait to feel you on the airwaves!

Catch it right here on Scryptkeeper using the player above, or catch it here: -- Sippin On Ink | blogtalkradio.com/sippin-on-ink

Come on and Conjure with us

2009-04-14T18:20:00.004-05:00

En el corazon del South Austin
tenemos un love for liberation!

9pm Saturday April 25, 2009
*Conjure: Calling up the Spirit of Struggle, Resistance, & Liberation*

Unofficial CD release party for 3JazzCollective's latest collection of music: she danced

We invite you to a forum for progressive artist/activists:
A series of experiments in jazz music, dance, spoken word, & cinema
This session will feature: spoken word peformance by Ana-Maurine Lara, visual expression by Wura-Natasha Ogunji, & special guest host Samiya Bashir.

Rooted in the tradition of improvisation, revolution, and blues, Conjure is a sovereign site for artistic/exploratory/spiritual collaboration, expression, and rejuvenation. Each jam session will highlight the “Afrological improvised music” of the 3 Jazz Collective along with a featured spoken word performer, dancer, and filmmaker inspired by the jazz aesthetic.

Throughout the series, we will celebrate/recognize/honor through artistic revelation/expression the resistance and revolutionary creativity of warrior women and men from John Coltrane and Joe Henderson to George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and local warriors such Ana Sisnett and raúlrsalinas.

a salmonrojo production.
Sponsored by Thematic Initiatives and Community Engagement of the University of Texas at Austin (TICE)

3 Jazz collective:
Joao Costa Vargas – bass
Phillipe Vieux – baritone, tenor, & soprano saxophones
Kevin Witt – drums
www.myspace.com/3jazzcollective

Debut performance of Gospel: The Reading a smashing success

2009-04-13T18:02:00.003-05:00

Thanks to everyone who came out for the debut performance of Gospel: The Reading. Special thanks to Dr. Matt Richardson who was featured as "Crow," for a stellar performance.

The house was packed, everyone had a great time, and the debut of the Gospel Tees was a hit! Order your Gospel Tees online now and don't miss out on the sexy wardrobe staple of the summer.

Check out these beautiful pictures from Sharon Bridgforth of the festivities ... and find out how you can bring Gospel: The Reading to your own hometown.

Much love to the University of Texas' John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies for sponsoring the show, and to director Dr. Omi Oshun / Joni Jones and Sharon Bridgforth for putting together a slammin party after the performance!

Look sexy and smart while supporting the arts!

2009-04-11T18:07:00.001-05:00

How?
By getting your super sexy Gospel T-shirt today!

These custom t-shirts were designed by women of color, printed locally with an awesome East Austin printer, and are as green in ethos as they are in color, featuring 100% organic natural cotton and earth-friendly dyes.

Buy Organic!
It's not just for dinner anymore. ;)

Gospel Tee Fit Guide:

Description: Anvil Organic T-Shirt. No pesticides or other chemicals are used in the production of this 100% Pre-shrunk, 5oz organic cotton fabric. Color: City Green. Sizes: M: XL-XXL, W: S-3XL

Check out these Fit Guides to help select the right shirt for you: Women's & Men's.

Pre-shrunk 5.0 oz. 100% Organic Cotton jersey

Shoulder-to-shoulder tape and seamed collarette

Double-needle sleeve and bottom hem

Women may wish to order one size smaller

Each online order comes with a free set of Gospel bookmarks!

Samiya Bashir is Awarded Fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

2009-04-06T20:36:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes y'all! It don't stop! Woo hoo! 2009: I'm kinda loving you.

Check out the latest:

For immediate release: March 31, 2009
For information: 434-946-7236

Samiya Bashir is Awarded Fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

(Amherst, VA) -- Samiya Bashir of Austin, TX, has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). The VCCA is located near Sweet Briar College in the foothils of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. Samiya Bashir will be among the approximately 20 Fellows focusing on their own creative projects at this working retreat for visual artists, writers and composers.

A typical residency ranges from two weeks to two months. An artist is provided with a comfortable private bedroom, a private studio and three prepared meals a day. Beyond the breakfast hour and the dinner hour, there are no schedules or obligations. This distraction-free atmosphere, as well as the energy that results from having some 20 visual artists, writers, and composers gathered in one place, enable artists to be highly productive.

Serving more than 300 artists a year (over 3,000 since its inception), the VCCA is one of the nation's largest year-round artists' communities. VCCA Fellows have received worldwide attention through publications, exhibitions, compositions, performances, and major awards and accolades, including MacArthur grants, Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim fellowships, National Endowment fo rthe Arts awards, Rome Prizes, Pollock-Krasner Grants, National Book Awards, Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, and Academy Award nominations.

The VCCA has been a wellspring of music, literature and the visual arts in teh United States, providing residencies for artists from all disciplines during the most important and least supportive phase of their work: the creative phase. This is done by giving visual artists, writers, cmposers, performance artists, filmmakers, collaborating artists and those whose work crosses disciplines the crucial elements every artist needs -- the time and space to do their work.

A non-profit organization founded in 1971, the VCCA is supported in large part by grants and private donations. More information is available online at www.vcca.com or by calling 434-946-7236.

# # # #

Starting Today strikes again! Day 70 ...

2009-03-31T13:13:00.003-05:00

If you haven't been following the progress of the First 100 Days of the Obama administration in poetry on the exquisite blog, Starting Today: Poems for the first 100 Days, you've been missing out on some amazing work. Check out previous posts about it here and here.

Today, Day #70, features the amazingly specific and specifically amazing poet, A. Van Jordan who takes a warriors stance and recasts it, beautifully:

“The farmers have won. Not us.”
-from The Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa

At 10 am on a plane to New York, I watch
The Seven Samurai for, possibly, the seventh time.
When stories act out our greatest fears,
we never grow tired of watching others die
to prove we can go on living. Deaths on screen
make sense of the quiet defeats in our day:
the friends who forget your face, the lover
who no longer calls your name, the check
you wait for as if it were a new love,
an old friend, a new day. And this morning,
in the newspaper--like the poor farmers
speaking to the samurai in the film--
to our president, less than 70 days in office,
we plead again for him to save our village
from the bandits who are waiting. Like the plot
in the classic film, the bandits wait and threaten
to return next season when the crops are fuller.

As if he were a samurai, our president agrees to save us
poor farmers whose families live in fear
of what’s just over the ridge of the mountains. He
collected his Ronin administration with their
distinct personalities, but even his own
economists fear what they can’t see. They fear
as if they have more to lose, as if they haven’t
lived through the season when the bandits
rode into the village, leaving us hungry after the harvest.
Once the bodies of the samurai fall over the crops,
their blood fertilizing our soil--
as in, once they save homes, food, children--I wonder
what last line he will utter to his surviving warriors
when he rides out of town looking over his shoulder,
as we return to work over our crops.

Listen Up! Thanks for the love, Mandrake Society Radio -- check the radio interview here

2009-03-30T20:14:00.004-05:00

Podcast: Poet, Samiya Bashir, speaks “Gospel”

Podcast: Play in new window

Author and performance poet, Samiya Bashir, talks with me about her new collection of poetry entitled, Gospel, published by Redbone Press. Her previous work, Where the Apple Falls (2005), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her works have been featured in Essence Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Black Letters Book Review, and Vibe Magazine just to name a few places.

Between performing her poetry, she is the owner of Lead Time Consulting, providing direction for business in brand development, social media, and project management. You can find our more about Samiya at her website, www.samiyabashir.com, and keep up with her blog for pictures of the various Gospel events at http://www.scryptkeeper.blogspot.com/.

Music featured in the show:

Autolect & His Meltdown Movement
“Fusha” (mp3)
from “Sunshine For The Blind (version one)”
(Required)

Don't Sleep: More News on the Poetry Front

2009-03-30T15:00:00.004-05:00

For those of us intrigued by the intersections of poetry, new media, alternative modes of poetic distribution and just poets on the verge of the NewNowNext, this was an announcement that brought a li'l bit of joy, some consternation, and a twinge of halting excitement.

There are some amazing folks on this list -- and some odd omissions IMHO -- so I'm looking forward to seeing what they're going to get up to!

Poetry Foundation Announces Inaugural Project of Poetry Institute

Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute to considerdistribution of poems through new media

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce that as its first project the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute (HMPI) will develop a set of “best practices” for implementing and elevating the profile of poetry through new-media platforms. A policy institute dedicated exclusively to issues of intellectual and practical importance to poetry, the HMPI has as its purpose to convene interested parties to identify issues and champion common solutions for the benefit of poets and the art form of poetry.

Over the course of 2009, the HMPI will invite a panel of poets, publishers, and experts from the fields of media law and technology to examine issues related to the distribution of poetry through new-media platforms, with the aim of forging recommendations that both protect the intellectual property of poets and publishers and ensure a vigorous presence for poetry in all its forms on all available outlets.

Consideration of the needs of poets and their publishers, and with them their audiences, will be a cornerstone in this initial Institute undertaking. As such, the project will include poets and publishers as essential stakeholders in the discussion, bringing them together with leaders from electronic media, media law, and other pertinent fields to create a model for new-media distribution of poems.

Through this focus on poetry and its creators and publishers, the HMPI will also work to address the distinctive needs of poetry as an art form and to consider these needs in developing its recommendations about how best to bring poetry to audiences now being reached by new media. The project will concentrate not only on the current distribution of poems over the Internet but also on the evolving nature of technology and new media in order to develop recommendations that simultaneously serve varied electronic distribution platforms. Any resulting administration of generated ideas will be undertaken by a separate entity or entities.

Katharine Coles, poet laureate of Utah, former head of the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, has been named the Institute’s inaugural director. Members of the Institute’s initial working group include:

Michael Collier, poet, professor, and poetry editor for Houghton Mifflin

Wyn Cooper, poet and lyricist

Rita Dove, poet, playwright, professor, and former U.S. poet laureate

Cornelius Eady, poet, professor, playwright, and co-founder of Cave Canem

David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Kate Gale, editor, writer, and founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press

Kimiko Hahn, poet and professor

Lewis Hyde, poet, essayist, professor, and MacArthur Fellow

Fiona McCrae, publisher and executive director of Graywolf Press

Robert Pinsky, poet, critic, professor, translator, editor, and former U.S. poet laureate

Claudia Rankine, poet, playwright, and professor

Alberto Ríos, poet and professor

Don Selby, co-founder of the Poetry Daily website

Rick Stevens, computer scientist and professor

Jennifer Urban, director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic at the University of Southern California

Monica Youn, poet and counsel in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law

For more information on the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, including full biographies of participants and more detail on the new-media distribution project, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.

***

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/aboutHMPI.html.

Download PDF >>

POETRY FOUNDATION | 444 North Michigan Avenue | Chicago, IL 60611 | 312.787.7070
Media Contact: Anne Halsey (312) 799.8016; ahalsey@poetryfoundation.org

2009-03-30T14:52:00.002-05:00

If you haven't heard it before I'll say it again: Don't sleep on Patricia Smith! Check out a couple of previous posts here and here and catch on up ... it's worth it.

Now that we're all caught up, if you're in NYC here's a little something you won't want to miss:

WRITING AWAY FROM THE SURFACE--Patricia Smith NYC Workshop, Poets House, May 6-June 10

This workshop will be composed of discussion and exercises designed to write toward darkness, secrecy, trauma, regret and, eventually, insight. Few poets actually heed the advice to 'write what you know.' Instead, we scrape stories from the surface of our lives, while ignoring uncomfortable truths that we mistakenly believe have been paved over and forgotten. Writers are among the fortunate few who have access to the whole of their lives. This workshop will teach us not to be afraid of that blessing.

Six Wednesdays, May 6-June 10, 6:30-9pm, $425, space limited, application required. Send three poems and a cover sheet with your name, address, email and phone number by Friday, April 3. No names should appear on the poems themselves. Applications must be received by or before the deadline. Applications may be emailed to classes@poetshouse.org or sent by mail to: Poets House, 594 Broadway, Suite 510, New York, NY 10012. 212-431-7920.

ScryptKeeper

Just Breathe

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Beautiful Equations

Gospel's Hugin & Munin think this sledding crow is tight.

Some sweet poets get the NBCC nod!

Guernica / The Harmonizer

The Harmonizer

Poet Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program

Yum. More poems.

I found an interesting poem today.

Haruki Murakami: Making My Life Dance Fire

When good things happen to good poet-people

Habari Gani--Umoja!

Thank You, Writers, for a Great 2011!

New Poem in Cura: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action

Thin Filament Pyrometry /or/ “Dag! We ain’t even in Detroit yet? Sheeeit. Stop here and lemme get me some chicken.”

-SAMIYA BASHIR-

Nikky Finney - some real-time reasoning for our holiday seasoning

Mmmmm.... poems ....

Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them

Some Sunday morning Love for #Occupy Wall Street

The Gettysburg Address

2011 Book #113: GOSPEL by Samiya Bashir - Blog - Matt Bell

2011 BOOK #113: GOSPEL BY SAMIYA BASHIR

Hey! It's my birthday! And I got an award!

Shuttlesworth vs. Jobs? Seriously? Let's keep it together people. ("us" vs. "them" = everybody loses)

His Name Be Witness: The Genius of Marvin K. White — Lambda Literary

His Name Be Witness: The Genius of Marvin K. White

This Weekend: Red Rover Series / Experiment #51

Red Rover Series / Experiment #51

A Weekend of Reading Poetry in the Great Lakes

It's National Poetry Month! Check out my new poem on The Rumpus!

National Poetry Month, Day 18:

“Transparent to Visible Light”

by Samiya Bashir

Whatcha doin on Friday Night?

Chimurenga Newsroom › call for classifieds

For Oscar Night: James Franco Talks Poetry

Something to [think/be/do/act/fart/sleep/puke/love/&] about... (maybe)

From Poetry Daily - Afaa M. Weaver

Sometimes you find what you're not even looking for...

Weekly Poem: 'Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink' | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Me @ AWP

Happy New Year!

Twitter Poet Flattery

I *do* love Tuesdays ...

Something about poets and math ...

War Diaries is hitting the streets!

Awwww ... Thanks Poetry House!

Gospel Nominated for Hurston/Wright Legacy Award!

Poetry Foundation Reprints 3 Poems from Gospel

Ooooo. Ahhhh. Ohhhhh.

Poems on TORCH!

Austin, Gospel, and Lucille Clifton's *Voices*? Wow. Nice.

Finalists announced for the 22nd AnnualLambda Literary Awards

There are cons, and then there are pros...

Yes, Francine. Absolutely yes.

Spring!

Not So Fast (I agree.)

Not So Fast

Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

By JOHN FREEMAN

READY

Learning to relax ...

Taking it on ...

The Kenyon Review gives Gospel some love ...

Empire State of Mind

Good food, Good folks!

Nappy Headed Aliens

Thinking about form and function ...

Walking Home

*Gospel: poems* gets some love ...

Poem of the day ... for Homecoming

Oiling my Pistons

Back Home

Gospel: poems a bestseller at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival!

The 2009 Festival was a great success ...

Here's the top-selling titles at Saints and Sinners, 2009:

“Stabilimentum,” New Poem published on The Rumpus

Fingers Through Holy Water - The Rumpus reviews Gospel

I do love Tuesdays ...

Austin, Gospel, and Lucille Clifton's Voices? Wow. Nice.

Finalists announced for the 22nd Annual
Lambda Literary Awards

Gospel: poems gets some love ...