"Vegetable Love" Poem by Barbara Crooker Read by Garrison Keillor on the Writer's Almanac- I Love This Poem!

www.thedailygreen.com/cm/thedailygreen/images

Poem- Vegetable Love

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/08/23

13 Poets (I am one) Interpret the Word "Marked" in the Blossom Bones Summer Issue.

http://www.blossombones.com

Journey - Poetry Anthology Eden Waters Press

http://edenwaterspress.com/current_issue

Journey Anthology includes work by Peter Krok, Mike Amado, Ed Galing, Halima Sussman, Helen Bar-Lev, Phillip E. Burnham, Phil Levy, Susan Tepper, Tom Sheehan, Elizabeth P. Glixman and many others.

Your form was submitted successfully. Thank you for your message.

From Editor Anne Brudevold

"Our second anthology Journey is a huge success, in the eyes of the critics who have read the galleys and and I hope it will be with you and the public. We think it is a beautiful book inside and out. The content is thought-provoking, funny, luminous, mysterious and covers all the emotions and brings up important issues. It's beautiful to look at. It's beautiful to read."

UPDATE! Taking Poetry Public by Kiki Anderson- Poets and Writers Magazine

Adam Robinson founded the outdoor journal Is Reads. My poem A Mother and Son Conversation is part of the current issue that is posted in public places in Baltimore Maryland. I love the idea that my poem appears in an unlikely place. Not a book. I don't know who read it, if anyone read it and I don't know if the wind blew it away. The randomness of the viewing is exciting. A person might walk into a rest room or by the side of an abandoned building and see a poem never having any interest in reading poetry. What a surprise. It is like finding something ( a jewel, a needle in a haystack, an irritation, a zen koan, nonsense, profundity) in an unexpected environment. Perhaps it has a momentary effect on the reader's consciousness even if only the utterance of the words, What's that doing here? An interaction has taken place.

The online issue my poem is in is not up yet. Enjoy the previous issue.

Is Reads website www.isreads.com.

And read an article about Adam and his outdoor journal in Poets and Writers Magazine

http://wwan>w.pw.org/content/taking_poetry_public

My poem was posted in these two spots among many others.

http://www.nashvilleisreads.com/glixman.html

http://www.baltimoreisreads.com/glixman.html

Charles Olson- "What do you see? What is happening where you live?"

You can watch Polis Is This about poet Charles Olson at
http://www.polisisthis.com/ . I have an interest in Olson's work for many reasons.

One: He was born in my hometown in Massachusetts along with other notable poets such as Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Bishop.

Two: I love Gloucester, Massachusetts. The Maximus Poems were inspired by Olson's love of Gloucester.Gloucester is a beautiful place even though it has changed dramatically in the last four decades. Going to Gloucester on a day trip when I was a teenager was like going to a new world where nature ruled. The air was clean. There was an abundance of light. I felt invigorated. The smell of the sea and the fish, the weathered buildings, the fishing boats, the ocean, the quaintness of it all spoke of another time when people lived off the land, respected it and had roots in community. It was this sense of an enclosed community that held onto tradition that intrigued me.

Three: Olson believed in people's ability to shape their world.

Four: It seems he didn't care what people thought of him ( he was a bit eccentric) and he was humble. He was outspoken, eccentric yet humble. Hmm. Seems like a contradiction. I gathered this from the film Polis Is This.

Five: He had a station wagon that had no reverse. When asked why, he said no one should go backward in life.

I often think that many great poets are like mystic sages, visionaries or teachers who show things to us we do not see because we do not have the capacity or sensitivity to see things as they are in this world. Or because we are stuck in our solo vision of things. Olson gives the people who read his work a different view of what people can achieve.


Info on Charles Olson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970), was an important 2nd generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Subsequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He is credited as one of the thinkers who coined the term postmodern. Across the Atlantic, these various poetic movements have exerted a deep and ongoing influence on an important array of alternative and experimental writers, including Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, and Geoffrey Hill, behind whose works lurks Olson's ghost of language-driven inventiveness."

Info on poems from poets.org

"He began work on his opus, The Maximus Poems, in the mid-1940s, and continued to expand and revise them until his death in 1970. Formally similar to Ezra Pound's Cantos, the Maximus poems are, in Olson's words, "about a person and a place."

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5964

April 24, 2009 - Do you love to draw whether free hand or on the computer? On June 6, 2009 ( Drawing Day)show the world your drawings.

Edward Gorey's drawings
One of my favorite " drawers" is Edward Gorey. I love his black and white drawings for their designs, textures, and humour (often bizarre or horrific).

Photos of Edward Gory
http://www.phobos-deimos.com/Edward_Gorey/Main/Edward_Gorey_Pics.htm

He did the illustrations for the intro to the PBS Mystery series.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/game.html


Make your own lines on a surface.
READ ABOUT DRAWING DAY

Poem- Kim Addonizio- What Do Women Want?

Kim Addonizio- What Do Women Want?
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171221

Slate
http://www.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/2936214.aspx

Kim Addonizio- Video Readings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkiZfPPY6HE&feature=related

March 27, 2009 Listen to Thomas Lux Talk about Poetry on the Paula Gordon Show .I Don't Know who Paula Gordon Is but Thomas Lux is a Unique Poet

God Particles is my introduction to Thomas Lux' poems. I am not sure how I feel about them. I do know that the title poem "God Particles" made an impression on me. I too wonder if God takes pity on us humans for our inadequacies.

The poems in God Particles do not shy away from the depressing and the ugly. Despite this they are life affirming to read. They are compassionate poems.

Here is a poem from the book

The Hungry Gap-Time

late August, before the harvest, every one of us worn down
by the plow, the hoe, rake,
and worry over rain.
Chicken coop confiscated
by the rats and the raptors
with nary a mouse to hunt. The corn's too green and hard,
and the larder's down
to dried apples
and double-corned cod. We lie on our backs
and stare at the blue;
our work is done, our bellies flat.
The mold on the wheat killed hardly a sheaf.
The lambs fatten on the grass, our pigs we set
to forage on their own—they'll be back
when they whiff the first shucked ears
of corn. Albert's counting
bushels in his head
to see if there's enough to ask Harriet's father
for her hand. Harriet's father
is thinking about Harriet's mother's bread
pudding. The boys and girls
splash in the creek,
which is low but cold. Soon, soon
there will be food
again, and from what our hands have done
we shall live another year here
by the river
in the valley
above the fault line
beneath the mountain.

Thomas Lux

God Particles
Houghton Mifflin

I really liked what Thomas Lux says about poetry in this interview on the Paula Gordon Show.

Lux gives credit to performance poetry for our culture's recent renewed interest in poetry and talks about why poets write.

Read the rest-Audio Interview
http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/lux/

Blogger's Unite * Women's History Month- Immigration

My grandmother as a young woman

People came to the U.S. seeking freedom of expression and economic opportunity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (THE SECOND WAVE: European Immigration from 1850-1920). http://www.memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/workshop/european/wimmlink.html

My grandmother was one of these people. She immigrated from Lithuania with her parents and sister. Later in her life at the age of fifty due to financial hardship, she opened her own business and in the spirit of many immigrants achieved her own American Dream as a small business owner.

My grandmother worked hard. She had an independent spirit. She represents to me all the hard working women who came to the United States from Ireland, Germany, China, Italy, Eastern Europe during this wave of immigration who paved the way for more equal rights for all women in the U.S. These women who worked in factories, shops, were housewives, supported their husbands' dreams, and or manifested dreams of their own are role models for women of all ages. Many young women in the United States today do not know what their grandmothers and great grandmothers went through to be able to work, vote, or garner equality.

Check these sites out to learn more about the "famous" and "not famous" remarkable women who paved the way for us all. In the twenty-first century women and their families are immigrating to the U.S. They will contribute to the ongoing story of History in new and unique ways.


Photo Essay

Gifts of Age: Portraits and Essays of 32 Remarkable Women

by Charlotte Painter

http://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Age-Portraits-Essays-Remarkable/dp/0877013683


Film

Women Make Movies Films by and about Women
A Place Called Home - Women and Immigration

"This extraordinary collection features titles that celebrate the lives and achievements of immigrants in the U.S. and explore ongoing struggles of immigrants today. Includes new release MOTHERLAND and the acclaimed ADIO KERIDA (GOODBYE DEAR LOVE)"

http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/collect18.shtml

Poetry

Emma Lazarus, Poet of the Huddled Masses

by Jacki Lyden

"In her poem The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus created what stood for years as an American credo. You know the words: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."

The words of the poem were engraved on a bronze plaque hung in the Statue of Liberty museum 20 years after her death. To many, the verse expressed the governing U.S. attitude toward immigrants: welcome. But today, a new debate over immigration is dominating the political debate."

Read the rest

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6359435

Miriam's Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets
Majorie Agosín

Not only have I carried and continue to carry the languages of my ancestors, but I have also many names. Because I was born in the United States, my mother named me Marjorie, like the character in Howard Fast's novel Marjorie Morningstar. In Chile I was called Margarita; at home Magita; and at the Hebrew school, Miriam.

- Marjorie Agosín -

http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/rv/rvbkMiriam.htm

Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been :New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Edited by Persis M. Karim
Foreword by Al Young
A powerful collection that speaks to history, immigration, and the emergence of a new international literary voice

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1557288208/qid=1145424983/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-3373945-6044804?s=books&v=glance&n=283155


Other Links of Interest

Immigration Learning Page Library of Congress
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/learn/community/cc_immigration.php

The Statue of Liberty: Ellis Island Foundation- Inc.
http://www.ellisisland.org/Immexp/index.asp?

Karen Tei Yamashita Novelist- Brazil- Maru
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-1566890004-0

Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita
http://www.eclectica.org/v11n4/glixman_yamashita.html

2 Novels: One about Identity Theft, the Other, a May December Romance

T.C. Boyle's 2006 novel Talk Talk is about one woman's experience with identity theft. I've heard ads on the radio about how to protect your identity. I never thought much about this type of crime until I read Boyle's book. The book made the whole experience frightening. You will find out it REALLY can happen to anybody!

I read the book quickly. I wanted to know if the deaf woman and her boyfriend (they took it upon themselves to find the thief) would catch him. There were a lot of scenes in cars which made the book seem like one big car chase between cops and robbers.

Here are two reviews.

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_08_009663.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/14/AR2006071401222.html

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He has written numerous books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (I will never forget this story) and Love in the Time of Cholera. Memories of My Melancholy Whores, his latest novel, is a 115-page, strangely erotic, and spiritual masterpiece. The man is a great writer, but I don't have to tell you that."

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is about more than the relationship between a young prostitute and a ninety year old man. Read more http://www.eclectica.org/v10n4/glixman.html

Inspire Me Thursday- Lace- Happy Valentines Day

E.P. Glixman

The challenge this week at Inspire Me Thursday is lace. Here is my poem in progress, my first draft. Since it is Valentines Day, I thought about hearts and flowers and lacy things. I guess Cupid loves lace. It is everywhere on this holiday.

Angela's

You might think you've entered a room
where everything is covered
with luxurious lace. You are right
You've entered a space with signs on walls
that read for the demure, the daring, the darling
The room is full of searching people like your neighbor
eighty year old Mrs.Rodriguez
hiding her Valentines Day hearts and flower thong
trimmed with neon pink lace in her bony hand
No one would have ever guessed

This is the way the world should be everyday
a shopping spree - a surprise-
All women are madonas goddesses
mistresses of the dark
in black lace and high heels and
then there are the women who are told
not to be women
who need to take care of their
deepest yin

This store is not a place of weeping and sighs
of threats and phrases
I am leaving you
Don't expect child support
And it is not a place where you pick up dry cleaning
or tell the judge how your significant other cheated

It is a place of
Revelation
Emancipation
Freedom
A declaration

I am a lover of lace and soft things
at Angela's Lingerie store

E.P. Glixman

Robert Frost " Versed in Country Things" Poems and New England Winter Photos

photo by a.coven

photo by a.coven

photo by a.coven

Robert Frost lived and wrote in New England for part of his life.

"Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony."

Read more about Frost at

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192

A few memorable poems.

DUST OF SNOW

by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.




Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

An Old Man's Winter Night by Robert Frost

All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him In clomping there, he scared it once again In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night, Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar Of trees and crack of branches, common things, But nothing so like beating on a box. A light he was to no one but himself Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that. He consigned to the moon, such as she was, So late-arising, to the broken moon As better than the sun in any case For such a charge, his snow upon the roof, His icicles along the wall to keep; And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house, A farm, a countryside, or if he can, It's thus he does it of a winter night.

From "Mountain Interval", 1916 I bought this book of Frost's poems and B.A. King photos years ago. I often re-read it. I find it inspiring. See more of King's black and white photos at this link.   https://bytonyking.com/index.php?cPath=16

"... (an) extraordinary collection, which has an energy, a precision and a deep black humour I haven't seen in a long time." The Guardian

"God Is a Chicken" is one of the stories from Beware of God stories (Simon & Schuster March 28, 2006) . Imagine what you would do as an Orthodox Jew if you died and went to heaven and found out God was an actual chicken who did all things chicken. All the practices you observed like keeping kosher were meaningless. You wanted to tell your family to stop being observant because God was a chicken and the practices didn't matter. But you were dead! Esquire Magazine called it "Heretical. Hysterical." Auslander's second book Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir was published in 2007.

Auslander has contributed pieces to The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine and NPR( You Must Read This by Shalom Auslander

Dear World: Lighten Up. Sincerely, Groucho)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95830821


Auslander's website

http://www.shalomauslander.com/index.php

Eclectica New Issue : Fiction, Poetry, Book Reviews, Interviews, Essays

http://www.eclectica.org/v13n1/toc.html

This issue includes interviews with and by these members of the Wom-Po ( Women's Poetry) Listserv.

Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi * Wendy Vardaman * Susan Settlemyre Williams * Kimberly Becker * Christine Pacosz * Shayla Mollohan * Charlotte Mandel * Barbara Crooker

Letters To the World
Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv

http://www.amazon.com/LETTERS-WORLD-Poems-Wom-po-Listserv/dp/1597090999

December 27, 2008 National Book Award Winners

November 18, 2008

National Book Awards Ceremony in
New York City

I turned on the TV yesterday in time to watch a tape of the November 18, 2008 National Book Awards Ceremony. Poet Mark Doty was accepting the award for his book of poetry Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems.
I also heard Judy Blundell children's book author accept her award for What I Saw and How I Lied.

I know the book business is downsizing and changing due to the economy and also because of new media formats like the Internet, Amazon Kindle, Blackberries etc. I have loved books since I was a toddler. I love the feel, smell and concreteness of a book. I hope that books do not go the way of the dinosaur. For me and many readers that would be a sad day.

Click on the link to read about the awards and to see videos of each winner's acceptance speech.

http://nationalbook.org/nba2008.html

Galway Kinnell "everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;/ though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness,"

Saint Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

© 1980 by Galway Kinnell

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3753

December 15, 2008 - I Can't Watch War Movies But I Read This Book

"Extraordinary... a vast, ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing novel" The New York Times Book Review

I can't watch war movies. The blood and bombs, the hand to hand combat gets to me. I was surprised that I enjoyed this novel. Oh, yes the battle scenes were there (they filled many of the pages of this 860 page novel) but I saw them in the context of the greater story of the life from youth to old age of Alessandro Giullani, soldier and believer in beauty, art, and the spirit.

As an old man, Giuliani tells his life story to his traveling companion, a young man of seventeen, as they walk through the Italian countryside.

"Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
For Alessandro Giullani, the young son of a prosperous Roman Lawyer, golden trees shimmer in the sun beneath a sky of perfect blue. At night the moon is amber and the city of Rome seethes with light. He races horses across the country to the sea, and in the Alps he practices the precise and sublime art of mountain climbing. At the ancient university in Bologna he is a student of painting and the science of beauty. And he falls in love. His is a world of adventure and dreams, of music, storm, and the spirit. Then the Great War intervenes."

Read the rest at Powell's books

http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0156031132

December 4, 2008 Join the ninth annual CALLS FROM HOME radio broadcast for prisoners.

"Thousand Kites is asking you to call our toll-free line 877-518-0606 and speak directly to those behind bars this holiday season. An answering machine will record your message. Read a poem, sing a song, or just speak directly from your heart. Speak to someone you know or to everyone---make it uplifting. Call anytime, now through December 9, and record your message.

The United States has 2.4 million people behind bars. Thousand Kites wants you to lend your voice to a powerful grassroots radio broadcast that reaches into our nation's prison and lets those inside know they are not forgotten.

We will post each call on our website as it comes in! Check our website http://www.thousandkites.org to listen to your call and others!

CALLS FROM HOME will broadcast on over 200 radio stations across the country and be available for download from our website on December 13. This is a project of Thousand Kites/WMMT-FM/Appalshop and a national network of grassroots organizations working for criminal justice reform. Learn how you can help blog, distribute, broadcast, or support this event (thousandkitesproject@gmail.com)."

Downsize my Monthly Budget? In 2005 I Tried to Live Without TV.

They Unplugged Me on August 22 at 6:00 a.m.
↑ that's a permalink! visit the full archive

by Elizabeth P. Glixman
originally published on 2004-05-17

It seems like yesterday I was O.K., breathing, full of life, love, and laughter. I had dreams and purpose.

Sunday nights I watched Mad TV. Monday night I kissed Fluffy and Boo Boo on my dusted TV screen. They were amazing animals on Miracle Pets rescuing their owners from faulty smoke detectors and heart attacks. On Tuesday I saw Simon Cowel ruin people’s dreams.On Wednesday I watched the dreamers sing goodbye, friends and family crying in the audience. Kleenex , please.Thursday was Will and Grace. Friday night Mad TV (redundant, I love that channel) and Nightly News. I avoided the segments where a man from Texas barbecued. Saturday I made fettuccine alfredo, tofu eggplant casserole, and egg foo young. When the cooking shows were over there were the infomercials, educational marvels that titillate us with flatter tummies, larger breasts, bigger pectorals, stainless steel egg cutters, and hair anywhere we want.

Read the rest.

http://uber.nu/2004/05/17/

Update-Bloggers Unite Poetry and Poverty

I don't know why I thought today was a Bloggers Unite Day. I am embarrassed to say it isn't, but I decided to leave the post up anyways.

Poverty is the theme of Bloggers Unite Day this year. I've chosen to post poems that deal with poverty( in it's various forms) or poems that suggest ways to go beyond poverty.


Olga Angelina Garcia

A Poor People’s Poem

This poem
angry
corajudo
bold
has got
a bad attitude
un genio from hell

and you
you’re afraid
of my poem

afraid of this
deep dark red poem
that bleeds
woman words

you
you’re afraid
cuz even though
this poem
*is*
about survival
it isn’t about
endangered whales
or dying forests

Listen
this is a poor woman’s poem
a Mexicana
Chicana
Mestiza
India
Mujer
Este de Los Angeles
poem

Yeah
this poem’s
got roaches crawling
all over it
and tiny pink mice
nibbling at the edges
and corners of
simple-everyday words

Listen this poem rides the bus
works 12 hours a day
7 days a week
with no medical benefits
and no paid vacations

Listen
this poem
has crossed rivers
and mountains
jumped over
and crawled under
barb-wired fences

this poem
has slaved
in hot-sun pesticide fields
picking
piscando
your lettuce
tomatoes
oranges
onions
picking
piscando
the vegetables
and fruits
that make your meals
nice and balanced

And this poem
has worked all kinds of shifts
in inner-city factories
sewing
packaging
stuffing
cutting
folding
ironing
the clothes you wear
the jeans
the shirts
the jackets
that keep you
in style

Yeah
this is a poor woman’s poem
a brown people’s poem
so you see
right now
we don’t want to talk about
the ozone layer

We
the people in this poem
we wanna talk about where we live
about affordable housing
about how the hot water doesn’t work
and the windows don’t close
about the Never-no-heat-in-the-winter
Sit-u-a-tion

we wanna talk about drugs
about the alcohol cocaine crack heroin
impregnating our communities
making modern colonized brown black slaves of us

we wanna talk about food stamps
about jobs and fair wages
about 12 hour shifts
and working conditions

we wanna talk about the police
about choke-hold
and billy clubs
about busted heads
and handcuffed minds
about sharp-teeth dogs
and shackled freedom
about racist cops
who hate
poor
brown
black
people

we wanna talk about dying
about the river of blood
flowing where we live
about the heads of 2 year old babies
scattered on concrete floors
about the mountain of bodies here
outlined in white chalk

So you see
right now
we don’t wanna hear you preach
about recycling
cuz poor people like us
we’ve always recycled
we invented the damn word
and out of necessity
recycled our papers, cans, bottles
recycled our socially constructed poverty
recycled even our dreams

So you see
we do wanna talk
but talk about lies
about Am er i KKK a
about treaties broken
and lands and people stolen

we wanna talk about
S L A V E R Y
U.S. colonization
Third World penetration

And you
you’re afraid
of my poem

afraid of the East side poem
holding hands
with El Salvador
Nicaragua
Tijuana
Chiapas
Pico-Union
holding hands
with
SWETO
South Africa
South Central L.A.

Yeah
I know
you’re afraid
of this
brown black
poor people’s poem

©1998 Olga Angelina García


Sonia on Hope Street


This is where I live,
at 1352 Hope Street
with mamá, tía Mari, tío Leo,
and my brother Milagro
we live here, the five of us
packed together in a box
where there's no hot water
windows don't work
plumbing don't work
heater don't work
nothing here works.
But this is where I live
in this lopsided brown building
that sags like an old face.
Tía Mari says it's gonna fold
into itself one day and come
down on us, a giant toothless
wrinkled mouth swallowing us
whole. Says she'll be glad
when it happens too
cuz she's waiting for the Big One,
the 8 point earthquake
that'll crack sidewalks open
and crumble freeways,
turn skyscrapers into chalk dust,
she's waiting for the earth to move
beneath her feet. But my mamá,
she's living on bent knees,
cleaning rich people's houses,
wiping clean white tile floors
and toilet bowls. Walking on bent knees,
making pilgrimage, holding sacred
holy apparitions on street corners,
underground metros, churches,
trees, tortillas. Mamá is waiting
for Jesus to come back
from the dead, for La Virgen
de Guadalupe to send her a sign,
for her cemetery of candles
and saints to rise up like riot
flames among the living.
She's waiting for salvation on Hope
Street. Tío Leo laughs, says
God in the USA is TV and money,
is a rich White slum lord living
in Beverely Hills, is the Border Patrol
asking for papeles, is the police officer
who shot Turo from down the street
and got away with it. Says
the bullet whole in Turo's back es la huella
de Dios. Somos cucarachas, he shouts
y el zapato o la mano que cae del cielo
a darte el madrazo es tu Dios.
Scares us when Tío Leo starts saying stuff
like that, Mamá shakes her head and asks:
¿Qué, no crees en nada? He says he believes
in numbers. In 2 roaches + 2 roaches = 4 roaches.
In 3 days sin chamba + 6 days sin chamba = 9 días de desesperación.
In 8 hours worked + 4 hours work = overtime.
In numbers typed in at the right hand side
of his paycheck = never enough.
He's waiting to win the lottery,
for God to fuck up and accidentally
call his numbers:

13 52 4 28 7.

Me, I'm waiting for something
as soft as my brother's name
to come raining down on me.

I'm waiting for for a miracle
cuz we're 5-to-a-room here
cuz there's a muerta on the 1st floor
and a deaf woman who eats mice on the 3rd.

I wait for miracles cuz here
roaches have wings and fall
from ceings into bowls of soup
and cereal. Here, we can't get
rid of them, even with daily sprays,
those roach motels, that Chinese chalk,
and the manager won't fumigate
says we got roaches cuz we're dirty.
All 126 tenants have roaches
cuz all 126 of us are dirty
and lazy and poor and well
everybody knows that roaches come
with poverty and poverty with roaches.
And the other day
when I told the manager
we needed mouse traps
he told me, aquí no hay ratones
and he said we should
leave him alone because after all
he wasn't God and he couldn't solve
all of our problems and anyways
we were all crazy,
seeing things
all 126 of us who live here,
seeing things

I pray for miracles
cuz I live smack in the middle
of this city's aneurysm,
where drunk disenfranchised men pee
against cracked walls and shoot heroine
up swollen veins, where the unwanted
leave their dreams lying around like syringes
on sidewalks.
I pray for miracles
cuz I'm only 17
and I live among all these roaches
these mice
these men.


From the CD's Raza Spoken Here 1 and When Skin Peels http://www.calacapress.com/wsp.html ©1998 Olga Angelina García Echeverría.

Falling Angels- Recent poetry book release by Olga Angelina García Echeverría.

http://labloga.blogspot.com/2008/10/falling-angels-and-ex-kop-readings.html


Rumi

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over! For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.
These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

"His century was also a century of war and famine, where the Mongol hordes had wrecked havoc in
Asia . Not much different from our own, where the majority of human
race lives below the poverty line and is constantly at war."

Read more about Rumi

http://www.khamush.com/

http://www.rumi.net/about_rumi_main.htm

Yusef Komunyakaa

Believing in Iron

The hills my brothers & I created

Never balanced, & it took years

To discover how the world worked.

We could look at a tree of blackbirds

& tell you how many were there,

But with the scrap dealer

Our math was always off.

Weeks of lifting & grunting

Never added up to much,

But we couldn't stop

Believing in iron.

Abandoned trucks & cars

Were held to the ground

By thick, nostalgic fingers of vines

Strong as a dozen sharecroppers.

We'd return with our wheelbarrow

Groaning under a new load, 

Yet tiger lilies lived better

In their languid, August domain.

Among paper & Coke bottles

Foundry smoke erased sunsets,

& we couldn't believe iron

Left men bent so close to the earth

As if the ore under their breath

Weighed down the gray sky.

Sometimes I dreamt how our hills

Washed into a sea of metal,

How it all became an anchor

For a warship or bomber

Out over trees with blooms

Too red to look at.

"Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he was raised during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. He served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam war, earning him a Bronze Star.
He began writing poetry in 1973, and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado Springs in 1975."
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/22


Emily Dickinson

Your Riches Taught Me Poverty


Your Riches—taught me—Poverty.
Myself—a Millionaire
In little Wealths, as Girls could boast
Till broad as Buenos Ayre—

You drifted your Dominions—
A Different Peru—
And I esteemed All Poverty
For Life's Estate with you—

Of Mines, I little know—myself—
But just the names, of Gems—
The Colors of the Commonest—
And scarce of Diadems—

So much, that did I meet the Queen—
Her Glory I should know—
But this, must be a different Wealth—
To miss it—beggars so—

I'm sure 'tis India—all Day—
To those who look on You—
Without a stint—without a blame,
Might I—but be the Jew—

I'm sure it is Golconda—
Beyond my power to deem—
To have a smile for Mine—each Day,
How better, than a Gem!

At least, it solaces to know
That there exists—a Gold—
Altho' I prove it, just in time
Its distance—to behold—

Its far—far Treasure to surmise—
And estimate the Pearl—
That slipped my simple fingers through—
While just a Girl at School.

About Emily Dickinson

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155