For those who don’t read at the other, a cross-posting.

The closing act of the spring writers festival was leaving on a blissful high note –a performance of 800-year-old poetry of Rumi by the Mushfiq Ensemble and Coleman Barks.

The Persian music was by 2 men from Afghanistan, sometimes singing the Sufi’s words in the original tongue. A woman from India and a woman from Canada completed the Ensemble with the guest from the southern U.S., Coleman Barks.

The voices, violin and harmonium, each so much like a human voice, and tapping of tabla (drums) and plucking of other instruments blended into each other.

Together they did a kind of jazz-feel jam, reading each other, fading into and out of the words of Rumi.

Barks interspersed his performance with flows to how Rumi’s movement made life the worship: silence, discourse, movement, gibberish, music, jokes, and watching the behavior of animals as kinds of scripture.

You can’t explain the poems of Rumi. They were spontaneous speech. “These poems are a medium you swim in”. Interspersed were Nasrudin jokes, stories of meeting people who can recite Rumi in different languages, meeting government officials who at diplomatic functions begin a strong debate. His translator explained it was not political but over drunkenness in the poems of Hafiz versus Rumi, soemthing he could never see happening in the U.S. cabinet. There were poems by Bark himself of indulgent grandfatherness. And that cyclical repeating words until they dissolve.

Some notes of what he related…repeated in a way of haiku repeated in air, except in this case to his mellow deep voice of the south to accompaniness of singing and instruments. Out of context of the body of sound and rhythm, they lose most, but I note to myself what I can of the holiness if inner listening of an audience with one ear and tongues sold.

• When you pray your own longing is the reply.
• It’s said that god created the world because he loves stories. Make your life a good story so God doesn’t get bored.
• Any religion, any group, any person, each has a secret way to be with the Mystery, none to be judged.
• I didn’t come here of my own accord. The one who brought me here will have to take me home.
• What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.

When he spoke of his grand daughter and going to her soccer game, her team lost and the opposite team paraded chanting we won, we won and his grand daughter got up on the seat of the convertible and pumped her arm and chanting we lost, we lost, 10-zero, we lost with as much enthusiasm. Good losers don’t laugh last/ they laugh continuously

By the end the entire auditorium by the end instantly gave a long ovation, no hold outs standing because others are standing. The group will have another performance at the national library on May 18th. You can hear some of their music sample here.

If you want to hear some of the poems, The Voice of Longing, Coleman Barks CD of Rumi.

The idea of randomizing Lampman more has happened. I threw a cover on the bed and the new sonnet with different set of rhymes made their individual word way to the floor. Before recording what I had. That’s the way the poem crumbles. So, what have we here upside down and following paths of chaos?

Was red the swift night and a song
sound might
sunny heard
stirred a knowing echoing
and could
heard sunny
retained
weight two
all but listening
shadow light mouth
ever maker of
not sad

(cross-posted at www.pagehalffull.com/humanyms)
I’ve got a review copy of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux. It is book 2 in a series on the history of Spoken Word. It is by the publishers who put together Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Book and 3 Audio CDs). I got that title years ago from a poetry festival. I still listen to years after I got it. Just to hear Auden and Gertrude Stein in their own voices is very cool. They improved the layout in this one by having an index that cross references track numbers to page numbers.
Intro
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser does the foreword. In it he says there that he feels performance poetry meets one of the basic human needs. One is happiest when doing what our ancestors had to do one to survive — one must cook, one must garden and one must tell stories. Writing is one step removed from this gratifying shaman state of artist-priest. Kooser says, performance poetry is “less revolutionary than – dare I say it – reactionary” against dullness and the “peculiar rectangle of words arranged on a page that poses a kind of riddle that one must solve or die” and dowdy old geezers who are for Literature with a capital L.
That’s up to debate but good debate always moves the field forward. For myself, I don’t know who those geezers might be. Perhaps they all died before I was born. Nonetheless it’s a good lively read.
The whole undertaking is ambitious. How to catch what is current and the essence and reduce down to the key samples that are in themselves excellent and are key indicators of those works that are left out for reasons of time and space. It’s the challenge of any anthology to select these seminal poems for an anthology.
Structure
Redux, published by sourcebooks has a CD with 75 tracks of spoken word and page poets, hip hop poetica, dub poetry and music. It’s like a Rough Guide, a survey anthology from poetic device devising a meditation or telling a memory to amped yell. And every sung note in between the poles.
There are 7 chapters. The first is slammers and laureates with sub-sections of women take the slam and the elders. Part 2 is legacy from Corso to Kerouac to Lerner. Part 3 is music and poetry connection. Slam poets and slam poets writing in form are followed by a chapter on those writing abroad (Germany, Australia, Jordan and more). Youth and hip-hop poetic are the last two foci.
The CD contains less than half the poems that are in the text (about 150 poems total). Although I’d like to have heard them all, that choice makes sense. If they entirely overlapped and duplicated each other, wouldn’t that have made one of them extraneous.
Considering that it’s a literary survey and not a literary magazine it would have been more useful to have bios with a bigger context, written in mini wikipedia style, rather than whatever one sentence the poet submitted. Most did however list some way to find more by them.
Some big personalities are explored in essays. Between one essay is by Henry Taylor, (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,1986) and another by Slam originator Bob Holman, you’ve got the value of the $25 U.S. cover price alone.
Taylor’s essay is 9 pages long and talks about his journey though poetry from academic formalist to slam poetry, still navigating between both “worlds”. As an undergraduate he heard live in the 1960s basically every big name in US poetry. He talks about being one of the readers when another reader took far more than the allotted time and how he and the other reader decided how they what they would do with their thin slice of the pie and all the ruminations of what performance is and what a poet owes to the audience or doesn’t. Holman’s 4 pages are devoted to memories of Robert Creeley.
My main complaint with this is after the build-up of how so much of his poems rests in the presentation, person, voice or Creeley himself, you turn a page and the CD is of Holman reading Creeley. Surely some archive could have been dug out and authorized. Likewise, the poem Thirty Again? slammed on stage by an 90 year old. That I’d want to hear not only read.
There’s a smattering of world voices, i.e. England and Caribbean from America but largely northeastern U.S. Part of the narration is done by one of the editors and organizer’s of this project — Chicago Public radio poet, and high school English teacher Kevin Coval.
There’s a dual market aim — general audience and high school classes, the latter comes out in the graphics and feel of the book (but perhaps it would only seem so to people who have also dealt with a lot of textbooks). A general audience who wanted to explore what this slam poetry thing is without going out, or having heard some and wanting to know the history and general context and range would be well-served.
It’s hard to generalize over so many poets and pieces. There were times in the book and CD that I felt the choices showed the nature of slam poetry to be topical based. There’s a grasp to record a piece of anthropology of a time and place, usually the northeast U.S. youth voice. A lot of the poems are narrative and recorded live bring in the audience reaction as part of the context.
The Poetry
Some narrative poetry lines overlap stand up comedy and storytelling such as Taylor Mali, repeat US slam poet winner. I’ve heard him before on youtube. He tweaks my sense of humor. Included here is his poem on his dad and his idiosyncratic system for labelling keys so no intruder (or anyone else) would know what fits what.
More free form is David Lerner with his rant against what this is not — “no grab bag of word play of sensitive thoughts and gracious theories word play over how many ambiguities can dance on the head of machine gun” in his poem entitled Mein Kampf, tapping the feet and brains of audience to incite rebelling against consumer society and the blindness of it.
Derrick Brown mixes singing then switches to late night radio tones with spoken words such as “We swerved home in black laughter” in Kurosawa Champagne. It’s as goosebump raising as Simone Muench in Tom Waits, I Hate You “for the way your voice snags my skin…plucking nightingales from a piano writhing as if it were my ribcage being played.” I’d really have to quote the whole thing to do it justice.
Or e.e. cummings put off your faces, Death for day is coming as a jazzy choir arrangement. This is clearly a CD and book to go through slowly over a lot of days hitting the pause button often.
A poem that keeps cycling back through my head is one by 2001 National Poetry Slam Individual Champion 2001, Mayda Del Valle which goes in part i’m crossing borders/abriendo puertas/ tongue waggin’/ clicking the roof of my mouth/ rolling ere’s / comiendo ese’s/ yo tengo el toque de tito’s / timbalero / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / writhing on my lips / i’m riding waves of / language deconstruction// wear ur hardharts / little chicken heads/ coz the alphabet is falling from the sky!! // I’m daring to deliver dialects not commercially created/ and destroy ur nit-wit imbecilic notions of / what language i should speak
Some powerful, some subtle, some political, some personal, some raw, some lyrical, some stories, mostly urban. A lot of poetry that reaches me in it, and a lot that doesn’t (which is par for course). Poetry is made by the audience meeting the word and what is started by the poet is being completed in the reader/listener.
There is a youth focus, but it travels well through time so far. Between backgrounds (on prose poetry on hip-hop poetica) to descriptions of people, passed on and present, and a lot of poetry and stories of lives, there’s a huge amount of resources in this book and it bears rereading. In fact, I already started re-reading it before I got to the end.
Vid Link: Max Middle Sound Project videos does a whole other take on poetry performance [now with correct link].

Robert Peake pointed to a berkley webcast event of Li-Young Lee about 45 minutes long. (The UC Berkeley site has more —Holloway series and lunch poems)

Lee is such a delight to hear. Part of it is his bashful modesty, the way he is Clark Kent until he lets the words take him and us to where the beauty is. I love his goals of life of keeping himself like Joni Mitchell does to that tender painful place, like inside the blue of welding meet metal. He tries to maintain constant contact with the cosmic energies, the profound, the underlying, the holy.

And to think that only by wandering a Dodge Festival pulled in by a Ken-doll of a reader who packed in an enormous crowd, just as he ended the second half of his last poem, sitting because there were suddenly cleared seats, only this way did I happen across Li-Young Lee taking the podium next. Such happenstance uncovering such sustaining wealth of words.

I saw Coleman Barks at Dodge that year too. Since then I’ve read 3 translations of Rumi beyond his. On Sunday he comes to this writer’s festival and I can get a fresh take. He brings Rumi in integration with who he is. Each translation shifts. In English Bark’s has energy and humor and earthiness and that booming projecting voice warms the words so. He aims for the transcendant grounded in the concrete real. This is a common thread between him, Lee and Powe.

BW Powe spoke yesterday at the Writer’s Festival. I had anticipated that with pleasure too since having read his book on the men of Canada who are unique critical thinkers (The Solitary Outlaw). I hadn’t realized that he not only spoke poetically with passion and deep thought, but also did poetry directly. He has a book from Guernica, The Unsaid Passing.

His focus last night was on Canada, and his exploration of what the word and geography and people means, in what he calls his Leaves of Grass, A Canada of Light. Although I took note (and notes), it’s a lot to process.

His way of envisioning himself and the way to peace, and the cultural norm of Canada are based in patience and dialogue, waiting out the blips. He believes ethnic tensions are passing and that Canada is a test model of forming a country through words. Dialogue and debate, consideration and waiting. Genesis over Armageddon, evolution over revolution. The way he thinks as he spoke reminds me of the pondering of Li-Young Lee as well. I mentioned quotes from Lee’s book the Alabasaster Jar last year. There’s a grief but no pity, no mourning, no pain in a way. There’s a sombreness but it has a luster like holy because it is grounded in a tenderness of love and hope.

Similarily, Powe speaks of these being challenging times with a lot of reason for grief but resists the “subversion of hope” and “subversion of joy”. One must let your heart be unprotected, dream new dreams, staying back from the demon of uniformity, stay inside hope.

Powe sees national identity as being the very process of us discovering who we are, each question yielding questions, further mysteries. He sees the basic questions of what is it to be Canadian is the same as the eternal questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? These are the essential human questions asked of the Sphinx. The answers are From Light, Towards Light, Made of Light.

His book elaborates on that. I have a feeling it would be an absorbing read.

We have a model of dialogue which allows us to step away from the ideas of “pious clarity” oversimplication. Too much nationalism is rooted in ethnicity and too much ethnic nationalism is divisive to nationalism, a self-annihilating force. To continue sensationalism, confrontationalism won’t get us anywhere. The very nature of being Canadian is a lack of iconic heroes. It’s our strength to not be monolithic. Just this week, that was on my mind in a debate about RCMP and how Canada is missing Heroes, like the U.S. has. Our lack of closure is as close as we come to a national trait.

Will it work for peace and for perpetuity or is it bound to clog or break into war? He quoted Pierre Trudeau when he said of this social experiment, I will not hang myself if it ends but I will work to do what I can so it does not end.

A week of poetry festival is a little bit of paradise come early.

To add extra whip cream to the week of sundaes, I got my Comstock Review in the mail too. It’s the 20th Anniversary Awards issue no less.

How in the world will I get anything else done with my attention so captivated by all this poetry?

At the festival, all these book titles to peruse, getting high on the deckle-cut edges, glossy matte embossed font and bindings, the ideas presented, cross-connection findings, all the social. Then the main events — the interviews. There was the interview with George Murray and his memorable way to describe how you know when satire works, the wince first then laugh. And poetry live. It’s always so different live. I don’t know why it always surprises me that it does.

Past Poet Laureate, George Bowering, in person is far different than I expected. Far more entertaining. I don’t know who or where I read or what I read of his to get my vague impression but it’s been nudged shoved upwards considerably. Now I want his latest book. (Appetite, whatever will we do with you.)

Here’s a picture of one bit, the poet panel in the cabaret hosted and structured by Stephen Brockwell, with George Bowering and George Murray of Bookninja.com (who I have one book of but now I want his sonnets or was it these*) and rob mclennan who for the sake of uniformity, can be renamed George as well. Wouldn’t that be curious. (And yes I will be compelled to buy the “>rest of his books too.)

*Note to self: must figure out what I want. My appetite is bigger than my bank account. As big of constraint might be how much I can absorb. But life is long. And the only press is internal. Well, and the AP of course.

Having been held over for live poetry from recorded videos, such as PoetryVlog it’s rather like tomatoes coming into season again after a season when the most scent and flavor comes from the stems of the ripened-on-vine ones. There have been poetry live readings lately of course but the density of poetry is different in every sense.

—

It’s an odd sensation to open books I know I’ve opened before and got from them before, basically that here is previous-tree with scratchings on it with ink and remember being vexed or blank-eyed and then a few years later open the same pages and “get it”.

It’s quite odd. I wonder if it’s like being a toddler who can reach a shelf now. Except what was at crawling eye level isn’t accessible in the same way.

I want to just widen my palate but find I shift instead. I get restless. I have made a new arbitrary rule (or is that redundant) for poetry. I will no longer give a few second’s flick of my eyes for any poem entitled cloud or sparrow. The chance of something good coming from there is just too low.

But I want to like every poem, the way I want every person I like to love each other.

Remember those cream horns? When I was small every week I’d hope for a treat of one and some months I did. I’d lick all the big sugar crystals off and feel the puff pastry apart layer by layer, savoring the sweetened cream. I had one a few years ago as an adult and it was saccharine and the pastry made a fat slick on my tongue. Of course when I was small, grapefruit and oranges and brussels sprouts were unbearably sour and white sauce was blank bland compared to those sugar crystals that pop on your tongue. I want to appreciate the cream horn and the citrus. One follows one’s bliss out onto a tightrope sometimes.

Which probably makes no sense and is entirely too editorial. And didn’t I say I had too much to do? No? I should have. Time for other things.