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LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Millennials Go Guerrilla for National Poetry Month

guerillaGuerrilla poets strike out for common sense, inclusion, social justice and all our best human ideals: Zero Forbidden Goals (ZFG) is a collective of artists from the Greater Sacramento area. It engages ideals and education through poetry, music and art delivered in a community setting, which is essentially what the “guerrilla” in “guerrilla art” refers to. I just found out about them today. All things considered: rather fabulous.

“In the past year ZFG has worked to bring an innovative brand of guerrilla art to Northern California with events such as Guerrilla Art Flash Mobs, National (Guerrilla) Poetry Month, Gorilla Storytime, Chainlink Poetry, and FLOW Sacramento.”

David Loret De Mola invites guerilla poets to participate in  “Guerrilla” Poetry Month by sending in your videos.

“Whether you rap or you slam ZFG invites you and yours to take part in Guerrilla Poetry Month 2016! Just film your piece and send links to ZFGpromotions@gmail.com or hit us @ZFGpromotions.
Find out more at http://www.ZFGpromotions.com
We look forward to hearing from you!”

“Zero Forbidden Goals is a group of young creatives based in Northern California working to cultivate the next generation of art on the West Coast. Since it’s conception in 2014, the collaborative comprised of poets, emcees, musicians, writers, photographers, videographers, engineers, visual artists, and designers have been working to support the creative landscape and general accessibility of the arts on the West Coast by working alongside schools, local businesses, and non-profit organizations to provide and support arts programming.

“In addition to sanctioned art collaborations, Zero Forbidden Goals is known for unpredictable public pop-up art events, installations, and exhibitions. From interactive visual arts to flash mob dance parties, ZFG was founded on the belief that you can turn any slab of concrete into a stage and any empty lot into an art gallery.” from the website

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REMEMBERING Poet, Writer and Gourmand, Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison (1937-2016)
Jim Harrison (1937-2016)

Jim Harrison, one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, died last Saturday. He was the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, the most well-know was probably Legends of the Fall, a trilogy of novellas. His latest poetry collection, Dead Man’s Float, was published earlier this year. His death came on the heals of Ancient Minstrels, also a collection of novellas, which launched in March.

Jim Harrison’s essays on food and our relationship to it are among my favorites and as I searched my bookshelves over the past few days, The Raw and the Cooked, Adventures of a Roving Gourmand is one of the two books of his that seem to have survived my downsizing. That’s an issue of shrinking real estate not regard.

Food – according to Jim Harrison – is more than food. It is a metaphor for life and living. The trick is to enjoy as much as you can without killing yourself because then you couldn’t continue to eat. Some of the meals he describes sound truly epic.

In 2007, Harrison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A rough and tumble sort, his preference was for the out-of-doors and he spent his time between Montana and Arizona.

If you are viewing this post from email, it is likely you’ll have to link through to watch the video.

41EhApVh1NL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Tomorrow

I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what:
not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold
snowy willows, garishly green and yellow,
and not my usual death, which I’ve done
before with Borodin’s music
used in Kismet, and angels singing
“Stranger in Paradise,” that sort of thing,
and not the thousand naked women
running a marathon in circles around me
while I swivel on a writerly chair
keeping an eye on my favorites.
What could it be, this astonishment,
but falling into a liquid mirror
to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.
She’s willing to sleep with us a little while.

Excerpt from In Search of Small Gods, © Copper Canyon Press, 2010; the photograph is from Jim Harrison’s Amazon page 

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CELEBRATING AMERICAN SHE-POETS (10): Audre Lorde, “My mother had two faces and a frying pot.”

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

“your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember ”
Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

I discovered Audre Lorde when I happened upon From the House of Yemanjá (below). Wow! She’s been peaking in our window, I thought. How could she know? I was very young and didn’t start really delving into her work until recently. Time sadly lost.

How many women and men grew up with two-faced mothers who took care (albeit resentfully) of the pragmatic aspects of motherhood, but were unable to love and demanded perfection of their children in return for their own unhappiness. Many, no doubt; but no one writes about the experiences of being marginalized in the home – or in the greater world – like Audre Lorde, a seminal poet. She had a keen mind, courageous spirit, was stunning in her crafting and had a gift for expressing emotion.

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Audre Lorde was born in New York City, the child of immigrants from Caribbean. She was a writer and poet, a radical feminist, a womanist and lesbian, an activist for right and the rights of the marginalized.

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”

The_Cancer_JournalsAudre Lorde wrote seventeen books by my count, both poetry and prose including her fictionalized biography, Zamie, A New Spelling of My Name – a Biomythology and The Cancer Journals, about her battle with breast cancer.

Lorde was New York State poet laureate in 1991 and until her death from liver cancer in 1992.

“The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”

From the House of Yemanjá

My mother had two faces and a frying pot
where she cooked up her daughters
into girls
before she fixed our dinner.
My mother had two faces
and a broken pot
where she hid out a perfect daughter
who was not me
I am the sun and moon and forever hungry
for her eyes.

I bear two women upon my back
one dark and rich and hidden
in the ivory hungers of the other
mother
pale as a witch
yet steady and familiar
brings me bread and terror
in my sleep
her breasts are huge exciting anchors
in the midnight storm.

All this has been
before
in my mother´s bed
time has no sense
I have no brothers
and my sisters are cruel.

Mother I need
mother I need
mother I need your blackness now
as the august earth needs rain.

I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

– Audre Lorde (1978)

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.”

© From the House of Yemanjá, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997); portrait courtesy of K. Kendell under CC BY 2.0 license; book cover art, Estate of Audre Lorde

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She had a way with words … VIRGINIA WOOLF… and the poet Anon

Virginia Wool (1881-1941), English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th Century
Virginia Woolf (1881-1941), English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th Century

“After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.[20] On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941.[35] Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.” Wikipedia

A sad end for a complicated soul and a hugely talented one, but her gifts to us live on as we continue – seventy-five years after her death – to read her writings, to share her preoccupation with transformation through art.

One of my favorite Woolf quotes has – predictably – to do with poetry and women . . .

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

… and with silence and simple daily things …

“Better is silence..Let me sit with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves

For Virginia Woolf fans, Rebecca Brooks created a blog dedicated to everything Virginia Woolf: her life, death, writing, context, relationships, mental illness, literary techniques and more: The Virginia Woolf Blog; The life and legacy of Virginia Woolf – Recommended. Enjoyable and informative. Bravo, Rebecca!