Alice Notley reading in the Holloway Reading Series

Alice Notley / Holloway reading series / Cal Berkeley / Wheeler #315 / October 10th, 6:30 - 8. 
And if you can’t make it: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Notley.php

Banned Books Week 2013

September 22 began Banned Books Week--seven days when libraries and educators encourage everyone to consider the history and effects of censorship. Librarians are a varied group of people--they have different belief systems and different politics; yet, did you know that American librarians subscribe to an ethical code? Right?! Number two on that list reads, "We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources."  Yet the question still remains, "Why?" I mean shouldn't some materials be censored? Aren't some books* dangerous?

Well, yes; ideas are dangerous, just as they are vital, challenging, and absolutely necessary. Censorship is so offensive because at it's center it is dehumanizing. It makes that assumption that the reader does not have the intellectual capacity to disagree with an opinion, or to recognize the difference between written narratives and the realities of his or her life. Censorship is also dehumanizing to the censor as it limits one of humans' greatest strengths: communication. No longer can the censor have a conversation with another as that information has been removed from the dialogue entirely. Being human is to swim in a world of ideas and communicate those in order to learn more about the world.

Banned Books Week on Twitter

We must accept the responsibilities posed by education, by knowledge, and by wisdom. If we are lucky enough to have free access to information, then I think we must also take responsibility for our communities, and for making sure that freedom of information is played forward to others. Kurt Vonnegut once stated that, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Wisdom is gained through experience and dialogue and sometimes, if we are lucky, through observation (either of real people and situations or those found in books and movies). (To take a look at some other literary greats' thoughts on censorship, take a look here.) So this is a good week to go visit your local library! Check out a banned book!

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*And let's not get started about comics! The Comic Code Authority came about mostly thanks to this guy, and we've felt the impact ever since. Comics are some of the least recognized, but most often challenged and banned books. Luckily we have the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today and they are totally worth checking out.

Throats and ears

Last night's reading at Small Press Traffic was great! Lourdes read from Yolotl and it was the first time I had heard her read a good portion of the text aloud. I have read Yolotl several times now (full disclosure: I, along with my wife and co-editor Ammie, published Lourdes in our Spooky Actions Books chapbook series) but hearing the poems arc and dive through the air to my ear reminded me how much poetry is an experience of the body. Lourdes includes throats in many of her poems, insisting on the body, so that I began paying more attention to both the sounds emitting from her throat and the way that these waves of sounds are actually things themselves too.

A beautiful poem can be read horribly, but when a gorgeous poem is read by someone so that the poem comes to life with the reader's voice, wow--there is definitely some magic there. If you live in the Bay Area definitely keep an eye out here and here for other readings!

Lourdes with her book Yolotl

Small Press Traffic reading in S.F. on 9/15!

I am really happy to announce that Spooky Actions Books (which I co-edit) will be releasing yolotl by Lourdes Figueroa on September 13th! To see the beautiful original cover by the fantastic Hanae Rivera, click here. And if you like what you read there, please come by Small Press Traffic's reading on September 15th at:

Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street, SF
5pm, reading starts at 5:30pm
$6-10

Here are the readers! 

WENDY TREVINO

Wendy Trevino lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco. Her first chapbook 128-131 was released by Perfect Lovers Press in June 2013. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Abraham Lincoln, the American Reader, Armed Cell, The Capilano Review, Hi Zero, LIES and Mrs. Maybe.

NICOLE TRIGG

Nicole Trigg lives in Oakland, works at Small Press Distribution, and is the author of a chapbook, Double Cup. She recently collaborated with strangers to make the literary magazine Birkensnake 6, and critical writing is forthcoming in Jacket2.

LOURDES FIGUEROA

Lourdes Figueroa was born in Yuba City, California during one of the trips her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil for tomatoes. She grew up in the betweens of everything not from here and not from over there. She is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum. Some of her work has been published in the SF Poet’s 11 2008 & 2010, an Anthology of poems selected by Jack Hirschman, and also in Generations: a journal of ideas and images. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing focusing in poetry at the University of San Francisco. She currently works as an interpreter, translator, and advocate. Lourdes believes in your lung, your throat, your tongue. She has a new chapbook, yolotl, coming out through Spooky Action Books. She will be reading poems from this.

Song for my home

Bees, a pickup, cold bottles of beer, pocket knives, all to appease those in a system which is essentially a song, a coveted cauldron, a bit of old-story-fluff skidding through the days and nights, always involving whoever it can. People most of all, and almost all of the time. Plural of which is generation, insisting as it were, on the very altar itself, for some control to balance the unending progression of this, this, this, over and over until an altar may as well be the front sofa. Grass is a little taller here, a little golden, and the light strikes upon your eyes just right to blind about 30% of the populace. 5% of the populace are writers (of which a small percentage is also blind) and are happy to describe events to those who have long ceased caring. So next time you’re there, maybe for that weekend-rated vacation, maybe to look at old-timey shit, and a woman cocks her head, points it your direction, just walk away and stop breathing; grab a coffee with the non-dairy creamer at the R&L minimarket, and walk the fuck out. You may not hear it, but parts of your ears do, and it is nothing that can be resisted long—it is a dirge thrummmming, demanding, just a piece, just you, just your hands and knees.

a long day of pillaging...

Remnant

Longboats are crashing into the shore, spilling raiders, who are interested in careers in finance, in social reform, in proliferating methods to raise test scores all the while searching for footholds in the steep pages of the New York Times. Even as we, looking back, want to find our ghosts, the revenants who will condemn us and thus allow us a place in the stupid story—and yet what we find is again only the bright purple flowers that only bloom for two weeks in our back yard, our spouse’s bare feet which tap as she speaks, a dead bee, and all these pieces exploding out booming, shifting between meaning something and not. What I want is probably not even worth it if I can imagine it; it’s just another trap. So if you imagine a time, say “now” or “25,000 years ago” an eight-hour span dissipates into itself, into you, into the idea of Vikings returning to camp after a long day of pillaging. 

a quick rough poem...

Distant solutions

Summon this sun to math, to a small speck

open to fault; a hero can’t travel

this relative distance. Queens, embedded

with boys cheat the North of its wanton joys,

open their mouths wide for geese to escape.

This is the here-ness that is everywhere—

caesura infinitely flat, only

known as summed breath hurtling into glacial

teeth, into a cloud, into the throats who

ring the North, never offering warning.