La Bloga has lent its virtual support with announcements and contests to mark annual 100,000 Poets for Change events.
La Bloga-Tuesday was eager to attend this year's event, a poetry marathon combined with a memorial to the founder of the 100K movement, Michael Rothenberg, and artists Yvonne de la Vega, and Amy Uyematsu.
The full-day event, hosted by Jessica Wilson Cardenas and Angel Miguel Lopez, introduced a number of visitors to the Sims Library of Poetry.
The Library, a converted residence at 2702 W. Florence Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90043, library@communitylit.org, holds almost 7000 works representing 3400 poets sharing 700,000 poems.
La Bloga-Tuesday asked one of Saturday's featured readers, Thelma Reyna, for her observation on the substance of the day, since fotos show only that something good went down.
Here's Dr. Reyna's keen précis of the wonders of poems read aloud by the poets.
Some of the poems' topics were eradicating war, self-love/affirmation, police brutality/ young Black genocides, hunger, child poverty, Dreamers, immigrant-animus, racism, [all focused upon] activism.
I think the poet Ideas Aubrey symbolized the main message: the power and endurance of poetry in facing and examining challenges, setbacks, sufferings that we universally face. Poetry saved him from gangs and energized him, inspired him, kept him hopeful and striving. Poetry does that to all of us who rail against the above iniquities. It focuses our energy and gives a clear, audible voice to our angst and wished-for ameliorations of wrongs.
Theme: the poetry takes all our disparate disenchantments and binds us together into one collective of visionaries who want to express how society/ civilization can be better. And we DO express. Poetry is the megaphone that puts our dreams out there in words, images, and feelings most human beings can embrace.
"We DO express," Dr. Reyna emphasizes. The fotos surely prove it.
It was a day of superb poetry beautifully performed in as diverse an array of styles as one can expect from contemporary, urban, poets of color: drumming, singing, chanting, marching, call-and-response, hyperbole, battle protreptic, dirge, elegant language, vulgate speech.
None of this is heard in a photograph. All of this is heard, and seen, on the real-time streaming channel 100K Poets ran throughout the event. La Bloga is not aware of an archive of the program, hence, let these photographs serve as a documentation that these poets were here, that these nine artists performed their best change-poems on a day one hundred thousand+ poets express their wishes and visions for Peace, Justice, and Sustainability.
"Ideas Aubrey symbolized the main message: the power and endurance of poetry in facing and examining challenges, setbacks, sufferings that we universally face. Poetry saved him from gangs and energized him, inspired him, kept him hopeful and striving. Poetry does that to all of us who rail against the above iniquities."- Thelma Reyna
