9/100,000 Poets For Change At Sims Library of Poetry

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.

Julio the Conga Poet Rodriguez

Ideas Aubrey

"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 

Shonda Buchanan

A fully engaged day for Shonda Buchanan who rushes to the reading after the morning's Altadena Poets Laureate Ode to the Land Workshop with Shonda Buchanan.

Sean Hill

Angel Miguel Lopez; Co-Host

Richard Modiano; Tribute & Poem

Richard Modiano shared his Tribute in Memoriam to Amy Uyematsu, whose widower joined today's audience to hear his wife's commemoration. Modiano also read an authored poem relating appearance and identity.

Thelma Reyna

Thelma Reyna's quiet delivery offers subtle contrast to her poem's powerful evocation being trapped in the depths of desperate poverty.

Aiyana Sha'niel

Not yet 21, Aiyana Sha'niel's self affirming call-and-response poet engaged every voice. "I love myself," we answered. And it was true, and if not, let it be true soon.

Antonieta Villamil

Antonieta Villamil writes principally in Spanish and today communicates in Inglés.

Tres Grandes Mujeres y Poetas: Publisher, Chairwoman of the Board, Founder

 

Poet Thelma Reyna is Publisher of Golden Foothills Press

Poet Shonda Buchanan is Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at Beyond Baroque

Poet Jessica Wilson Cardenas Founded L.A. Poet Society, Organized & Hosted Today's 100,000 Poets For Change Event

Oracy In Plague-time: Zoom.

Reading Your Stuff Aloud  
Zooming Into Poetry Readings In Plague-time: Silver Concho Poetry Series
Michael Sedano

They’re here to stay, poetry readings via Zoom. And for artists reading your own stuff aloud, that means change, adaptation, opportunity. This is evident as you start attending readings, like the recent Silver Concho Poetry Series sponsored by Press 53 and hosted by editors Pamela Uschuk and Bill Root.

Technology offers major change in the way audiences experience the poet. What hasn’t changed are why you read to people: to sell them some books. One  poet in the lineup sold out the publisher’s inventory and now Press 53's ordered a second run.

It’s not what you say, it’s also how you say it.
That’s what sold those books for Richard Vargas: superb poetry read effectively. Vargas’ poetic voice speaks with wisdom, incisive humor, restrained bitterness, and the hottest irony around. That the artist reads his stuff better than the others in the set today makes a difference.

When a critic says stuff like “he’s better than the others,” that should raise another performer’s next two questions, “what about me?” and “what’s so good about him?”

What About Me?
Every reading happens in three planes: the reading you thought you would give, the reading you actually deliver, and the revisions that hit you after you clicked ‘mute’ and it’s too late to say it like that. Not so. There will be a next one.

Readers have a wonderful technology-driven opportunity to self-confront. Look at that person on screen. What objectives did he or she achieve? Speech 1A, Purpose: inform entertain persuade instruct. Voice & Articulation: can I understand the sounds as words I know? Do I get directness, eye contact, personalization from that face? Do I want to hear more? That person on screen, that's you.

Vocal variety. The downfall of every bad-to-average reading you’ve ever attended is called “The Voice.” Good poets find such ponderous weight in every dad-gummed word that their reading comes at you relentlessly like a robot pounding on a tambora. Is that what you do to your work on screen?

There’s the opposite effect, when reading voice and transitional conversational voice sound identical, as if the poem is a desultory interruption in the conversation. Conversation is a key.

How do I lose my “the voice”? “I’m not an actor, I’m not getting in front of my camera and emoting!” 
One way of changing your vocalic style is imagine yourself seated with a friend and you’re sharing a line or two. Another friend pokes her head in the door, you catch her attention without stopping, she enters and you include her in your reading. Now more people enter and take seats and you expand your presentation to bring them all into the spell of words. My friend and mentor at USC, Milton Dickens, called this “the enlarged conversation."

Another of my mentors, Aristotle, and a montón of rhetoricians through the ages, advocates finding a model to emulate. Vargas’ transitions offer models of economy and pertinence. For example, the Marilyn poem he links events of the past few days to the memoir. When a transition provides immediacy like this, audience draws closer to the poet and the poem expands in meaningfulness. Captured imaginations say, “I want to read that one again.”

Vargas’ directness comes without notice, even in the absence of direct eye contact, it's in his eyes, you can see them. Richard's not reading, he’s reciting from memory. Or, perhaps the poet is a technology whiz. His glasses reflect a text page, not the Zoom matrix. So long as Zoom audio is running, a reader can open a window to the poem and read off the screen with the appearance of constant, person-to-person eye contact.

Richard Vargas doesn't start out strong. He doesn’t get “up to speed” in comfort level until the third poem, Marilyn. But his programming makes up for it. He starts with his best short poem, one dripping irony and the persona’s mystification. This reading segues into a masterful aesthetic construction, Guernica, revisited, whose power and passion would draw an impassioned reading from any other reader, too.

What did I like about my presentation? What behaviors do I plan to repeat?
Ask anyone and get a litany of complaints, “I left out..., I didn’t do..., I was nervous…” That’s not what you asked. What did you like about your presentation? Back to Speech 1A. Did your introduction make a point? Did you pause effectively after the title and the final line? Be honest and straightforward and list your skills.

Now, what are only one or two elements I will do differently? Compare parallel elements with how the model performer does it. Copy and try it on.

"I know I can do better." Then do. Rehearse three times, each time raise those issues: what did I do well, what are one or two behaviors I want to do again, less of, more of. Keep it fresh, no more rehearsal.

The power of the pause. It’s subtle but effective. Vargas announces the title, half a pause, another half, begin. The final line, “There. Is. No. Art. Here.” Silence. Eye contact. Hold that silence--even a beat longer, Richard. Avert your glance to release the mood, transition into the next title.

Transitions help audiences listen. “My next one…” is not a transition. “Let me see where it is…” is a transition, the bad kind. Transitions summarize what went before, summarize its import in a word or two, announce something else. Chatty transitions work well when the poet is chatty, not nervous. Vargas, for the most part, lets his work speak for itself, preferring fewer words of transition but direct to his purpose.

How do you look on teevee? How do you sound? How do you want to?
That person on screen is really what you look like, and sound like. Technology makes it so you can alter elements, like did you know you can superimpose cartoons over your face?

Not that anyone wants to you to dress like a turnip when you read to them—kids might, and this “filtering” is something you can learn about Zoom technology. Start by shedding any learned helplessness about technology and gain facility with pushing buttons. Learn to test the connection, so when it’s your turn, you start. “Am I on? Test test, 123?” First impressions are lasting impressions.

Learn Chat. You could put your poem in a side window for your audience to read along. Reading and listening enhances the heck out of your pieces while covering up some delivery issues. 

Learn to do cool stuff with the computer and Zoom. What can you do with backgrounds? Lighting? Filters? This is on-the-job training for today’s artist. Click this link to read a primer on Zoom technology, from a recent La Bloga-Tuesday. 

Produce a Considered Reading: Not Acting.
Movement and body gestures lose import when you’re planted in front of the camera. Simultaneously, the camera makes vocal variety and eye contact ever more vital to an effective reading.

If selling books is goal one, sharing poetry is your means to that end. Merely reading words is not reading poetry. Review your reading, start-to-finish. Did you hear poetry, or words?

While every person experiences a reading differently, every reader at the Silver Concho will benefit from attention to vocal variety, eye contact, pausing, and transitions. The process of delivering a considered reading begins at composition, those subvocal readings to make words fit, edit, read it again in your imagination and the crowd goes wild. Read it aloud that way.

Effective vocal variety begins with marking up your manuscript, highlighting words and phrases that matter more than others. Find expressions in the lines where you can alter delivery--speed up, slow down, make a face, make a voice, sing, isolate with pace and pause. Make the sounds fit the lines like a facemask and gloves. Visualize the image under the words, hear the sounds, feel the mood, and your voice shares the moment.

Analyze and apply.
I did not hear enough analysis in the Silver Concho program. These artists assembled a head-spinning virtuoso collection of poetry to read to you. My ears struggle to discern what’s important, the words and phrasing come out with a sameness of voice, tone, pacing. Now and again, a poet produces a satisfyingly aural moment. Audiences love that and forgive lots of drudge for those golden moments.

That's little different from most readings, maybe your last reading, too? Identify those moments in advance, rehearse and install them into the performance.

Poets work hours to hone an expression into the right words in the right place, then read them with all the words sounding like all the other words, in relentlessly patterned meter dominating how the words mean. 

Enjambment is your friend, poets. Readers who pay obeisance to the visual line create a heavily accented, ponderous reading. Lines that sound like any other line and words having identical value to any other word fails the poetry on that page. Oral presentation is not words on paper.

Suppose you sold a few books. Your reading satisfied that many people who had spare money. How many more books would you sell with a reading that more fully shares all the truth and beauty and hard work you invested into those pages? I advise writers to respect their art. Do the work.

Here’s a link the full Silver Concho reading on Face, the first of three. I hope future readings will begin to employ the Chat feature. Listen to the author and while your ears work, share the work with your eyes. Seeing with hearing with reading multiplies the impact of words, the poetry emerges off the page. 

Read and listen, y sabes que? Buy the book, because there are more poems like this (link).

does your arm tire
as you swing your
baton into the thud
of my flesh and bone
and you hear me
moan in pain
when you crack
my ribs and jab
my soft belly
do you feel like a
job well done when
you pin me on the
ground and harness
my wrists like a
rodeo cowboy
hogties cattle
no matter that
we are both looked
down upon by those
on their balconies
of glass and steel
who laugh and joke
as they spread caviar
on fancy crackers
that will never pass
our lips
while you choke me
knock me down
look at how they
raise their flutes
of exquisite champagne
sparkling in the sun
blinding you with
cold brilliance
and empty nods
of approval

Richard Vargas, pub. in Guernica, revisited (link to publisher). 2014

==
Silver Concho Poetry Series Reading presented by Press 53

Howie Faerstein is the author of two books of poems in the Silver Concho Poetry Series: Googootz and Dream of the Rain in Brooklyn. Howie is a Poetry Editor at Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Anita Endrezze’s poetry [Read by Pamela Uschuk] collection, Enigma, appeared in the Silver Concho Poetry Series in 2019. She is the author of eight books of poems and is of Yaqui, Pima and Maya and European heritage. She lives on the coast of Washington state.

Richard Vargas received the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference’s Hispanic Writer Award and was on the faculty of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference. His book of poetry Guernica, revisited appeared in 2014. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hedy Habra is a Lebanese American poet and essayist, born in Egypt. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth, winner of the 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award; Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award for Poetry; and Tea in Heliopolis, winner the USA Best Book Award and was finalist for the International Book Award for Poetry. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Maj Raigain [QEPD read by William Pitt Root], beloved bodhisattva and poet, passed into another dimension in 2018, but not before his final collection of poems, appeared in the Silver Concho Poetry Series: Clouds Pile Up in the North: New & Selected Poems. He is sorely missed by the poetry community he nurtured at Kent State University and beyond.

About the Silver Concho Poetry Series
Believing that small presses publish some of the most vital poetry in America today, we support Press 53 in its ongoing pursuit of furthering the cause of American literature. Our aim is to select each year the two highest quality poetry manuscripts written either in new voices or in voices inexplicably forgotten or ignored. Open to all forms and styles, we do favor compelling poetry with a distinct edge.


—William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk, Silver Concho Poetry Series Editors

Chicana Movidas. Floricanto in the Front Room. Bits and Tids.

Review: Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell, eds. Chicana Movidas. New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era. Austin: UTexas Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-4773-1558-3 (link)
Michael Sedano

Chicana Movidas isn’t that book you take down on a cold night and slowly read beside the fire, nor devour it cover-to-cover, unless your academic needs dictate you read good stuff that makes a difference to your own work.

Even if Chicana Movidas New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era is assigned in a C/S course—which it should be—readers will read it carefully, so as not to miss something important out of myriad ways this is a useful collection.

On its face, the collection offers historical readings for activists and feminists involved in social change today. Unless assigned to read cover-to-cover, readers will want to pick and choose a chapter here, a woman there, according to one’s own interest.

Editors Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell cover a broad range of fields to focus on women whose leadership and acts produced local change in policy, law, or attitude, along with lasting individual acclaim. It’s a large book and there are a lot of significant accomplishments by important people, Chicanas doing movidas located in four spaces: hallways, homes, borders, and memory. Twenty-one essays apportion into the divisions, the editors allocating five to each section, with exception of Part II Home-Making Movidas, where the edition’s one male contributor joins the table of contents.

The title word, “Movida,” elicits instant interest from informed readers, some of whom may perhaps see pejoration, as in the line from Tino Villanueva’s “Aquellos Vatos,” the slightly unsavory kid who “always had a movida chueca somewhere uptown.”

Espinoza et al express keen insight into their intentionality, “are collective and individual maneuvers, undertaken in a context of social immobilization, that seek to work within, around, and between the position means, ideologies, and practices of publicly visible social relations.”

Within the four-division structure, the essays collected identify movidas within the spaces and that operate within and across the lexical division of “hallway” or “border” For instance, historiographic movidas inhere in all academic writing. Here, the editors describe the motive of the academic worker who introduces “a proliferation of discourse that had been largely ignored it in the earlier books on the Chicano movement that in most cases offered only token and mentions of women.”

Growing from historiography comes “Mapping Movidas,” an abstraction of place that is less critical as a term than the product of the mapping movida. These are “small scale, intimate political moves, gestures, and collaborations that reflect the tactics women used to negotiate the internalities of power within the broader social movements.”

The impressive textbook echoes the work, and movida, of Rita Sanchez and Sonia Lopez, eds. Chicana Tributes: Activist Women of the Civil Rights Movement: Stories for the New Generation (link). There, the epideictic occupied the writers, praise and recognition the book's singular movida. Chicana Movidas is a heavy-duty research-centric academic endeavor. Sanchez and Lopez are ideal for a C/S 100 course. Espinoza, Cotera, and Blackwell is for the upper division and first year grad courses. In fact, several essays are the work product of graduate students at the cusp of entering the academic grind where these movidas are essential to master the system.

Chicana Movidas makes a strong contribution to movement studies, as well as its feminist intentions. The editors de facto answer the standard question, “Is the movimiento dead?” or “Whatever happened to the movimiento?” This volume illustrates an alive and fruitful movimiento, we are an infinite potential of “theories in the flesh” people making social impact.

The movimiento is the women in the 21 chapters, not some nationally famous person. The collected essays show that a movimiento comes of individuals acting locally, like Ester Hernandez’ Sun Mad painting that expresses a world of farm labor protest. One painting, reproduced and hung on walls, along with broadsides, giclées, screen dumps, collectively these messages produce social change, new laws, better attitudes and engages communication. That’s what the movimiento looks like.

Movements don’t arise from a leader’s stance, nor do movements exist as a function of a top-down leader:

This collection marks how bearing witness to a movement and writing from the individual 'I' can be a key movida that inspires others to voice and incites other strategies for social change.

Chicanas didn’t invent social movements but they’re really good at it. People who study stuff like movimientos will tell you it’s hard work by multitudes that makes a movement. Here are essays by 21 scholars that illustrate that and simultaneously are taking part in the movimiento as are you while you read.

Whatever happened to the movimiento? Pues, aqui ‘sta.


Living Room Floricanto at Casa Sedano Welcomes Edward Vidaurre, or, Do Try This At Home
Michael Sedano

Enigmatic, dynamic, engagingly minimal, McAllen Poet Laureate Edward Vidaurre fills  so compact a space on the page with enormous complexities:

I.

Three poems

Single spaced

Ode to A Matador From A Dying Bull
A voice
The Age of Softening

Not one stanza mentioned your death

--“I.” Edward Vidaurre

“I.” is the type of poem that’s forgiving on an eye, but hard on a listener. Reading this poem aloud poses a challenge to reciters, to read the piece congruent with the poem on the page. That’s a challenge, not a requirement.

Readers see the character two lines below a collective title, "Dappled Things." Essentially the poem is unnamed. “I.” announces the work’s position in a series named “Dappled Things.” Then the fun starts with the conventional double space to a poem's opening words.

“Three poems” double return and a reader's in ambiguitylandia. Might "I." be instead titled “Three poems”? Or is the line a first stanza, and the double hard returns after the line signal another stanza? At any rate, “Single spaced”, comes as an enigma of the visual poem for the reader to pause, work it out. That's lost on the listener. Hence, the challenge I look forward to seeing met beyond the poet's expectation.

Vidaurre uses the tiny device effectively, working from familiarity with his text.

Sunday afternoon, Vidaurre shared the piece and a host of other wonderful poetry in a Living Room Floricanto at Casa Sedano. Casa Sedano is on a roll with the recent year-ending liz gonzalez Living Room Floricanto (La Bloga link) and now kicking-off the new year with the latest Pasadena California gathering,  welcoming Edward Vidaurre and sixth-grader Bella Vidaurre.

I imagine Edward on open space instead of Casa Sedano’s cramped living room restricted quarters. The three hard returns into the “Ode to a Matador…” the reader sees the white space. Here, Edward would take three deliberate steps before interpreting, "ode..." With those steps the listener eases into three lines where mystery lurks. Whose voice? Age--epoch or youth? Is softening metaphor? A final step to where the reading ends lets those thoughts linger in momentary pause, the movement bringing new perspective for the final line. “Not one stanza…” the eye immediately sees that eponymous structure in the white space. And when you think about it, the voice just changed from the bull’s to the poet’s. Or did the bull win? Whose death? A reader asks, are there four stanzas in this poem, not three? The audience watched the stanzas form on the floor.

A reader can stop and think about it, whose is "your" because the reader can't hear the poet make the point with his voice. Listeners can't push "pause" and rewind memory without missing something, maybe getting lost.

Casa Sedano's guests sat enthralled by a powerful presentation. Beyond sharing the moments, the front room environment encourages interaction, commenting,  requesting an encore, talking to others in the room sharing satisfaction.

Noted poets Gloria Enedina Alvarez and Altadena's Poet Laureate emerita, Thelma Reyna,  arrived after Edward’s reading, so they didn’t to hear any of this. Nor would anyone who wasn’t in attendance hear the readings. Floricanto, like all oral communication, is a here and now experience.

Not in this case. Latinopia’s Jesus Treviño joined the floricanto guests and as a bonus, videotaped the reading. Television production has become part of the experience at most Casa Sedano living room floricantos. Today, guests sign a film release because some guests may appear on Latinopia site within a few weeks.

Vidaurre's reading enjoyed the pleasures of one-camera production. Although he’s retired from Hollywood, ever the Director Jesus Treviño called for Take Two to do CU to intercut in the finished product. Guests, as well as those who missed the Living Room Floricanto at Casa Sedano, will enjoy reliving the event with all that artful editing, via Latinopia. Latinopia adds features every Sunday.

The Living Room Floricanto is an outgrowth of the late artist Magu’s Mental Menudo and its Casa Sedano variant, Mental Cocido. The occasions go by other names, Tertullia, Salon, many people know about the living room floricanto in Prufrock. In the rooms at Casa Sedano the women and men come and go speaking of agua chile tostadas and tacos de chicharron, cheeses and fruits. A few birongas and some good wine add their flavors as chosen.

Gloria had read with Edward Vidaurre the night before in Boyle Heights so she missed the stuff he didn’t read the night before. For Casa Sedano, Vidaurre saved the best piece of the night, read superbly, “Why I Don’t Own A Gun.” This is the two-take reading and everyone should look for Latinopia’s documentation of the fabulous afternoon.

La Bloga and Casa Sedano invite you to start your own Living Room Floricanto series. Like a book club that meets every so often,  hold your LRFloricantos in Summer outdoors, indoors Winter, and as occasioned by events whenever.

If an author happens to be making a tour into your tierra, throw a Living Room Floricanto. Vidaurre and his sixthgrader Bella, are touring his book “I Took My Barrio On A Road Trip,” and that’s part of why Casa Sedano and friends were able to welcome Edward Vidaurre and Bella. The Boyle Heights homeboy was presenting at HomeBoy Industries, whose Father Greg Boyle blurbs the collection.

Try a Living Room Floricanto in your chante. Like Alice’s Restaurant, if everyone did a LRFloricanto it’d be a movimiento, the Living Room Floricanto Movement, and all over the land gente will be celebrating friendship, chicano literature, authors, books, and puro fun. There’s all this literacy spread out all over Aztlán, bring it together every once in a while. It’s good for your soul.

"Pome" the poet says, "I understand Texan," says Rhett Beavers, right.

News 'n Notes, Bits and Tids
Alivio Open Mic: Floricanto in His Garage

For 5 years, we have been working toward maintaining a space where community members and beyond can safely express themselves and release their stress to a supportive audience. Spaces like these are important, as they disrupt the capitalistic monotone relationships we are pressured to have at work and in our lives. We must continue to break out of the consumerist nature of our society, and consume knowledge, stories, art, song, and poetry.

Event Details:
+Open mic list -- first come, first serve. Arrive early to sign up.
+Special features: Ladi Soul and Figgy Baby
+Food will be sold, but only cash is accepted.
+We will have 16 vendors.
+We will have music after the event to celebrate Eric's (the host) birthday.
+Entrance is free, but donations are welcomed to help us keep growing.

Program:

Sign up: 7:45pm
Open mic: 8:00pm-11:00pm


Chicago: Museum of Mexican Art

San Jose California Opera News

Tickets are on sale now for La Llorona/The Weeping Woman, an award-winning musical drama by Héctor Armienta. Previous productions have sold out, so make sure to get your tickets right away!

The production is based on a folk legend well-known throughout México and the American Southwest. Both Latino and non-Latino audiences, first-time theater goers and those familiar with opera, will be captivated by this powerful and breathtaking musical drama.

THREE PERFORMANCES:
Friday, June 28th at 7:30pm*
Saturday, June 29th at 7:30pm
Sunday, June 30th at 2pm


La Llorona/The Weeping Woman
Mexican Heritage Theater - School of Arts and Culture @ MHP
San Jose, CA

Fotos y Canto: Hitched & Holy Grounds Return. Beginnings & Endings For La Palabra.

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Hitched at Holy Grounds Celebrates Macondo Writers and Two Book Releases!
Michael Sedano

Hitched  is a quarterly reading series, created and engagingly hosted by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Notable for Bermejo's pairing of intriguing voices, Hitched might feature seasoned with emerging writers, people working in complementary styles, writers with contrasting approaches. Bermejo always finds a delighting facet in her guests' poetry and prose.

For December, the event paired two writers bringing debut books to light, Vickie Vertiz's collection, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press) and Joseph Rios's collection, Shadowboxing (Omnidawn)! In addition, all the writers were Macondistas, including liz gonzalez, Alex Espinoza, Tisha Reichle, Sarah Rafael García. With Saturday's reading, Hitched reaches its seventh year. In Los Angeles, that's an institution. That Macondo writers workshop has been an institution since Day One.

For years--since December 2010--Hitched was a feature on the remote westside, at Beyond Baroque in Venice. When Bermjeo relocated the series to the eastside, Hitched got forcibly interrupted after a car crashed through the El Sereno front door of host, Holy Grounds Coffee & Tea.

The December 9 Hitched marked the return of Holy Grounds and Hitched. The owners of the venue donate their comfortable paved garden. The sound system provides clean audio adding no discernible artifacts. Readers Saturday showed how to use the two-step stage and microphone to advantage.

That microphone, however, complicates a photographer's quest for a perfect portrait of an artist reading aloud. A listener's brain can render the mic invisible, or at least irrelevant to enjoying the work. The camera is a dumb instrument that sees whatever comes between the lens and the speaker's face.

Technology adds dimensions to a reader's considerations that can enhance a presentation, or let it be a "more of the same" experience for audiences. There's no such thing as a "bad job" but there are infinite ways to be good, better, the best you've done. Knowing your tools makes writers better readers.

Cardiod microphones are a reader’s best worst friend. They solve a lot of issues. A coffee house patio, for example, demands projection, vocal power to draw in those people on their laptops, be meaningful to the ones who came to hear you, help them hear over those laughs coming from somewhere.

When there's amplification, a lot of noise and clarity issues get solved. Hitched at the resurrected Holy Grounds Coffee & Tea demonstrates the worst and best of  a microphone’s nature for writers reading to a live audience.

Two theories come into play when a reader sees a microphone on the bare stage. There's the mic theory and the speaker theory.

Mic theory is pura technology. Imagine a soap bubble coming out of the end of a pipe. The walls of the bubble begin at the pipe and swell spherically away from the pipe, to the sides and larger to the front.

The pipe is the microphone. The bubble is the microphone’s sensitivity to hear words clearly. The microphone hears above and below itself, to the side as well. Think of the bubble. A speaker need not direct one’s mouth to the mic for the mic to hear the words. If someone shouts “speak up,” angle the mic on the stand, or turn up the amplifier volume.

Speaker theory is pura complicada. Boiled down, directness counts. This means eye contact, gesture, presentation of self, handling text, memory, anxiety, voice and diction, expressiveness, variety, just to begin. Complicated, yes, but sabes que? You learned these when you acquired language and speech. Practice.

For microphone purposes, speakers will want to do as Joseph Rios, and be tall and project with a good voice. If not, lower the mic to chin level, stand a step off center from the stand. The bubble will reach out for your voice, even as you swivel your head making eye contact with people.

Or, one can do as Vicky Vertiz, who holds the mic in one hand, her book in the other.

Alex and Sarah took advantage of the two-step podium. They took the high ground. The end of the mic--the pipe with the bubble--is at chin level, well within the sensitivity bubble. The mic at mouth level will be too high to allow both a satisfying view of the reader's expressive face and good audio capture.

All bets are off if the reader buries her his face in the text.

Speaker bios provided by Hitched.

liz gonzalez 

liz gonzález's poetry, fiction, and memoirs have been published widely. Her work will appear in or recently appeared in City of Los Angeles 2017 Latino Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide, Inlandia: San Bernardino, Litbreak Magazine, Askew Poetry Journal, and Cultural Weekly, and in the anthologies Voices from Leimert Park Anthology Redux, The Coiled Serpent, and Wide Awake. Her recent awards include a 2017 Residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and a 2017 Arts Council for Long Beach Professional Development Microgrant. She grew up in the San Bernardino Valley and lives in North Long Beach with her fur-buddies Chacho, a Chihuahua mix and Espresso, a tortie cat, and her partner Jorge Martin, a sound artist. She directs Uptown Word & Arts and is a member of Macondo Writers Workshop. She is a writing consultant and coach, a facilitator of free community creative writing workshops, and a creative writing instructor through the UCLA

Tisha Reichl

Tisha Reichle is a Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen. Originally from a trailer on a dirt road, she moved to Los Angeles to study Sociology, Communications, and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. While engaging high school students with socially conscious literature, she completed her single-subject English credential at Cal State Dominguez Hills and earned an MFA at Antioch University. Her stories have appeared most recently in The Acentos Review, The Lunch Ticket, and Ghost Town. She is an AROHO Retreat alum, a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Las Dos Brujas, and an organizing member of Women Who Submit. She is currently a Wallis Annenberg Fellow at USC where she will eventually earn a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature.


Joseph Rios

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico to parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in suburban Los Angeles. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. His first novel, Still Water Saints, was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The book was released simultaneously in Spanish, under the title Los santos de Agua Mansa, California, translated by Lilliana Valenzuela.

Sarah Rafael García is a writer, community educator and traveler. Since publishing Las Niñas (Floricanto Press 2008), she founded Barrio Writers and LibroMobile. Her writing appears in LATINO Magazine, Contrapuntos III, The Acentos Review, among others. She is a Macondo Fellow and editor for the Barrio Writers and pariahs anthologies. In 2016, she was awarded for SanTana’s Fairy Tales (Raspa Magazine 2017), which was supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, through a grant supporting the Artist-in-Residence initiative at Grand Central Art Center. Most recently, García is supported by Community Engagement for LibroMobile, a literary project aimed to cultivate diversity through literature. Her works and lifestyle promote community empowerment, cultural awareness and collaboration.

Vickie Vertiz

Vickie Vértiz was born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles. A Lucille Clifton Scholar at the Community of Writers, she was also the 2016 Poetry Center Fellow at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her writing can be found in Huizache, Nepantla, and in The Coiled Serpent from Tia Chucha Press. Her second collection of poetry, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, is available now from the University of Arizona Press, Camino del Sol series.

Hitched Celebrates Macondo Writers and Two Book Releases

UC Irvine Shuttering Magulandia

There seemed to be lots of time to get down to deepest Orange County, to Irvine to catch Magulandia and now that's less true. There's no time at all, in fact, to take in the show whole. After December 12, only the central University Art Gallery portion welcomes visitors until December 16. Click here for details on the final days of Magulandia at UCI.

If you were waiting for the exhibit to come down to buy that Magu sculpture, now's the time to make your offer. Have you picked out a place for it in the front room?

Beginnings & Endings at Avenue 50 and La Palabra

Karineh Mahdessian restrained the tears that refused restraint so the tears flowed as she disclosed news to a supportive crowd that today wraps her service hosting the immensely important and popular reading series, La Palabra at Avenue 50 Studio in Northeast Los Angeles. The December 10 meeting wraps the series for 2017.

Avenue 50 Studio has yet to announce January's host. Mahdessian will be in the audience. Joining her will be Don Newton and Laura Luisa Longoria, Luivette Resto, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, the stellar lineup of hosts emeriti.

For this final celebration, Karineh invited her parents, shown in the heart of the group portrait. Numerous others who've featured or open mic'd through the years joined the readers in the circle of readers.

Circles have no beginning and no ending, a circle circles continuously. That's the logic of a La Palabra reading, The Circle. Today's circle doubled down, taking a round-robin format. Readers take the floor inspired by a previous reader or a moment's duende. 

Mahdessian launches the day with a tribute reading, Maya Angelou's "And Still I Rise."

Thank you, Karineh for making La Palabra take wing. All that energy. Invite the features. Curate the event. MC the Open Mic. Set up chairs. Bring refreshments. Clean up afterwards. Recruit Albie Preciado to be the official baker of fabulously imaginative treats. Make time to make time to make it happen. Cry when it works so well. Cry when things happen having nothing to do with La Palabra but are life, love, happiness. Like poetry. Like everything.

Mission Accomplished! Fun, Poetry, Gente, Love, Value. Karineh Mahdessian, órale.