Youth Speaks: POETRY SLAM

Poetry slam: March 27th! Tonight at the Museum of Modern Art theater in San Francisco nearly twenty  young poets stood on the stage and gave us their poems. Some spoke with ferocity. They were rewarded with high scores. All were brave just to be there, never mind that they were 15, 16, 18 years old, pouring out stories of injustice, angst, and pain. Their stories mirrored life experience of audience members, most of whom roared their support. I liked Carmela Gaspar, a diminutive Asian student who had memorized her long and rapid in-front-of-the-mirror poem with fast zingers like  …palid be / like a malady… that got me wishing I had the words to that poem in front of me. She didn’t hard drive it with lots of four letter words or end the poem with SHIT! like the favorite slam-girl Ebony Donnley, who looked like a young Queen Latifa. Emcee Chinaka Hodge had a good relaxed style and kept the feel-good atmosphere going. There were some powerful male poets like Mic Turner, and Travis Eglip, but it was the young women  that held my attention.

Annelyse Gelman, a white girl from “the other side of the Caldecott,” had style (both Rachel and I liked her grey coat) and confidence. I started scribbling her phrases...smiling is just a special way to wince… and  angst is unconditional. I would have given her a few 10′s in her score, if I were one of the judges.  These five judges seemed to go for power in presentation, slam-skill, and the degree of tragedy described.  The points started at 9.1 and went to 10 and above. Every poet had a score of at least 9.1. I liked that. Lots of applause and cheers. Most poets were in the high 9′s.

Mannie Rizvi (Mannie, how do I find you?)

Then there was Mannie Rizvi, my favorite poet of the evening. She is an East Bay slammer who drove home the complex and brutal treatment of women in Pakistani culture. She began with  Our hands are always shaking…brown girls covered in black cloth…this is a noise the world’s chosen not to hear. When I shook her hand to thank her for the good work at intermission, she seemed to be quivering with that energy that comes to poets who are tuned into something bigger, much bigger than they are. An important message.

Youth Speaks is getting much attention nationally. It is 13 years old. I believe I went to one of the first slams, outdoors at Fort Mason years ago.  April 11th the FINALS are at The Opera House!

And April 5th at 11:00PM HBO is presenting Brave New Voices Slam. Check it out. This is the voice of the future, y’all.

My Dad and Mae West

I couldn’t resist downloading this picture. It was a promo for the Quaker Oats Company. My dad, John Baker, had just cinched the legal deal with Canadian lawyers to allow a deed for one square inch of land in every cereal box – Quaker Puffed Wheat and Rice – in most kitchens in America.

OK, but what does Mae West have to do with cereal? She was an icon. She began in Vaudeville and on the stage on New York. By the fifties, when this photo was taken, Mae West had been a a cinema heavy for nearly twenty years. Here she was, holding the deed to one square inch in the Yukon! I wonder what my Dad was thinking…   Mae had great wit and sparked controversy. Actress, comedienne, and writer in the motion picture industry, she pushed the edge. Here’s a selection of scenes that show Mae as a mixture of Bette Midler and Marilyn Monroe:

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful! – Mae West

 

 

 

 

Sardines, Mackerel, Words and other Food

It was good to get the letters sardi_e down as the first move. Shabda had the N there in toner. Scrabble is still an option, if you are willing to put down the book, get off the computer – away from any screen at all, or come inside out of the chilly night.

Sardine is a lead in to my Mark Doty theme of late. Here is an excerpt from a favorite poem in Fire to Fire. The sardine is one of those  small identical fish like Mackerel… sardines remind me of salt and The Costa Brava in Spain, whereas Makerel, as everyone knows, are HOLY.

A Display of Mackerel                              

They’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

 

of heaven’s template,

Makerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving                                                        

 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

 

in its oily fabulation

as the one before.

Suppose we could iridesce, 

 

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer –

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That is only 5 stanzas from the middle of a 17 stanza poem. Look it up. You’ll be glad.

Last week was the final time to see Mark teach or read in the Bay Area. He finished his program at Stanford University with a Colloquium, introduced by Director of the Creative Writing Program and premier poet, Eavan Boland. The subject of the paper he presented was “Memory and Desire,” with respect to Constantine Cavafy and Marcel Proust. One wrote poetry in Greek, the other,  prose in French. Both were held by the work of memory. Mark spoke of “the poetics of space,” the meeting ground between the space occupied by the reader and that of the writer.  After all, where did we store intimacy and daydreams in our childhood? We had secret places – the fort under the stairs, the attic, the tree house. He mentioned that memory is organized by the spaces which hold our intimate moments (more than by sequential time). Cavafy and Proust each set out to construct a “memory palace.” Memory, he goes on to say, “is a way of holding that which is lost” and may be “a stay against dread.” Mark Doty always has me considering new directions of thought.

The talk was geared to a group of Cavafy’s small poems about love  and love-making that occured in a room, afterwards, in the poet’s memory. This work was personal, and concise, not like his famous Waiting for the Barbarians, with the closing lines:

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

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 Best dining tip: Cafe Collage way out in the middle of – well, north of the North Fork of the Eel River, off Marysville road, off highway 49, there is a village called Oregon House – I never saw it – but the zip is 95962.  I guess I’m an urban girl when I’m so far out in the country that the actual restaurant seems to be a kind of hallucination.  The restaurant is elegant,  the Chef-owner,  Salim Ben Mami, is a gracious and gentle Tunisian, who takes small groups on Culinary Guided Tours of his home country. The word “pizza” on the sign is not a reflection of what is inside.  His menu mentions “fine Mediterranean Cusine.” Pizza is probably a code word to keep the rednecks thinking it’s a normal place to eat. It’s not. The food is sublime! And I am a choosey eater.I had a the best spinach pie I have ever tasted. Shabda had the Moussaka. Being with our great old friends, Ann and Terry, was also delicious.  If you are ever wanting to drive and drive and drive and eat like this, go see Salim. Call first. 530-692-2555.