Like the page of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore and help it get to 3000 likes! The lucky person to hit the 3000th like will receive a free bundle of 10 Tia Chucha Press books. Yes that is my first book “We Are All The Black Boy” on top of the stack. The art on the cover was created by Tony Fitzpatrick based on the first eight poems of the original manuscript.
I interviewed Nikki Giovanni (another of my early influences) last month in her office at VT, with her ever present dog on her lap, as part of a project I am editing and producing called “There Came A Thunder: Of Poetry & Protest” an anthology of poems and essays commemorating MLK and the March on Washington. Over the last two months I have had the privilege of being in the presence not only of Giovanni, but also of Mari Evans, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Sterling Plumpp, Useni Eugene Perkins, Al Young, Eugene B. Redmond, Ismael Reed, and other “elders” and all of them only deepened my already profound respect for them. What also struck me was how vibrant and fierce and generous and committed and ever-brilliant each one of them continues to be.
The TCAT project combines text and images and project photographer Victoria Smith has captured stunning images. We have held sessions with more than 80 poets across the country. The photograph of Giovanni in this post is not from the “There Came A Thunder…” project. Seeing the image simply made me realize it is time to start letting people know about TCAT. For now we are reserving the photographs taken so far for publication. Stay tuned to armageddonoffunk.com for future updates on the project.
Friday, June 7
BROOKSDAY, 9am-7:30pm, Free
Chicago Cultural Center,
Randolph Square Cafe
78 E Washington Street
This is a marathon reading and day-long celebration of the works and life of Gwendolyn Brooks — my first poet mentor. As I often confess, I stole a book of poems in junior high school called 3000 Years of Black Poetry. In that book I met Gwendolyn Brooks for the first time and had the naive audacity to think to myself “I can do that.” Fortunately I had the good fortune later in life to become a friend of the Master poet who was also the definition of generosity. I told her on more than one occasion that it was her fault that I fell into poetry. I am honored to read in the 5pm time slot with Kevin Stein, Rosellen Brown, Bayo Ojikutu. avery r. young, Runako Jahi, and Nora Brooks Blakely. BROOKSDAY is co-sponsored by The Guild Literary Complex, Third World Press, and The American Writers Museum.
I hope to also see you at one the following events where I will be signing and reading from my most recent book of poems The Armageddon of Funk:
Saturday, June 8 — MICHAEL WARR — POETIC MEMOIR 6-7pm, Free
Arts and Public Life, 301 East Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, IL
This performance/presentation will focus on South Side writers who have influenced my work, both artistically and politically, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson, Sterling Plumpp, and Haki Madhubuti. This will be achieved partially through recitation of praise poems in the African tradition and will combine a reading of my poetry as well as the aforementioned authors’ work illustrating the impact of those writers and world events on my writing in a multi-media presentation I call “Poetic Memoir.”
Monday, June 10, POETRY SALOON at NOON
Featuring Michael Warr and Thax Douglas, Free
Sulzer Regional Library in Lincoln Square
4455 N. Lincoln, Chicago, IL
Monday, June 10, MOLLY MALONE’S OPEN MIC AND READING SERIES
Featuring Poet Kyle McCord (plus a few poems from Michael Warr) 7pm (feature at 9pm)
$5 if you can, $3 if you can’t
Hosts Nina Corwin and Al DeGenova
7652 W. Madison, Forest Park, IL
PLEASE TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND ENEMIES…
Friday, June 7
BROOKSDAY, 9am-7:30pm, Free
Chicago Cultural Center,
Randolph Square Cafe
78 E Washington Street
This is a marathon reading and day-long celebration of the works and life of Gwendolyn Brooks — my first poet mentor. As I often confess, I stole a book of poems in junior high school called 3000 Years of Black Poetry. In that book I met Gwendolyn Brooks for the first time and had the naive audacity to think to myself “I can do that.” Fortunately I had the good fortune later in life to become a friend of the Master poet who was also the definition of generosity. I told her on more than one occasion that it was her fault that I fell into poetry. I am honored to read in the 5pm time slot with Kevin Stein, Rosellen Brown, Bayo Ojikutu. avery r. young, Runako Jahi, and Nora Brooks Blakely. BROOKSDAY is co-sponsored by The Guild Literary Complex, Third World Press, and The American Writers Museum.
I hope to also see you at one the following events where I will be signing and reading from my most recent book of poems The Armageddon of Funk:
Saturday, June 8 — MICHAEL WARR — POETIC MEMOIR 6-7pm, Free
Arts and Public Life, 301 East Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, IL
This performance/presentation will focus on South Side writers who have influenced my work, both artistically and politically, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson, Sterling Plumpp, and Haki Madhubuti. This will be achieved partially through recitation of praise poems in the African tradition and will combine a reading of my poetry as well as the aforementioned authors’ work illustrating the impact of those writers and world events on my writing in a multi-media presentation I call “Poetic Memoir.”
Monday, June 10, POETRY SALOON at NOON
Featuring Michael Warr and Thax Douglas, Free
Sulzer Regional Library in Lincoln Square
4455 N. Lincoln, Chicago, IL
Monday, June 10, MOLLY MALONE’S OPEN MIC AND READING SERIES
Featuring Poet Kyle McCord (plus a few poems from Michael Warr) 7pm (feature at 9pm)
$5 if you can, $3 if you can’t
Hosts Nina Corwin and Al DeGenova
7652 W. Madison, Forest Park, IL
Join Yolanda Catzalco and Michael Warr at the Thursdays At Readers Poetry Series Thursday, April 11, 6:30pm FREE, at Readers Bookstore, Bldg C., Fort Mason Center. This series is curated and hosted by San Francisco Poet-In-Residence and SF International Poetry coordinator Jack Hirschman.
Spread the word.
(photo by Dimitri Moore)
Of the poems I read today in workshops with MFA students and “Library Ambassadors” at The University of Mississippi, this is the poem we spent the most time deconstructing:
The First Time Ever…
In my ’68 Volvo, on a sloping street outside the house
where I taught myself Bach preludes, danced the James Brown
and Calypso while my mother tried to waltz me, where she
allowed my zoo of beetles, frogs and ladybugs bottled in her
living room, outside that museum of my youth, a Colombian
revolutionary escaped from the bucket seat, leaned across the
stick shift, and strapped me into first love with a kiss.
Our eyes flared across enlightened rooms, crowded with cadre,
in picturesque Victorian Flats in San Francisco’s Mission,
where the Symbionese Liberation Army and “Squeaky” Fromm
fabricated faulty solutions. At her antique dining table we shared
utopian Super Burritos from Las Palmas, near the Panaderia
and Maoist bookstore, blared music to deny the FBI our whispered
strategy and tactics, studied Vladimir’s What Is To Be Done?
as the Isley Brothers’ Who’s That Lady? spun conspiratorially.
On a couch in my boyhood bedroom in front of a window
she would not notice until we too were wide open, all the
dialectical discussions were lost in the tearing off of clothes,
as I told her “I wanted first to read a book on how to do it,
so that I would do it right.” She kept tearing off her clothes,
not letting her husband, dos niños, or my 19-year-old naivety
distract her 29-year-old wisdom.
I quit the Bank of America’s promise of a perfect bourgeois
future to be a full-time functionary, taut from pseudo
unemployment, stomach flat as a stack of Leninist leaflets.
On the way to meetings she slipped her hand into my
baggy pants and pulled slightly as I shifted gears.
(from The Armageddon of Funk)
I am posting this update from 35,000 ft. up in the air over the awe-inspiring terrain of New Mexico on my way to the Mississippi Delta for four days of planting my poems in university classrooms, bookstores, galleries, and libraries.
In a way this trip to Mississippi really began in early 2012 when I recited poems to a crowd of more than 200 librarians at the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Awards Ceremony during the ALA annual conference. I was there to accept a BCALA poetry award for The Armageddon of Funk (Tia Chucha Press). One of the librarians in the room that day was Amy E. Mark, Information Literacy and Instruction Librarian & Associate Professor at the J.D. Library, University of Mississippi.
Amy and her librarian ilk are literary superheroes swooping into our lives to assist readers and writers. Thanks to her superpowers this week I am in Oxford conducting workshops with MFA students and Library Ambassadors, consulting on cultural competency and diversity, signing books, and giving a public reading/performance at the University of Mississippi this Thursday in Bryant Hall at 6pm.
After Oxford I head to Clarksdale. I have to thank Rosalind Wilcox, a friend from back in the day in Chicago, for that leg of the tour. I am anointing her, along with Amy, as a member of the Cultural Justice League, a fictional organization of literary superheroes that I just conjured up. Rosalind is now the very real Department Chair, Fine Arts at Coahoma College, Clarksdale, MS. An artist, musician, and teacher, she is owner and founder of Sun House Studios, a gallery, workspace, and community center.
Brad Hardisty at The Nashville Bridge blog wrote the following of Rosalind, AKA Mississippi Rosalee:
Rosealee is an accomplished singer/songwriter who also plays drums for two of the oldest Mississippi blues legends, Robert Belfour and LC Ulmer. In fact LC wrote a song for her on the M For Mississippi soundtrack, “Rosealee.”
She had named her art/performance space Sun House in honor of Son House, another Clarksdale native that inspired Led Zeppelin and Jack White among other rockers.
I will be reading/performing my poems at Sun House this Friday, February 8, 5pm, Rosalind was close to Guild Books and the Guild Complex (now the Guild Literary Complex) where I served as founding Executive Director for 10 years. I am thrilled to learn from Rosalind that she modeled Sun House after Guild’s commitment to combining arts and community.
Traveling South as a touring poet is exactly what I hoped to be doing after more than a year of scattering the seeds of The Armageddon of Funk in the hope that it would spread like… How about like kudzu? But without the shade induced killing. I have many people to thank for the stubborn unraveling of this collection of poems that moved from idea to manuscript, to loss, to manuscript, to reinvention, and again to revised manuscript, and finally to an actual book, as slowly as “molasses in the wintertime” as my mother would say. After Clarksdale I will try to give thanks to everyone who held the hand of this book as it learned to walk.
Please tell all your friends in the Delta about my upcoming appearances in Oxford and Clarksdale. To all librarians, curators, arts directors, educators, and cultural impresarios, you too can be anointed as a member of the Cultural Justice League. All you have to do is use your superpowers to get me to wherever your Metropolis happens to be.
