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.
Duke Checks Out Ella As She Scats Like That
To Quincy Troupe
by Michael Warr
When Ella starts scatting
she magnolia planted
beside Duke playing
that tonal Ouija board
and he swings her that slick,
startled, “woman you too
bad” intonation,
when the Duke do dat,
survival becomes a god
to marvel at, even as the creator
of Mt. Kilimanjaro, survival
transmuted from sanctimonious
sanctioned genocide to African
angels swinging that singing
like a trumpet made
of clouds and lightning, toppling
walls in a way that can only be
called biblical, metaphysical,
in the umbilical between heaven
and Hades, where the devil
is an angel stringing sounds
that defy atrocity.
When Ella starts scatting
and in an approaching layer
of time Nina Simone wails
of Four Women, after Lady Day
cast southern trees in a bright
white light that not only
dreamily signaled death,
but was death,
and we are majestically
resurrected by Mahalia,
a miracle happens,
continues to happen.
More than a mere resurrection,
a triumph over inhumanity.
When Ella starts scatting
’cause the Trumpet man Armstrong
momentarily
then momentously forgot
his words
and spontaneously
started this ingenious tongue
and James Brown
put horns, and strings, and funk,and things,
a primal electrified scream,
all in the same thing,
thang, thing, thang, thang.
And Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag
tells us it is never ending, never
ending, always something new
interpenetrating the old
like the digital ripping off
of the G-Fatha’s analog riffs
by the hip-hopping Cab
Calloways of today,
a ghettoized tribute
to his funknosity,
to global tenacity,
to the Yoruba way, that lives
in every beat
and b-note created
by our creators,
when Ella scats
like that…
(This poem appears in The Armageddon of Funk)
Investing in The Creative Hunch, aka “the Itch,” is a sociocultural network of artistic projects that organize administrative/production teams around convening dinner gatherings. Amidst the sharing of art, spirits, and food, new friendships are born.
At the next Itch Mixer, on Sunday, October 28, I will share a sample of ”Poetic Memoir — A Multimedia Writing Workshop.” This Itch project focuses on the creative development of a workshop that combines poetry, storytelling, music, digital text, graphic and image projection, all weaved into an interactive curriculum. Workshop participants share their own lives in poems that capture the social-economic and cultural environment in which those experiences occurred. The Itch Mixer happens at the Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA.
This project seeks to take the current “low-tech” and disjointed version of the “Poetic Memoir” workshop and create a technologically seamless interactive presentation for classrooms, community organizations, prisons, places of workship, workplaces, performance venues, homes, libraries, etc. Sunday’s sample will include poetry performance, storytelling, and digital projection.
This project is also interested in experimenting with “spinoffs” from “Poetic Memoir” that are created, produced, and “owned” by Itch participants. In a separate, but relevant example, Chicago artist Tree Turner has been independently re-creating and re-mixing my poem “Brain on Ice — The L-Train Poem.” His most recent rendition is “riding while black.”
Feel free to contact me before the Itch Mixer if you are interested in contributing any of the following skills: project management, video and audio production, website and/or blog production, graphic arts production, curriculum development, social networking, business and funds development, and marketing skills. For more on “Poetic Memoir” or a conversation about joining the project follow armageddonoffunk.com.
– Michael Warr
TIA CHUCHA PRESS
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release/ October, 17, 2012
Contact: Luis Rodriguez/ 818.898.0013
SYLMAR, CA—Tia Chucha Press— the publishing wing of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore—is proud to announce that Michael Warr’s poetry collection “The Armageddon of Funk,” has won the 2012 PEN / Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Warr will recite at the 22nd Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Awards ceremony on Saturday, December 1, 2012, at the Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Ave. from 2 to 5pm.
The Black Caucus of the American Library Association this year also awarded “The Armageddon of Funk,” Warr’s second collection of poems. Tia Chucha Press first published Warr in 1991 with his groundbreaking work, “We Are All the Black Boy.” He is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Poets Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. A former resident of Chicago and Addis Ababa, he now lives in his hometown of San Francisco, CA.
“I don’t think you need me to tell you that these poems are the real thing, brilliant in language and imagination, never a nerveless line, they move in both senses, of their own music and of the heart. But I’m telling you anyway,” wrote the late, legendary, poet Adrienne Rich of Warr’s poetry.
PEN International, a Nobel Prize-winning organization devoted to defending freedom of expression, was founded in 1921. Founded in 1989 by Ismael Reed and co-founders Floyd Salas, Claire Ortalda and Reginald Lockett, PEN Oakland (dubbed the “Blue Collar PEN” by The New York Times) was created as a “multicultural” conclave to “promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds and to educate both the public and the media as to the nature of multicultural work.”
Poet/writer Luis J. Rodriguez founded Tia Chucha Press in 1989 in Chicago. In 2000, Luis moved to the Northeast San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles and a year later co-founded
Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, which provides workshops in the arts, writing, dance, theater, music and more, as well as a bookstore, art gallery, and publishing center. By 2005, Rodriguez moved Tia Chucha Press from Chicago to Sylmar, CA. In twenty-three years this small press has published renowned poets like Elizabeth Alexander, Diane Glancy, Nick Carbo, Ricardo Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan, Tony Fitzpatrick, Kyoko Mori, and new and emerging voices.
The most recent books published by Tia Chucha Press are Patricia Spear Jones’s “Painkiller,” Jose Antonio Rodriguez’s “The Shallow End of Sleep,” and a tabletop book with essays, interviews, poetry, photos, and art called “Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams: How the Arts are Transforming a Community,” edited by Denise Sandoval and Luis J. Rodriguez.
For more information on Tia Chucha Press and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, please go to www.tiachucha.com or call 818.939.3433. To order Tia Chucha Press books, contact Northwestern University Press online at
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu
or cal1.800.621.2736.
