The last couple days, I’ve been having hits on my blog from the keywords: “Chinatown poem.” So, if you’re that awesome person trying to find out about the poem I published in The (awesome) Rattling Wall, then check out my reading below.
Tag: Poetry
On Saturday at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, The Rattling Wall had a celebration to release Issue 3. David L. Ulin, James Meetze, Jillian Lauren, Angel Nafis, and others read at the Masonic Temple to a packed crowd. Michelle Meyering hosted the event from a desk on the stage.
Ulin and Nafis were my favorite readers. Nafis has such a great reading style, and her poem (the one that ended each line with the word black) was a knock out. She concluded the night. Here’s a video of Nafis:
Plus, there was this great video beforehand about the making of The Rattling Wall. Michelle talked a lot about the softball tournament I helped organized back in the summer. She also wrote about the game in the introduction to the book. Michelle writes that during that softball tournament, she realized that she had created a home in Los Angeles by creating The Rattling Wall. It’s a pretty powerful intro and sets up the whole theme of home for the issue.
I was lucky enough to have my poem, “Chinatown,” published in the book. And it’s right next to Ulin’s piece, which is pretty bad ass. Joyce Carol Oates is in the book, too. Plus, there are these awesome illustrations by Ben Tegel in the book. They were displayed during the event, and when people were reading, I found myself laughing out loud…lol.
Well, at one point during the night, Michelle asked the contributors to stand up. That’s when I stood up out of the crowd with all the other writers, and I felt incredibly proud and humbled at the same time. This is really one of my most significant publications to date for my poetry, and it’s an incredible start. And I felt a part of Los Angeles, too — even being some kid from Clinton, Mass.
So, it’s going to be a big week. Finishing up a piece at Pacific Standard. Just got the edits back. And then I’m working on a draft for a piece on Kerouac. I had a pitch accepted at an amazing publication. Just don’t want to jinx myself yet. Talk is cheap. Writing is real. But can still be cheap. Goodnight everyone!
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When I was at FIU completing my MFA, I was taking a poetry class, and we were studying “The Masters” of modern poetry. Our professor hand selected each one of the masters, which included Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, and a couple of contemporaries influenced by these poets. Well, I learned a lot from this class, but what I got most out of the class was our exercises on imitation. I saw the process the same as repainting a famous image. Also, in the class, I found out that Bishop and O’Hara are both from Worcester County — my hometown.
So one of the poems I chose to imitate was Elizabeth Bishop’s, “In the Waiting Room.” Well, the first line goes, “In Worcester, Massachusetts.” When I read that, I nearly lost my mind. I grew up in Worcester County. And the poem was beautiful. It was about a moment of awareness, of understanding the complexities of normalcy and horror, and I knew I wanted to try to imitate Bishop. So I wrote, “In World History Class” — my tribute to Elizabeth Bishop. That’s the poem above. Hope you’ll like it. I’ve been working on it for a couple years, and now I’m looking to try and publish it.
Also, yesterday I had two new pieces come out at the OC Weekly. Here they are: Flying Lotus Concert Review and Zombies Take Over Long Beach.
One more thing: I saw this hilarious video from the Florida/Georgia game this weekend. It’s of Coach Muschamp freaking out on his tight end. He’s such a spaz. Dan Le Batard called him “The World’s Angriest Ventriloquist.” Check it out.
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Right now, I’m sitting outside of my apartment listening to Miles Davis’ “A Kind of Blue.” Hendrix, my dog, is watching the night’s sky, and I’m taking a break from a piece I’m writing on the LA poet laureate. I need to take a break and kind of think away from the page, away from the assignment, to reorient my thoughts.
So, I’ve been trying very hard, over this last month, to find ways to make writing pay. To use words as commerce, as funding for a life. But I find myself, right now, wondering about poetry. It’s a form that I love, but it’s a form that no one, hardly, will pay for. And I have found that I’ve been writing less and less poetry.
Well, what is the point of poetry? What is the point of writing it?
When I was in graduate school, I thought about switching from a concentration in Fiction to Poetry. But in the end, I sort of thought about poetry in a similar way to a hydrogen car. Lol, let me explain. The way I understand a hydrogen car is that the by-product of the reaction that takes place is that water is produced. All this machinery working hard to power an automobile, to have an object move us around the grid, and it produces water — the building block to life. I sort of thought about poetry in that way. That when I was writing fiction, the machinery pumping, the byproduct was poetry. That I would find the poetic moment by working at something else, and it was difficult to force that moment.
But now that I am out in the world, trying to survive without graduate school, I am starting to realize I had it all wrong — poetry is the goal. It is a job that is “unproductive” and financially suicidal, but it provides me with so much spiritual satisfaction. When I find the poetic moment, today, it strikes me as something so valuable and rare that it almost startles me. I want to keep this in my life. I want to cultivate these moments rather than allow them to startle me.
So, the other night, I found one of these moments at 2:00 a.m. when I was looking for a cab somewhere just outside of Downtown Long Beach. I called a cab about a half an hour earlier, and I was staring at my phone, waiting for them to let me know they arrived. I needed to get home. It was way too late. So, finally, my phone rang, and I bolted out the door and stepped outside to find the cab.
Nothing there though. I kept walking down the streets, looking for the cab. It was late. The neon lights from a liquor store were blinking like eyelids, and I was lost. I didn’t even know what street I was on, and, suddenly, I was struck with a sense of fear — was I in a dangerous part of town?
I looked around to gage my surroundings. A woman walked out of the liquor store, banging on a pack of cigarettes. I looked into a puddle, and I saw a reflection of the sky, the few visible stars mirrored in the water, when a car drove through it, scattering the parallel world. I looked up, and I noticed the actual stars for the first time in nearly three weeks. And across the street, two men were sitting on a bus stop, rapping.
I was no longer scared. Then the cab pulled up and brought me home.
Whether or not I was successful in relating the significance of that moment, it was something I treasure, because most of the time I’m just rolling stones up a mountain and watching them fall back down. I treasure the moment that meant nothing and everything at the same time.
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I have been using Twitter for almost three years as a way to network, build an audience, and stay connected to a literary community. So, in those three years, I have found a few “tweeters” that are worth following, too. Here is a list of five. My list in no way tries to rank all of Twitter; I’m just trying to suggest people I enjoy following.
- Dave Landsberger — @davelandsberger. Dave is a poet who lives in Chicago. He is one of my favorite poets under 30, and his tweets can make you stop and think like any great haiku or guffaw so hard you accidentally drop your computer and scare the crap out of your dog. Not only will you be granted access to Dave’s comic-book and Motley-Crue mind, you will see links to his poetry as well. Often, Dave tweets the poetry he writes for the Chicago Side Sports.
- Megan Amram — @meganamram. I first found out about Megan Amram when I covered the Literary Death Match for the LA Weekly. Amram was one of the judges. Back then, she was billed as a Twitter phenomenon. So I followed her, and I was suddenly opened up to brief moments of hilarious awkwardness. Nothing is off limits for Amram. Some might not like her soft-core porn raunchiness, but I look forward to her observations and one-liners that are as witty and ironic as Mitch Hedberg
- J. David Gonzalez — @MgrMoustachio. A connoisseur of all things Miami, Gonzo is the editor of Cabinet Beer Baseball Club–a blog on booze, baseball, and literature. He calls himself “a bartender with reading recommendations.” He loves sports, and he’s filled with witty insight and profound observations. Soon he’ll be moving to Los Angeles and tweeting about his transition from one coast to the other. He’s also a great avenue for drink and food recipes. Gonzo pretty much has it all. Plus, he wrote one of the best blog posts on Ozzie Guillen’s comments on Castro that I came across.
- Carolyn Kellogg — @paperhaus. Well, this one is easy. Kellogg is a staff writer at the LA Times and writes about all things bookish. She’s hip to what’s new in literature. She’s also actually pretty funny and snarky on Twitter. You’ll never feel missed out of the literary conversation when you follow Kellogg.
- Jeremy Radin — @bigradinmonster. So I first heard Jeremy Radin read at a festival in Silver Lake. He was reading poetry as part of the PEN Center USA Literary Stage. I walked away from one of the food trucks, and there was this goofy dude reading lines to a hypnotized crowd and waving his hands like a crazy man. His poems were phenomenal, and his readings were so passionate and compelling it was impossible to turn away. His Twitter feed has the same energy. I want to recommend following Radin on Twitter just because he’s such a bad-ass reader and poet, but he’s also a great 140-character writer, too. Strange little observations mixed with moments of sincerity. Give him a shot.
Well, I hope you’ll give these writers a shot. Poets, writers, and comics need to be heard.
