Here in New Bedford, the kind folks at Gallery X have donated space in their Frederick Douglass gallery for a 100 Thousand Poets for Change reading. The event will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, 9/24 from 2-5 PM.
So far, our lineup of readers (in alphabetical order) includes:
Bob Barboza
Jim Bobrick
Maggie Cleveland
Jaime Duquette
Bill Gauthier
Patricia Gomes
Everett Hoagland
Colleen Keenan
Nancy Morgan-Boucher
Mwalim *7)
Jake St. John
Tracy Tarvers
Rhonda Ward
This list is growing by the hour. Right now, I’m looking to hear from folks interested in reading (send an email to whalingcityreview@gmail.com for details), along with volunteers to help spread the word (creating and distributing posters or flyers, sharing this event listing through facebook ); also, helping with setup/takedown of chairs, and bringing snacks or drinks to the reading. Any help would be appreciated!
If you have connections with local schools, colleges, or youth groups, we could especially use your help. This is a great opportunity for young people to use their voices to talk about the kinds of change they want to see.
If you’re not from the area, it’s a great time to visit New Bedford as the Working Waterfront Festival featuring musicians, authors, demonstrations, and the world’s best fresh local seafood is taking place right down the street.
Hope to see you there!
__________________
New Bedford area poets and friends – please post your poems in the “comments” section of this post so that they can be archived. Thanks!
I am a poet from New Bedford, MA, a place where poetry usually happens in dedicated arenas like galleries, bookstores, and academic circles where poets read to the converted. I ask for change that would take poetry to the people, mobilizing poets in community beyond their own egos into public arenas like festivals, cable television (as I have done), and diverse sectors of public life where an exchange can take place between the poets and “the People”.
I believe this would change the tone and effect of poetry in a region where many are isolated from the power of the Word. The following poem reflects my concern for the withdrawn intellectuals who stand apart from the political engagement which could liberate them and transform community.
Spring Poem—Renewal at the Immigration Rally, April 10, 2006
by Claudia Grace, 4/11/06
Hermanas,
we welcome you
into this month of the Fish moon,
Egg moon: when Sky is full of itself
Sprouting grass running the ground
Well of course, could we do any different…
We live in the city of fish
Number one fishing port in Americanation
Your tribe scaling, gutting in its grey Atlantic
The way we don’t want to need to do.
We welcome you hermanos
not quite like the woman who hands out sweatshirts ID-ing
as “Americans too” your eddy of baseball-
capped workers, hundreds representing still more low-profile,
triangulating the space between our institutions,
City Hall and the Free Public Library,
implicated in an America
you cannot read,
faces open as sunflowers
chanting litanies of “si se puede”—“it can be done” possible at last all
you could ever do
unlike the missionary who thinks you should have stayed in Mexico,
unlike the Mayor’s call
for ID cards and above-the-table deals
with your consulate and our government
watching,
most unlike the suit with a gun in one pocket
and a flask in the other
grinding your generations to their knees
unlike the tall men, the CEO’s who can never meet
your eyes,
unlike the thinkers expressionless under their shades
A native drum remembers you
Compadres
Your eager faces, the tiny flags wafting the April breeze
Waved by brown arms of children who
no doubt
will be taller than you thanks to price rite
and the free health
center
It beats wel/come
Be a-
ware
in this cost-effective
corp-o-nation built on a free
labor pool
Y cuando diga Libertad
Me dicen Muere!*
Echoes of homeland (twice, louder the 2nd time)
We,
The children of immigrants, slaves, Native
human beings welcome you….stand with you
Waxing toward fullness, Egg moon expands through dying light,
Benevolent in its moment of Unity,
our humpbacked flute player, your Aztec song.
*Otto René Castillo, Guatemalan poet and revolutionary, murdered by the junta in 1968
“When I say freedom , they tell me ‘die’.”
I read at 100 TPC in New Bedford, MA. I quoted Woody Guthrie “Patriotism is neighborly.” Change starts on your street, in your town and then moves outward. But you need to be aware.
routine
so many around me
walk with eyes closed
stubbing their toes
on the edges of life
getting bruised in the process
and tripping over
their surroundings
never taking the time
to see the cracks
in the sidewalk
or the flower
poking up from the ground
littered with plastic bottles
around the stop sign
spray painted with graffiti
at the corner of the intersection
eyes closed they stumble around
with hands outstretched
so they don’t fall
down the stairs of the city
or catching a tree branch
to their nose
in the fields of eternity
sending the singing birds
squawking into the sunburnt
sky of clouds
that they will never see
Here is Colleen Keen’s self-explanatory poem on change:
“It’s Supposed To Change Tomorrow”
Stop the mundane
They call
Life?
We have found our way home.
Breathe in
It is safe.
The dirt roads leading to nowhere
I found myself there
They will too.
The cable is out
I wish there was a place you could rent books
Is it still unheard of to read?
Enrich their minds
Find solace on a page
Entertainment through knowledge
Not for the mindless
Tomorrow we become enlightened
No task for the wretched sloth
Motivate fulfillment
Renewed opportunity for the driven
No more soulless routine
Conformity destroyed
A drastic change
Individuals illuminated through liberation
We are all saved!
From greed
Pessimism
Idiocrasy
Dictatorship
Narcissism
We are saved from ourselves
Tomorrow will be different
War
No longer the answer
Transformation
No fear of the unknown
All is well
Oil prices down,
Nasdaq up
Who cares?
Lower taxes
Just a little bit?
Tomorrow gas is free.
Jake St. John: Quoted Woody Guthrie: “Patriotism is neighborly.” it starts on your street, in your town and then moves outward. But you need to be aware.
routine
so many around me
walk with eyes closed
stubbing their toes
on the edges of life
getting bruised in the process
and tripping over
their surroundings
never taking the time
to see the cracks
in the sidewalk
or the flower
poking up from the ground
littered with plastic bottles
around the stop sign
spray painted with graffiti
at the corner of the intersection
eyes closed they stumble around
with hands outstretched
so they don’t fall
down the stairs of the city
or catching a tree branch
to their nose
in the fields of eternity
sending the singing birds
squawking into the sunburnt
sky of clouds
that they will never see
-Jake St. John
100 TPC New Bedford, MA
9/24/11
Here is Colleen Keen’s self-explanatory poem on change:
“It’s Supposed To Change Tomorrow”
Stop the mundane
They call
Life?
We have found our way home.
Breathe in
It is safe.
The dirt roads leading to nowhere
I found myself there
They will too.
The cable is out
I wish there was a place you could rent books
Is it still unheard of to read?
Enrich their minds
Find solace on a page
Entertainment through knowledge
Not for the mindless
Tomorrow we become enlightened
No task for the wretched sloth
Motivate fulfillment
Renewed opportunity for the driven
No more soulless routine
Conformity destroyed
A drastic change
Individuals illuminated through liberation
We are all saved!
From greed
Pessimism
Idiocrasy
Dictatorship
Narcissism
We are saved from ourselves
Tomorrow will be different
War
No longer the answer
Transformation
No fear of the unknown
All is well
Oil prices down,
Nasdaq up
Who cares?
Lower taxes
Just a little bit?
Tomorrow gas is free
One Response to 100 TPC New Bedford – More Details Released!
Ricky A. Pursley says:
September 26, 2011 at 11:08 pm (Edit)
change
I must confess that I came to this poem
the long way around,
as I sought to express
the multitude of things
for which new thinking –
change –
must be found;
the task was daunting,
with socio-economic and
political ills taunting
from every corner of life,
each filled with their own traps
and trappings,
too many for me
to do much useful mapping;
I stopped by the yard sale
that the three sisters,
Atrocity, Duplicity, and Mendacity
were having,
looked around,
bought nothing,
and thought,
this is fertile ground
for some change;
I wandered down Main Street
where all the Isms have their shops,
decorated with grand rhetorical flourishes,
although most of them have
turned out to be flops:
in one dark cavern
sat Sexism, old and grey,
but with lively eyes and hands
that never seemed to stop moving –
he was disarming, charming –
but underneath it all, I could sense
a smarminess that I found
quite alarming;
another fetid stall
seemed to have it all:
Ageism, Fascism, and Genderism
were all lined up against a wall;
seeing them so posed
made them seem rather small,
and ripe for change;
further down the way
a large crowd seemed to
swing and sway
in front of the joint exhibition
of Capitalism and Socialism
(Communism was out of the way),
although try as they did, neither one
seemed to win the day,
poised and posed
for the hand of change;
there were dozens more Isms
in all the other tiny spaces,
more hogwash than dogma
splattered across their faces,
and so I moved on, noting that
change is needed in all of their
rigid, stiff-jointed places;
and I came to Hunger and Homelessness,
huddled together due to a
change in the weather,
and the sight of those two,
who knew not what to do
made me
weep
and vow
to keep
promises for change yet again;
I saw Civility and Dignity,
lying naked, near death, in the street:
they were both too wounded to stand,
they were both too bloated to eat;
they seemed lost in a foreign world,
out-of-place curiosities at whom
jeers and derisions were hurled,
and I was so sad that I had
to look away;
and then I came upon the saddest sight of all,
four thousand stories high, with
nothing else as large, or as tall:
it was Loneliness looming like a dreadful pall;
and I thought, this is what most
needs change:
cure Loneliness, and we may cure all.
September 22, 2011. Written specially for reading at 100 Thousand Poets for Change, September 24, 2011, Gallery X, 169 William Street, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2011, Ricky A. Pursley. All rights reserved.
Michael says:
April 23, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Great! Post this on the home page of this blog too if you can. Best, Michael
Reply
Patricia Gomes says:
April 23, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Thanks — I certainly will!
Reply
Kathryn says:
April 23, 2011 at 3:03 am
I love this poem, Maggie! Good choice for Earth Day, too.
Reply
Maggie Cleveland says:
April 22, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Razing the Mills
The wrecking ball
like a clumsy metronome
keeps time
in staggered beats
as it taps
the façade
of the monolith
with a heavy
kiss.
Asbestos laden
frames crack,
panes of glass and
floorboards steeped in
a hundred years of machine oil
and sweat
split,
tumble down the bones
of the behemoth,
slam the ground
and send a rumble
to the rocks
across the river.
What’s left is blasted to bits –
bulldozed, swept
into tall piles,
shoveled into trucks
and hauled away,
or blown by handfuls
into the wind
with a wish
that they won’t
fill the hole
with poison this time,
that what’s built
in its flattened place
won’t be an empty box
of concrete and glass
with a sun bleached
“for lease”
sign in the window –
this year, the air
is tinged in color,
even the tips
of the seagulls’ wings
are red.
-Maggie Cleveland
(first published in Amerarcana: A Bird & Beckett Review, 2010)
Reply
Poetry Collage by Pat Gomes, moved from prior comment thread (to be archived)