Hey everyone — just a quick shout out to let you know we started a Facebook Group - DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency.
Alot easier for sharing photos and videos (although it would be great if you would keep those coming here too).
Join us here, there and everywhere!
Next Open Mic is Monday - 9/15, 7pm at Dupont Circle (at fountain). Jali-D is the musical feature — and he’s amazin!
Tonight, the SF Collaborative Arts Insurgency celebrates its 5th anniversary with its weekly lyrical ambush outside the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station at 16th & Mission Streets. The crew's been rocking since 2003, and recently got noted by a series of weekly papers, including SF Weekly, the Bay Guardian, and even The Onion!
In addition to the weekly open mic, some cats from the scene also hold down the 16th & Mission Review, a monthly poetry anthology. To submit your work for publication, email submissions to Brandon at seven7htangent [at] gmail.com. Also, an initiative organized by some of the CAI's founders saw the third annual Poems Under the Dome just a few weeks ago, featuring an evening of poetry inside SF's elaborate City Hall.
Anytime you're in SF, pass by 16th & Mission on Thursday night. We'll be out in force from 9pm until around midnight…..
Alexandra Geller
Untitled
As far as all us know, love and sin
Walked side by side in world from the beginning:
Serpent's temptation in the garden of Eden
Turned Eve and Adam into human beings.
Thank you, the cunning serpent, for your gifts:
Apple and passion, untold good and evil,
And has remained for many centuries
The might of sinful pain and gorgeous feelings
Project the mind - it resonates with thunder;
Reject the mind - around you t burns.
Intrepid joy - impassioned restless wonder -
The heart-suffused and life-rich way to learn:
Intrinsic conflaggrations, hard to pity
Or to respect, or even yet to see -
The nature's splendor reaching into city
To render its inhabitants half-free
Until joy drops, and out appears concept
And meaning - this, if only for some!
And from beneath the axioms, a rocket
Ballasts into the space, explodes and is gone
And then - another time, another meaning,
The meaning is constructed from all sides
And forms the structure that informs the seeming
Which then becomes the vision of mankind -
Â
And then come other meanings and perceivings
Constructed like dynamic SQL…*
The culture wisens, thickens as it's dreaming
And builds to levels more removed from hell.
* For the non-computer types: SQL is a tool that lets the people work with data. Dynamic SQL is SQL statements created by program based on conditions.
The Biggest Mud in History
About Rush Limbaugh
A finger and a pudgy head
On billboard on the road -
It says on it, "Reality Check"
And on the radio
Insults, abuse and poison
And malice of all kinds:
Hideousness, lies and noise and
Attack on people's minds.
Read the rest of this entry »
As former GPI poet now living in sunny Australia, I would like to congratulate all of you for making GPI as big as it is today.
Shahid, Laurie, Jessica, and the rest of you, you rule.
I'm including here addresses to my own writings, which I've continued as a new husband and father:
http://ibshambat7.blogspot.com (weblog)
http://www.geocities.com/ilya_shambat2005/poems.htm (poetry)
http://www.myspace.com/ibshambat (my space)
http://www.geocities.com/ilya_shambat2005 (translations)
Hope you continue growing and become the next big thing in poetry and politics!
The GPI has been staying active despite wrapping up the DuPont Circle lyrical ambushes for the winter. We host the weekly open mic at Busboys & Poets from time to time (most recently on October 30), and also did a joint set with singer/songwriter/Ukele-hip-hop artist Jon Brahman at a group house in Mt. Pleasant on November 20.
Opportunities to perform still abound, and we're specifically looking for someone to take over compiling events from our calendar to distribute weekly to 700 subscribers on our listserv. Hollah at us if you're down at dcguerrillapoetry-discuss@lists.riseup.net!
Also, just to keep your inspiration flowing, check out this article in The New York Times:
Art . . . did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our . . . teacher . . . . Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,†people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.
The Cake Bar still has openings for poets to read at its upcoming event, Sweet Potato Soul, which will feature Thanksgiving themed poetry readings and spoken word performances. Each poet will be reading one Thanksgiving themed poem and one poem of choice. If you're interested, contact Carla at contact@thecakebarandlounge.com and include a sample of your poetry.
Go, Musharraf, go!
That's how my flow goes
so learn what happened if you don't already know
Pakistan needs to see democracy
we need sanity
to help preserve humanity
the vanity of America's fading empire
means only that the rubble will pile higher
kick the liars and the cronies out of power.
Shower.
Wash your hands of the master's plan.
Attack Iran? What makes 'em think we can?
Cheney's high-rollin' for 30 years with no plan,
chickenhawks say we need to invade
but talks ain't even started, and there's peace parades
They want more war, but why listen to them?
They started a quagmire and will do it again.
To stop the next war, brother, pick up your pen.
