Event: Wordfest at the Grotto

Come savor a smorgasbord of local literary talent – at our Oct. 14 fundraiser for ERIC QUEZADA, FOR DISTRICT 9 SUPERVISOR at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

WHEN: TUES., OCT. 14, 6-8 PM
WHERE: 490 2ND ST. (NEAR BRYANT), 2ND FL.
WHO: A BEVY OF LOCAL WRITERS:

CHRISTOPHER D. COOK (Author, Diet For A Dead Planet)

ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN (Editor, Big Ugly Review, winner of the Bay Guardian prize for short fiction)

JAMES TRACY (Author, Avanti Popolo, Sparks and Codes, Civil Disobedience Handbook)

ALFONSO TEXIDOR (Mission District Poet Laureate, as far as we’re concerned.

MELISSA KLEIN (Author of Looking and Other Stories)

No one turned away for lack of class privilege, all others pay $25.00

Estanislao, Esteva, Sinister, and Tracy 5/22

THURSDAY MAY 22nd, 7:00

GILMAN STREET PROJECT, 922 GILMAN

SPOKEN WORD NIGHT

OPEN MIC AND FEATURED READERS

Rupert Estanislao from Eskapo
Ananda Esteva author of Pisco Sours on Civil Defense Poetry

Bucky Sinister author of All Blacked Out and Nowhere to Go on Gorsky Press
James Tracy  author of Sparks and Codes on Civil Defense Poetry

This May Day–The Strike!

I’m honored to be invited to read at City Lights’ grand May Day event, The Strike! It is a sequel of sorts to a reading which happened during the last Presidential election year, entitled Manifesto. Like last time, thirty poets are going to sound-off (three minutes at a time) on the subject of empire, only now we’re supposed to answer the question So what are we gonna do about it? Obviously, the “surge” of poetry isn’t likely to stop the war, but hopefully it might just put a spring in your activist step, and maybe, provide some inspiration to delete the empire once and for all!

A City Lights May Day event
@ First Unitarian Universalist Church 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, CA
Doors open 7 pm; performance begins 7:30 pm
Admission: $12.00 @ door

Join City Lights and friends for an evening of narratives that cut through the core of the neo-liberal agenda

30 local poets, performers, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians deliver 3 minute pieces offering imaginative responses to the hunger of global capital and its effects upon community

STRIKE addresses strategies of resistance. We pose the question: what serves as meaningful resistance in an age of disaster capitalism? We shall explore the liberation of the commons- through poetry, performance, music, and magic.

Participants:
Charlie Anders
Maxine Chernoff
Justin Chin
Diane di Prima
Camille Dungy
Ananda Esteva
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Lisa Gray-Garcia
Jack Hirschman
Paul Hoover
Kevin Killian
Joseph Lease
Jon Longhi
Michael McClure
Cameron McHenry
Annalee Newitz
Barbara Jane Reyes
Al Robles
Leslie Scalapino
Matthew Shenoda
Bucky Sinister
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Amber Tamblyn
James Tracy
Roberto Vargas
Youth Speaks
more to come..

Rooks-Poetry Review

Review originally published in Beyond Chron.

Now that Journalists are finally asking some hard (but basic) questions about what really led the nation into the latest phase in the war in Iraq; questions of how individuals are prepared to fight wars may be better left to the poets. No poet is better qualified to ask these questions than Gil Fagiani. In “Rooks,” his second collection of poetry, Fagiani, take the reader on a bare-knuckled tour of Pennsylvania Military College, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

Fagiani’s work, like the PMC itself, is tightly controlled.. The freshman (rook) year is best thought of as a factory where young civilians are forged into elite officers, eventually to command and pass the abuse onto the next generation of cadets. In Spit Shines, Fagiani recalls the discipline and punish that makes mountains out of molehills:

At the morning muster, Sergeant Kotowski
Swaggers up to me
Points to a speck of dust on one shoe
“Hey, douche bag,
what did you polish your shoes with,
Brillo pads?”