Poem + Photos: John Murillo (Book Launch)

Earlier tonight I headed over to Logan Square to Elastic Arts, where Tres Colony (Krista Franklin, Sandra Ivelisse Antongiorgi and Shirley Alfaro) hosted a book party for poet John Murillo, whose new book, Up Jump the Boogie has just been published by Cypher Books (New York). The collection's cover features one of Krista's collages, and the great Martín Espada pens a foreword that gives real insight into what John's poetry is up to., As the title suggests, hiphop flows through these poems like electricity, though soul and soul's spirit is also here, la alma de vida, and life here takes on tremendous textures in these lyrics, these lyric voices. As Martín says in his intro, John is "young and urban," "African American and Chicano," a "wordsmith and a song-maker": he's a true musician, operating on multiple levels, mixing and breaking, taking his crossfader sensibility to the very edge. These are powerful poems, whether the sequence for Etheridge Knight, or the crown of sonnets about growing up and breakdancing, or the poem, which made me go "whoa," in which John rolls up, for real, like a gangster. Tres Colony brought together a hot roster of poets and performers, including Toni Asante Lightfoot, Kevin Koval, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Avery R. Young, Randall Horton, and Roger Bonair-Agard, who not only offered their words but set things off live, for John to bring to a fitting conclusion with his very live and alive poems. Congratulations, John, and what follows below are some photos and one of John's poems.

John Murillo reading

John Murillo reading one of his poems, "Hustle"



MC Krista Franklin

One of Krista's collages, which were on display (I think this one is titled "Baking Wonders Never Cease" (2008)

Poet Randall Horton reading

Poet Toni Asante Lightfoot, who performed

John Murillo taking in all the good words

Sandra Ivelisse performing her song

And now, one of John's poems, a love poem.

Round Midnight

Some nights I watch you
     sleep, the eyelid's jig

and beg, the blue rise
     of memory and moon.

When you drift, I snatch
     a machete from behind

a bedpost, stalk the night,
     plot the rise of infidels.

Before dawn, maybe you
     whisper the six histories

of river and rain, rise like
     steam from an open wound,

wrap yourself in ash,
     blood and honey.

Maybe you navigate
     stained glass streets,

havoc the avenues, ransack
     basilica in search of me.

Maybe you burn candles,
     moan canticles, conjure

lightning and thunderclap.
     Sweet river woman,

waist beaded and bangled,
     breathe moon and I will

dream too. Rise blue
     and I will find you.

Copyright © John Murillo, from Upjump the Boogie,
New York: Cypher Books, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Up From the Depths

Up, from the depths, but only temporarily. I was trying to think of the right word to describe this quarter, this January and February, the steep and suffocating mound of work, and the feeling of being buried and being unable to get out from under it, to imagine a way out of or around it, and I realized, when Chris was here a few weeks ago, that I'd mentioned it in a conversation with him: vivisepulture. Which, I reminded myself, will be a title of a new project. Slowly, surely, I'm climbing up out of it, eyeing my way out of it at least, but there's still a long, ascending incline to go. And blogging, which I love to do, unfortunately has to come last on the list. But rather than let this month (Black History Month, no less!), pass by without at least an initial post, here I go.


Blackboard work, after my lit class (one of the few fun things I do every week)

***

A weekend ago, Tisa Bryant and Duriel Harris were in town for the final week of Jennifer Karmin and Amina Cain's month-long festival at Links Hall, "When Does It or You Begin? (Memory as Innovation): Writing, Performance, & Video Festival." I caught the Friday night set, which brought together Tisa's and Duriel's performances, as well as video clips by father and son team Bryan & Jake Saner and Chi Jang Yin.

I've read Tisa's book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007) in various versions, but I'd never heard Tisa read from the book, and it was a revelation; she read from the Dido chapter, and the charged narrative, which gathers tremendous force all the way up through its final words, a figurative and literal gathering up of the disparate (black) voices she imagines in the London in which that story-essay is set, are still resonating for me. Duriel performed a selection from a new project, "Unquiet Borders & on the Air, a Gallows," which imagines the moment following Emancipation and preceding Reconstruction, in a way that only the multivocal, multivisional Duriel can. The two video pieces worked less well for me, in part because I thought both could have used a bit more context in the form of an introduction, and in the case of the Saner piece, The Inaudibles, which focused on young and older political activists, the divergent strands didn't really come together in the short sliver that I saw. In the post-show talkback, both Tisa and Duriel offered some cogent thoughts in response to the lively questions that moderator Tony Trigilio was asking, particularly in relation to how historical memory, cultural memories, and the lived, everyday experiences of regular people, could be viewed in relation to each other.

Here are some photographs from the event:

Amina Cain introducing the event

Tisa reading from Unexplained Presence

Duriel, performing her work

A still shot from the Saners' film, The Inaudibles

The talkback (l-r): Amina, Tisa, Tony, Jake and Bryan, Duriel, and Jen.

***

The following night, I went to a forum and community discussion, presented by The Silver Room and Tres, on the "Social Responsibility of the Artist" at the Silver Room, in Wicker Park. The panel featured artists Theaster Gates, Jon Bollo, Maritza Cervantes, Courtney Jolliff, and Krista Franklin, among others. Hector Rivera and Sandra Ivelisse Antongiorgi moderated. I won't attempt to recap the discussion and Q&A session except to say that the panelists and most of the audience came down on the side of social responsibility, while also agreeing that artists ought to have as their primary concern doing the best work possible. The l'art pour l'art crowd was a decided minority. Some photos:

The panel (Krista is wearing the white sweater)

Audience

The audience at the forum

The DJ getting ready for the post-forum party

Post-forum viewing and partying

I'll end there, and try to post photos from Tisa's, Krista's and my trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where we caught the Jenny Holzer and Theaster Gates exhibits, which were closing on February 1.