Zygomatik: Piet Verbist in quintet

The zygomaticus major is the muscle in your face from kind of your temple to your mouth. The zygomaticus minor is the one going to  the lower part of your face: together they make all expressions. So actually Zygomatik is a great name for a very expressive Jazz cd. Piet Verbist is the leader of the group, performing on Sunday morning as a quintet. Words that come up while thinking of the concert are:
Full
power
unpretentious high quality
expressive
jazz funk
rock
Above and Beyond brings the fragility of bow on strings, from lust to lost, the drums gather and accent the delicacy of the quintet. Their names: Herman Pardon on the drums, Bram Weyters piano, Vincent Brijs and Matt Renzi (San Francisco) bass and tenor sax...
The 4th piece had a genteel start, hands on drum, almost oriental, in a beautifully structured time and improvisation and thereafter we fall into Piet's magnificent: PMS Alert! read: Piet's Manic Scream Alert! Belief me it was like a rush, soft and wild in the discipline of a musical structure. Great stuff!

Poetry as Insurgent Art

Follows an extract from a message from Ms Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO: On this World Poetry Day 2010, let us recall that poetry is a universal country in which peoples may meet through words of all colors, rhythms and musicality. Words that, regardless of the language from which they blossomed, reach out far for a light that captures the very essence of the human being, the dignity of each person. UNESCO, committed to its mandate to fully promote the democratic principles of dignity, equality and mutual respect perceives poetry as a vital resource.

Yes poetry is alive and kicking but nit really thanks to Unesco, but thanks to the pets writing, reading, performing, small publisher spreading the words of poets, the translators who build bridges, further understanding. That is why from one day we organize a poetry festival starting March 17 in salon 12b with Job Degenaar and his book ICH BIN * I AM. Assisting poets will also have time to read and share their work. The activity o the actual poetry day is still being organized. Then the second event is on March 23 three poets, diverse in their way of writing will present each a book in Gallery The Black Panter in Antwerp: Annie Reniers with a trilingual book (Dutch, German and English): Letters of Light. Her reading is followed by Roger Nupie with  the also trilingual book. The last pet is Annmarie Sauer with a bi-lingual book Traces/Sporen. March 29 in the literary café den Hopsack in Antwerp it will be the Bart Stouten party with the trilingual book Open Heart. All books produced by poet Fred Schywek. April is poetry month in USA, so while being there we'll have a Desert Poetry Night with guest from San Francisco. We do all this to give a voice to more poets, to let people hear diverse forms of writing. Yet also because the Unesco system is rather cumbersome to work with as independent artists and to claim poetry as an insurgent art:

Poetry as Insurgent Art  Lawrence Ferlinghetti
 

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

2nd European Poetry Festival, 9/17/2011

In a week the first guests of the Festival will arrive. First early in morning flying in from San Francisco is devorah major who has advise and strong thoughts to offer. The first poem she'll read is: tempest. Storm in Dutch.

does the ocean understand
the land she smooths and softens
   
put a value on the minerals she extracts
from shells she has pounded
from bones she has chewed
from wood she has sucked
from iron she has bathed

does the ocean see her color
liquid crystal transformed
when painted by sun and dusted by silt
until she becomes gray and brown 
blue and silver, sparkling green froth
as she grows and recedes
paying no attention
to the sufferance of humans
beyond offering the gift of her song
that hums in singular contentment
or howls a deep enduring sadness

does the ocean feel the shape
of each mountain she contains

how some of her lithe torso
with the gentlest of rotating currents
or through the thrusting of storms
cuts paths and rounds ridges
spoon caves and craft nooks
where life finds sanctuary
or meets destruction

does the ocean plan her lessons

stillness without quiet
light inside darkness
how she nurtures life
and how she ends it
without pity or remorse

Follow up on high end ghetto

I need to correct something  I wrote in the last posting: high end ghetto. I transpired this morning that the weapons the man brandished were FAKE. The policeman got injured by a rubber bullet from one of his 'toy-guns'. His ploy was to commit suicide by policemen shooting at him.

In these economically difficult times, people get deeper and deeper in trouble and more and more psychologically imbalanced people live in the streets. We saw it in San Francisco where after two days you knew who slept where, who begged where, what route another followed. One also knew who was slightly aggressive and who was not. We live in difficult times.

devorah major

devorah major is one of the featured poets who will perform and read at the 2nd festival of European poetry. She will travel from San Francisco to Antwerp. She has been invited to read and perform poems from the upcoming anthology Harbors of the West and some powerful anti war poems. You can read a poignant poem about her ancestry.

I am a California born granddaughter of West Indian documented and undocumented immigrants, and Eastern-European immigrants (all documented I believe but I am not as aware of this side of my family line.) As a second generation writer I have found the universe of words, where one can create other worlds, other times, or freeze time or place as it is, to be a place of power, comfort, terror. Poetry found me first, later it was fiction and still later creative nonfiction found a way to carve a place in my writing soul. Words stuck, cut through my tongue, healed, confronted, questioned, demanded, flowed. I wrote while single, while in and out of love, as a new mother, and then as a poet in residence at a cultural center while my second child grew in my womb. I wrote through the painful dissolution of a difficult marriage and through biting poverty as a singe parent. And I still write- as woman black and proud, born in a family which has for generations struggled to make a better way , a more just world. And my writing has borne fruit. Thus far four books of poetry, two poetry chapbooks, two novels, and myriad single poems, short stories and non-fiction essays have been published.

   I have written of family, of the streets, of struggle in both poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. I have performed my poems on war and peace, love and survival in England and Wales, in Bosnia, in Northern and Southern Italy, and at innumerable cultural and political gatherings in the US. I have served as Poet Laureate of San Francisco 2002-2006. Poet, novelist, internationally touring performer my books include street smarts, where river meets ocean, and with more than tongue, An Open Weave and Brown Glass Windows. For over twenty years I performed and recorder with Opal Palmer Adisa as a part of the poetry jazz performance group “Daughters of Yam.” I am featured on two Daughters of yam CDs as well as four other music and poetry compilations. Completed forthcoming collections are teardrops in the mouth of the moon and treasure hunting. I write as witness and as questioner. I write as one who loves. I cobble together my living as a writer, performance poet, poet in residence in community and/or institutional settings, and part time lecturer at an art college.

DEVORAH MAJOR