A Face to Meet the Faces will be released by The University of Akron Press in February 2012. Oliver de la Paz and Stacey Lynn Brown are hosting an AWP book release party at The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct., four blocks from the Chicago Hilton, on Thursday, March 1, 2012, from 6-7:30 pm. Readers include Tara Betts, Eduardo C. Corral, Nina Corwin, Matthew Guenette, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Marty McConnell, Tomas Q. Morin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patricia Smith, and Brian Turner.

On Friday, March 2, 2012, 6-7:30 p.m. at Harold Washington College, 30 E. Lake Street, Room 102, Chicago, IL. contributors to the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series’ new anthology, VILLANELLES, co-edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali. Free and open to the public. Tara Betts is featured in this anthology, and readers at this event include: Grace Bauer, Robin Becker, Bruce Bennett, Martha Collins, Brendan Constantine, Steven Cramer, Timothy Donnelly, Danna Ephland, Annie Finch, Charles Fort, Claudia Gary, Matthew Hittinger, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Taylor Mali, Patricia Monaghan, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Marilyn Nelson, Kathleen Ossip, Lois Roma-Deeley, Jill Allyn Rosser, Susan B.A. Somers Willett, Kate Sontag, Lisa Vihos, and Ken Waldman.

Saturday, March 3, 2012, 4:30-5:45 p.m. Tara Betts will be presenting at the 2012 AWP Conference panel “Ear Candy: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetic Meter” with Liz Ahl, Jeff Oaks, Annie Finch, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Rooted in a diversity of aesthetic and pedagogical perspectives, this panel focuses on the teaching and learning of meter: how, when, and why might one teach meter to young poets? Is teaching meter like teaching other elements of poetic craft and technique? Is meter akin to music or language when it comes to learning and teaching? How can we help our students sing out rather than slog through? How might activities like scansion, reading aloud, or imitation, help poets develop an ear for meter?

Saturday, March 3, 2012, 6-8 p.m. Aquarius Press/Willow will host a special off-site reading. Details on readers and venue are soon to be announced.

Tara Betts and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina double feature at Equilibrium, a series curated by Bao Phi at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, MN. More info on the time and place will be posted soon.

See larger image Arc & Hue (Perfect Paperback) By (author) Tara Betts List Price: $16.95 USD New From: $16.95 In Stock Used from: $12.12 In Stock

A debut poetry collection.

I haven’t been blogging as much as I would have liked in 2011, and I’m hoping to change that. I just did one of my last readings for the year in Columbia, MD, where I shared the stage with Terrance Hayes as part of HoCoPoLitSo’s (Howard County Poetry & Literary Society’s) inaugural reading for the Lucille Clifton series. We were honored to share the night with one of Ms. Clifton’s daughters too. We talked about how we approach the page, what advice do we offer to young writers, how jazz and hip hop as artistic forms impact poetry. Here’s a photo from that dialogue.

I’m working on interview questions, essays, and poems, and working my way through another semester, but I plan to offer some online workshops and manuscript consultations soon. If you are interested, let me know.

I needed to write something to clear my head before trying to sleep. I feel deeply hurt by the denial of a stay by the U.S. Supreme Court. I’ve been involved in many death penalty protests and several protests against specific cases. This one held open a window that made me feel as if this case might be different. The biases of race and class are undeniable in this particular choice of punishment and throughout the entire prison industrial complex.

I do encourage people to check out the campaigns by Amnesty International, the NAACP, and the invaluable work that The Innocence Project continues to do. I also encourage people to check out Angela Y. Davis’ tiny, but insightful book Are Prisons Obsolete? and the documentary Deadline about the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.

I wanted to share a poem that may change. I needed to write so I can process what happened. Tomorrow, will be another day to move forward.

Not the Words

I signed letter and petition on behalf of Troy Davis,
counted the hours that passed before he was strapped
to gurney for more hours that I clutched and hoped
that my name would be the last one needed to nudge
the tide toward overturning. I am afraid of stilled limbs,
halted breath. Time, a rigid, finite vice clamps down.

The last chance to close one’s eyes should not be
assigned by writ, enforced by rows of black flak jackets.
Inert paper turns into fatal weapon. Last breaths should
not have blueprints. A final shudder precipitated by profile,
a death as a symbol, sketched in the chiaroscuro of melanin
as indictment, set as some sort of relief pressed into lives
that are poor, brown, less than clean, polished wealth.

All of this is so clinical, trapped in metaphors that will not
resuscitate the man who left saying he was innocent. He was
free. Troy Davis is free, but the ink falters when I write such
words. There is no freedom unless the death machine loses gears.
Martina Correia stood away from her wheelchair, and I will stand.
De’Jaun Correia stood fully in his seventeen years. He will stand.
The former warden, an FBI director, and b-boys made their stand.

As midnight presses its fingertips against my eyelids, a gurney
looms in my head. A man strapped to his last hours while
judges deliberate, or not. Those fetters were never named torture,
but innocence claimed is defiance. The semantics of execution
damn the cloud of doubt drifting thick and filmy tonight. Forgive
and forget are not the words. A new vocabulary must be written
for a new South, new evidence, new humanity, new lives intact.

I wanted to blog about something topical today since the news is irritating me, but I decided to make some cupcakes-vegan cupcakes at that.

Some of the ingredients are a bit more expensive, but I definitely feel that the food is a bit more guilt free. The recipe is a slight variation from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Sometimes, they tell you to put a little less in each cupcake filler, but it depends on whether or not you’d like the cupcake to be slightly domed or not. Read the recipe all the way through so you have an idea of how to pace yourself. I decided to share the recipe here and a photo of the finished product.

I just had to take a bite, so you could see the dark, rich red that may be a result of the carob chips that I added to each cupcake.

Vegan Red velvet cupcake STEP 1: 1 cup soy milk whisked w/ 1tsp apple cider vinegar, then set aside to curdle.

Vegan Red velvet cupcake STEP 2: Combine 1 &1/4 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tbsp cocoa powder, 1/2tsp baking soda, 1/2tsp baking powder.

Red velvet cupcake STEP 3: After mixing dry stuff,add 1/3cup EVOO,2tbsp red food coloring,1tsp chocolate extract,2tsp vanilla extract,1/4tsp almond extract. Add soy milk & apple cider vinegar mixture to this as well.

Red velvet cupcake STEP 4: Fold ingredients in until lumps disappear. Add optional carob chips. Fill cupcake liners in pan 2/3 up.

Red velvet cupcake STEP 5: Cook in preheated oven at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes.

Cream Cheese Frosting STEP 6: Soften non-hydrogenated vegan shortening or margarine. Find a bowl w/ high sides & whip w/ electric hand mixer. 1/4 cup vegan cream cheese w/ 1/4cup softened vegan non-hydrogenated shortening.

Red velvet frosting STEP 7: Mix 2cups confectioner’s sugar into vegan cream cheese & shortening 1/2 cup at a time. It will get fluffier.

Red velvet frosting Final STEP: Whip in 1tsp vanilla extract. Frost cooled cupcakes with this sweet frosting.

It’s been raining off and on all day. I can look out of the window and part of the sky is whitish gray and the other half of the sky is blue with clouds. The rain is coming in starts and stops as my keys mimic the cadence of Art Blakey’s “Sportin’ Crowd” so I’m keeping up a steady beat. It’s Friday, and I look forward to Fridays like I did when I taught for the better part of 5-6 days per week in Chicago. When Friday hits, I usually want to be dancing, cuddling with my man, eating some ice cream, maybe a nice dinner or a movie, or a trip to a museum. Today, it just seems like the thunder is grumbling at me. “Where do you think you’re going?” crackles the bellow inhabiting half the sky. It makes me think of Robert Hayden’s poem “Electrical Storm.”

There’s a softness in the air as the rain picks up its momentum. It gets louder, but it’s comforting. When I was a teenager, I remember my mother standing in the doorway of our living room, just within the screen door, as if she was savoring the scent of rain. I imagine the rain strikes like millions of sticks beating against the drum of the earth. The patter running a race like a chorus of excited hearts thumping against sternum. I wonder if it’s not just cleansing. Does water not just keep us alive, but exist to remind us of our own inner rhythms?

There is something to be found outside the hamster wheel, the smack of hand against hand, the trading of cards, being dressed just so, and even the fluttering of pages in books, that one consistent love. I feel it when the rain in the air settles in the hollow near my collarbone. Some sense of vibrant life that makes me like the rain, if I’m in a proper trenchcoat and shoes that don’t get soaked in cold. Being on a train and watching the water pearl its traffic on the windows is even a vision for introspection. I’d felt the same when I turned soil for my mother’s tomatoes in the spring and spread rotting leaves that I’d raked in the fall over that same garden patch months later.

I’m discovering that running for no purpose and missing all the cycles of seasons without appreciating their power is something I cannot do. I’ve always been able to keep working, but the extremes tend to diminish any energy. So, it is days like today, with some sunshine parting the rain, and no sweltering heat or frigid stinging air, that feel best. I’m not a fan of the rain, unless I like what I’m doing inside. Today, I’m just sharing this thought with you. Take a moment to breath and notice the rhythmic nature of water.

“Electrical Storm” by Robert Hayden
Collected Poems edited by Frederick Glaysher

God’s angry with the world again,
the grey neglected ones would say;
He don’t like ugly.
Have mercy, Lord, they prayed,
seeing the lightning’s
Mene Mene Tekel,
hearing the preaching thunder’s deep
Upharsin.
They hunched up, contracting in corners
away from windows and the dog;
huddled under Jehovah’s oldtime wrath,
trusting, afraid.

I huddled too, when a boy,
mindful of things they’d told me
God was bound to make me answer for.
But later I was colleged (as they said)
and learned it was not celestial ire
(Beware the infidels, my son)
but pressure systems,
colliding massive energies
that make a storm.
Well for us. . . .

Last night we drove
through suddenly warring weather.
Wind and lightning havocked,
berserked in wires, trees.
Fallen lines we could not see at first
lay in the yard when we reached home.
The hedge was burning in the rain.
Who knows but what
we might have crossed another sill,
had not our neighbors’ warning
kept us from our door?
Who knows if it was heavenly design
or chance
(or knows if there’s a difference, after all)
that brought us and our neighbors through—
though others died—
the archetypal dangers of the night?

I know what those
cowering true believers would have said.

I wanted to share this review that I wrote of Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata since the book is worth checking out. If you haven’t, maybe this book will share enough about the poems to pique your interest.

DIWATA, Barbara Jane Reyes, BOA Editions, www.boaeditions.org, 2010, 84 pages, $16.00 paper

Barbara Jane Reyes’ third poetry collection Diwata is an insightful retelling of the parallel cosmogonies of Adam and Eve paired with the Filipino story of Malákas and Magandá. A Diwata is a fairy-like creature associated with health and prosperity or illness or tragedy when they are ignored. The poems create a growing web of interconnected creation stories throughout time where women are willful, defiant of the ways of their fathers. They are the diwata who curse and bless. They are heroines and witnesses to the tragedies that poison the land like “Pasig”:
“Tell me, why would the diwata visit this dead, filthy place, to make a/home among its broken things, to drink its filthy water, to breathe its/acrid air?”

In a series of prose poems, litanies with spare lines, and incantations that attempt to heal a land attacked by “sun worshipers,” the women fight the repercussions of past repression while attempting to preserve the culture that shapes them.

In the story of Malákas and Magandá, both are born from bamboo, instead of a Garden of Eden. In “The Bamboo’s Insomnia” and “The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2,” the stalk asserts that there is a poet and “she” is stuck inside the cradle of my bones and tendons. Magandá, an Eve, is the poet. The title character, a Diwata, can be considered a fairy or pixie-like character in Filipino mythology, but here, she is the muse who calls on people to testify, tell stories, and create the world that is needed, and each woman functions in these poems as a diwata herself.

As the poems accumulate, Reyes focuses in on the “Duyong”, which are aquatic herbivorous creatures that were often mistaken for mermaids and crocodiles. Here, the Duyong function as creatures that are attacked by fishermen, as in “Duyong 3:
”They ravish her stinking skin, her fleshy teats, with so many groping man/hands and wet, open man mouths. One by one, they enter her body and/spill so much seed. She cries, and with their spears, they slit her open and/taste a feast of almond oil and sumptuous veal. She cries.//I am certain my song does not resemble hers.”

Declarations like these inform the reader that these women have agency. Sometimes, they retaliate against attackers, as in “Duyong 1″:
”As for their sons, their bodies come slipping deep into my home. Hands/and feet, bound. Salvaged bodies full of soldiers’ bullets, blooming blood/flowers in my water. I sing them to sleep in my garden. If the old men only/knew what care I take, bedding the sleeping sons of fishermen, warming/their bodies in blankets of mud.

As the tumult of purported civilization approaches and corrupts the lives of these couples’ descendants, as is evident in the swift transition from a comfort woman in “A Little Bit About Lola Ilang” to describing sex work in “How I No Longer Believe in Pious Women.” Eve contributes to the implied narrative that the ancient environment will be destroyed, and another beginning will require different women in “Eve Speaks”:
Let the man who cannot dream be a condemned man…/This place is my dreamweaving, its iron sculptures,/framed in light. Flickering chandeliers’ fake fire. Still, wax melts and curls/around my feet. The tables are scratched brass, carved with names/and regrets. You who regret, that is who you become. And you who need,/but but do not know why. Your need opens something in me which knows/to anticipate dread…tell me why you have created me to dread you…Lover, did you not/know I wrote my own creation story? Did you not know we all do.”

In this latter part of Diwata, the women call on natural, supernatural, and divine powers, including “Tocaya” which addresses Saint Barbara (referenced by Reyes as Santa Barbara in an epigraph from Lorca and can be considered Chango in the Yoruba/Santería tradition). The final poem leaves us with “Aswang”—a vampire-like figure in the Phillipines that is often blamed for miscarriages. She describes her frightful façade and leaves herself open to blame for destruction:
“I am the encroaching wilderness, the bowels of these mountains./I am the opposite of your blessed womb; I am your inverted mirror./Guard your unborn children, burn me with your seed and salt,/Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.”

With the introduction of each female figure, Diwata develops into a story of home that can never be reclaimed as it once was, but its vestiges can be retrieved. There are small victories.

The two pieces of advice that I end up giving everyone is (1) you have to make time to consistently write and (2) you should be reading other books if you want to write a book of your own. Since I’ve had so many life changes over the past five years doing both without feeling distracted has been difficult, but I think I managed pretty well. Instead of writing every day, which was my habit, I’d write a few days a week or simply write in class with my students. I realized how important it was to tell people that you may not be able to write every day, but there are people who write every weekend, every night after their children are in bed, an hour every morning before they go to work. Writing, in this sense, is a discipline.

I promised myself that this summer that I would write every day. I would make the time to follow my own advice, so as a result, expect to see more writing here, and in other venues. I’m working on several projects, including writing some short prose pieces and co-editing Bop, Strut, & Dance: A Post-Blues Form for New Generations with Afaa M. Weaver.

After a difficult spring, I am dusting myself off and using the laptop for more than short runs. Like resolutions, promises don’t mean much unless we follow through on them. In the meantime, I will be posting short entries here more regularly.

If there’s a short story that you like, please share it as a comment below. I’ve been reading The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis and rereading Points of View edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny.

To me, there is nothing more exciting than watching someone reinterpret the work that you’ve created, especially when it’s so clear that they understand the intentions of the writing. I experienced that feeling for the first time when Steppenwolf Theatre adapted my poem “Two Brothers on 35th Street” for the stage production “Words on Fire.” The audiences wrote about my piece because it was the only work that featured young people, and many of them recognized this scene of catching a bus near the Howard red line train on the South Side. This idea of putting people that are familiar to me in other mediums is precious. Performing work myself can sometimes be nerve-wracking, but to see how it takes on a life of its own? That makes me giddy. So, imagine, after being a long-time fan of projects like “The United States of Poetry,” how I felt when I encountered the film-making and writing of Nijla Mu’min and I got to share my work with her.

Mu’min integrates poetry and images into her blog. When I got a copy of her chapbook last year, I was taken by her spare lines and the way she got to her point in each poem with such tenderness. Her filmmaking addresses a range of issues and characters, but her cine-poems project is only beginning. What is a cine-poem? A re-telling of a poem in film. Mu’min’s first cine-poem features a silent version Ruth Forman’s “Stoplight Politics” from her Barnard Poetry Prize-winning collection We Are the Young Magicians.

So, I’m happy to share our first collaboration based on my poem “Why I Collect the Hair” from Arc & Hue.

Why I Collect the Hair from Nijla Mumin on Vimeo.