Elena Martinez, advisory board member for Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco) and folklorist at City Lore, blogs about the P&W-supported readings with the Bronx Music Heritage Center (BMHC). Martinez has an MA in Anthopolgy and an MA in Folklore from the University of Oregon. She co-produced the documentary, From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale, which won the National Council of La Raza 2007 ALMA Award for Best TV Documentary. She is currently on the Advisory Boards for Casita Maria/Dancing in the Streets' South Bronx Cultural Trail, WHEDco's Bronx Music Heritage Center, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archive at Hunter College.

Since 2010, I have been part of a group of musicians, artists, advocates, and educators driving the planning and development of the Bronx Music Heritage Center (BMHC). We were brought together by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco), a Bronx-based nonprofit that sees value in preserving and promoting Bronx music and cultivating Bronx artists as a way to spur neighborhood revival and bring cultural programs to the community. Currently, BMHC programming takes place in the BMHC Laboratory, a storefront in the Crotona East neighborhood of the South Bronx.

This fall, I worked with Grammy-nominated musician Bobby Sanabria to co-curate Bronx Rising! Music, Film & Spoken Word of the Borough, a new series at the BMHC Lab. Our goal was to showcase art about the Bronx, by Bronx artists, or significant to the Bronx community. Over the course of the series we maintained a loyal audience but struggled to get community members, who might peer in the windows, to come into the Lab and stay awhile.

Thanks to Poets & Writers, we were able to present two exceptional Bronx Rising! poetry nights in honor of Puerto Rican Heritage Month. On November 19, 2012, we hosted Americo Casiano, an original Nuyorican Poet. Americo was backed by his NuYoRican Poetry Jazz Ensemble, which accompanied his poetry seamlessly. During the program, two young men, enticed by the activity they viewed from the sidewalk entered the Lab. These newcomers actively listened, participated, and quickly became Lab “regulars.”

The December program paid homage to the declamadores of Puerto Rico, who use the language and themes of the area’s African heritage throughout the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. While the declamadores work within oral tradition, historically literary poets have also been proponents, among them Julia de Burgos (Puerto Rico) and Federico Garcia Lorca (Spain), whose poems were included in this program. The poetry was recited by organizer and declamador Sery Colón, Prisionera (Paula Santiago), and Tato Laviera, another original member of the Nuyorican Poetry Movement. This evening was once again punctuated by a few new faces that had been drawn to the prophetic personalities and socially-minded works filling the Lab. Robert, a first-time visitor, likened the event to “a revival." He said, “Once the crowd got going, the energy was infectious and I began to understand why these powerful messages needed to be delivered that way.”

These events, where new community members interacted with the BMHC, were symbolic for the series. Over the last few months, audience members who came into the Lab for hip hop stayed for Latin Jazz. People who came in for a photography exhibit returned for African drums.

On our last evening of Bronx Rising! Word(s) on the Street, five minutes before the program started, I realized we had a new problem on our hands. We ran out of chairs. For the first time, the BMHC Lab was packed to the brim with nearly 100 audience members. With this momentum, we are looking forward to our next season. We hope to see you there.

Photo: (left to right) Chris Nieves, Tato Laviera, Prisionera, Sery Colón, Elena Martinez, Jorge Vazquez. 

Photo Credit: Thomas Haskin.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

PW-funded poet Camille Dungy blogs about the daily life of writers and the role Poets & Writers' Readings/Workshops program plays in that life. Dungy is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She has published three collections of poetry—Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press); and What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press).

1) The writer asks questions.

2) The writer answers those questions.

3) The writer elaborates on the answers. In other words, a writer doesn't just stick with ROYGBiV answers, but answers questions the way a bird can see colors, as in more completely, more complexly, more deeply than most humans can imagine.

4) The writer imagines.

5) The writer worries. Does anyone care? Does it matter? Is anyone out there? Can anyone see what I say I have seen? Does anyone care?

6) The writer asks a series of questions that override the worry for awhile. What, for instance, is it about writing, the writer asks, that would cause a group of young people in Mozambique, a nation devastated by decades of war and until recently listed as one of the 10 poorest in the world, to found Revista Líteratas, a blog dedicated to discussing the vibrancy of Afro-Lusophone literature? The writer won't rest until she can begin to understand what is it about the literature that keeps the writer going back to the page, even if the page is written in something as foreign as Portuguese.

7) The writer works toward penning answers to those questions. This is what the writer might call the spreading of truth. This is what the world might call translation.

8) The writer elaborates, wondering how the time she spends writing her own poems or translating others' can honor the time writers in organizations like California Poets in the Schools spend teaching second grade students, and high school students, and hospital-bound children, and children moving through the juvenile correction system, and students moving past the juvenile correction system, and junior high school students, and first graders how to learn to love poetry. The writer could go on and on about the importance of expanding people's access to literature.

9) The writer worries that the questions she is asking have been asked already or that the answers, those particular answers the writer spent so much time elaborately imagining in tones far beyond red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and even violet, have been written already by someone who is better at writing than the writer believes herself to be. The writer also imagines that the answers she has taken such care elaborating upon will reveal Poets & Writers' secrets and will, she half worries, trigger the release of some agent who will set out hot on her tail. Will the agent laugh at the writer's tail?

10) The writer asks what on heaven's earth is the relationship between a tail and a trail and a tale and when the words diverged or converged, if ever they did either; and how to most colorfully get this cacophony of ideas down on the page without confusing the reader, if there is a reader out there to confuse; and if these are questions worth spending time writing about...

That's what writers do all day.

Go ask a writer.

Photo: Camille Dungy.  Photo credit: Marcia Wilson/Wide Vision Photography.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-supported poet James Arthur recently gave a reading at Seattle’s Hugo House in celebration of Copper Canyon Press. Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, an Amy Clampitt Residency, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. His first book, Charms against Lightning was published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2012. Event coordinator Elaina Ellis blogs about the event below, and has a few questions for Arthur.

Who do I write for?
For you, and everything alive inside of you.
                --Vicente Aleixandre

On December 14, Copper Canyon Press launched our fortieth anniversary celebration at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, elbow to joyful elbow with nearly two hundred of our closest friends. This was no typical end-of-year soiree, and it was definitely not your average poetry reading. It was a poetry party, and it was every bit as nerdy and exciting as that sounds.

For the first hour of the event, we simply let conversations unfold. Highlights in the crowd included the teenager who shyly inquired how she might learn to write poetry; the seventy-three-year-old visual artist who told us, “I came for the food, I’m staying for the poems”; and faces from all corners of the literary world, including booksellers, slam poets, and teachers.

At  eight p.m. we ushered the crowd into the theater, where local writers including Ed Skoog and Matthew Dickman performed the works of C.D. Wright, Hayden Carruth, June Jordan, Natalie Diaz, and Pablo Neruda. Our featured poet for the evening, James Arthur, gave an impassioned reading that was supported by Poets & Writers. He was met with audible enthusiasm from listeners, and we couldn’t help but hope that this room might represent the future of poetry. We asked James to share his thoughts below:

We had quite a lively crowd at this particular reading. How does the character of an audience impact you?
 
I depend on the crowd’s enthusiasm. When an audience is excited, I get excited. If an audience seems bored, I take that to heart. I know some poets feel uncomfortable reading their poems publicly, and are writing primarily for the solitary, silent reader; I have no argument with those writers. But I want my poems to be heard. Half the meaning is in the rhythm.
 
Readers today seek poetry in a variety of venues: e-books, YouTube, poetry slams, and of course that old-fashioned bookshelf. Where do you hope poetry goes from here?
 
E-books and the internet have already affected how poetry is published, and I’m sure they’re affecting how poetry is written, too. My method is pretty old-fashioned; I go for long walks, I look at the things around me, and I compose my poems by sound association.
I try not to cultivate any prescriptive ideas about how poetry in general should develop. It’s easy to get drawn into arguments about how poetry should be, and about how other people should write—but for me, at least, those debates are unhealthy. They eat away at my doubt and curiosity, and those are the two qualities that a poet needs most.

Who do you write for?

I want my poems to explore serious questions and still be widely accessible. I write for anyone who’s listening! 

Photos: Top: "poetry party" participants (James Arthur is on the right). Credit: Hugo House. Bottom: James Arthur. Credit: Shannon Robinson.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes one fiction writer for a body of work, were announced today. Of the ten authors only three write in English, including American novelist Marilynne Robinson, who was first short-listed for the award in 2011. The winner, who will be announced in May, will receive sixty thousand British pounds. 

Representing nine different countries, the finalists were annouced this morning at the Jaipur Literature Festival. The list includes U R Ananthamurthy of India, Aharon Appelfeld of Israel, Lydia Davis of the United States, Intizar Husain of Pakistan, Yan Lianke of China, Marie NDiaye of France, Josip Novakovich of Canada, Marilynne Robinson of the United States, Vladimir Sorokin of Russia, and Peter Stamm of Switzerland. 

While many of this year's authors are relatively lesser known, Robinson, who teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is no stranger to literary prizes. Her debut novel, Housekeeping (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982) won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; what is perhaps her most widely known novel, Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and her most recent novel, Home, also published by FSG, received the 2009 Orange Prize. 

The current panel of judges, which has grown in size from previous years, includes chairman Christopher Ricks, critic and translator Tim Parks, critic Elif Batuman, and novelists Aminatta Forna and Yiyun Li. On the Man Booker International website, prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco attributes the wide range of finalists to the expanded scope of judges, each who represents a different geographical focus. “Now that we have five judges, we have been able to read in far greater depth than ever before,” she says. “Fiction is now available in all sorts of forms and in translation in more countries. This list recognizes that and is the fruit of the judges' collective reading.”

The award is given every two years to a living author who has published original works of fiction in English, or whose books are widely available in translation. The finalists and winners are chosen solely by the judges; there is no application process. 

Past winners of the prize include American novelist Philip Roth, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and Albanian author Ismail Kadare, who won the inaugural prize in 2005. The winner of the 2013 prize, who may also choose a translator of their work to be awarded fifteen thousand pounds, will be announced on May 22 in London.