Gathering Poetz to Purpose
Archived workshop notice. See current gatherings ↗
Gathering Poetz Registration (archived)
The talk of these times treats the beaudacious criminality of this administration as tho it were something new, something more dysfunctional & destructive than the last administration, or the one before that, or before that, before that. Nonsense! It’s always been the same unfolding profit-driven lie.
If you wear the rags & feathers from Salvation Army counters (thank you Leonard Cohen) then every fiber of your being, every cell dancing in the soup of interstitial fluids that is you, knows that ain’t nothing really changed. The hogs have just picked their heads up from the slop, so their faces are fully exposed.
This is America. The ICE patrols sweeping up migrants & citizens alike from courthouse steps & Big Box parking lots—well, ain’t that the patterollers of the antebellum south that Robert Hayden hips us to in Runagate, Runagate?
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
Poets, Poetz be the people speaking truth to the masses these days, & to my telling, in all past days. Poetz speak to the heart, speak of the body’s resonance in the field of absurdities it inhabits. Certainly Baraka, Neruda, Milton, Lorde, Felakuti. It’s the Poetz job to speak truth to the people, as Mari Evans counsels, and to not look away, as Nikky Finney says about the responsibility of the Poet, the artist.
This RootFolkz workshop series aims to uncover the real as it unfolds in the lives of this city’s/region’s Poetz. Join us at BIPOCA Incubator & Gallery during the five Sundays in November. It’s bound to be an experience; it’s bound to be an exploration, it’s bbound to be about being.