Wednesday, May 11, 2016
CMLL Poetry Reading
Proud to say, I actually performed haiku, notably bilingual haiku, in the CMLL poetry reading of today, May 11, 2016.
I am painfully shy about my poetry. I do ok on the fiddle these days, and I know how to charm an audience, but when I'm reading my poetry I can hardly even look at people. I would do better at a slam event, but in this case, there were a number of very good Spanish poets, and I was actually reading a few that had my own bad Spanish in it, and it made me embarrassed. I'd have done better, perhaps, if I'd stayed on the ground I know better.
I showed the new book. Even the 2015 e pluribus, which has a map of El Paso and a monarch on the cover, is of interest to a truly bilingual crowd; the 2016 version, which has a century plant on the hope road in New Mexico, was also of interest. Unfortunately that 2016 version will be redone, because the picture didn't come out too well (I gambled on posterization and lost) and the poems are in the gutter (it's better, I suppose, to have one's poems in the gutter than one's mind)...
One of the presenters was bilingual and presented a poem that was in both Spanish and English, and was set in Las Cruces. Another wrote and translated poems in German and English. It was a good place to explore the process of including other languages and rhythms into a very brief structure. More about that later.
I am painfully shy about my poetry. I do ok on the fiddle these days, and I know how to charm an audience, but when I'm reading my poetry I can hardly even look at people. I would do better at a slam event, but in this case, there were a number of very good Spanish poets, and I was actually reading a few that had my own bad Spanish in it, and it made me embarrassed. I'd have done better, perhaps, if I'd stayed on the ground I know better.
I showed the new book. Even the 2015 e pluribus, which has a map of El Paso and a monarch on the cover, is of interest to a truly bilingual crowd; the 2016 version, which has a century plant on the hope road in New Mexico, was also of interest. Unfortunately that 2016 version will be redone, because the picture didn't come out too well (I gambled on posterization and lost) and the poems are in the gutter (it's better, I suppose, to have one's poems in the gutter than one's mind)...
One of the presenters was bilingual and presented a poem that was in both Spanish and English, and was set in Las Cruces. Another wrote and translated poems in German and English. It was a good place to explore the process of including other languages and rhythms into a very brief structure. More about that later.
