At MOCA, L.A.'s poetry old-guard held out the torch to the young bucks and said... psych!
It was youth's night at the museum's auditorium several weeks ago. That's what the young poets said. Then Luis Alfaro stepped up to the podium, saying he had inaugurated some of the first poetry readings at the museum in the early 1990s and that he was there to represent the youth. Some of the night's poets weren't in kindergarten when Luis first read at MOCA.
Luis's poem sped the audience into the driveways and crashed through the fences of his Pico-Union, Mexican/Chicano upbringing and reminded you why he's decided to write plays for a living. His poem ended with a shaving of the mustache that reminded him of his Mexican father.
19 year-old Dante Mitchell threw down a poem that zipped the audience from "gangsta Bush," to women's basketball, to mother's angel eyes. Dante's a recent high school graduate who's cut his teeth in the Leimert Park scene with Project Blowed. Dante and several of the other poets who read at MOCA credited L.A.'s Mike the Poet with inspiring them to write and perform.
Longtime poetry and arts promoter Mario Davila organized the reading through LAartlab and called it "METAPHORIA." What was unique about this reading was the overlapping of various schools of poetry. Dante's young bucks performed their rapid spitfire, rapped social analysis, Alfaro made the audience feel the tearing of the soul and body torn by three Chicano cultures, while the poetry of Karla Diaz and Linda Gamboa echoed the melancholy voice of the late, great bulldozed barrio poet Manazar Gamboa. Linda and Karla, while about 15 apart in age both took Manazar's writing workshops.
Add to the mix Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, whose performing roots go back to the mid 1990s Chicago, the birthplace, she says, of poetry slams. She helped everyone in the audience tap into their inner Asian American woman.More of these kinds of readings are needed, a mixing and matching of styles, generations and backgrounds. It's not easy to put on this kind of reading. As a poetry organizer you need experience outside your comfort zone, you need to recognize good writing that doesn't sound like your crew's own. Most of the poetry readings these days are neighborly, tribal endeavors. There's nothing wrong with that. Leaving the neighborhood, hearing other voices, hearing the beauty of complete sentences and storytelling can only improve everyone's writing. Right?
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Hey Adolfo – hope all’s well.
Just read your post again and I thought I should add my perspective on the LAartlab spoken word event at MOCA.
Given the feedback of the veterano poets and the audience, your take on how Luis Alfaro and others schooled the younger poets seems like a real miss. All of the Emails and comments I received contain praise for the younger writers – participating poets Linda (Gamboa) and Luis were among the most complementary.
As the project coordinator for the event, I'll share that one of our main goals was to simply highlight what is happening in our city’s poetry scene, no hierarchy or judgments, just an acknowledgement that poetry is alive and well in Los Angeles.
Que estés bien – Mario Davila