Barbara jane reyes biography of barack obama

For the last dozen years, October 20th has been the day America has celebrated the National Day on Writing. I’ve been hosting poetry events for it dating back to October 2011 when I first learned about the occasion. This year over the course of 48 hours from October 18th to the 20th, I hosted three poetry events and visited former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez to commemorate the day. We did two events honoring the National Day on Writing on October 19th because of scheduling and logistical reasons. And though for so many of us every day is the National Day on Writing, I’d like to take time here to celebrate a constellation of poets, writers, students and professors who tirelessly give themselves to promote writing and fellowship around the spoken and written word.

In the Fall of 2011 I was beginning graduate school at Cal State LA after a 14-year gap from graduating UCLA in 1997. The time between the two schools was spent freelance writing, teaching and giving city tours as a tour guide. More than anything though, I had hosted countless open mics dating back to 97-98, Hosting open mics has played a major role in my development as a writer. I enjoy sharing space with other writers and it’s amazing how many writers got their start from going to open mics. Therefore it was only natural that when I started grad school, I would host on campus open mics with both undergraduate and graduate students alike. I instantly found two professors who supported the cause: Dr. Lauri Scheyer and Dr. Christopher Harris.

How It All Started

The first open mic I hosted at Cal State LA was celebrating the National Day on Writing a decade back. The date was October 20th, 2011. We set up shop next to the Engineering & Technology Building on the southeast side of the Cal State LA campus, adjacent to a large tree. Besides the microphone and speakers, we had a massive bulletin-board where people could pin a short musing they wrote on one of the index cards w

Long Line of Beginnings

a review by Bruce Isaacson

The Poetry Deal, by Diane di Prima, San Francisco Poet Laureate Series no. 5, City Lights Foundation, San Francisco, 2014, 109 pages, $11.95 paperback

"BEAT" IS PERHAPS the last acknowledged poetry movement to create a broad cultural impact on Western society—it's mores, politics, the ways we relate to one another, the ways we relate to ourselves in the mirror. Diane di Prima is one of a few seminal Beat poets. In her first new full-length book of poetry in decades, here is a major poet working at the peak of her powers. Now approaching the end of a writing life, di Prima is taking stock of her ideals, ambitions, of progress achieved and unachieved. Because of the way America adopted and followed the Beat movement in her era, in an important way, the book assumed a dimension of America looking back on itself.

Throughout, di Prima reflects on the idealism that brought her from New York, on the social movements of her times, and on the city she has loved and lived and, in her way, led for almost forty years. In this book you find the San Francisco where the young went to be reborn, where a newer-easier-better lifestyle took shape and took hold. For those idealists who have mused about "what happened to the Sixties?" di Prima has an answer. They're alive and well in this book, in di Prima's uncompromising insistence on a sentient future built on sustainable lifestyles. But it's more than that. In principle and in poetry, di Prima is all about people—loved ones, family, social observations of simple interactions that show larger truths.

The book is also emblematic of San Francisco in a more specific way, in that it's a publication celebrating her installment as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. The book opens with her Laureate lecture, and this reader's initial reaction illustrates the larger grace of her book and her vision. As a lecture, a discussion about poetry, it seems at first unrealisti

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Rumpus Poetry Editor Brian Spears conducted the following interview via email.

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The Rumpus: I love the way you work with creation myths in Diwata, especially because you pull from multiple backgrounds. What drew you to that concept, and what were the big challenges you faced in working that soil over?

Barbara Jane Reyes: Thank you for reading Diwata, first of all. I’ve been influenced by Filipino writers and artists whose source material are the indigenous arts and cultural productions of the islands. The musicians Joey Ayala and Grace Nono were my “way in.” Ayala introduced me to the term, “Bagong Lumad,” the “new native,” or the “altered native,” or “the alternative,” as he wrote in his liner notes to one of his albums. In other words, how have the “natives” survived modernization and urbanization, how do they continue their cultural practices now, in the 21st century. The themes in Joey’s songs also espouse values we could call “indigenous”—environmental advocacy, reciprocity, et al.

Nono, I believe, is an ethnomusicology teacher at University of the Philippines. She’s recorded various chants, songs, and other orally transmitted narratives in different communities. One of her albums which has had a profound affect on my poetics is Isang Buhay, which means, “One Life.” So the songs on this album are a life cycle, a series of rites of passage, and they contain some wonderful call and response, incantation, praise, and lament. The quality of her voice as well is just treme

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

The essays of Maria Victoria A. Grageda-Smith and Barbara Jane Reyes in

Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America, Edited by Abayomi Animashaun with Introduction by Kazim Ali

(Black Lawrence Press, 2015)

BOOK LINK

In its Submission Call for Others Will Enter the Gates, editor Abayomi Animashaun and publisher Black Lawrence Press provided four prompts for potential contributors:

a)    Influences

b)    What it means to be a poet in America

c)     How work fits within the American poetic tradition, and

d)    How work fits within the poetic tradition of the (poet’s) home country

Philippine-born Maria Victoria A. Grageda-Smith presents the longest essay in this anthology as she adhered closer than many other contributors to providing fully-fleshed out answers to the four prompts. (Grageda-Smith is the author of a recently released a poetry collection, Warrior Heart Pilgrim Soul.) I much appreciated her taking the time and effort to write a long piece as such allows her not to elide the complexity of the many issues raised by the prompts—as she notes, what exactly is “America” and who defines?

Also effective was her use of Socratic questioning to investigate the issues—questions rather than declarative statements allow spaces for other views besides what she might hold as well as fit how the same question or prompt can elicit differing views and, even from the same person, views that change (evolve) over time. For example:

“Is ‘being’ an American writer a function of ‘place,’ of where we live and do the act of writing? Or is our identity determined by nationality roots, the dominant socio-cultural construct that thereby becomes the frame of reference for our work?”

Grageda-Smith offers a variety of insights. For example, s