People I'm feeling right now:

M.C. Siegel: mcpoet.blogspot.com
The honest truth is that when I feel like I'm resisting this tendency I, for the life of me, cannot write. Emotional anguish and solitude are the perfect catalysts for my writing. Sadly enough, when I'm happy it's like being on soma, I have no ambition to commit my thoughts to paper. All I want to do is stay happy, kill time, and ignore the issues that make for the majority of my writing. It's just like drug-addiction...and it's the most normal thing in the world to do. The question I'm always facing is whether I want to drift through life in a cloudy haze of happiness, or if I want to confront the monster under my bed, even if that means sacrificing some of that "happiness" in favor of a somewhat different form of satisfaction, and ultimately one that I value much more than the former.

It's like John Stuart Mill saying that it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than the pig satisfied. I used to always argue that it's better to be the pig, because the pig has no idea what it's like to be Socrates. The pig is content to roll in its own slop all day long without a single solitary care in the world. I, on the other hand, have a million troughs all around me, but choose not to eat. I choose to indulge my dissatisfaction so that (metaphorically at least) I might be Socrates.

Jessica Torres: paranoidpoet.blogspot.com
i have to admit that i felt like i didnt deserve to be thanked like i did because i really didnt do anything but read my work and fall in love with it/them. the boys took me onboard only recently and because of that i felt awkward hearing my name being called out. but they did so because they thought i represent what acentos is all about and what we want to do with poetry for the now and later. so i kept on telling myself that they are adding my name for the future..not quite for the past. it will always be o's and fish's idea materialized.. but it has become my place. algarin was sonorous. mayda was spoken word. open and closed mic was what really made me smile. hosting for those few minutes was nervy but i gave it a go...though i thought of eight million other things i could have said--once i had already gotten off the spot.

F. Omar Telan: www.subfab.com
I was at a conference last fall where there were a number of administrators who work in dance organizations. One of the major discussions that I was in the room for, but could not contribute to was about getting local media to pay attention to what was happening at their venues. As I came to understand it, dance, as an art, is no longer an art form that is appreciated by overall society. Somewhere along the way stopped being for the audience and became for other dancers and choreographers. Whether or not this opinion is held by dance enthusiasts nationwide or only by the people who were in the room is unknown to me. What I do know is that from the vast majority of dances I have seen, the only thing I've been able to appreciate is the sheer athleticism of these bodies. Okay, I'm lying; I've also giggled a great deal at how silly some of what is obviously meant to be intellectually deep.

Mara Jebsen: marajebsen.blogspot.com
I lost it again in my writing class.
Race again.
One writer chose to do a persona poem as a black man, but he was
really sheepish about it, worried about whether he had the right.

I said, yes, in theory, if his intentions were right,
but that in this case the the voice didn't come off authentic and you have to watch for racial ventriloquism.
But the prof went off on a tangent about the natural need to impersonate, the existence of racial difference as a recent phenomenon (she studies ancient Greece, I think) an finally, alluded to something about tribalism, happening everywhere. like look at Rwanda and Burundi.
While I believe her intentions to be good, and her point about racial difference as an unnatural construction to be interesting, I think largely accepted as valid, at each point I took her on, until the Tribalism thing came up, and I was the little teapot, steamed up, out-bursting, emotional, pink, sweating and loud impossible. I know too much about this.
She apologized a bit, and deferred gracefully to my knowledge/emotion, but I still came off like an idiot for losing it like that. I don't know. Amongst my program people, I am not everybody's favourite person.

As it's pretty clear that louder than words will be getting an extended run - just confirmed: Friday, May 21st @ 8pm - I've created a new blog specifically for it at http://louderthanwords.blogspot.com. Click it, bookmark it, and link to it from your own site or blog!

It's going to be a group effort, with Eric and Diane - and hopefully even Helen popping in as our Hawaii correspondent! - posting along with me, about the show, continuing some of the debates that are raised, baiting prospective guest features...you name it!

I also added a post-by-post commenting feature so the audience interaction can continue even after the show is over.

Technology rocks!!!

From: Bob Holman
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 12:22 AM
To: 'Guy Lecharles-Gonzalez'
Subject: WOW


So much to say, but overall, UNBEFUCKINLIEVABLE

Please forward to Eric, Helen, and crew.

Let's talk. How about 8pm Friday May 14?

B

More than any other feedback I've received on the show so far, this was the most gratifying, especially taken in tandem with his initial comment at the end of the show about it far exceeding his expectations.

It exceeded even mine.

I was an anxious wreck the couple of hours before the show started as we drove in from Westchester after dropping the kids off at grandma's for the night. It occurred to me that there were so many firsts I was facing with this show: an untested format; a super-tight schedule; a venue with people assigned to specific jobs that knew what they were doing. For a control freak like me, there was so much out of my direct control, my stomach was churning.

By 7:59pm, everyone involved in the show was in the house and we were ready to go. Breathe...

[The rest of this entry has been moved to the official louder than words blog at http://louderthanwords.blogspot.com. Click it, bookmark it, and link to it from your own site or blog!]

It's 4:30pm as I start to write this, 27.5 hours before louder than words premieres.

I still can't believe that it all came together so quickly and am more than a little nervous about both the turnout and the response. The concept has received a lot of positive feedback but, like many of my favorite sports teams over the years, it's not about how things look on paper. It's about execution. So many variables in the mix, so much of it completely out of my hands... Ironic that one of the things that triggered the desire to do the show was Cristin's comment to Morris about not being able to control the poetry read onstage!

I'm not the least bit worried about the poetry as everyone I've picked, for both shows, I have the utmost confidence in. It's the debate portions of the show, the real meaty stuff, that concerns me.

Roger and Taylor have the potential for being a volatile, controversial combination if we can push the right buttons. There was a moment two days ago when Eric, Helen and I met that we realized our focus was a bit too narrow and things could be brought to a halt by an unexpected moment of clarity from either of them. Or by their simple refusal to play along. I'm not really worried about the latter, though.

Judging by what he wrote about the show on his calendar, Taylor's coming prepared to have fun with it:

I am looking forward to this immensely because Guy is so incendiary and opinionated that he is fun to bait and argue with, but Eric says I should be ready to answer some pretty fank and honest questions about the choices I have made as a performance poet. So maybe Guy is planning a little ambush of his own.

On the other hand, I'm not really sure about what Roger's thinking. I'm expecting him to be on guard a little in the beginning but hoping his competitive spirit gets him riled up as we put on the full-court press.

As it is, they're two very different personalities, with Taylor being more open, while Roger is a bit more nuanced. At their core, though, I think they're very similar in the way they approach things.

Then there's Eric and Helen...the loose cannon and the wild card. As much as people are expecting me to push things, Eric's the one to watch out for. Which is why I wanted him to co-host with me. He's not afraid to offend with honesty or to speak from his own experience and own it. And Helen? She's probably the smartest person that will be on the stage and is like a hollow point bullet when she takes aim at a target. Of all the people on the scene, she's one of the few I'd be afraid to get on their bad side. Most poets are blowhards but she's the real deal.

27 hours and eight minutes to go. {shiver}

Hope to see you there!

PS: My Guestbook is getting jealous of the TagBoard. The quick comments are fun but where's the beef? Hit me off!

Been reading Esmerelda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals simultaneously over the past couple of weeks, and thoroughly enjoying them both.

I was concerned that Santiago's book would turn out to be another semi-autobiographical disappointment along the lines of Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, with a Lifetime TV plot full of "exotic" archetypes and cliché. Fortunately, it's a cut above that, largely because her writing is much less forced. It reads more like a well-written memoir than a pretentious literary whitewash. One of her strengths, that Danticat shares, is her talent for painting vivid pictures of her childhood home. Of course, I'm only a third of the way into the book and she hasn't been transplanted to New York yet, which is where Breath really started to fall apart so...I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I'm further along in Alinsky's primer for wannabe radicals and feel kind of like a rookie pitcher that's used to throwing straight heat being introduced to fundamental mechanics and a slider. It's rare to come across a book that crystallizes many of the things you believe in and try to live by but have never been able to properly put into words. Or action. There's quite a few things that turned my head and offered some answers to past failures. That I was two years old when it was first published - in 1971 - and yet it remains on point about the continuing ills of our society is both amazing and sad at the same time.

One of his most interesting ideas is the difference between an organizer and a leader:

Having his own identity, [the organizer] has no need for the security of an ideology or a panacea. He knows that life is a quest for uncertainty; that the only certain fact of life is uncertainty; and he can live with it. He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity. Because of these qualities, he is unlikely to disintegrate into cyncism and disillusionment, for he does not depend on illusion.

...Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation. He conceives of creation as the very essence of the meaning of life. In his constant striving for the new, he finds that he cannot endure what is repetitive and unchanging. For him hell would be doing the same thing over and over again.

This is the basic difference between the leader and the organizer. The leader goes on to build power to fulfill his desires, to hold and wield power for purposes both social and personal. He wants power himself. The organizer finds his goal in creation of power for others to use.

That's a healthy meal to digest on for anyone that believes they're really "doing" something with their lives. You know, beyond living the Nike slogan and being like Mike.