Revolutionary Poets Brigade presents chanteys and poetry hosted by Karen Melander Magoon. This is an online zoom meeting. Go to link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87915475327. Meeting ID: 879 1547 5327
Chanteys and Poetry
Tag: poetry reading
Sacred Grounds Poetry Reading on Zoom
Clara will be the featured poet at the Sacred Grounds Poetry Reading. The series used to be at the Sacred Grounds Cafe on Cole and Hayes. Because of the pandemic it is now online. This is a popular reading. You must email host Dan Brady to get the zoom link. It is not listed. Open mic before the feature. Clara will read between 8:15-8:30 pm.
Poetry Reading at the Black and Brown Social Club
Clara Hsu and Greg Pond will be the featured poets at the Black and Brown Social Club to celebrate its reopening of the poetry reading series. There will be an open mic.
The reading is sponsored by the San Francisco Chapter League of Revolutionaries North America. IRNA.ORG
International Women’s Day Poetry
Panorama of Eternal Night
Please join us for a live poetry reading and music performance! with special guests: Genny Lim, Clara Hsu, and David Wong. The event will take place in the gallery located on the second floor of the Minnesota Street Project.
Clara Hsu is a Chinese American immigrant from Hong Kong. She is a mother, piano teacher, traveler, actor, translator, poet, playwright, a BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) artist and a recipient of the Jefferson Award for public service in 2021. Clara’s children’s play, The Piano, a Play-Movie was selected to screen at the 2021 International Children’s Film Festival Seattle. Gai Mou Sou Rap is Clara’s best known work. Written in 2021 during the height of hate crimes against Asians, the rap has received over a quarter of a million views on the internet and the Palm Beach International Music Award.
Genny Lim was San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett and Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awards. Her award-winning play Paper Angels has been produced throughout the U.S., in Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award. Lim has collaborated with numerous jazz musicians such as Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong and Del Sol String Quartet.
David Wong, Executive Director of Tranquil Resonance Studio, brings his passion for the ancient traditions of China to every note he plays on both guqin and guzheng and every cup of tea he brews. Studying music, arts, and pursuing his graduate studies with masters both here and abroad in China, he actively teaches, lectures, and performs around the San Francisco bay area, always enthusiastic to share all that he has learned and showcase the deep-rooted traditions and music of China.
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Poetry in Chinatown
Four Chinese American poets come together for a dynamic reading on heritage and perspectives. They will be joined by Mike Taylor, songwriter, and Katie Taylor for a music interlude. Tickets are available at Eventbrite.com
Nellie Wong
Nellie is a member of various literary, artistic, and political groups, including Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. In 1989, she received a Women of Words award from the San Francisco Women’s Foundation. With Mitsuye Yamada, Nellie was the subject of the documentary Mitsuye & Nellie, Asian American Poets (1981). Nellie’s poems have been installed in public sites in the San Francisco area. In 2011, a building at Oakland High School was named after Wong.
Clara Hsu
Clara is the director of Clarion Performing Arts Center, a non-profit charitable organization in San Francisco that provides music lessons, workshops, theater and music events. She leads a weekly poetry group at the On Lok Senior Center, and is a member of the Grant Ave Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe that performs throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Clara incorporates poetry into the cabaret shows and dramatic elements in literary readings. She reads in English and Cantonese, a dialect of the Chinese language.
Genny Lim
Genny is the author of the poetry collections Winter Place (1989), Child of War (2003), and Paper Gods and Rebels (2013); the children’s book Wings for Lai-Ho (1982); and the plays Paper Angels (1978) and Bitter Cane (1989), among others. Her work appears in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women (1993), the Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995), and Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island (1980). Lim is the winner of the 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1982, she founded a theater company, Paper Angels Productions, now known as Theatre XX, a company that performs experimental theater. Lim has taught at the New College of California, and her papers are held at UC Santa Barbara.
Jeffrey Leong
Jeffrey is a poet and writer who worked as a public health administrator and attorney for the City of San Francisco. He earned his MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island, the first new translation of this work in almost 40 years. His writing has focused on the Asian American experience including adoption, multiracial families, and student activism during the 1960s. He lives with his wife and daughter in the East Bay.
“TRIPLE SPAR”: A DECADE OF SPARRING WITH BEATNIK GHOSTS
The Warsaw Chronicles 3
The taxi driver was friendly but a little scattered brain. He took me for a long ride to another part of town before realizing that he had misunderstood the address that I gave him. I arrived at the reading 40 minutes later to find a beautiful duet of violin and guitar playing. Without entering the performance space I asked the people at the counter if there is a poetry reading. The girl said no. I was greatly disappointed but decided to go into the space anyway and listen to the music. Then a man came forward and told me that there is indeed a reading but in Polish only. I said YES! That’s what I’ve come for.
The man in the middle (of the photo) read very well and the music that accompanied him enhanced his voice and was never intrusive. I found out at the end of the reading that he was actually an actor reading the poetry of the man on the far left. He had a rehearsal with the musicians the day before.
Poetry Reading at księgarnia Cafe
You ask me how I can listen
without understanding.
I ask you what ‘sex on the beach’ has to do
with a Polish cocktail?
Meaningful words.
Meaningless their meanings.
The poet at the mike mumble-jumbles
mumble-jumbles
“Catastrophe!” cries the taxi driver,
“You want Grochowska, but we’re on Grójecka.”
Meaningless words.
Meaningful their meanings.
It won’t matter as long as I get there,
to hear a different sound in a different place,
where meaning, although meaningless
is rich in its meaninglessness.
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Photo from Ksiegarnia Cafe
Cafe La Promenade
Behold Cafe La Promenade
Poets and writers congregate
To defeat winter’s bitter cold.
Don Brennan, Bill Mercer incite
Attendees are here to recite
Fervent verses, songs and stories
To defeat winter’s bitterness.
All hail Cafe La Promenade.
The new poetry series was born on a cold winter night, to the music of the berimbau. Chuck Bernstein played. A single string vibrating with a stone and gourd. Dan Brady gave the inaugural reading. Poets from far and near joined in the open mike. We remembered our dear friend Steve Mackin, who had attempted a few times to establish a reading in the Richmond neighborhood. Now we have a new hope.
La Promenade Reading series is every first Saturday of the month at 7pm. Cafe La Promenade, 3643 Balboa Street, San Francisco.
Thoughts After a Reading
Going into a bookstore to hear a famous poet, coming out depressed. Was this all that I got from the reading? The words came and went but sadness stayed, like a fully soaked sponge.
Was it the skill of the poet that put me into such a depressed state, or was it something else? Most poetry readings are like social gatherings. There are the good, the bad, and the ugly. The variety brings highs and lows into the realm as the audience tune in and out; and by the end of the evening, after everyone has his/her share of fame, we go home semi-drunk.
The person sitting next to me was fully engaged with the poet’s delivery. nodding, making agreeable utterances now and then. I carried something else. Maybe the poet’s burden.
Photo by Sharat Ganapati.