San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Culture / Books & Poetry

A Review of ‘Last Days in Ocean Beach’ by Jim Miller; Coping With the End of the World As We Know It

by

Last Days in Ocean Beach by Jim Miller – Book Release Event Friday, April 20, 7-9pm at the Ocean Beach Green Center

Editor’s Note: We’re giving Jim Miller’s column a week off to celebrate the publication of his new book.

By Ian Duckles

Jim Miller’s new book Last Days in Ocean Beach (City Works Press, 2018), explores the question of how to live one’s life in the face of looming catastrophic climate change. The novel, like life, is challenging, depressing, hopeful, sad, and filled with moments of incredible beauty and incredible tragedy and is highly recommended.
  [Read more…]

Still Loving After All These 80 Years

by

If I’m breathing April 18th, 2018,
I will be 80 years old.
And to brag a little bit,
I lived those years
with a lot of love in my soul
and that’s quite an ac-com-plish-ment
for someone with
COLORED written on his birth cer-ti-ficate   [Read more…]

Elizabeth Acevedo – ‘Beloved or If You Are Murdered Tomorrow’ – All Def Poetry | Video Worth Watching

by

From the Huffington Post’s Latino Voices:

Acevedo told The Huffington Post that the poem is inspired by the thoughts that run through her head when she hears that yet another black man has been shot and killed by police. “I was cooking black beans the day when the Jordan Davis case went to trial, and I was distracted, thoughtless in some ways, and the pot boiled over and the beans burned,” Acevedo said. “Something about that image really struck home. How the stove smudged, how the beans look when they’re split open, how heavy my heart was over this kid in Florida. But the history of Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians) also played into the moment. This is a Caribbean dish of simple ingredients, rice and beans elevating the other. It’s also A dish named after the Moor conquest of Spain. The racial dynamics in all of that: the Caribbean, Spain and North Africa, Jordan Davis, coalesced through that metaphor. It was how I was able to enter the poem by exploring that moment and my stake in it as an Afro-Latina and partner of a black man.”

  [Read more…]

Operating Instructions | Geo-Poetic Spaces

by

Prior to surgical intervention
complete a thorough examination
of the subject

Note critical anatomical features
essential to survival
ignorantly puncturing a major artery
has terminal implications
that must be avoided   [Read more…]

Langston Hughes -‘I, Too, Sing America’ | Video Worth Watching

by

Langston Hughes reading his poem “I, too, sing America”. As testament to its enduring impact consider that according to the Poetry Archive, it was written in 1924 and recorded by Folkways in 1955, and that Wikipedia notes: “On September 22, 2016, his poem “I, Too” was printed on a full page of the New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.”   [Read more…]

Broom Man | National Poetry Month

by

The broom man
sweeps up each day
in front of the library—
dreams, hopes, brushed together
with leaves and candy wrappers.
Carrying his broom like a scabbard,
he is a guard at the entrance
of some dark journey.   [Read more…]

Hanif Abdurraqib – “All Of The Ways I’ve Kept Myself Alive” | Video Worth Watching

by

Hanif Abdurraqib performing “All Of The Ways I’ve Kept Myself Alive” at the LA release show for his debut book, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. Filmed at Art Share LA.   [Read more…]

The Third Conning | National Poetry Month

by

Turning and turning over malls and freeways
The drones outrace their wireless signals;
Houses fall apart; grocery carts are filled with gear;
Mere starvation is loosed on half the world,
While others eat designer foods and
Protest they’re entitled to deny the real.   [Read more…]

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book | National Poetry Month

by

By Lyn Lloyd-Smith

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book

Into the coffee shops of idle eyes
She hikes her threads of tat-torn cloth
And residue of mildew breath.
She deftly drags a bulging pram,
Brimming with her rubbish child
Of cradled, cherished, bloated bags,
And crumpled faces off the road,
Her precious offspring
From the moon-blown streets.
  [Read more…]

Melissa Lozada-Oliva – ‘My Spanish’ | Video Worth Watching

by

Continuing the National Poetry Month theme, from the 2015 Women of the World Poetry Slam, here’s Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “My Spanish”.   [Read more…]

It Is My Fault | National Poetry Month

by

San Diego Free Press continues its National Poetry Month coverage with the poem Stan Levin, a local activist with Veterans for Peace.

I was not a good kid,
not at home
not at school.
Once I slapped my first grade teacher
and she slapped me back.
I did not like school
and I did not like kids
who liked school
I’m not smart.
I did not like smart kids
Two high schools threw me out
I couldn’t get a good job.
As soon as I could
I left school
I left home
I left the neighborhood

and everything I was mad at.   [Read more…]

Libros – Grupo Pacuprá | Video Worth Watching

by

Sometimes poetry is found in books. Sometimes music is found in poetry. Can it be that sometimes poetry is found in books as music? Here is the Columbian percussion group Grupo Pacuprá performing their work Libros.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry