Story Archives of 'poetry'

Juan Felipe Herrera’s poetry, in the words of one critic, is “a manifesto you can dance to.” It’s little wonder. The son of migrant farm workers, Herrera was reared on both the hardships and the heart of California’s campesino community. Cesar Chavez loomed large. So did Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Herrera’s mother, who taught him the power of storytelling, word play, and self-possession. His was a boyhood that kept time to Mexican ballads and San Francisco jazz - a rich brew for a kid given to solitary wanderings and prone to brooding over injustice.

By the 1970s, Juan Felipe Herrera was a pioneer of the Chicano spoken word movement, combining art and activism. Today, he holds the Tomas Rivera endowed chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the Univerisity of California-Riverside. He is the author of 25 books. One of them, One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Books), was just named winner of the PEN/West and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles poetry prizes. At the beginning of that collection, he writes, "I didn’t start out to be a poet. Because I had been silenced, I started out to be a speaker." Juan Felipe Herrera joins Word of Mouth to discuss art and activism from the studios of KUCI in Irvine, Calif.

Watch Juan Felipe Herrera read from One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border:

Here's a poem from a recent issue of the poetry journal Luna:

iraq tree

all the broken boys
and the shredded elms cannot be sewn back
nine generations of weeping for every wound,
all dust howls nine lifetimes, ragged, upright orange flesh open
butterfly seed tomb

colorless, almost transparent standing in between cross-fire
and five hundred pound American bombs and Shiite clerics,
the face of Walt Whitman with a pipe, or Hirschman on Columbus Street
angular, frayed and the cherubic azure of their eyes
upon the dead with fists frozen, rising up, or with shoulders bleached
hunched to serve, they fire the body, love they say, treasure
its rose-stamped holdes, Euphrates across the broken pubis
the leaf branches curled to one side, a mosque remains,
in a bitten wood of syllables, poison and beards, I hear
a mortar broadcast across the globe, general-men in
camouflage, they say nothing has changed, we are en route
to triumph, listen to them

—Juan Felipe Herrera

If you’re looking for a new experience this holiday weekend, consider the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. It’s the first ever state-wide celebration of poets and poetry on the home turf of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Kerouac. The three-day festival features readings, workshops, films and music.

Headlining tomorrow night in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, is poet and author Nick Flynn. His two books of poetry earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other awards. His memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the Pen/Martha Albrand Award. He’s also collaborated with visual artists, worked on an Academy Award-nominated film, authored a play called Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, and is now at work on a new memoir.

Nick Flynn joins us on Word of Mouth to talk about his work and this weekend's festival.

Tonight on the Front Porch, we're re-living the high school experience. Teacher Nathan Graziano has a new book of poetry that puts all the usual high school caricatures under the microscope, from the popular jocks to the dazed stoners to the overly nostalgic lit instructors. His book, Teaching Metaphors, tries to go "beyond the lesson plans…to probe the humanity of the modern high school." He'll share some of his work with us, and we'll hear an assortment of stories from the hallowed halls.

Celia Thaxter’s 1870 book “Among the Isles of Shoals” put the nine rocky islands off the coast of New Hampshire on the national map. At one time the home to thousands, today the Shoals are for the most part uninhabited, but their mystique remains, due in part to the beautiful descriptions by its most famous resident Celia Thaxter. We’ll explore the history, mystery and attraction of our Isles of Shoals on the latest Granite State Stories.

Guests

• Julia Older, Editor of “Celia Thaxter: Selected Writings and Anthology” and author of two novels “The Island Queen: Celia Thaxter and the Isles of Shoals” and “This Desired Place: The Isles of Shoals”
• Laurence Bussey , administrator of Smuttynose Island, founding member and Past President of the Isles of Shoals Historic and Research Association (ISHRA), and owner of Northeast Yachts

This program was originally broadcast on June 22, 2007.