Tag Archives: poetry

GuerrillaReads No. 55: Lindsay Halladay

Posted on November 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Poet, spoken word artist and actress Lindsay Halladay has a heart that is so zen, it needs to beat only every now and then. Just watch this guerrilla reading of her poem, Zen, and you’ll understand.

Halladay, aka The Lindz, has performed sold-out shows for the LA Women’s Theater Festival, and she  partnered with Declare Yourself, a non-partisan voting initiative founded by Norman Lear. She’s also been nominated for the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant (FAAR) through The Ford Foundation and The Hip-Hop Theater Festival.

Read more about The Lindz on her website.

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GuerrillaReads No. 54: Amber Howard

Posted on November 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Amber Howard is a SoCal poet. Her book, Fallen, was written during a difficult year in her life. Howard describes it as “personal and observational takes on love, lust, self-discovery, dreams and musings on life.”

Howard did a guerrilla reading at the 10th annual West Hollywood Book Fair.

More on her website.

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GuerrillaReads No. 51: Occupy Poetry!

Posted on October 23, 2011 | 4 Comments

I dropped by Occupy LA again today, this time with a few gallons of water and a copy of my book, The Streetwise Cycle, to donate. The guy at the library told me that poetry and plays are the most popular items getting checked out. Which is great news! That’s definitely not what they’re pushing at the big box corporate bookstores.

While I was there, the library organized a poetry reading. Some folks read works by famous poets, while others read or performed their own work. Two of them were kind enough to do guerrilla readings of their own poems on camera.

First up, Courtney Klink.

I thought these lines from her poem were particularly timely:

Liliana is singing a sparkling revolution
It’s too bad no one’s listening.

Next is Tina Xu:

My favorite lines:

I can’t get by one day without wanting to burst
So teach me, will you,
Teach me to shine on like you.

GuerrillaReads would love to post more work from Occupy writers! Send us your video, or drop me a line.

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GuerrillaReads No. 41: Jenny Toune

Posted on September 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Guerrilla reader Jenny Toune is a poet, performer, yogi, tap dancer and drummer. She’s been published in various anthologies, including the Award Winning Australian Writing 2011. She’s currently working on her first poetry ebook and full-length manuscript.

Toune describes herself as “self-taught, self-funded, self-obsessed, experimental, experiential, expounder of the word and the beat.”

As many of the best poets are.

More about Toune aka “Red Uncensored” on Facebook.

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GuerrillaReads No. 40: Jen Hofer

Posted on August 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

Today’s guerrilla reader is Jen Hofer, poet, translator, urban cyclist and more. Here she reads several poems from her translation of Myriam Moscona‘s Negro marfil (Ivory Black), from indie publisher Les Figues Press. As she tells us in the video, this book itself is a visual object to accompany the poetry on the page.

In her essay, Suspension of Belief: Thoughts on Translation as Subversive Speech, Hofer says this:

How can we become aware of what there is to see in what we do not see? We become entrenched; we need instigations, provocations, to be pried out of wherever it is we land most comfortably. Translation functions to change the pitch or tone at which we live: the white noise of “the normal” becomes audible in the new scale a foreign body traces. Translation reminds us that context is everything — as is content, as is form.

Read Hofer’s bio, or check out her website-in-waiting.

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GuerrillaReads at Les Figues

Posted on May 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Melissa shooting Jen Hofer‘s guerrilla reading at the Les Figues Press Garden Party!

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GuerrillaReads No.26

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 1 Comment

Native Angeleno Melinda Palacio is a poet and novelist.  Here she reads three poems from Folsom Lockdown, which won the Kulupi Press Sense of Place award.

Melinda recently described the back story behind Folsom Lockdown:

Earlier this year, in January, my sister Emily convinced me to accompany her on a difficult journey, visiting our father in Folsom Prison…. I didn’t realize the importance of this visit until weeks after I had arrived home. One day a downpour of poems kept my pen flowing. I wrote twelve poems about the experience over a weekend. My friend Susan read some of the poems and was the first to announce that I had a chapbook, and a good one. Keep writing more of those poems, Melinda, were her words to me.

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