Day One
De Anza College Faculty/Student Reading
“This is a week devoted to words.” The sentence echoed.
Poets bowed. People were clapping. There were “oohs,” “aahs,” “hmms,” when the room heard something profound. There were laughter when the room listened to something funny, or something obscene.
The Writing and Reading Center lent the spotlight to faculties and students alike in the opening of De Anza College’s first Literary Festival on May 5.
Students and teachers paid homages to a girlfriend, a gorilla, a Bush, and a Hillary. Nature also received its due as a student read an excerpt from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. A cathedral was likened to Vietnam war zone, and a mother was compared to a Hindu god of destruction. There was a poetic placement of Peet’s Coffee & Tea advertising, but there was also a recount of witnessing a shooting and seeing a dead man.
For a festival subtitled A Multicultural Literary Arts Festival, the reading was a perfect fit.
David Sullivan and the screening of “Coyote and the 10 Gallon Hat”
After a short recess with cakes and Peet’s Coffee, writer David Sullivan screened his most recent film, “Coyote and the 10 Gallon Hat.”
“Coyote” explores the complex relationship between the U.S. border patrols with coyotes, the guides who lead migrants across the Mexican border. Along the way, the film made fun of the idea of justice, good versus evil, and racial stereotypes.
“It’s always gratifying to hear the laughters,” Sullivan said, commenting on the audience’s response during the screening.
He said film-making combines the elements of both play and poetry. A film must get its dialogues right, but also convey what it wants to say through images.
Sullivan’s “Coyote” is produced by Cinema Artist Resource, Cinemar in short, as his screenplay won the Cinemar Scriptwriting Contest. He had to do a lot of collaborative work during the production, he said. That made the film richer and richer.
Day Two
Al Young
The bass first lulled you off into its rhythm. Then came what you thought was the baritone sax: Young’s deep, cavernous voice reverberating across the conference hall. He was reading poetry.
California’s Poet Laureate Al Young read, talked, shook his body, nodded his head, hummed, stopped, and sang, with musician Dan Robbins on bass in Conference Rooms A & B Tuesday, May 6. Unlike many duets of poetry and music, neither Young nor Robbins hogged the spotlight. Instead they made eye contact with each other, listened to each other, and smiles were shared as they responded to each other’s words or rhythm.
“The concept of the Other is killing us,” Young said. The concept allows us to alienate other people “to the extent we can detach ourselves from everybody else.”
We tend to forget that we all share the same source of air, water, and food. We ‘Other-ize’ other people and hallucinates that there are bubbles separating us from everything else. We think our actions against people, against nature will go away. But even human excrements get recycled. Matters are not created and are not destroyed. What we did will eventually haunt us at our dinner table. “There is no ‘away,'” he said. “Things return.”
Robbins responded to this message by playing classic tunes like “Stella by Starlight” and “All the Things You Are” in accompaniment. These songs celebrate the value and importance of every person, he said.
Then enter Young’s poems. “Poetry is always our salvation. Music, drama, dance, sculpture, they ultimately won us over,” Young said. Poetry is in our everyday lives, in what we think is ordinary. Poetry is a tool we use to prevent us from getting lost.
And Young was not speaking in metaphor. The direction to De Anza College from his house has just taken a poetic turn that goes, “880 South, 237 West/880 South, 237 West/880 South…”
Brian Gore
“Poetry saved my butt when my life was in the bad,” guitarist Brian Gore said.
A lot of Gore’s music is inspired by literature. A tune he performed on May 6 was named “Erendira,” after the work of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez Innocent Erendira. “It is a symbolic story about indenture servitude, evil grandma, and finding freedom,” Gore said. Gore’s “Erindira” started peacefully until the melody seemed to shift near the end where it incorporated tensions, seemingly to mimic Erindira’s struggle for freedom.
Gore is known as a guitar poet. He writes poems to his music to share what the songs mean to him.
Explaining the involvement of poetry, prose, film, and music, the co-director of the Writing and Reading Center, Julie Pesano said the Festival celebrates all ways of expression, whether it is music, poetry, or prose. Day Three
Marilyn Chin
Poet Marilyn Chin walked to the podium and started talking. Before long, you noticed the sparkle of her black leather jacket.
“You wanna hear a nasty tale?” The crowds belted a raucous cheer. “Oh, the girls here are baaad,” Chin said. “Here’s a nasty tale for the bad, bad girls in here.”
Chin read from her poems on Chinese American experience, identity, and revenge in Conference Room A on May 7.
While reading one of her poems that was especially laughter inciting, Chin stopped and provided a quick commentary. “You know I’m a feminist when I rhyme penis with unhappiness, don’t you?”
She said the self in her poems must represent something larger than itself. The experience and identity of the self represents a community, a movement.
Chin is a major California poet whose works have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and The Open Boat. Her awards include two grants from National Endowment of Arts, the PEN/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship.
She also read from her collection of blues poems, Chinese quatrains, even sonnets, like her poem “So, You Fucked John Donne.”
When we think about sonnets, we are paying homage to the great fathers/poets of the form. “So of course I have to be a bad girl and disrespect them,” Chin said. “It is the job of an artist to be rebellious.”
Regie Cabico Workshop
Shortly after the session started, the lecture-style Conference Room A was transformed with chairs in a big circle, standing participants, and hand claps that went around the room.
A few minutes passed. Now students were running from one end of the circle to another. “Kitty wants a corner,” a student who became ‘it’ said. “Go to my next door neighbor,” a student replied. The kitties grew from one, two, three, four, and in no time there were five students who wanted a corner. The rule of the game eluded some spectators, but it sure looked fun.
“Imagine if a bunch of faculties were doing this,” a spectator and the dean of language arts department, Lydia Hearn, said.
Regie Cabico leading the workshop is a spoken word poet who had won three National Poetry Slams, appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and MTV’s Free Your Mind.
One exercise he gave required the participants to write a poem answering the question, “Who are you?” From time to time Cabico yelled out a word which through any means must be incorporated into the poems.
“Red,” he said. About 30 seconds passed.”Chicken.” Pens scribbled and groans were heard.”Toilet.” He waited.”Bum Shakalaka Shakalaka Bum-bum-bum!”The room roared.
“Spoken word poetry is like preaching your own gospel truth,” Cabico said. “Each word in a poem is like a Frisbee. You want your audience to catches it.”
By then, the room had transformed into a proscenium, with participants performing the poems they had just created.
When coaching a student Rehana Rehman’s poem that talked about the urge to punch a hole-of-your-behind in the face, Cabico even used himself as a visualization target. He mocked her poem, her voice, her physique until her urge was realistically conveyed through her voice and gesture.
Rehman described the work
shop as nothing short of phenomenal. “He managed to bring my inner voice out,” she said. Day Four
Francisco Jimenez
“‘Don’t tell me the story. I know the story. Give me your analysis,'” Jimenez said, quoting his college English professor. When he received his essay back, it looked as if it had red ink poured all over it. A disappointing C. In his next paper, he had to write about Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Francisco Jimenez, an author and a professor of literature at Santa Clara University, shared his childhood, the source of his award-winning memoirs The Circuit and Breaking Through, in Conference Rooms A & B on May 8.
Eyes were fixated on Jimenez’s childhood photos as he explained the stories behind the photos and how they made it into his memoirs.
There were many words he didn’t understand when he read the Grapes of Wrath, he said. He understood the meaning of ‘grapes’ as the vineyard in Fresno, and ‘wrath’ as how he felt when he lost his little notepad. But he could relate to the family in the story. “Somehow the grades seemed less important than what I had learned just from reading the book.”
Jimenez attributed the moment when he first read for enjoyment as “the power of words to change minds, and the power of literature to change hearts.”
A student Miguel Rivas found Jimenez’s life incredibly moving. “How he lived represent the stories of many people. We all could find something to identify with in his stories.”
Regie Cabico in Performance
“When I say ‘poetry,’ you say ‘rock.’ Poetry…””Rock!””Poetry.””Rock!””Poetry.””Rock!””When I say ‘De Anza’, you say ‘rock.’ De Anza…”
Regie Cabico returned from his workshop on Wednesday in a slamming performance that flushed the room with laughter.
His poetry was about everything. He simplified the experience of sleeping with an older man in a language a student of poetry could understand, with the man’s penis described as “epic” and his orgasm as “Onomatopoeia! Onomatopoeia! Onomatopoeia!”
He sang in a shrill shriek of what he called an impersonation of a Latina singer.
At one point Cabico walked down the aisle and offered the audience with certain zodiac signs a few lines of poetry and a piece of chocolate.
The chocolate was sweet, and so was the performance as the Festival came to an end.
Students said they felt enriched and should have more Cabicos coming to De Anza to perform. Some were inspired by his courage to be funny, while others just enjoyed the dose of good laugh.
The poets’ words “are still ringing in our ears”, said Ken Weisner, a Language Arts faculty. It was a wonderful week, and he would like the festival to return next year. “But this is where students make a difference,” he said, encouraging the students to give feedback on the festival.
