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In my role as the City’s Poet Laureate, l issued a call to L.A.’s middle schools for students’ poems responding to the following questions: What location or site in the City means the most to you & why? What part of Los Angeles would you want to save forever?
As I indicated in the November 4 episode of Poems on Air, there are a slew of new or forthcoming poetry collections that I’m excited to add to my reading table.
One of the benefits of literature is that it allows the reader to empathize with the protagonists or—in the case of poets—with the themes and issues that concern them.
Let us dare haunting verse of the oppressed,
poems with hoodies, finger-tapping, ambling.
I mean pissed off and ardently expressed,
poems delirious as midnight rambling.
Bebop, Hip Hop, a decima or slam,
First, a number of greetings in the language of a few native peoples on this continent:
Yaa'teeh – “It is good” in Dine/Navajo
Kwira Va – “We are one” in Raramuri
Ideas of racial/cultural purity or superiority are alive and well in the United States. These are oppressive, non-biological, and unnatural concepts, pushed on us like other lies and illusions in our society. This wouldn’t matter much except people believe them.
In the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre, Orlando, Florida, June 12, 2016
By Luis J. Rodriguez
Hate becomes death becomes hate.
The world unravels in fear.
Columbine: 13 students and a teacher gone.
North Carolina has some of the most diverse terrain of any state—from the Great Smoky Mountains, which includes the Blue Ridge peaks of the massive Appalachian mountain range, to the Outer Banks on the Atlantic coast. The state is rich in bio-diversity, history, and people.
Any good craftsman carries his tools.
Years ago they were always at the ready.
In a car. In a knapsack.
Claw hammers, crisscrossed heads,
Below is the introduction by Luis J.