love beau 2

Posted on September 19, 2014 at 4:01 pm

Feeling emotionally hesitant about starting this lovebeau series. Thankfully I already posted a date for it so I can’t back out now. Going through old love poems was not as fun and easy as I’d initially believed it would be. looking back at my previous process post on this, I noticed that I’d written the word, “installment.” I’m gonna interpret that as I’d better have more than one of these on monday. I’ve decided 5. I think I’ll post 5 poems at a time. It allows me the opportunity to have each installment reflect a range of love ideas. Not sure how I’ll structure future installments, but this first time around I’ll try to hit all the major time periods, including now. Originally, I wasn’t going to write any poems in-the-moment for this site until next year, but things change. All it took was for someone to joke that I can’t say I’m dropping new poems each week if they’d been written in the past. I disagree with the idea, simply because ‘new’ and ‘past’ are so subjective and misinterpreted- but what stuck was not being bound. When considering this further for lovebeau, it makes sense that some of the poems are from my life now. Especially if I’m really going to go there about love and my relationship with it. I’ve got to be in this moment if I really want to connect it to before in order to build a fuller henceforth and forevermore. I just have to figure out which 5 poems I start with, how I am going to disguise identity without losing integrity of verse, what the “set,” is going to look like, and how I’m actually going to get it shot.

poems section context

Posted on September 18, 2014 at 10:54 pm

The poems section isn’t intended to reveal the secret genius I’ve kept from you for decades. It isn’t to show the arc of my legacy in superior volume. It isn’t living under the assumption that because I wrote it, you should bow before my awesome. I imagine that there will be many poems in this section that you will not love. My fragile ego is worried that there will be many that you don’t even like. Fuck my fragile ego. I want to show every beginning writer that regardless how their work is judged now, that it can grow beyond their critics’ expectations. I want to post all of the writing I had to do in order to understand my voice. I want the audience to experience how many shitty poems it may take to get there. How many lines of fear are jotted before freedom. How many presentations must be exhausted before tasting the truth. How through all of the failures of self & writing in the process, that the core is always present, waiting to be unleashed. The poems in this section need to be bad to prove history. They need to be redundant to show how we keep returning to the scene of the crime until we can grasp the scope of the situation. They need to break all pre-conceived public ideas of me as a poet, if I’m to grow into the poet I look up to in my dreams. The poems section is not about preference or value comparison. It is a glimpse into the narrative often lost in the product of art. It is a realm where the 17yr old & the 38yr old are equal. It is the space where the poems are waiting for you to explore depths beyond how well they’re written.

steve cannon’s book

Posted on September 15, 2014 at 6:15 pm

for those of you who don’t know, steve has nurtured and helped so many new york poets on their journey. for poets who get up on stage and aren’t afraid of history, steve is someone to be respected and seek counsel with. as part of the nuyorican poet’s cafe mythology, steve spent many years “heckling,” everyone on stage from the bar, yelling at them to, “finish the damn poem!” including myself. visiting him in new york, he asked for a copy of my book. I replied in some teenage way, like, “no doi.” after several emails and months, I have yet to send steve his copy. Wondering what my hang up has been, I realized there’s no fucking way I’m sending steve my book if someone else is going to read it to him. I neglected to mention that steve is blind. and my book has yet to exist in braille. and steve knows from my nuyorican days that there isn’t another human alive who can replicate the vocal representation of my poetry. I respect this man and want him to receive my work the way it’s intended. there are tones other readers do not know I’ve written into the poems. there are reciters who are unaware of the emotional projections their voice places on the text. there are poets who can’t allow in what they haven’t been trained to. so I’ve decided to audiobook my book for steve. not as an item to sell. as a series of simple videos for steve to listen to when he misses his second favorite asian poet. I’m writing about it here so that I’ll actually do it before 2015. this will be the other youtubey thing I drop next week. looking forward to your thoughts steve. will send your signed copy after I finish this audio project for ya.

Blog Process

love beau 2

poems section context

steve cannon’s book