Cuernavaca, Morelos, México.

From now until July 18th, 2008 I will be mostly out of contact as I travel through Central America. I will periodically be checking email, but will only have a chance to respond to urgent messages. For Verbobala booking, please use this contact form on the Verbobala site. Gracias, ¡nos vemos después!

The problem with writing about tour is that there is rarely chance to do so. From mid-March until the end of May, Verbobala toured from Tucson to Portland, Boston to San Antonio, New York to Austin. It was our first time on tour in the US, and it was, in short, a blast.

Though Moisés (1/3 of the group) was unable to get a US visa, we were able to re-work our entire set and incorporate him through video projection. He wrote a different poem for just about every stop on the tour, recorded each one, and passed them to us the day of each show. It was incredible watching the audience react to the “mojado digital.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audience jump to its feet and cheer for a video projection… obviously he was able to transmit more than just his image.

In Worcester we were shown hidden speakeasies, mostly unchanged from the day that Prohibition was repealed. Adam called to the ghosts. In San Antonio we were shown an amazing time and got to meet Grupo Fantasma, a group I have loved for years. We went to Vancouver for a day and I featured at a poetry slam, which makes me feel like I’ve completed some crazy NAFTA-of-slam. In Tucson we debuted a brand-new full-length piece called Nobody Speaks with our sister group Flam Chen… it feels like the coolest performance I’ve ever been a part of. We sold t-shirts. I nearly sold out of books again. We played the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City with Patricia Smith and Jamie Caroline. Adam made his poetry open mic debut and offended everyone. We projected video onto the 60-ton, 3 story Cathedral of Junk in Austin with Show Me Tiger. We were on the radio, we scared coeds. We were called weird. We said thank you.

There is video of a lot of this, but it will be a little while before any of it goes online. Stay tuned. There is so much that could be said, so many names to mention.

I’ve been back in Mexico for about 10 days, catching up with Moi and other close friends. Verbobala has allowed all three of us to make a living with our art, and it feels incredible. I’m in love with this project. We’ll be renting a house in Hermosillo in August to work on new material for a Mexican tour that will be September-October. Later in the fall we’d like to do some Canadian dates. There’s some ideas for Argentina as well. Hopefully we can work with some people to get Moi’s US visa worked out, it would be nice to tour the States again sometime. But we’re not sitting around waiting for it.

Here’s to hoping for Obama in November.

One thing about tour: it is definitely not vacation. It is a privilege to travel, but it’s not relaxing, that’s for sure. As of Wednesday, I’m gone traveling. It is time to disappear for awhile again with a blackbook and a pen. I’m headed to Honduras to meet up with a friend, then moving through Nicaragua to Costa Rica. We’ll be mostly off the beaten path. As of July 18th I’ll be back full-time.

Hasta entonces, amigos. Que les vaya chido.

Este miércoles es la premiere del documental “Los Peces del Viento” del videoasta Wilfred Massamba. La obra se enfoca en dos poetas bilingües, el mexicano Mardonio Carballo (español-náhuatl) y el estadounidense Logan Phillips (español-inglés), en este estreno contaremos con la presencia de los dos y el grupo Bungalo Dub.

Miércoles 11 de junio a las 20:00 hrs en la Alianza Francesa México, Sócrates #156 (esq. Homero), Col. Polanco, México D.F. La entrada es gratis.

This Wednesday is the premiere of the documentary “Los Peces del Viento” by filmmaker Wilfred Massamba. The work focuses on two bilingual poets, Mardonio Carballo (Mexico, Spanish-Náhuatl) and Logan Phillips (USA, English-Spanish). Both will be present at the event, along with the group Bungalo Dub.

Wednesday, June 11th 2008, 8pm at la Alianza Francesa México, Sócrates #156 (esq. Homero), Col. Polanco, Mexico City. Free.

LOS PECES DEL VIENTO
Palabras, words, des mots…
Mouvement poétique, social et culturel, le «slam» apparaît à Chicago dans les années 80. Basé sur la notion de communauté, le slam affirme le caractère démocratique de la poésie et lui ajoute une dimension de spectacle. Un documentaire de Wilfrid Massamba (52′). Los peces del viento…palabras, words ce ne sont que des mots. La parole se manifeste comme une expression des désirs, pensées, émotions, souffrances, aspirations…

It is time, amigos, for a new Dom Flemons post. Three years ago I wrote about him when he had just made the big move Out East. Now, I’m happy to report that Dom is continuing with his Conquest of the World. With his current band, Carolina Chocolate Drops, he is touring the world. Word has it he’s Big In Europe, which he should be. I just caught up with him in NYC, where we ate some slices and he played old accordion. Then, back in his room, he played Peruvian-style wind pipes with blues guitar. The kid is wild, and the kid is going to blow up.

It inspired me to dig out some old video of him I shot at his request back in 2004. I was renting a room in a small house in Flagstaff, I sat him down, got creative with the lighting, and let the borrowed camera roll. Back then (way oh so back then in 2004) there was no YouTube, except for those real, organic, gooey tubes of yours. So I sat on the video. Until now (cue drums).

Here’s Dom. There’s more here.

This is first in a series of posts that I’ve been meaning to make over the last few months of tour, but am only now getting to.

Like most people, I couldn’t wait to leave the town that I grew up in. My entire world was a little place called Sierra Vista, and it seemed to me that it existed at the expense of everywhere else: I wouldn’t be able to expand my horizons until I left and vowed never to come back. Sure, that’s extreme, but the world is an extreme place at 18 years old.

Again, like many people, I used the change of scenery to reinvent myself. Moving to Flagstaff, I grew my hair long and started to read my poems in public. I played a lot of guitar with people I had just met. I skateboarded everywhere. These were all things that I hadn’t been able to do in my hometown.

It has only been this spring––some seven years later––that I’ve made my peace with this place. Though I regularly came back to visit my parents, I still wasn’t comfortable. Then, a few years back, I began to perform in Bisbee from time to time and discovered a generous and empathetic audience.

Word got around, and plans started to be made for coming back to my old high school. I’ve always liked working in schools, but I was nervous about this one. I had been a very different person in high school––would the place remember me that way? There was lots of anticipation.

On a Friday in late March I did two performances for about 500 students each, and had brought along two of my favorite poets from the Albuquerque scene: Carlos Contreras and Jasmine Cuffee. I didn’t want it to be about me, I wanted to be about us, about the students: this was something that anybody could do. After the school-day performances, we came back to the library later that night for a performance open to the entire community. It was a great little crowd.

Jazz, Carlos, Adam (along for the ride), and I celebrated hard later that night. I woke up on my living room floor the next morning (it was a full house) with a groggy head. Carlos tells me "You’re not going to believe this," and tosses a newspaper at me. I fail to catch it, and it hits me in the face. And there it was: my mug on the front page. Holy shit. What a surreal thing.

Then the following Monday we did something like four workshops with about 30 students each. We tried to touch on everything in a very short time: free writing, revising, reading for a peer group, performing for a crowd, and even organizing a slam. Turns out that it worked, because a month or so later the school held their first-ever poetry slam.

And the student council asked me to speak at the Class of 2008 graduation, which I did last Thursday. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been doing this near enough lately, but here’s something that I ran across recently that completely blew me away: an amazing graffiti / stop animation / experimental video piece by BLU. I don’t know this crew, but when Verbobala gets to Argentina eventually I’d love to meet them.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Thanks to my friends Stacio and Becky, there is now a whole slew of new video on YouTube from a feature I did last week at the Puro Slam in San Anto, Tejas. It’s one of my favorite slams in the country, and it was a good night. The quality of video isn’t killer, but it’s good to have, especially since there are some brand-new poems included!

See them all here.

Tucson, Arizona, EE.UU.

Adam and I have been wondering what saint deserves some prayers every time we almost completely screw up on tour. For example, when we leave $5,000 worth of equipment sitting just off of 4th Ave. in downtown Tucson at midnight on a Sunday. What saint was responsible for us turning the van around and finding it there before anyone else did?

Tour with Verbobala (and all its applicable tech) is a grime ballet of one thousand swirling details. Everyday, very specific and small tasks have to get done in order for everything to line up correctly. Sending ahead press releases, booking parties to fill in dates, buying 100’ VGA cables, catching the shuttle, updating the website, etc. The good news is that by and large tour is going great. But it’s easier to notice the near-disasters, for example, realizing in Portland that I forgot my passport in Arizona.

This happened last week at 2 A.M., hours before we were scheduled to pick up the rental car and drive to Vancouver. Ensuing panic. What are the border rules? What’s up with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative? Was it pushed back again? Spring and I swung by to pick Adam up at 8 A.M. When I told him, he started laughing, much to his credit. But it was the Nervous Laugh, the one that sounds like homicide waiting to happen. We went anyway, my Dad spent his Sunday morning scanning my birth certificate, and we stopped in Seattle to print it out. Long story short, we made it into Vancouver on Sunday, April 20th.

YOU: CITY NEAR THE WIERD COAST WITH BIG MOUNTAINS AND FIVE DOWNTOWNS. YOU WERE WEARING BROKEN SKIES AND READING IN FRENCH AND ENGLISH AT THE SAME TIME. ME: MOHAWK’T VERBSPITTER CON CUATES IN THE RENTAL CAR, BLOWING OUT BASS IN RENTAL SPEAKERS. I DIDN’T MIND YOUR BASEMENT APARTMENTS, HEROIN DISTRICTS OR ICE COLD APRIL. I KNOW WE JUST SAW EACH OTHER ONCE, BUT I THINK I LOVE YOU A LITTLE BIT. CAN WE SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN?

Among the few upsides of the whole incident was the opportunity to feel fear of a border again. I hadn’t had that feeling since traveling in Central America and the Caribbean in 2006. The way that borders do that thing, oscillating between being Ports of Entry and Border Walls. Borders are like the surface of water. They can let you pass right through, or they can kill you. We’re taught to fear borders, and to think it would be easier to Just Stay Home.

Meanwhile, Moisés is having to deal with all of that on a constant basis. He flew from Mexico City to Mérida, Yucatán last week, in order to get a quick interview with the U.S. Embassy there. Since the Tucson Poetry Festival had passed while his artist work visa was still officially “pending,” he decided that it was time to cut our losses and apply for a tourist visa. Last Monday it was denied, and he was not told why. Maybe because the Festival had applied the work visa. Maybe because of an incident when he was a kid. Probably because the U.S. government is afraid that he will sneak away to pick strawberries or clean our toilets, nevermind that he’s an established international video artist. Apparently, US burrocracy has now driven Moi nuts and he has run off into the Yucatán jungle with some Irish girls that he met. We haven’t heard from him in days. Who could blame him?

We are a three-person group, missing our third member. Adam and I get along famously, and there are a lot of good times, but they’re always tinged with a certain bitterness that Moi Isn’t Here, that Moi Would Love This, that This Would Be Perfect With Moi. Sure, he’s been working hard in Cuernavaca, uploading pieces to our server so that we can use them in performance (and thus manifest his presence, a digital illegal immigrant). But he’s not getting to hear the applause, do the interviews, meet the people, travel. We have been told by crowds that the legal situation adds a certain urgency to our shows, which maybe it does. But Moi Isn’t Here. We talk about this a lot, and Adam called it Mourning Moi. I called it Moining. A-haha. Sin llorar, cabrones, como dice él.

So Moi lights candles to San Judás, Saint of Lost Causes. Adam and I keep up on the grime ballet, bouncing between airports and venues. Good things are happening. It looks like we’ll be touring from here on out. And we’re figuring out who to pray to.

After years of people asking, I finally have a email list. It’s focused on Verbobala, which makes sense since that’s just about all I’m focused on these days. We’ll send along tour dates, news, and spanglish albures. If you’re interested, drop me a line with your email address and I’ll send you an invite.

Also, if you want to be emailed when this site is updated, you can subscribe to dirtyverbs.com.

More soon! It’s all happening!

Great news, internetters. After more than two years, I have books available for purchase online again! Since living in Mexico, I’ve not been able to keep up with my D.I.Y. method of sending out merch bought online, until I got down with my friend Mo Browne and her company PoetCD.com. They’re a clearinghouse for indy poetry publishing, and you’ll have no problems whatsoever ordering from them. I have received tons of requests for this, so here you go!

Coming soon for the first-ever Verbobala Spoken Video US tour: new stickers, new shirts, new DVD’s, lucha masks (!), new posters and more. The tour dates are on NuestroSpace, hope to see you soon!

Merch currently available online:
All items are sold through my friends at PoetCD.com, which is SSL secured and completely safe. I vouch for them 100%.

• This Line Drawn Across Footprints, book, 2007. Second printing.
  16 poems, including 4 in both English and Spanish. Some of my best-known work from the last few years, written mostly in Flagstaff.
• Where Do Airplanes Build Their Nests?, book, 2007. Second printing.
  23 poems, all in English (except one). Work from the 2006 world travels: London, Spain, Guatemala, the Carribean, Ireland, Mexico, etc.
• Jiutepunk in the Solspace, DVD, 2007.
  Verbobala Spoken Video’s first DVD, containing highlights from nearly every performance in 2007, in the US and México. Hours of Spanglish video performance art!

Últimamente el periódico mexicano Milenio a través de su suplimentario “Laberinto” ha publicado un par de notas que son—por lo menos a mi aparecer—bien interesantes, las dos acerca de las nuevas tendencias de la poesía aquí en México. La primera, entitulada “Poesía al limite,” de Rocío Cerón, echa una miradita hacia las “nuevas” formas literarias: el spoken word, los slams de poesía, performance, etc. (Y también, por cierto, incluye una foto de nuestro grupo Verbobala Spoken Video, tomada durante el festival Poesía en Voz Alta.07 de la Casa del Lago) Después viene otra nota, “Di no al spoken word,” por Heriberto Yepez, atacando la validez de lo que se llama spoken word. Obviamente no estoy muy de acuerdo con ese infeliz, pero su comentario sí trae unos puntos interesantes y hasta ciertos.

A mí, me parece poco útil entrar en cualquier debate de cuales formas de arte si son validos y cuales no, aunque estoy seguro de que escribir de este tipo de polémica está bien para vender periodicos. Prefiero pasar mi tiempo creando mi propio arte, en vez de intentando de quitar el derecho del próximo de hacer lo suyo, solamente porque su arte no es lo que yo considero “arte.” ¿Qué es arte? ¿Qué es cultura? ¿Quién tiene derecho de inovar, jóvenes o adultos? ¿Indígenas o estadounidenses? ¿Español o inglés? Son todas cuestiones sin respuestas, y aunque es interesante considerarlas de vez en cuando, yo creo que hay espacio suficiente en este mundo para que cada quien tiene la oportunidad de crear su arte como le da la gana.

Lo que sí está muy bien es que ya la poesía está tomando una nueva fuerza en la sociedad mexicana actual—la poesía en todas sus diversas formas.