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New anthology peeks into city’s non-traditional art
Experimental, street, and non-academic poetry for Berkeley’s New Millennium
What is a poem?
Must its words rhyme?
What if you don’t have an expert to pontificate upon the subtle poetic flavors?
Do they still exist?
Does a poem have to be taught to students who scored high on the GREs in order to raise a pulse? Does art have to make sense?
And what if nothing in your life makes sense, nothing whatsoever?
Say you’ve spent a little too much time on the rough side of the street and it’s amazing you’re even alive.
What, then, if you want to write, or your hand itches to draw, and the desire to manifest your artistic vision is so strong in you, so compelling, that, at times, you can hardly breathe. You can hardly think. The obsession fills your horizon and every inside space.
What, then, do you do about that?
The New Now Now New Millennium Turn On Anthology (no, that wasn’t a typo) might be your port in the storm. This provocative, edgy, sometimes gentle, sometimes bitter, kooky, luminous, and occasionally lightning-strike brilliant collection of mostly Berkeley artists and writers is one big ‘ol mother lode of non-academic, street and experimental artistic expression.
Dedicated to the spirits of Gregory Corso, Alan Ginsberg and other local artists who died within the last few years (some of whom did make it well into “the academy”), the anthology’s editor, H. D. Moe, has gathered the work of about 250 contemporary poets, illustrators, reviewers, and short story writers.
Many extraordinary poets and artists are represented in this anthology. I don’t have the space, in this review, to name all the names, and can’t do justice to many remarkable works….
Please understand you might want to buy the anthology and see this work for yourself.
It’s impossible to even find a representative voice or image in this plethora of sensibilities, some searching for esoteric wisdom, others expressing rage, a few just shifting burdens from arm to arm –
But here are the first few lines from one voice:
Heavy Drinking
By Robert Lavett Smith
In my teens, prevented by cerebral palsy
From driving—the usual rite of passage—
And unacquainted still with the mysteries of sex,
I viewed those first clandestine beers on sticky
Summer nights as an invitation to adulthood:
Proof I was part of a world I had barely begun to understand
And here are the closing few lines from a poem by another voice:
From Me To She
By Leonard Irving
But she lies beneath
The yum-yum tree
Of memory
And there will stay
As I lie here
In Peoples Park
Bereft and sad
In Berkeley.
Or you might want to consider these words if you’ve, perhaps, given up on defining what poetry is, and instead want to wonder what it does….
From Whole Poetry
By Kelly Arbor
Sing, daughter, sing.
Your wideness is wonder.
Your whole is not half.
Find your voice inside
the hole of poetry.