Building community through performance poetry
By Kimberly Kinser March 7, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel Authors’ Sala
Carol Sherman & Minerva Neiditz
Fri, Mar 7, 5pm
Villa Jacaranda
Aldama 53
50 pesos

When Carol Sherman reads to us from her vast array of poetry and nonfiction on March 7, she will reach out to us, her new winter community. She will say, “This is who I am. This is what I feel. This is what I care about.”

Sherman comes to San Miguel from her home in East Hampton, New York. In New York she is involved in writers’ workshops, poetry workshops and community theater. For 26 years, she has been meeting weekly with the poetry workshop at the Southampton Library. Her circle of friends and colleagues is large.

This is her second winter in San Miguel after spending 12 winters in Nevis, West Indies, followed by three in Oaxaca. Last year, her first in San Miguel since 1993, she hosted the open mike session at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. She told me proudly that at the beginning of the open mike session there were 12 women who had no connection, but when the session was complete, they had a new community.

Sherman read a couple of poems to me during our short time together. One made me laugh, and the other made me feel the sadness of aging. Isn’t that what poetry is all about? Sharing feelings? It reminded me of a Robert Frost quote that I learned from Geneen Roth, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

I asked her if she was nervous before a reading. Nervous, no. Excited, yes. She has read to audiences in person, on television, on the radio and here at Bellas Artes in 1993. She is comfortable sharing her work.

The reading will be a combination of her poetry and her nonfiction prose. She will be reading from her memoir, Bronx Ballads. Fourteen of the 24 stories in this book have been published. She will also read from her most recent chapbook, Swimming in Lavender, poems of flowers seen through felt experience.

Though Sherman does not script the reading too far in advance of the performance, there is a chance that she might read from another of her chapbooks, Women Under Assault. She is not a fiction writer, she tells me. Everything that she writes is true. In Women Under Assault, she writes monologues in many different voices, all based on fact, either word-of-mouth accounts or articles that she has read.

I wondered about this idea of performance poetry, thinking of those rap-like poetry slams that I have seen on television. That is not what is going to happen. Trained in performance poetry by Swedish actress, Viveca Lindsfors, Carol will transport us, her new community, to the moment that the poem was birthed, whatever that emotion might be.

At the Authors’ Sala Third Annual Writers’ Conference last weekend, Sherman again chaired the poetry open mike session and her presence inspired me to pull out my poetry, so sacredly guarded and begin to build a community of my own. That is the power of a community of writers and the Authors’ Sala’s stated mission. Please join us for Sherman’s Sala debut.

Kimberly Kinser is the creator of Pizarra Blanca Writers, an Amherst Artist and Writers Workshop that she leads at LifePath Center.

A diverse life at the PEN series
By Bill Pearlman

PEN Writer’s Aloud
Peter Marin
Thu, Mar 13, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Poet, novelist and essayist Peter Marin will read from his work for PEN’s Writers Aloud series. Marin has published several collections of poetry and essays on moral and social issues, as well as a novel, In a Man’s Time. For many years, he was a contributing editor of Harpers Magazine and his many pieces for them included examinations of new age spirituality, “The New Narcissism”; explorations of homelessness in “Helping and Hating the Homeless”; and meditations on war and violence in “Coming to Terms With Vietnam.”

His poetry is at once lyrical and concerned with the detailed joy of day-to-day living and the indeterminate mysteries surrounding transcendence. In recent years he has composed bodies of work around certain historical figures, including Casanova, Wittgenstein and Louis Gottschalk, an early American composer. For this reading he will choose poems from the Casanova group, and will add to them other poems dealing with different aspects of erotic connection: sexuality and friendship and the roles played in these by death or its proximity.

A lively raconteur, Marin grew up in Brooklyn, went to Swarthmore, Columbia and Brandeis, and then spent part of his early manhood on freight trains and at casual, migrant labor. He has taught, lectured or read at many universities and has had grants from the NEA and the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Patterson foundations. He has lived in Santa Barbara for many years, where he heads up the Committee for Social Justice, a group that advocates for, and provides free legal services to homeless and marginal men and women.

Popular Mexican Sayings 
By Geoff Hargreaves

A regular glance at the popular wisdom of Mexico.

Te gusta tirarte para que te levanten (you like to throw yourself down so that they’ll lift you up). This saying aims to chastise those who affect false modesty, accusing themselves of defects they hope their listeners will deny. “Oh, I’m no good at that sort of thing,” the person moans. “But you are, you are!” is the hoped-for response. “You’re very good at that sort of thing. You’re absolutely brilliant!” And a gleam of knowing satisfaction lights up the lowered, modest eyes.

La basura siempre flota.(the garbage always floats). This is the equivalent to our “The truth will out”—but with the added implication that it is always a very nasty truth that has come to the surface. In a society where accountability and transparency are still novel concepts, it seems unduly optimistic. A great deal of garbage, one suspects, lies

permanently buried at the bottom of the pond, never likely to float upward into the light of day. 

Mujeres juntas, ni difuntas. (women together, not even when they’re dead). This saying might be construed as an example of misogynistic Mexican machismo, except that women themselves employ it to denounce the cattiness that can surface among a group of women that has no male participation. 

El que con niño se acuesta, mojado le amanece el día (if you go to bed with a kid, your day starts soaking wet). This is the politest version of this proverb. Other versions offer far more graphic descriptions of the state in which youngsters with little control over their bodily functions can leave their bed-partners. All versions, however, make the same stern point: that you’re asking for trouble, if you hook up with somebody a lot younger than you.