I break upon May as a hurtled wave upon the hungry shore.  Am I then broken or reconstituted?  Yes.  Ahh, to be slurped by sand after taking the brunt of that long-spun shock.  And ooo to be pulled irrevocably, as all are pulled, back to the core of the sea, where all shocks thrum, where all things mix again until the stars burst free of the sky.  But that’s another matter for another time, and for this part I’d rather join, rather swirl a bit in the dark and gather mass, so I may once again raise and be raised, shock-fed soup that I am.

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ANNOUNCE  ::  A visit in May from George Wallace, veteran NY poet and spoken performer, co-editor at great weather for MEDIA press, Writer in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, and founder of Poetrybay, prompts a couple of events.  George will be giving a workshop at the home of Blue Light Press in San Francisco on Saturday, May 10, from 10-4, and it’s sure to be spectacularly good.  Click here to see the Facebook event page for the workshop.  Then on Sunday, he hops over to the East Bay to do a reading with San Francisco poets and novelists Kit Kennedy, Ken Saffran, Tom Stolmar, and the East Bay’s own Alexandra Naughton.  Excited to see you, George!  This will be a powerhouse reading, so if you’re in the area, rush on over to catch it!  Deets on the Events page.

ANNOUNCE  ::  Believe it or not (I can’t), I’ve added a new page to this website, the Etc. page which you see on the menu above.  It’s been years in the making (well, hours), and is meant as a place to dump all kinds of junk I’ve done that doesn’t fit elsewhere.  Exciting, huh?  I know you can’t wait to click that link.   😛   At this point, it contains Book & Journal Editing, since I have done a bunch of that, and Book Design & Layout, since I love designing books, especially covers, and doing layout as well.  And I’m sure I’ll be putting more stuff there in the future.  So check it out!  Or at least click on it just to be nice to me.

BONUS GEEKAGE  ::  I learned something interesting while working on the new Etc. page.  Basically I spent quite a few hours getting everything on there and looking okay in WordPress, but when I published it, none of the images would appear on any browser.  On top of that, the page was causing my access to WordPress to shut down, and the system at my internet host (InMotion, who are terrific) to interpret it as a Brute Force Attack.  What the hell?  It’s just a bunch of text with pictures!  Spent an hour on the phone with a very smart tech guy (InMotion’s tech support is awesome), and here’s what he discovered.  The permalink for the page, basically the link you can use to go directly to the page, was automatically constructed by WordPress as www.richardloranger.com/etc.  Turns out the “etc” is the name of one of the host’s system servers, so every time the page was opened, for some reason their system thought the pictures were on that server, not in my account, and tried to access it 35 times, once for each pic (which wasn’t there), and which it thereupon considered to be a hack attack.  Fascinating, if you ask me.  The solution was just to rename the permalink, which now reads /misc, and everything works fine.

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Locomotive hurtles through trees – who knows the cost.  As if cost is clear.  What lifts the pallor of the butterfly, so that she may flit another day?  Does she feel use or simply urge?  Don’t tell me you don’t know, because this isn’t about you.  It’s about momentum, cormorants diving, steel splintering ancient elms, buildings stabbing skyward, eighty billion bodies crushing the planet.  Now that’s momentum.  But if a simple monarch, caught in a whirl of pollen and breeze, can feel the slightest sense of use, of purpose, not divine worth but the simple sense of motion being worth something, of moving toward the better, a sense of better, an urge to flourish, and to flourish amidst, and I think they do, then perhaps, just perhaps there lurks somewhere a simple better, a flourishing that might hurtle us toward sane life and away, away, away from profligate propagation and the mad greed mind of man.

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REVIEW  ::  Had a blast+½ last month at the third installment of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente?, San Francisco’s new festival of Latino poetry and spoken word.  Org’ed and hosted by the tireless (and fabulous) Baruch Porras-Hernandez, the festival just finished its first year with 22 writers performing over three shows, each on consecutive weekends in a different venue.  I caught the final show and seriously gala event at Galería de la Raza, which featured eight wordsmiths at the top of their game.  Throughout the evening, every single performer captured the audience in a singular way, which is a joy to witness, with tones ranging from meditative to sardonic to enraged.  Way to book, Baruch!  In fact I suspect that each audience member left with different faves to rave on; here were the highlights for me.  Tomas Moniz tickled the audience to squirming with dissertations on nipples, the uvula, and suckling.  MK Chavez put all men in their place, then sealed the box with packing tape.  The biggest pleasant surprise of the night for me was Gabriel Cortez, who could grip a nation with every sound out of his mouth.  His poem, “Perfect Soldiers”, starts with an indictment of how soft drink companies target people of color, then takes us on a razor sharp narrative of his family’s hopeful immigration from Panama, only to be colonized by the US economy.  And boy that guy can read.  The evening peaked with headliner Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who has been plaguing governmental, economic, and post-colonial institutions for decades with his wit-stung rhetoric.  And to boot, Gómez-Peña is seriously hot.  His whirlwind set dragged academia through about thirty wringers (in English, Spanish, and ungentle patois), teased technophilia with phonemic feathers, blew those feathers into mind with a series of pure sound poems, and Godblessed just about every empire-trammeled country on Earth (except America).  God Bless Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I say – or at least somebody out there should.  Rounding out the evening were Christina Pérez, Kay Nilsson, Marisela Treviño Orta, and Sarah C. Jimenéz, all just as good as the next, and there must be someone out there reviewing their pieces right now.  With a lineup like that, this reading was basically a truck without breaks hurtling down the mountain toward city hall.  Check out their site for even more on the festival, and keep an eye open for a second helping next year.  Baruch, I hope you’re working day and night on that already!  ☺

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I could say hurtle again but I’d rather say plane.  As in make smooth.  I’d rather say raze.  Say sheer.  I could say hurdle but I’d rather say sand.  Say glass.  Glaze.  The sung ring of glaze.  Or luster.  At any rate nothing that a kiln can’t blaze.  I’d rather say blaze.  I’d rather say myrtle.  I’d rather say luster.  I’d rather say May.

Sincerely,
Richard