Spotlight on Guante

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered Guante. His poem "Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up" has been viewed over half a million times and will be published in the Button Poetry anthology "Viral". I heard that poem first, and it got me hooked, but his poem "Action" truly moved me.

"Rape Culture is silence." I don't think I've ever heard a more perfect definition of Rape Culture the one he gives in this poem. It is silence. It's us not having the conversations we should be having with our friends and our siblings and our kids. We should be telling our girlfriends to stop slut-shaming and our guy friends to stop using violent terms for sex. We should be telling our kids about enthusiastic consent. ("Consent is not the absence of a no. It's the presence of a yes.") Rape Culture is perpetuated by our silence, by our fear of the potential social isolation that comes from standing up for what's right. Well whatever. I'd rather lose a friend than my integrity.

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Like a Python

Five 2 One Magazine has published my poem Like a Python ! Check it Out! I submitted the poem to them in January and received an enthusiastic response about 5 1/2 months later. Not bad timing. I'm honored to be a contributor to a magazine that publishes such interesting, unusual works. Thanks Five 2 One!

Literary Provocation

Literary critic Juan Vidal wrote a piece for NPR Books entitled Where Have All The Poets Gone? In it he says, " The Beat Generation is dead, and literary provocation in America, I submit, is at a low." He hungers for a time when poets were at the forefront of marches and rallies, speaking out against injustice. I don't know what the world used to be like. I don't know if poetry used to have a broader audience than it does now. Allen Ginsberg died when I was six years old. I've never marched for any cause. But maybe that's because when people in my generation support a cause or are enraged by an injustice, we don't take to the streets. We go to social media. We raise awareness by sharing youtube videos. We try to change minds by blogging. All the great poets aren't dead and gone. They're online. After Michael Brown's death, Sarah Kay shared the poem not an elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith on facebook. Poets a...

Pilot

I'm enjoying my first small successes as a poet. A poem of mine has been published by The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly , and it resonated with Bill Cameron ( a writer whom I have never personally met) so much that he wrote a very nice blog post about it. Thanks kind stranger! I've had other small successes as well. I wrote my first spoken word poem and performed it for a group of close friends. They were all speechless. One of them said, "I would listen to that on repeat." This same friend keeps a poem that I wrote for her on all her electronic devices. A friend of hers (a stranger to me) saw the poem about her and said, "I'm stealing this and reciting it to my girlfriend." How crazy is that! Strangers want to recite my poetry to their girlfriends! Needless to say, these little victory moments have renewed my excitement for writing. I have two main goals in writing this particular blog. The first is to pay it forward. It made me so happy to see that Bi...

Feeling Is First

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