Guest-edited by Chip Livingstone, the fifteenth issue of Hinchas de Poesia contains at least 40 contributors!!!!
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
HINCHAS PRESS: GHAZALS FOR FOLEY VIA KICKSTARTER
I am trying to raise some moolah on Kickstarter to publish a book of ghazals commemorating the life and work of James Foley, American Journalist. We are going to call it, Ghazals for Foley. met Jim in grad school and we quickly became compinches. We suffered through helming Freshman Comp classes, and Jim taught me a lot about teaching; we even taught together at the Care Center in Holyoke, MA.
To this day, I don't know if it was Jim's moral sense that drove his work in Syria and Lybia, or his naivete, our specific brand of American innocence. These are the facts though: Jim was a freelance combat journalist; he had to sell his reportage to continue to report on Syria; he worked in extremely dangerous situations, with extremely sanguine and unsavory characters; the area he was reporting on was highly contended, with both side willing to commit atrocities (documented) against civilians.
I would like to use the ghazal because it is such an old form. According to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, the ghazal is "a lyric poem, generally short and graceful in form and typically dealing with themes of love." In terms of structure, the ghazal "begin[s] with a rhymed couplet whose rhyme is repeated in all subsequent even lines. The odd lines are unrhymed." It is a very Arabic, middle-eastern poetic form and it's used a lot in music and lyrics.
What I find most interesting about the ghazal is that it was introduced to the west by the German Romantics, guys like Goethe and Schlegel. According to LitFinder Classic Collection "ghazals are essentially lyrics distinguished by having a limited number of stanzas and by the recurrence of the same rhyme." Those of you who know Jimmy like I knew him knew him to be extremely discursive and recursive, always spitting rhymes and talking about "bars". One of his characters in a novel he had just finished, "Hungry Son," likes to write rhymes while doing his "time" in a youth camp for incarcerated youth in Cook County.
According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3ed.), the ghazal is a "short lyric poem written in couplets using a single rhyme (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.), sometimes mentioning the poet's name in the last couplet." Authors have to be inventive in how they repeat and replicate the line, and it is very personal because the poet signs it at the end with his or her name. When people think ghazals, they think of Rumi, and I think they are right to. I have yet to discern in which ways Rumi and ghazals diverge.
To this day, I don't know if it was Jim's moral sense that drove his work in Syria and Lybia, or his naivete, our specific brand of American innocence. These are the facts though: Jim was a freelance combat journalist; he had to sell his reportage to continue to report on Syria; he worked in extremely dangerous situations, with extremely sanguine and unsavory characters; the area he was reporting on was highly contended, with both side willing to commit atrocities (documented) against civilians.
(screenshot of the Ghazals for Foley Kickstarter Page)
I would like to use the ghazal because it is such an old form. According to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, the ghazal is "a lyric poem, generally short and graceful in form and typically dealing with themes of love." In terms of structure, the ghazal "begin[s] with a rhymed couplet whose rhyme is repeated in all subsequent even lines. The odd lines are unrhymed." It is a very Arabic, middle-eastern poetic form and it's used a lot in music and lyrics.
What I find most interesting about the ghazal is that it was introduced to the west by the German Romantics, guys like Goethe and Schlegel. According to LitFinder Classic Collection "ghazals are essentially lyrics distinguished by having a limited number of stanzas and by the recurrence of the same rhyme." Those of you who know Jimmy like I knew him knew him to be extremely discursive and recursive, always spitting rhymes and talking about "bars". One of his characters in a novel he had just finished, "Hungry Son," likes to write rhymes while doing his "time" in a youth camp for incarcerated youth in Cook County.
According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3ed.), the ghazal is a "short lyric poem written in couplets using a single rhyme (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.), sometimes mentioning the poet's name in the last couplet." Authors have to be inventive in how they repeat and replicate the line, and it is very personal because the poet signs it at the end with his or her name. When people think ghazals, they think of Rumi, and I think they are right to. I have yet to discern in which ways Rumi and ghazals diverge.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
On Saturday, March 7th at 11306 Venice Blvd. Luivette Resto, Ryan Nance, Rey Macias, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Ashaki Jackson, and Yago S. Cura are going to read their work for the 6 for 2015 poetry event at Gus Harper Art.
I made the above flyer to help publicize the reading, and my printer is acting all weird so it printed the top and bottom all jacked up but it kind of makes sense if you ask me.
The above flyer is the one that didn't make it but I wanted you to at least see that this is definitely not the one that I should use but to get to the first flyer I had to mess it up with this one.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
LOS ANGELES COUNTY JAIL SONNETS #13
Don’t talk about commissary on commissary day,
or the Lord of Hot Water will snatch that privilege
due to dues you have not yet paid with the makeshift
bridge of comfort afforded by municipal strangers
scrubbing trays
in Waterworld, or emptying pod bins in the trash
barracks, buffing sparkle paste into the loam of county
corridors trill with linoleum hinges of time-served,
suspended sentences or recognizance released into
the wilds of the streets like a dirty, old bastard, tryant.
When you write your man, don’t write another dime’s
name. Watch out if your bunky tends to hide, she could
be cooking Pruno or assaulting another female in there
when you at class, on your dayroom-game.
Read your book with one eye on the rec room, read the space
like a text, like a cipher armed with ominous nuance, like
scratch-ticket loot spent on roses, graduation bears,
gas-station sunglasses, and Lady-tazers.
or the Lord of Hot Water will snatch that privilege
due to dues you have not yet paid with the makeshift
bridge of comfort afforded by municipal strangers
scrubbing trays
in Waterworld, or emptying pod bins in the trash
barracks, buffing sparkle paste into the loam of county
corridors trill with linoleum hinges of time-served,
suspended sentences or recognizance released into
the wilds of the streets like a dirty, old bastard, tryant.
When you write your man, don’t write another dime’s
name. Watch out if your bunky tends to hide, she could
be cooking Pruno or assaulting another female in there
when you at class, on your dayroom-game.
Read your book with one eye on the rec room, read the space
like a text, like a cipher armed with ominous nuance, like
scratch-ticket loot spent on roses, graduation bears,
gas-station sunglasses, and Lady-tazers.
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