here's luck

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Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

People! Friends of mine! There are many awesome vidders signed up for the VVC auction this year, and I am going to be bidding on grammarwoman because a) she is awesome, and b) SHE IS OFFERING TO VID FARSCAPE and I HAVE FARSCAPE VID IDEAS. One of these ideas I am keeping for myself, but trust me, I HAVE IDEAS TO SPARE.

So who wants to go in with me? I know my fellow Farscape fans are out there. Leave a comment and let's do this!

Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

The Republic of Poetry is divided into three parts. The first is about Chile: history, coup, repression, resistance. The second is a series of elegies for poets and other artists. The third is about the creative process itself, the alchemy that makes art out of event.

I don't know what moved me to pick this particular book off my shelf of unread poetry this week, but whatever it was, I'm grateful.


The Soldiers in the Garden
Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the solders
vanish from the garden.


— Martín Espada
from The Republic of Poetry

Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

In 2011, Nikky Finney won the National Book Award for Head Off and Split (from which I posted a poem a couple of years back). Someone recently pointed me to a video of her acceptance speech for the award, which I had never seen -- and which I can now highly recommend.

Elizabeth Alexander's introduction begins at 1:09; Finney's speech begins at 4:45. It is, among other things, a poem -- about poetry, literacy, slavery, incendiary literature, and "the will of the human heart to speak its own mind."



Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

Hat tip to kass for pointing me to this poem and the Rise Up Review website.

Advice for My Nephew on Getting his Driver’s Permit

Set your hands at 10 and 2
Grandpa once said to me, your mother,
your cousins, and he’ll say to you.
He’ll tell you to buckle up, adjust your
seat, your mirrors, and the one-second rule
for estimating the distance between
you and the car in front of you.
Then round and round you’ll cruise an empty
parking lot with Grandpa braced
between the dash and seat, smiling.
But he is a white man and may neglect to add:
Keep your palms flat against the wheel
when the police stop you for a broken light,
and never reach for your wallet.

— Wendy Scher

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Festivid treat for anoel, who keeps requesting things I want an excuse to vid. :D

Get Loud
source: Ghostbusters (2016)
music: Kitten Forever, "Get Loud"
summary: Jillian Holtzmann. Yeah, you know you wanna.

Download: Get Loud m4v (39 MB)


password: Festividz!

I feel like I should say something about this vid, but, uh, I don't really remember making it? The whole thing happened in the 36 hours right before GoLive, during which time I also had surgery, so I was super high on pain meds for a lot of it. I'm kind of amazed I managed to get the vid exported and uploaded without mishaps. Bless absolutedestiny and the magic that is LlamaEnc.

All comments and feedback are welcome, either here, at the AO3, or via email (heresluck at gmail dot com).

NOTE: If you want to know when I post new vids, you can track the "vids: announcements" tag on this journal or subscribe to heresluck at the AO3.

Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

We make ourselves free by the choices we make. I MIGHT BE A LITTLE EXCITED ABOUT THIS.



Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comments on Dreamwidth

Found via Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. From the site: "Minal Hajratwala is a poet, publisher, author, and writing coach/founder of Write Like a Unicorn. Her collection Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment was published in 2014 by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Her nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents won four literary awards, and she is the editor of a groundbreaking anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India. Visit her website for more information."


‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’

Your rage is pomegranates spilling open on ice, is the flute’s thin silver seam, is a volcano spitting rivulets of fire to wash clean these corrupt lands. Your rage is solidarity before after & during the hashtag. Your rage is the angel of karma before after & during the video. Your rage throbs tight in your chest against symbologies of sticks & stones & chokes that break ligament & bone. Your rage is the fulcrum of your desire, chimaerae busting out of cages, heart-sparks flying. Your rage gets shit done & it is no joke. Your rage is the luminous gold truth of sunrise, what you sit with long enough to dissolve your fear. Your rage is a checkmate to your compromise. Your rage is heat from a magnifying glass, focused, bursting into flame. Your rage is a cool blue spotlight circling the empty stage. Your rage is the dog who won’t lie down for the wrong master, fierce hen who won’t be moved till her brood is hatched, moth who unbinds her cocoon & lifts her body toward light. Your rage is a lesson & you learn it as you breathe. Your rage is this holy sword slicing through stone walls. Your rage is a sentence that says what it must, full-stop. Your rage is our dream of a sweeter brighter world. Your rage is this oar treading the sea to steer this ship this gorgeous fucking hot mess goddamn revolution.


Note: The title is a line from “Cruelty” by Namdeo Dhasal, poet and founder of the Dalit Panther movement.

— Minal Hajratwala
From Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky

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This poem about Boston's Old South Meeting House (Wikipedia) was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant.

Ignite the fire in us.


Old South Meeting House

We draw breath from brick
          step on stones, weather-worn,
                    cobbled and carved

with the story of this church,
          this meeting house,
                    where Ben Franklin was baptized

and Phillis Wheatley prayed—a mouth-house
          where colonists gathered
                    to plot against the crown.

This structure, with elegant curves
          and round-topped windows, was the heart
                    of Boston, the body of the people,

survived occupation for preservation,
          foregoing decoration
                    for conversation.

Let us gather in the box pews
          once numbered and rented
                    by generations of families

held together like ribs
          in the body politic. Let us gaze upon
                    the upper galleries to the free seats

where the poor and the town slaves
          listened and waited and pondered
                    and prayed

for revolution.
          Let us testify to the plight
                    of the well-meaning at the pulpit

with its sounding board high above,
          congregations raising heads and hands to the sky.
                    We, the people—the tourists

and townies—one nation under
          this vaulted roof, exalted voices
                    speaking poetry out loud,

in praise and dissent.
          We draw breath from brick. Ignite the fire in us.
                    Speak to us:

the language is hope.


— January Gill O’Neil
from poets.org

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Because I can't say it better, I will steal from the back of the book: Natasha Trethewey describes Hum as "concerned with what's beneath the surfaces of things—the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us," "a meditation on the machinery of living, an extended ode to sound and silence."

A search for more info about Jamaal May introduced me to Split This Rock and their social justice poetry database, which I am linking here to remind myself to poke around in it some more.


Pomegranate Means Grenade

The heart trembles like a herd of horses. — Jontae McCrory, age 11

Hold a pomegranate in your palm.
Imagine ways to split it. Think of the breaking
skin as shrapnel. Remember granada
means pomegranate and granada
means grenade because grenade
takes its name from the fruit;
identify war by what it takes away
from fecund orchards. Jontae,
these are the arms they will fear from you.
There will always be at least one like you:
a child who gets the picked-over box
with mostly black crayons. One who wonders
what beautiful has to do with beauty as he darkens
a sun in the corner of every page,
constructs a house from ashen lines,
sketches stick figures lying face down—
I know how often red is the only color
left to reach for. I fear for you.
My heart trembles like a herd of horses.
You are writing a stampede into my chest.
This is the same thumping anxiety that shudders
me when I push past marines in high school
hallways, moments after their video footage
of young men dropping from helicopters
in night vision goggles. I want you to see
in the dark without covering your face,
carry verse as countermeasure to recruitment videos,
and remember the cranes buried inside the poems
painted on banners that hung in Tiananmen Square—
remember because Huang Xiang was exiled
for these, exiled for this, the calligraphy of revolt.
You stand nameless in front of a tank against
those who would rather see you pull a pin
from a grenade than pull a pen
from your backpack. Jontae,
they are afraid.


— Jamaal May
from Hum

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