, said co-pastor Tai Amri Wilson, at First Christian Church Oakland. it is a parish made up of elderly African Americans, young people from the LGBT community, Quakers and Buddhists, social justice activists.
i have not been doing so much on the social justice/advocacy front, because I have wanted to get small and hollow, to get tossed across the sky like a sparrow. go light. find new nests. ok, so maybe, the advocacy i do runs in little, intimate currents and happens between me and other people/clients, one-on-one. maybe. something i have been thinking about.
but i am doing a lot of collaborations. writing Waveform with Denise Leto changed my whole concept of how it would be possible, more than possible for me to continue to write. it gave me a new way in that was social and somatic practice. it made it Mambo Italiano at the top of my lungs and too much cheese. Collaboration (as a poet) brings the body and other lives into the work, in just about he only way that makes sense to me; in terms of justifying to myself, how i spend my time, how art has spiritual or practical efficacy. Collaborating is also a form of documenting one's knowing of another (being-in-time together), which to me, has always been the thing. So, collaboration is documentary poetics, also.
Two new collaborations:
Val Witte and I braiding together a long poem based on a set of instructions for folding an origami iris. (We are also taking a bluegrass women's signing class together at the Freight and Salvage. This is probably not unrelated.)
And, Nancy Yates and I creating a poe-ga workshop, to be held near Ashby BART in two weeks. Please come! Rumi--you might roll your eyes, but he re-translates your rotater cuff, I promise. See details here: http://writetoconnect.blogspot.com/2012/03/poetry-in-motion-yogawrite-to-connect.html
