Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "bisexual"

Last week received my contributor's copy of Askew, a Southern California (Ventura)-based literary journal in a newspaper format. I enjoyed the poems a lot, and I liked the way the editors presented my poem about my mentor ("Julia Vinograd Turns Canned Food into Poetry") and its final line "She does not deign to eat the peach" right under another poem that ended with the word "peach."

Askew is edited by Phil Taggart and Marsha de la O with the help of Friday Lubina. Phil and Friday also host readings in the Ventura area. I was scheduled to read on July 31 at Phil Taggart's reading at the Artists Union Gallery there. Unfortunately the gallery just lost its lease and the reading its venue, so I'll have to wait for another opportunity to hear the editors of Askew read.

I also received my contributor's copies of Assaracus: Lady Business, with five of my filthiest queer poems bringing up the rear, so to speak, at the end of the volume. Assaracus is a gay male literary journal edited by Bryan Borland. This was their issue of poetry by lesbian and bisexual women, and I absolutely loved it. My favorite poetry in the volume was by Maureen Seaton. Couldn't find her on Facebook -- hope to run into her work again soon.

Editor Michael W. Jones of the online journal The Eloquent Atheist was kind enough to print my poem "Downsizing the Solar System" at http://www.eloquentatheist.com/2012/0....

As I've mentioned here before, I'm not an atheist, actually. I just know that I don't know what the cosmic story is, but I acknowledge that you might, so I'm not really even a proper agnostic. (That is, I understand agnosticism to be the belief that one cannot know whether God exists.) The thing is, I have a physician's attitude that if the answer to a question doesn't change the plan of action, then I don't need the answer. Since I'd behave the same way toward other people whether I knew that God existed or not, I figure it's best just to get on with the good works and try to be as decent a person as I can. I respect the faiths of others, and also the agnosticism or atheism of others.

Lastly, I wanted to remind San Francisco Bay Area readers that I'll be featured at Caffe Greco in North Beach in SF with Julia Vinograd on Monday, July 9th. Sign-up for the open mic is at 6:30 PM. 423 Columbus Ave., between Vallejo and Green. Hope to see some of you there! Bring a little work of your own to read at the open mic if you'd like to.

Julia Vinograd is my poetry mentor. You can find a lot of her books here on Goodreads. Here's her short bio:

Julia Vinograd is a Berkeley street poet. She has published 56 books of poetry, and won the American Book Award of The Before Columbus Foundation. She has three poetry CD collections: Bubbles and Bones, Eye of the Hand, and The Book of Jerusalem. She received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has a Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Berkeley. She won a Pushcart Prize for her poem “The Young Men Who Died of AIDS.” She was one of the four editors of the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1: The Babarians of San Francisco— Poets from Hell.

That's the title of a delightful blog by Sara Chittenden, a bi woman who plays bass in the indie band Soundmeetsound. If you want to learn more about bi people (or get a shot in the arm of pride!), check out her inspiring and beautiful Tumblr at http://thesunnysideofbeingbi.tumblr.com

You can find her great review of The Horizontal Poet at
http://thesunnysideofbeingbi.tumblr.c...

Soundmeetsound's first album is coming out soon.... I can't wait.

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I'll be doing at least three San Francisco Bay Area readings in September. Save the dates:

September 5 PM I'm featured at Sacred Grounds Cafe Open Mic in San Francisco, hosted by Dan Brady, who recently read his own work at the SF Public Library.

September 8 PM I'm cofeatured with my friend and mentor Julia Vinograd at an open mic hosted by the lovely Tanka and performance poet Jeanne Lupton at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda.

September 22 PM I'm featured with my husband Hew Wolff and several other queer and/or kinky erotica writers at Perverts Put Out, San Francisco's literary smut salon hosted by Carol Queen and Simon Shepard at the Center for Sex and Culture.

Details and invitations to follow!

San Francisco Bay Area readers, save the date! I'll be reading Friday evening, Nov. 16, 2012, with Betty Blue, (aka Jane Kindred) at BiFabulous Authors, the kickoff event for the 25th Anniversary celebrations of the Bay Area Bisexuals Network (BABN). The reading and reception run from 7 PM to 9 PM at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St. (between Castro & Collingwood streets) in San Francisco, California.

It's gonna be a great party, people. I joined BABN when I moved to the SF Bay Area in 1998. Soon after, at a meeting of Berkeley BiFriendly, I met the host, Hew Wolff. He had been a member of BABN almost since its inception. We have been partners now for 14 years. Today is our wedding anniversary. Happy Halloween, y'all!

Betty Blue is a bi erotica writer, one of whose alter egos is the fantasy writer Jane Kindred. I'm thrilled to get to read with her and to celebrate one of the biggest reasons I live here in Oakland -- the peer group of other bisexual people I found here in the beautiful Bay Area.

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. She was bisexual. Here is a poem of Mistral's that she dedicated to the man who translated her poems from Spanish to French. Below it is my translation of her poem to English.

La extranjera

A Francis de Miomandre

Habla con dejo de sus mares bárbaros,
con no sé qué algas y no sé qué arenas;
reza oración a dios sin bulto y peso,
envejecida como si muriera.
En huerto nuestro que nos hizo extraño,
ha puesto cactus y zarpadas hierbas.

Alienta del resuello del desierto
y ha amado con pasión de que blanquea,
que nunca cuenta y que si nos contase
sería como el mapa de otra estrella.

Vivirá entre nosotros ochenta años,
pero siempre será como si llega,
hablando lengua que jadea y gime
y que le entienden sólo bestezuelas.
Y va a morirse en medio de nosotros,
en una noche en la que más padezca,
con sólo su destino por almohada,
de una muerte callada y extranjera.


The Stranger

To Francisco de Miomandre

She speaks with a feel of her savage seas
with I don’t know what seaweeds and sands;
she prays to a formless, weightless God,
aged as if she were dying.
In our garden that she made alien to us,
she has planted cactus and rough herbs.
She breathes life from the desert’s wind,
and she has loved with a whitening passion
she never speaks of, for if she were to tell
it would be like the map of another star.
She will live among us eighty years,
yet always as if just arrived,
speaking a tongue that pants and whines
and that only the little beasts understand.
And she will die here in our midst
one night of utmost suffering,
with only her fate as a pillow,
a quiet and foreign death.

It's been a while! Missed you all. Wanted to tell you about a new project of which I'm a small part:

Kickstarter Campaign to Publish Best Bisexual Short Stories

The aim is to help create a literature of bisexual characters so that bi young people have a place to read about people like themselves. The anthology is edited by Sheela Lambert, president of the Bisexual Writers Association. It will be published by Circlet Press. It includes stories by Ann Herendeen, Katherine V. Forrest, Jane Rule, Cecilia Tan, me, and others.

Great prizes are available for Kickstarter donations!