Who's the Poet in your life?

For the past eight years, Center for the Art of Performance has been engaged in an on-going poetry initiative, where we ask our UCLA and L.A. communities to consider the question, "Who is the poet in your life?" Activities have included open mics, readings, salons and performances, workshops and panels, a continuing live poetry bureau; and the publication of 2,000 mini-books of original poems. We hope you will join us on this journey by answering the question in your own way. Recommend a poet, share a poem, write one yourself, look for the poetry around you. Be surprised, and surprise others. Contact us at the links below with questions, thoughts, ideas and submissions -- and watch this space for news on upcoming events. We look forward to hearing from you. "Poetry is everywhere. It just needs editing." --James Tate

[poetinyourlife]

art is...

Art. Huh. Art is…um… is this art?  Um…a lot of people think art has to have meaning but sometimes you just want to create something that looks nice.

Art is written in the lines of my brain, art brings me closer to myself.

Art is nature, or stars in the sky or…

Sex…

…sex

…art is…what I doodle on my paper?

Art is trying out a new clothing style.

Art is something I’ve never felt I have ever touched, I don’t know what art is, yet I have created art all the time - I used to like drawing and dancing and photography, I guess they are all a part of art.  Oh – and piano.

Art is defined by intention, by the human perceiving it.

Art is being the singer you are in the shower.

Art is rigid, art is tough, art is welcoming, art is magical...

…it is whatever you need it be and more and sometimes it isn’t enough.

Art is oversleeping.

Art is what I hope I haven’t lost. It’s what I do when I pick up a paper and pencil with equal parts hope and fear.

Art is art. I am art.

Art is pain.

Art is singing alone in the car

Art is not knowing what to write…

Art Is Bullshit.

Art is my dog, my dog for sure…

Art is thinking about what you have to do and thinking about what you want to do…

Art is “me time.”

This is art.

God is art.

Art is three years of trees with long leaves whipping at your face during storms.

Art is the way I get ready every day.

Art is our atoms in their…arrangement.

Art is expression personified through experiences, art is everything --literally we are a culmination of art, living, moving breathing forms of art.  I feel like I need a Ted Talk now.

Art is on a computer screen,

in a keyboard…

and in an equation.

Arghhhhhh! Art is overwrought and self-inflated and art is also awe inspiring.

Art is the stuff you’re afraid to say or do.

Art is no one’s, it is never fully learned.

Art is a way of life, it is my way of life.

Art is fighting for what you think is right.

Art is what gets me through hard times and clears my mind.

Art is symbolism, light at the end of the tunnel, finishing work right before it’s due, escape, transformative, transportation, more than meets the eye, deception, human perception at its highest form -- calming the soul.

Art is tattoos, art is handwriting.

Art is an artifact, art is a mindset.

Art is using the real world to create an escape into your world. Das it!

Art is the surprise ending, the wake-up call.

Art is everyone staring at you.

Art is having someone tell your story.

Art could be what I am missing.

Art is looking for the upside when all that appears is downside.

Art is a fishbowl where you are fish, water, bowl and onlooker all at the same time.  

Art is not knowing where you will end up but knowing how you want to feel as you take the steps to get there.

Art is a way of expression but sometimes,

    Sometimes…

      Sometimes…

           ...the mouth can’t say what the mind feels.

 Art is the space, the place…Inside there is space between breaths, and outside…Outside, it goes so…freaking...fast.  

 --Meryl Friedman, a found poem compiled from over 200 responses from UCLA students, AA10 Arts Encounters: Fall 2019.

[capucla-blog]

On a morning walk/trees reach out hands in greeting/reminders of life… The @cap_ucla Poetry Bureau will be live today @5pm, LA Time on the CAP UCLA Facebook page. Join us for more poems and to submit a request! #poeminyourpocketday #haiku https://www.instagram.com/p/B_nKL8olAfU/?igshid=1iiqgwarmv7ni

[poetinyourlife]

Ursula K. Le Guin, backstage at Royce Hall, CAP UCLA, 2015

In honor of Earth Day, here are excerpts from a talk given by Ursula K. Le Guin, at the conference, “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,” in May, 2014

Just this week, I heard the poet Bill Siverly say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. Well, we know that we don’t need more infantile new technologies that demand throwing away all the old ones every Tuesday. We need adult rational technologies, old and new: pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, carpentry, solar power, sustainable farming.

But after our long orgy of being lords of creation and texting as we drive, it’s hard to stop looking for the next technofix. We have got to change our minds.

To use the world well, we need to relearn our being in it, renew our awareness of belonging to the world. How do we go about it? That awareness seems always to have involved knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin gave that knowledge a scientific basis and now both poets and scientists are extending our awareness of our relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to non-living beings, our fellowship as things with other things. Relationship among all things seems to be complex and reciprocal. It’s always at least two way, back-and-forth. It seems as if nothing is single in this universe and nothing goes one way. In this view, humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long lasting, a web of connections infinite, but locally fragile, with and among everything, all beings, including what we generally class as things, objects.

Decartes and the behaviorists willfully saw dogs as machines without feeling. Is seeing plants without feeling a similar arrogance? We don’t know. But one way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as natural resources is to class them as fellow beings, kinfolk. I guess what I’m trying to do is subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has got us. To subjectify is not to co-opt and colonize and exploit. Rather, if it’s done honestly, it involves a great reach outward of the mind and the imagination.

What tools do we have to help us make such a reach? Mary Jacobus, in a book called Romantic Things, wrote, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things, to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”

Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is to speak humanly for it in both senses of the word for. A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual relationship to a thing, a rock, a river, a tree, the relationship to or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Science describes accurately from outside and poetry describes accurately from inside, you could say. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the language of both science and poetry to save us from ignorance and irresponsibility.

[poetinyourlife]

In honor of Earth Day, a poem about birds, by Theo.  Written at the CAP UCLA Poetry Bureau on April 16, 2020.

[poetinyourlife]

Pablo Neruda/some odes

https://poets.org/poem/ode-my-socks

https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/pablo-neruda/ode-to-salt/

https://classicalbookworm.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/neruda-ode-to-the-dictionary/

[poetinyourlife]

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here, Yet the granaries are bursting with meal, The sacks of meal piled to the rafters. The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish; Birds darken the sky.  Is it enough That the dish of milk is set out at night, That we think of him sometimes, Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings? John Ashbery

[poetinyourlife]

The Best Poetry of 2016

The Book Review’s On Poetry columnist picks his favorite books of the year.

[capucla-blog]

A moment of inspiration in #uclaspecialcollections #librariesofinstagram

[archivesofamericanart]

Today is Romare Bearden’s birthday!  Bearden was an artist, writer, arts advocate, social worker, humanist, composer, and cat lover. Interested in learning more about Bearden and his cats?  Read more about the subject in our blog: https://www.aaa.si.edu/blog/2017/06/romare-bearden-and-his-traveling-cats

[poetinyourlife]

A janitor preserves the seized belongings of migrants...

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-janitors-collection-of-things-confiscated-from-migrants-in-the-desert

[capucla-blog]

#designforsharing begins its 9th year of arts residencies with our fabulous partners at #uclacommunityschool. Today, Over 100 4th and 5th grade students went on a gallery walk of their self portraits and poetry, a culmination of a week’s hard work and creativity. You allow us to see the world through your eyes and our hearts fill with hope. We love you guys! #artmatters #artseducation #lausdarts #uclaarts

[poetinyourlife]

How To Be Alone

[poetinyourlife]

The poetry of Audubon...  https://hyperallergic.com/179612/all-of-audubons-birds-of-america-in-one-high-resolution-flock/

[poetinyourlife]

The Streets of Los Angeles by S.A. Griffin

The Streets of Los Angeles here, tonight in this, the 2nd largest city in America a strange peace rocks these urban canyons there are no magnificent fireworks to scratch the sky with celebration no…

[capucla-blog]

[the-lexicographer]

Word of the Day

Celidography, n. /sēl’i-do’grafē/ - A description of the spots in the sun or planets.

      Source: The Oxford Universal Dictionary, 1933

[hirshhorn]

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.” 

Happy Birthday to Marcel Duchamp, born on this day in 1887! 

Portrait by Bert Stern, 1967.