A reminder
YEAR EIGHT is ending for the NMCACWF at the Tuesday, May 5th, 7-9 p.m. NMCACWF’s First Tuesday … in the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center in San Benito ….
Come and see if the “high” from Poetry Month can be maintained!
Add your 10 minutes to the vault of universal wisdom!
Gene for Tri Facilitators Mel, Robin [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
How wonderfully self-centered!
Scarcely a word from the developed world when it comes to: contaminated water; diarrhea; AIDS; malaria; malnutrition; general sanitation and hygiene; starvation; birth difficulties; factory farming and its unhealthy spin-offs …and the list goes on and on ….
Why worry! Those health issues only affect about half or more of the [...]

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By Gene Novogrodsky
The ATV factory closed,
So they tossed beds and
Mattresses in the back of the
Pickup, and headed for the shale fields.
She had a day to clear the rental,
And she never knew that her morning glories
Would orange two months later,
While oil and coal field particles
Filled her flowerless and new rental ….

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A report
Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty people showed up Monday, April 27, at the Galeria 409 to hear Betsy Price, consultant Ken Mills and David Martin Davies of Texas Public Radio outline burgeoning plans for a new organization, Voices from the Valley, aimed at bringing more public and community radio to the Rio Grande [...]

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from Virginia Gause
Poetry Month in the Valley will conclude with the first official book signing in the United States for La Primera Voz Que Oí (The First Voice I Heard), a collection of Spanish poems by Brownsville native Brenda Nettles Riojas, is scheduled at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 30 at the Arnulfo L. Oliveira [...]

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Video by Edgar Clinton, Jr.

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Video by Edgar Clinton, Jr.

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from Gene’s Notebook
…and the man in the Lopez Four line speaks of the puente George Washington in Spanish, so I cut into his conversation and say, “My grandparents used to live near the George Washington Bridge in New York City after they moved from a poorer section up to the bridge.”
He listens. And I ask [...]

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By Rudy H. García

There you are! My morning light!
Sparkling,
Shining,
Silver kite,
Guide me with your moon-beam-string
While the morning mockers sing.
Waken up my drowsing state
And cast your silken thread to me.
Draw me, forth, unto my lover
To kiss caress and stir her
From our nestling bower.
Lead us far into the dawn
Til we see what`s there beyond,
Beyond, the rise, horizon`s skies
And [...]

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Opinion by Gene Novogrodsky
I am addressing this to the mainly erroneous TEA Party and secessionist adherents – though they have at least two good points.
The current federal tax code is written with favors to the rich at its core, so the Tea Party folk have a gripe there – not that I heard [...]

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A video by Edgar Clinton, Jr.
Here is some documentation of the TEA party in Harlingen.

The text of the accompanying song:

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by Gene Novogrodsky
Purple blossoms,
Purple beds,
And there I see death,
More than I did under
Full branches, leafed,
That strayed like wild women’s hair
When winds blew ….
Yes, I saw death once
From a bench under those branches;
Now it soothes from those purple beds,
Beds like sheets, twisted, and soft ….

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by Rudy H. García
Recuerdo bien aquella vez
Cuando tu madre luz te dio
Mis ojos se abrieron realmente, por primer-vez
El hombre más feliz fui yo
Y
Recuerdo bien aquella vez
Esmeralda es tu mes
Cuando tu rostro suavecito y rosita sentí.
Cuando Magdalena, Eulogia, broto de ti
Cuando el más grande orgullo regalaste a mí
Cuando tu nacimiento celestial fue grand orgullo para mí
Cuando [...]

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A video
Here is Despedida ( the fourth movement) of the Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra by Ney Rosauro performed by Thomas Raines, marimbist, and the University of Texas at Brownsville Orchestra. The performance took place at Sacred Heart Church at the corner of Sixth Street and Elizabeth in Brownsville. You should have been there. It [...]

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By Gene Novogrodsky
High mountains in the southwest,
Misty chills, thatched huts, twisted roads,
Women, kids and the elderly,
An eco-tourist paradise ….
Ripping waves in the northeast,
Fishermen with gutted sharks,
Hanging rays, cut bait fish,
Women, haughty and worn, and skinny kids,
Fresh red and white-fleshed food for the state and nation ….
And here arrive the Texas-based missionaries,
Christ , God and used [...]

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by Thomas Thornburg

Mary Jane, you brown-eyed baby, the way they put you down
And tell such little lies on you around this stinking town;
Rarely once and maybe never Mary Jane won’t tell;
If she’ll let you, she can get you feeling very well;
Just because you haven’t met her, you can mend your luck:
Unless you’re blind, man, go [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
With gloves and a metal poker,
He goes deep into the day’s
Trash cans, grabbing and stabbing
Aluminum cans from weekend parties
Buried under pizza boxes and store-bag plastic.
Earth Day?
Earth Day 39?
What’s that?
A recycler he is,
Doing what he knows on
Earth Day, while unknowing as
The trash can fillers of the day’s shaky promise ….
He hopes their parties expand,
Longer [...]

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Intellectual theft by Stan Raines

This needs no explanation.

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A proposal
It’s National Poetry Month, we’ve just had a celebration of verse and spoken art at the Galeria 409, and the Valley International Poetry Festival is about to take off for its second year.
So it must be time to again shuffle out some clerihew, those little satiric pieces invented by Edmond Clerihew Bentley at age [...]

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An outrage noted by Joe Premont
This is from a Yahoo news story:
At Permian High School in Odessa, Texas – made famous by the H.G. Bissinger book “Friday Night Lights” – school officials spent $70,000 for a chartered airplane to fly the football team to visiting games. Meanwhile, the school’s textbooks were 15 years out of [...]

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A tip from Jim Abbott

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by Gene Novogrodsky
And since she never wanted
To come to the United States,
Preferring a Russian gin mill
That her father owned,
The rabbi getting her name
Wrong at her funeral brought
Down the curtain on the bar-maid
Teen turned mother, cook and
Egg-peddler in street-house-car-
Packed New York’s Lower East Side,
Those Russian snows and woods and wolves
Unsettling dreams for seven-plus urban decades [...]

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A Thank You

Realizing that I have a certain prejudice, but my feeling was and is that last night’s celebration of NYBT’s first year as a literary rag was a screaming success. The parting comments were all positive and there is a strong possibility that, if we make it through another year, we’ll have another. My [...]

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A reminder

Don’t forget the party tonight at the Galeria 409 to celebrate the first year of NunnaYerBizness Today. There are refreshments available and much entertainment including poetry and music. The Galeria is at 409 East 13th Street in Brownsville. See you there.
-Stan

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By Gene Novogrodsky
Before the urban animal control truck
Came to take the dark grey possum
To the still-wild brushland,
A white possum came to the trap -
A visit – and then ran across a cracked yard,
Slanted street and under a rotted-board
House when the truck stopped ….

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