In 2012, I had the great privilege of performing my poems with the celebrated choreographer and dancer Shizuno Nasu and percussionist Gene Tamashiro. The performance was titled “Dancing the Seasons.”
Shizuno was brilliant and terrifying and moving!
This experience transformed the way I look at “reading” poetry.
See the video of “Spring”
here and the video of “Summer” here
Second Childhoodfor Lucille Clifton Bless Lucille’s big hips!And bless my own free-at-last hips!Here they are dawdlingand not worrying onebit about where they arein relationto anyone else. You can look at me or not.I am not saying anything personal anymore. I am saying hips breasts belly legs feetroots branches and big thick trunktidessunrisesmonkeys lithe and witty…
Letting It Go I’m walking on my birthdayand this timeI’mletting it go. Headline!Waistline!Toe the line!Morning line! I’ve stopped stoppingat all the roads not taken(you know the ones I mean) because here’s the joke:every road is a dead end. So I’m just walking on my birthdayand letting it go. In my throat, regret.On my tongue, mourning……
When Don and I arrived at Jenn’s studio, I was only coming to dance with her and other amazing women dancers. Don was only there to try out various options for filming the group, in preparation for a future video of us “dancing my poetry” on the lava at Hilina Pali, or among the koa…
Myopia in the Afternoon What landscape is this? My flesh curvingover your bones, pectoral swellunder my cheek, darkness of tangled fur,and beyond that, the wet angled branch of a tree, and beyond that,something white, something pale blue.Call it tree and window,sky and snow. But what this is, so close at hand, I cannot say.This landscape…
Fat Time Under purest ultramarine the raisedgoblets of trees overrun with gold.We should be reeling drunk and portly as groundhogsthrough these windfalls of russet, citron, bronze, chartreuse. Everywhere color pools like butter, like oil of ripe nuts,like piles of oranges under a striped tent. Oh, let us be greedy of eyeball,pigs scuffling in this gorgeous…
The White Queen Comes the White Queen worryingand hurrying to keep up and losingher hairpins. Mind pieces slipout of their sockets. Because it is all held togetherwith hairpins —the old kind, meant to be invisible? And they were invisible.I didn’t know they were there holding my mind togetheruntil I startedto lose it. Someone whose name…
