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A Sampler of the Theater of Ishmael Reed

Directed by Carla Blank

Narrated by Tennessee Reed

Performed by Boadiba, Seth Corr, Sherry Davis, Michael Lange, and Alex Maynard

Saturday, April 28, 2:30pm, Nahl Hall, on CCA’s Oakland campus | 5212 Broadway at the intersection of College Avenue & Broadway

Sunday, April 29, 2:30pm, Timken Hall, on CCA’s San Francisco campus | 1111 Eighth Street between Hooper & Irwin

Maps and directions

Free and open to the public

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American Academy in Rome e Casa delle Letterature di Roma Capitale sono liete di invitarla a:

Translating Poetry: Readings and Conversations

Damiano Abeni, Edoardo Albinati, Antonella Anedda, Sarah Arvio, Geoffrey Brock, Franco Buffoni, Patrizia Cavalli, Clare Cavanagh, Moira Egan, Massimo Gezzi, Julia Hartwig, Robert Hass, Karl Kirchwey, Franco Loi, Valerio Magrelli, Lucio Mariani, Guido Mazzoni, Jamie McKendrick, Anthony Molino, Jennifer Scappettone, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Susan Stewart, Adam Zagajewski

Per programma dettagliato

3 maggio 2012 – ore 18,00
American Academy in Rome, Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta San Pancrazio, 1
www.aarome.org

4 maggio 2012 – ore 16,30
Casa delle Letterature
Piazza dell’Orologio, 3
www.casadelleletterature.it

Ingresso libero fino ad esaurimento posti. Sarà disponibile la traduzione simultanea. Questo programma è reso possibile grazie alla generosa donazione dei Sig.ri Price e della Sig.ra Nancy M. O’Boyle, e al supporto della Casa delle Letterature di Roma Capitale, dell’Istituto Polacco di Roma e del Polish Book Institute; in collaborazione con la Keats-Shelley House e il British Council.

American Academy in Rome and Casa delle Letterature di Roma Capitale request the pleasure of your company at:

Translating Poetry: Readings and Conversations

Damiano Abeni, Edoardo Albinati, Antonella Anedda, Sarah Arvio, Geoffrey Brock, Franco Buffoni, Patrizia Cavalli, Clare Cavanagh, Moira Egan, Massimo Gezzi, Julia Hartwig, Robert Hass, Karl Kirchwey, Franco Loi, Valerio Magrelli, Lucio Mariani, Guido Mazzoni, Jamie McKendrick, Anthony Molino, Jennifer Scappettone, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Susan Stewart, Adam Zagajewski

Access full program

3 May 2012 – 6pm
American Academy in Rome, Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta San Pancrazio, 1
www.aarome.org

4 May 2012 – 4:30pm
Casa delle Letterature
Piazza dell’Orologio, 3
www.casadelleletterature.it

Seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Simultaneous translation will be available. This program is made possible through generous gifts by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Price and Mrs. Nancy M. O’Boyle and with the support of the Casa delle Letterature di Roma Capitale, Istituto Polacco di Roma, and the Polish Book Institute. Collaborating institutions include the Keats-Shelley House and the British Council.

Photo credit:
Giorgio Vasari, Uomo che legge alla finestra, affresco
Museo statale di Casa Vasari, sala del Trionfo e della Virtù

Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici, Paesaggistici, Storici, Artistici ed Etnoantropologici di Arezzo

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Visit Al Young’s Poem-a-Month page at KQED’s
‘The California Report’

butterflypictures.net

April, the Coolest Month

April? The cruelest month? Says who?
From Chula Vista to Bakersfield – she drove up
to the San Joaquin Valley to hear him quote this?
What was it about reading and college anyway?
“Fool,” she ached to say, “just look out the window.
Your A-plus blacks out sunlight!” Breathe.
She knew how April fools, but April pulls, too.

April pulls up National Poetry Month. Breathe.
April pulls up National Library Week and (bass
and drum roll) Jazz Appreciation Month.
Lobbies buzz. With every spore afloat, adrift,
ravishing her sinuses, she could feel April’s
mutual pulls flow out in her snail-soft exhale.
Her family knows beet fields, artichokes, grapes.

She breathed the early pull of April, a soul of melt
and yearly turn-around. Unsprung, they kissed
away distance and loved it up for lost time.
All the way home to green, old San Diego County,
she missed him bad. She made up poems
to sing for them over a crackling SmartPhone
in the twilit chill of April, the coolest month.

© Al Young

Courtesy photos

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“April in Paris” — Sarah Vaughan (singer), Clifford Brown (trumpet), Herbie Mann (flute), Paul Quinichette (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Jones (piano), Joe Benjamin (bass), Roy Haynes (drums), 1954

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click on the eiffel tower

JJWebb/Cruzio Blues Café

To animate the avatar of Al Young reading and singing with the Dartanyan Brown Trio, click here.
Dartanyan Brown, bass | Jorge Molina, piano | Sly Randolph, drums

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APRIL IN PARIS

after Yip Harburg & Vernon Duke

It was here in that one-time, one-step, lighted blue
of Paris at ease, close to the Cluny, in splendid,
straight-up noontime shadow that your slow and
measuring eyes met more than their burning match.

The smooth warmth of your whisper along my neck,
the nappy back of it, where you’d peeled back
its soft, excited collar to tell me everything you’d learned
or discerned in a city where love and prices flirt.

A product of standstill winters, sudden summers, sultry
prejudice, and heartland steak-and-whiskey afternoons,
you’d blown in from the States, an orphan of the arts –
Mary Cassatt, Josephine Baker, Mary Lou Williams,

Jean Seberg. What breathlessness overtakes me here?
Brushing and combing out memories of your touch,
in a season as uncertain as coastal fog moving inland
from the loveless edges of that country we’d both fled,

I shiver. Whom could we run to if not one another?
Back home we knew what it was like to be the other –
displaced, despised, imprisonable. We watched and fought.
The colors of loss deepened. Yearning to break free,

unconsciously American, we counted our chickens, certain
that the ships we’d always banked on would sail in.
In Paris, our adopted country of each other’s arms,
whose borders blurred all time, all common market sense,

we saved the slow but steady squeeze of night, of time,
the way it smothered darkness, the way it mothered light.
The April of your frightened French was like that, too;
you had no words for holiday tables, for chestnuts in bloom.

Parisian light, like light at home — Detroit, Des Moines –
lit up your waifish eyes. I said, “Think twice before you speak.”
Over here you mostly knew the blues; rue rhymed with blue.
There couldn’t be too much light, too much touch.

Al Young
© 2001, 2006, 2008 by Al Young

Meet the Poet-Animator

Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb a.k.a. Beau Blue

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clickable

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© Brian Baer/CAC

See and hear California’s Poetry Out Loud 2012 finalists at the California Channel (March 25 & 26) | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Photo credit: Brian Baer / California Arts Council 2012

Mohammad Shehata from Fresno County took second, and Jonathon Bermea from Tuolumne County was third in an extremely close competition

El Dorado County’s Corbin Gomez to represent California in Poetry Out Loud nationals

By Mary Beth Barber
© California Arts Council
March 26, 2012

Corbin Gomez, a senior at Oak Ridge in El Dorado County, took first place in the 2012 California state finals of Poetry Out Loud. Mohommad Shehata, a senior at Clovis West High School in Fresno County, was the first runner-up and will represent California in the national finals if Gomez is unable to attend. Jonathon Bermea, a senior at Sonora High School in Tuolumne County, was the second runner-up.

Three other students made it to the final round, including (in no particular order) Madeleine Centrella (Santa Barbara County), Austin Carr (Solano County), and Brittany Wiltz (Sacramento County). A list of all of the county winners and links to their high schools follows this release. The competition took place on the evening of Sunday, March 25, at the Sacramento Sheraton (Round 1), and the morning of Monday, March 26 (Rounds 2 and 3), on the state Senate floor. Video recordings of both days will be made available soon at www.calchannel.com.

“We have a very strong contender and compelling young voice to represent California in the national Poetry Out Loud finals this spring in Corbin Gomez,” said Craig Watson, Director of the California Arts Council. “But all these students in the California state finals today are champions. This was my first Poetry Out Loud state finals since joining the Arts Council, and I was amazed at the level of talent in the room.”

More photos of the Poetry Out Loud top three winners are available for publication. Photo credit: Brian Baer/California Arts Council 2012.

http://www.cac.ca.gov/poetryoutloud/2012/Poetry_Out_Loud_Press_photos_2012.zip

Dana Gioia, the acclaimed poet who initiated Poetry Out Loud during his tenure as the former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), was on hand Sunday and Monday and spoke about the importance of the program and the arts in general. “The main reason I took (the job as NEA Chair) was that everywhere I went in the United States as a poet, someone in the audience would tell me how the arts education program had been taken out of their school,” he said. “It struck me as a disaster that in this country as we enter the 21st Century — a time when America is not going to compete on cheap labor but on ingenuity, on creativeness, on innovation – we have taken imagination out of the educational system and are not properly educating our kids.”

“The purpose of arts education is not to produce artists,” continued Gioia. “It is to produce complete human beings.”

This year marks the seventh time the California Arts Council has produced the annual competition — the largest of its kind in the nation, with over 40,000 students in approximately 33 California counties participating. The program encourages high school students to learn about poetry through memorization, performance, and competition. The California state finals is the culminating competition between county winners who have shown their merit in the classroom, school, district, and county (a pyramid competition structure similar to the spelling bee).

“Poetry Out Loud facilitates the ability of an ordinary person like me to experience something truly extraordinary through the art of poetry recitation,” said Gomez.

Photo: El Dorado County Arts Council

Gomez, as the California Poetry Out Loud champion, receives $200 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He will go on to compete in Washington, DC in April, and his school will receive $500 for books. Shehata, as the runner-up, receives $100 from the NEA, and $200 for books at his school.

The state’s Poetry Out Loud program is directed by the California Arts Council, and was initiated by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation. Local arts agencies and school districts conduct the program on the county level. The California Arts Council would like to thank the Target Corporation for sponsoring the state’s program and helping bring California Poetry Out Loud to as many California high school students as possible.

Additional thanks are extended to the California Channel and its staff, who allowed Monday’s portion of the competition to be broadcast and webcast, and who video recorded Sunday’s program for later viewing both on California Channel cable stations as well as webcast at www.calchannel.com. The California Channel has had a long history with the California Poetry Out Loud program, and the organization won a Telly in 2007 for their hour-long program on that year’s state finals.

Also essential to the success of the program is the staff from the state Senate, including Senate TV who recorded Rounds 2 and 3 from the Senate floor and made the airing and live webcast by the California Channel possible.

Members of the press interested in California’s Poetry Out Loud program may contact Mary Beth Barber at 916-322-6588, mbarber@cac.ca.gov. More general information, including a list of poems the students chose to recite, can be found on the California Arts Council website (www.arts.ca.gov) under the Home/What’s New tab. A list of all the county winners follows this release.

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California Poetry Out Loud 2012
County Champions (in alphabetical order by County)

Alameda County
Michelle Yang, Oakland Military Institute
http://www.oakmil.org/omiacademy/site/default.asp

Contra Costa County
Denica Garcia, Salesian High School
http://www.salesian.com/

El Dorado County
Corbin Gomez, Oak Ridge High School
http://www.orhsonline.com/

Fresno County
Mohammad R. Shehata, Clovis West High School
http://cwhs.cusd.com/

Humboldt County
Terra Trujillo Ashbrook, North Coast Preparatory and Performing Arts Academy
http://northcoastprep.org/

Inyo County
Elizabeth Richards, Big Pine High School
http://bigpine.ca.schoolwebpages.com/education/components/layout/default.php?sectionid=1&url_redirect=1

Lake County
Sylvia Manners, Lower Lake High School
http://llhs.konoctiusd.org/

Los Angeles County
Calvin Lam, San Gabriel High School
http://www.sghsmatadors.org/

Madera County
Michelle Linn, Glacier High School
http://www.sd5.k12.mt.us/ghs

Marin County
Douglas Pardella, Redwood High
http://www.glacierhighcharter.org/

Mendocino County
Elijah Ravitz-Campbell, Mendocino Community High School
http://www.mendocinocommunityhighschool.org/

Modoc County
Tahlia Guzman, Surprise Valley High School
http://svhs.snappages.com/

Mono County
Ashley Garrison, Mammoth High School
http://www.mammothusd.org/site_res_view_folder.aspx?id=396312af-8927-4391-9e51-97ddad3128e7

Monterey County
Arwa Awan, Pacific Grove High School
http://www.pghs.org/

Napa County
Emily Mourraille, New Technology High School
http://www.nths.nvusd.k12.ca.us/Website2007/index.html

Nevada County
Jeremy Van Hecke, Ghidotti Early College High School
http://www.nuhsd.org/Ghidotti.cfm

Orange County
Ellen Webre, Orange County High School of the Arts
http://www.ocsarts.net/

Placer County
Helen Bansen, Truckee High School
http://ths.ttusd.org/

Riverside County
N’kem Ehiemere, Nuview Bridge Early College High School
http://nuviewbridge.org/

Sacramento County
Brittany Wiltz, Natomas Charter School
http://www.natomascharter.org/

San Diego County
Oscar Sanchez Cid del Prado, Valley Center High School
http://vchs.vcpusd.net/

San Francisco County
Abigail Schott-Rosenfield, Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts
http://www.sfsota.org/sota.cfm

San Luis Obispo County
Blythe Berg, Mission College Preparatory Catholic High School
http://www.missionprep.org/

Santa Barbara County
Madeleine Centrella, Dos Pueblos High School
http://www.dphs.org/

Siskiyou County
Nicholas Cordell, Yreka High School
http://www.yuhsd.net/

Solano County
Austin Carr, Benicia High School
http://beniciahs-beniciaunified-ca.schoolloop.com/

Sonoma County
Brynna Thigpen, Maria Carrillo High School
http://www.mariacarrillohighschool.com/Pages/Home.aspx

Stanislaus County
Kathryn Harlan-Gran, James Enochs High School
http://mcs.monet.k12.ca.us/schools/enochs/default.aspx

Sutter County
Molly Grover, C.O.R.E. Camptonville Academy
http://www.coretca.org/

Tuolumne County
Jonathon Bermea, Sonora High School
http://www.sonorahs.org/

Ventura County
Jeremy Brooks, El Camino High School
http://www.sanjuan.edu/ElCamino.cfm

Yolo County
Ella Rose Eldon, Esparto High School http://espartohs.espartok12ca.schoolfusion.us/

Yuba County
Ocil Herrejón, Lindhurst High School
http://www.mjusd.k12.ca.us/education/school/school.php?sectionid=15

© 2012 California Arts Council

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