Split This Rock Interview with Regie Cabico

Eighth in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 14-17, 2016. Pre-registration for #SplitThisRock2016 is open now until March 31st.

Interview by Anas "Andy" Shallal

Regie Cabico is a pioneer of spoken word and the first openly queer and Asian slam poet to take top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. He is a former Nuyorican Poets Grand Slam Champion. He co-edited Flicker & Spark: A Contemporary Anthology of Queer Poetry and Spoken Word (Lowbrow Press, 2013) which was nominated for a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Television appearances include HBO's Def Poetry Jam and NPR's Snap Judgement. 

His work appears in over 30 anthologies including The Spoken Word Revolution (Sourcebooks, 2003), Chorus & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt and Company, 1994). Regie curates and hosts Sparkle Queer Open Mic at Busboys & Poets in DC. In addition to founding Capturing Fire International Queer Spoken Word Slam, he is co-founder of Split This Rock and of La-Ti-Do, a weekly spoken word/musical theatre cabaret series, with DonMike Mendoza. A recipient of a 2006 New York Innovative Theater Award, Regie performs his unique blend of poetry, stand-up comedy, and theater throughout North America and the United Kingdom.

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Busboys and Poets owner/founder Andy Shallal and Split This Rock 2016 featured poet Regie Cabico sat down at the 14th & V Busboys to discuss poetry’s place in our political and civil lives, Cabico’s 25 year career in Spoken Word and teaching, and the special role of Split This Rock.

Cabio calls Split This Rock Poetry Festival a "solidifying and bonding moment" for poets and dreamers from all over the world. He credits the festival as a “gathering of passionate, politically charged, eloquent artists who are trying to show that poetry can be more than chandelier pretty.”

Shot, edited, and produced by Anthony Amos, SKIES THE LIMIT Entertainment, 2016.

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Anas “Andy” Shallal is an Iraqi American activist, artist and social entrepreneur. He is the founder and proprietor of Busboys and Poets, an activism center and café in Washington DC, which features prominent speakers and authors and provides a venue for social and political activism. Since its inception, Busboys and Poets has become the most blogged about restaurant and gathering place in Washington DC and has become an incubator for activism and social change. Andy Shallal is a member of the board of trustees for The Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank. He also sits on several arts and philanthropic boards, including The Washington Peace Center, The Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at GMU, DC Vote, Think Local First, Social Venture Network, and The National Arab American Museum. He was a founding board member of Split This Rock.

Poem of the Week: Regie Cabico

 
A Queerification

for Creativity and Crisis at the National Mall

queer me     

shift me     

transgress me   

tell my students i'm gay    

tell chick fil a i'm queer  

tell the new york times i'm straight    

tell the mail man i'm a lesbian   

tell american airlines  

i don't know what my gender is   

like me 

liking you 

like summer blockbuster armrest dates

armrest cinematic love 

elbow to forearm in the dark    

humor me queerly    

fill me with laughter   

make me high with queer gas      

decompress me from centuries of spanish inquisition

& self-righteous judgment 

like the blood my blood   

that has mixed w/  the colonizer

 & the colonized    

in the extinct & instinct to love  

bust memories of water & heat 

& hot & breath 

beating skin on skin fluttering    

bruise me into vapors    

bleed me into air    

fly me over sub-saharan africa & asia & antarctica  

explode me from the closet of my fears   

graffiti me out of doubt     

bend me like bamboo   

propose to me   

divorce me   

divide me into your spirit 2 spirit half spirit 

& shadow me  w/ fluttering tongues

& caresses  beyond head  

heart chakras   

fist smashing djembes   

between my hesitations    

haiku me into 17 bursts of blossoms & cold saki     

de-ethnicize me    

de-clothe me     

de-gender me in brassieres 

& prosthetic genitalias   

burn me on a brazier    

wearing a brassiere    

in bitch braggadocio soprano bass    

magnificat me in vespers 

of hallelujah & amen    

libate me in halos 

heal me in halls of femmy troubadors    

announcing my hiv status

or your status   

i am not afraid to love you     

implant dialects as if they were lilacs   

in my ear   

medicate me with a lick & a like

i am not afraid to love you   

so demand me       

reclaim me     

queerify me

 

  

-Regie Cabico   

  

Used by permission.

Photo by Les Talusan 

  

  

Regie Cabico  is one of the country's leading innovators and pioneers of poetry and spoken word, having won 3 top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 National Poetry Slams. Bust Magazine ranked him in the 100 Men We Love, and The Kenyon Review called him "the Lady Gaga of Poetry." He won a 2006 Best Performance Art Production award for his work on "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind." He has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam and NPR's Snap Judgement. His work is published in over 40 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution, & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has taught at Urban Word NYC, Poets House, Kundiman, and Split This Rock, and has served as faculty at Banff Arts Center's Spoken Word Program. Regie curates and co-hosts La Ti Do: A Weekly Cabaret & Spoken Word Series. He received the Writers for Writers Award for his work with at-risk youth from Poets and Writers. With Brittany Fonte, he co-edited a collection of North American and United Kingdom queer poetry, Flicker and Spark, a 2014 Lambda Literary Award Nominee for Best Anthology.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive. 

Sunday Kind of Love: Bas Böttcher & Regie Cabico

Sunday Kind of Love

presents
a Celebration of 20 Years of Slam Poetry
in Germany with

Bas Böttcher 

&

Regie Cabico  

Sunday June 15, 2014

5-7pm

Busboys & Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by
Busboys and Poets,

Split This Rock &
The Goethe-Institut DC

Bas Böttcher is one of the first to bring slam to the German-speaking stage and the 1997 German Slam Poetry Champion. Böttcher utilizes a dynamic, rhythmic form of poetry, direct and driven by the sound and melody of the language. His poetry shows sophistication, accurate choice of language and style, and highly developed linguistic skills. Böttcher simultaneously introduced rap into the German poetry scene and exposed hip-hop to more lyrical elements. Today slams in Berlin and urban metropolises of North Rhine Westphalia attract huge crowds that generate an impressive roster of new poetry stars. Böttcher's visit to Washington celebrates twenty years of slam poetry in Germany.  

Regie Cabico is one of the country's leading innovators and pioneers of poetry and spoken word, having won 3 top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 National Poetry Slams. Bust Magazine ranked him in the 100 Men We Love, and The Kenyon Review called him "the Lady Gaga of Poetry." He won a 2006 Best Performance Art Production award for his work on "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind." He has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam and NPR's Snap Judgement. His work is published in over 40 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution, & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has taught at Urban Word NYC, Poets House, Kundiman, and Split This Rock, and has served as faculty at Banff Arts Center's Spoken Word Program. Regie curates and co-hosts La Ti Do: A Weekly Cabaret & Spoken Word Series. He received the Writers for Writers Award for his work with at-risk youth from Poets and Writers. With Brittany Fonte, he co-edited a collection of North American and United Kingdom queer poetry, Flicker and Spark, a 2014 Lambda Literary Award Nominee for Best Anthology.

Bas Böttcher photo by Felix Warmuth

Regie Cabico photo by Les Talusan

Review of Collective Brightness

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them.

The book opens with Franklin Abbott’s “Koan.” Koans are Zen Buddhist stories or sayings that must be understood intuitively – they do not make sense to our rational minds. Abbott’s “Koan” explores history, both global and familial: “my face/ before my birth/ was half/ my father’s face/ looking/ back into/ eternity.” This koan sets the tone for the book – intimate and urgent, these poems speak to a world that see persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, or Queer as less than whole people. These poems insist on speaking the experience of poets whose souls are demeaned and damned by people who claim to determine who religion is and isn’t for.

The book doesn’t have a religion agenda; it isn’t an evangelical anthology. Ellen Bass’s poem “Ode to The God of Atheists” insists on a world in which “[t]he plums that bloom extravagantly,/ the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,/ each pebble and fear, pond and fish/ are yours whether or not you believe.” Beauty, spiritual and physical, fills this world, as Robin Becker writes about “peach and azure birds” flying from the mouth of a monk brushing his teeth. God godsself is drawn by this beauty. In the poem “Beetle Orgy,” from which the anthology’s title is drawn, Benjamin Grossberg writes of God looking down on a group of HIV positive men having sex and being “[m]oved to add/ His touch.” God gains from this experience, “comes to some knowledge/ as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased/ by the collective brightness of human skin…”

The anthology does not ignore the other, painful side of faith, religion, and spirituality. Kazim Ali’s “Home” claims that “God’s true language is only silence and breath,” and Jericho Brown, in “Romans 12:1” (the verse in which Paul orders Christians to offer their bodies as “living sacrifices”) observes that people, “[o]n the whole/ Hurt by me, they will not call me/ Brother. …they hate a woman/They smell in me.” Doubt, loneliness, hatred, and rejection are aspects of the spiritual experience of LGBTIQ people that are also explored in the anthology.

As is violence. Late in the book, Joseph Ross’s poem “The Upstairs Lounge, New Orleans, June 24, 1973” brings the murder of the patrons of the Upstairs Lounge, a bar and church where gay men could worship, vividly to life. Ross writes of the patrons singing “like they deserved to.// They prayed like they meant it.” The bar is set on fire, and many of the patrons die, including George, who escapes, then returns for Louis. The two “were found, a spiral/ of bones holding each other…” Ross does not stop with the fire; he continues to the aftermath – the jokes on the radio, the laughter of priests, and the refusal of churches to bury the dead: “Save one: a priest from// St. George’s Episcopal Church, who received hate mail…”

This is the hate and indifference to violence that leads to despair, which is achingly described in Regie Cabico’s “Soul Bargaining”: “By soul,// I mean God make me a wind instrument so I can toss myself/ into the East River. The street lamps are howling for the first// slivers of light. By light, I mean falling off a bridge// wrapped in the arms of a God who knows your name.”

Collective Brightness includes a poem by Azwan Ismail, a Malaysian writer who received death threats for participating in the It Gets Better Project and producing a Malay language LGBT anthology, Orang Macam Kita. Seung-Ja Choe is also included, the first time a Korean poet has been featured in an LGBTIQ anthology in any language. And Japanese poet Atsusuke Tanaka appears translated by Jeffry Angles for the first time.

The anthology is a global effort, and one that again and again gives evidence of what editor Kevin Simmonds claims in the introduction: “Abiding with this faith [which religion scholar Karen Armstrong refers to as the “opposite of certainty”], however, is one very personal certainty: No matter what, as a gay man, I belong.”

This Sunday, October 16, Kevin Simmonds and other poets from the anthology, Collective Brightness, will read at Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Sts, Washington DC. The reading will begin at 5:00 p.m.

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality

Edited by Kevin Simmonds

Publisher – Sibling Rivalry Press

$24.95

A free review copy of the book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher.

Regie Cabico at Poets and Writers Online

Check out this great video:

http://www.pw.org/content/regie_cabico_16

The World & Me Youth Poetry Contest Awards Reception

Split This Rock Presents:

The World & Me Youth Poetry Contest Awards Reception

Saturday March 6, 2010
4-6PM
BUSBOYS & POETS
14th & V STREET, NW

Keynote Poet: Samuel Miranda
Hosted by: Regie Cabico

The Top Youth Poets of Washington, DC
read original poems of Provocation & Witness.

Poets Representing:
Archbishop Carroll, Seed Charter School,
Bell Multicultural High School,
Sousa Jr. High, Powell Elementary, Alice Deal Middle School, Willam E. Doar

EVENT IS FREE

Please R.S.V.P. by March 3, 2010 to gregory [at] splitthisrock [dot] org.

Co-sponsored by Busboys and Poets

Photo of the Week: Kim Roberts and Regie Cabico

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Kim Roberts, editor of Beltway Quarterly, celebrating 10 years, and Regie Cabico, Split This Rock Youth Educator, at the Sunday March at the 2008 festival.

Party With Split This Rock, Thursday August 27!

Featuring A.B. Spellman and Regie Cabico with the DC Youth Slam Team!



Thursday, August 27, 6-8 pm
Langston Room, Busboys and Poets
14th & V Streets, NW
Washington, DC

Split This Rock invites you to a party Thursday, August 27, 2009, 6-8 pm, in the Langston Room, Busboys and Poets at 14th and V Streets, NW. Busboys will be donating fabulous refreshments and creating a couple of funky Split This Rock cocktails.

Why party? Split This Rock has recently received nonprofit status, a crucial step on the road to becoming a permanent home for socially engaged poets from DC and nationwide. Plus, believe it or not, it's just 6 months until the second Split This Rock Poetry Festival. So we figure it's time to celebrate.

Reading and performing will be 2010 featured poet and DC leading light A.B. Spellman, along with Regie Cabico and the DC Youth Slam Team. See below for more details. Entry will be $10-$25, sliding scale, and you'll have a chance to bid on amazing prizes at auction. Come prepared for readings, for fun, for volunteer opportunities, and for celebrating! For more information: info [at] splitthisrock [dot] org or 202-787-5210.

Can't make the party? You can still volunteer - just contact us at the above email or phone. We'd love to have you involved! And you can definitely still make a donation. Just click here. Many thanks!

Poets Celebrating with Split This Rock August 27 - Join Us!

A. B. Spellman is an author, poet, critic, and lecturer. His poetry collection, Things I Must Have Known, was recently was published by Coffee House Press. He has published numerous books and articles on the arts, including Art Tatum: A Critical Biography (a chapbook), The Beautiful Days (poetry), and Four Lives in the Bebop Business, now available as Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan Press). In recognition of Spellman's commitment and service to jazz, the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005 named one of its prestigious Jazz Masters awards the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy. He was a poet-in-residence at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia, where he taught various courses in African-American culture, and at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard Universities, where he offered courses in modern poetry, creative writing, and jazz.


The DC Youth Slam Team poets utilize their vocal energy and strength to channel emotions, generate a message, or participate in the artistic field they enjoy. Through their poetic works, they rejuvenate the art of poetry and create individual identities with distinct voices. These teens are the future voices of America. Welcome to the beginning of a movement.



Regie Cabico is the Director of Split This Rock's World & Me youth poetry contest and Artistic Director of Sol & Soul. Cabico is a poet, playwright, and spoken word performer. He took top prizes at the 1993, 1994, and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies and he co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. He received a NYFA Artist Fellowship for Poetry in 1997, NYFAs in 2003 for Poetry and Performance Art, and two Brooklyn Arts Council Poetry Awards. Cabico has been a teacher for Urban Word and developed a poetry and performance program for teens with psychiatric illness at Bellevue Hospital. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers in recognition of his work with diverse communities.