- So, Danielle Izzo is next on our list.
Danielle I know is here.
And I'll read a little bit from the program.
Danielle is a liberal arts major,
manager, I'm sorry, manager at an ASAP here at QCC.
Growing up in the, quote, "Mean streets of suburbia."
Okay, so this'll be, maybe,
a nice contrast - [Danielle] Yeah.
to what we just heard. (crowd laughs)
Danielle Izzo knew she needed to write out
the screams of complacency that surrounded
her upbringing and become a poet.
She earned her Bachelor's degree
with honors from St. John's University,
and completed Naropa University's summer writing program,
focusing on the Postmodern, Beat, and feminist aesthetic.
At the end of December 2009, Danielle will be awarded
her Master's in English Literature from Queen's College.
She has been published in various literary journals,
and is working on her first book of poetry,
entitled, Idol Banter, that's I-D-O-L.
(laughs) - [Female] Yes.
- Okay, welcome Danielle. (applause)
- Sorry you're under the lamplight,
streetlight, lamppost lampoon.
Is that thing twisting?
But now reality's tripping through,
gyres and Ciphers, cyclones of unknowns.
Strewn inside the gutters, breathlessly.
Howling through the moon, awakens.
Dead face, dead friend, dead men, dead children,
Into nothing.
The nothing of somethings and everythings and everywheres
where banter brews like reckless rabid dogs in heat,
like relentless rebel relics escaping themselves.
Stirring for some transcendental,
existential containment of entertainment.
Away from the words,
away from language,
away, away.
I have a terrible, terrible cough.
So, if I stop to drink, or I'm gonna have
like, probably, lozenges stuck in my throat. (crowd laughs)
So, I'm gonna try to work here up with this.
The next three poems that I'm going to read for you,
they all have to kind of do with this idea of
creating a written piece of art in a sense.
When you're creating poetry, first it's that lust
to find something that inspires you.
Then, there's an inspiration.
And then, lastly, the kind of the birth,
the unveiling of it.
So each poem kind of represents those three stages.
And they're all from my manuscript entitled, Idol Banter.
So this one's called Spark.
Let me linger, in the longing.
The song that comprises the sizes of silos,
wholly in the essence of our beings.
Let me linger, tasting the tongues
of eloquent solillaquists questing for meaning.
Tasting tapestries, transparent visions,
viscerally wrapped in this misery.
And I burn for your lips, to with strawberry smoke,
sweet memories of fire, desire to capture this longing,
this impatient, incessant longing.
For you illuminate the breath of beauty,
incomparable, your hair glistening like a barn light,
where creatures of the nocturn burn and lust for you.
Let us dance, wild and negligent in our nexus,
drown the dawning of selves, lusting and starving.
Mad, stone, drunken love, challenging the void
of faceless fantasies to find us a poem.
(applause)
This next poem I wrote, so it's kind of the second half,
dealing with what motivates you to write.
And I was actually in Boulder, Colorado, and I was at this
Tibetan Buddhist festival, and I was studying at Naropa.
And it's really interesting how these festivals and all
these different cultural events going on,
but I couldn't help but notice
the homeless people, the homeless couple
who was like, a couple rows in front of me.
And even though there was so much happening,
there were these Japanese music and Rastafarian band
going on, I was just stuck on these homeless people right
in front of me, who were having a great time, actually.
So, it's called Image of Stratosphere.
The day I heard the Japanese drums play, I was dreaming.
I was dreaming about the bums,
about what I once called love, what I once called love.
I was dreaming the day I heard those drums,
each tap tore tightly across me, bowed me to ghosts
and echoes of magnificent beatific lovers before me.
They asked me on stage, and I dreamed of the city
I thought was home.
I dreamed of the bum with a cannabis
bonnet and the Indian bones as thin as drumsticks bum woman
would dance and love at the edge under the stage.
I dreamed of their smells, so foul, as they carried
the hippie-free city and all its strung-out, strung-on pain
and the ragged, tired pores of their skins.
I dreamed of the Blackfoot war songs,
the Pawnee Ghost dancers chanting,
chanting in unison to the shrill of Tokyo.
I dreamed of the Rastafarian, swinging his dreads
in the cold rain, drinking cold beer
in the hot sun with the Indian woman,
smoking a joint with the bonnet-wearing bum.
I dreamed that I wasn't a writer,
that I wasn't filled with shame
at every instance of suffering that I call the muse.
(applause)
This is my last one, Birth of the Poem.
I feel it comin on, the birth of the poem.
The be-bop, hip hop, flat top, one-woman hot shot stop.
I feel it moving up my lungs, the birth
of the poem, cooling and breezing.
Alert tick tock tune Tantric tingles like crazy demon fire,
like weary jumping stars spinning, like leaking cantinas
of the cantos, like dripping bloody sweat seeping
out of vultures' sutures squirming.
I feel it, the birth of the poem.
A tic tac totem tug teething teetering mess.
A deedle dee dee da doo wop.
The birth of the poem, dirty, and greasy,
gritty and grisly.
Feel it.
Comin up crawlin like tiny white spiders
crawling like junkies' arms outstretched across
busy, lonely streets against the backdrop of quick, pacing,
important leather feet denying their denials
of need and lust and the insipid romance
of the pavement and the loose change.
Crawling like babies with heavy diapers,
weighing them down, weighing them down.
So connected to being weighed down.
Beaten down, content with down, dripping to what's down.
I see it, that old birth of the poem.
Sliding out canals, through the annals and channels
of tight jaws, Cairo chirons, crossing the
wham bam double slam scam jam enjabments.
Jiving through shocking sockets.
The birth of the poem.
Charging through quiet midnights,
erupting dawn among thick, unforgiving streams of smoke.
Sing of self, hiding all the beauty and pain
and shame and struggle and suffering
and beauty around the pen and the poem
that insists beauty, that insists beauty.
That insists on every second of sour, clear,
bashful moments to be hailed, beauty.
To be forgotten, beauty.
To be remembered, beauty.
That whole birth of the poem, I feel it.
In internal turns of burns, beating
tapping trapping tipping churns.
In collages of couplets and streaks of stanzas, shouting,
"You need me."
Shouting, "You need me."
Feed me that birth of the poem.
Growing to groom and tailor and trim and grope and hope
the dip-dyed dripple drip slides through.
Talking about justice, telling about justice,
whispering about justice.
That birth of the poem.
The mangy, mangled muck, warring like thieves,
warring like angels, warring like the Cosmos,
warring like the Ethos of danger daggers dragging through
love and through love and through...
The birth of the poem.
Pointing reckless, fidgety fingers like accusers,
abusers, losers, losing everything they never had.
Losing the great battle between
the me and the he and the she and the we.
Losing and losing.
Screaming, "Be born, poem. Be born, poem."
Screaming, "Give me my poem."
I'll tell you about that birth of the poem.
Comes in stages, it comes with a struggle climax
that's so great, you have to heave and moan
to every stripping away, beating away,
your thin and thick flesh meshing over your piped organs.
Follows you when you're needy, when you're desperate.
Where your disbelief to all the uproarious,
outrageous madness and sadness that plays each sour grin.
Forcing to be entered, forcing you
to abide to the violent fury that insists beauty.
The birth of the poem.
It slips up and slides into you, infects you,
injects you with the awareness
that every birth is painful, and ugly, and violent,
but that every birth still insists beauty.
That birth of the poem, ruble-range, riddled with thunder,
with procession of coming out, stepping out beyond shadows,
deceiving disguise, posing progress, screaming.
Screaming, "Give me my poem."
(applause)