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The Poets Are Gathering (feat. Juan Felipe Herrera)

from The Poets Are Gathering by Benjamin Boone

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    Includes a **16-page booklet** with photos and liner notes by noted cultural critic GENE SEYMOUR... *PLUS* I'd be delighted to autograph the CD however you'd like me to sign it (within reason of course!) - a GREAT GIFT - Help spread the message! Thank you for your support!

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about

Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Community and art have always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community.

Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children, with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 contains texts in both Spanish and English that examine the cultural hybridity that "revolve around questions of identity" on the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown.

lyrics

From the Liner Notes:

Herrera contributes The Poets Are Gathering’s title track, an 11-plus minute tour-de-force of Whitmanesque exaltation, incantatory vocalese and a polyrhythmic, poly-cultural shoutout to the world-at-large, continent by continent, city by city:

“… In Johannesburg / the poets / have not forgotten that / Biko Biko Biko (echoing) still lives / In São Paulo / the poets are drumming / are drumming / are drumming on the streets / drumming / on the roofs / drumming on the beds / drumming in the tiny rooms / In Singapore the poets are writing diligently / In Alaska / the poets are staring through the darkness / through the darkness in the mid of midnight / In Finland, the poets are writing about impossible friendships in all its ingredients… In Berlin / the poets are hammering / your walls / on paper and all the walls around the world...”

Here’s one of those cases where putting the words on a page doesn’t begin to convey the poet’s virtuosity with sound and space and its interaction with Boone (on soprano), pianist VonBerg, bassist Patrick Olvera, bassist Nathan Guzman and percussionist Richard Juarez.

INSIDE SCOOP: Benjamin Boone and Juan Felipe are colleagues at California State University, Fresno. They worked closely together on Herrera's final US Library of Congress Celebration in Washington, DC in 2017. Boone set 3 of Herrera's poems to music and they were performed there. They then began collaborating in concert. Herrera's vision of inclusion and empowerment -- what this poem is about -- is what inspired this album.

credits

from The Poets Are Gathering, released October 16, 2020
Juan Felipe Herrera (p/n), Benjamin Boone (ss), Craig VonBerg (pn), Patrick Olvera (b), Nathan Guzman (d), Richard Juarez (perc)

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Benjamin Boone Fresno, California

Benjamin Boone is a jazz saxophonist, composer, professor, and U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ireland (2022-23), Ghana (2017-18) and the Republic of Moldova (2006). His Origin Records album THE POETRY OF JAZZ was #3 "Best Album of 2018" in the 83rd Annual Downbeat Readers Poll and featured on NPR's All Things Considered, The Paris Review, and many others. Websites: BenjaminBoone.com & OriginArts.com ... more

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