Berkeley Book Launch Nov. 5 by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) and Dick Cluster

Berkeley Book Launch 

by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) and Dick Cluster

Sun. Nov. 5, 3 p.m.

Sponsored by Poetry Flash

Art House Gallery & Cultural Center

2905 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley, CA 94705

FREE

with refreshments

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) reads from "God in Her Ruffled Dress" (What Books Press) and Dick Cluster reads from Paula Abramo's poetry cycle "Fiat Lux" (bilingual edition translated by Cluster from FlowerSong Press), nominated for a Northern California Book Award.

Please note: we turn clocks back at 2 a.m. that calendar day, so make sure not to be late!

The Music of Poetry, A Writing Workshop Nov. 4 with Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) (via Zoom)

The Music of Poetry
led by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)

via Zoom

November 4, 12:30 - 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time

Hosted by Hudson Valley Writers Center
ask@writerscenter.org 

Working with our attention on the sound of our words returns a spirit of play and discovery to our writing. 

Even while writing free verse, we can call on a range of musical techniques to both enrich our poems and help us access content that we are not yet conscious of. 

Get out of your own way as you create by heightening the musicality of your poems.

In this workshop, we will first read poems that put musical form and elements at the forefront. We will review tools such as rhyme, alliteration, assonance, syllabic stresses, and enjambment. 

Then we will turn to playing with these techniques and others (such as listening to a poem in a language you don’t know and “translating” it, and writing while listening to music) to produce work that is freer and perhaps more revelatory — with a more direct connection to the muse. 

The workshop will include discussing the new work we have generated. 

It will be taught on Zoom and capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. 

Miami Book Launch Oct. 29 by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) and Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Miami Book Launch by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) and Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Sun. Oct. 29
4 p.m.

Books & Books Coral Gables
265 Aragon Ave.
Coral Gables, Florida 33134
(305) 442-4408

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) will read from her new poetry book "God in Her Ruffled Dress" (What Books Press) and Caridad Moro-Gronlier will read from "Tortillera" (Texas Review Press, new hardcover release). 

Launch Reading Oct. 25 for Fall 2023 Titles from What Books Press

 

What Books Press Fall 2023 Launch Reading 1!

Wed. October 25, 7 p.m. FREE

with refreshments

Village Well Books & Coffee
9900 Culver Boulevard #1B
Culver City, CA 90232
(424) 298-8951

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) 

Bryan Price

Michael Ventura

Celeste Goyer

Sarah Maclay

Maria Perez-Talavera

with introductions by Gail Wronsky

New Poetry Book "God in Her Ruffled Dress" out in October from What Books Press

I'm thrilled that my second full-length book of poetry, God in Her Ruffled Dress, is to be published October 17, 2023, by What Books Press, reaching online bookstores October 25. 

You can order a signed copy directly from me now. Go here for payment options or contact me.

What Books Press comprises a collective of writers, who have created a small nonprofit publishing house featuring beautiful-looking and compelling literary work with a West Coast sensibility. 

(One of the reasons I enjoy their collective approach is that in the '80s, I was a member of the San Francisco-based publishing and editorial collective Five Fingers Poetry, launching the respected literary journal Five Fingers Review.)

Back to God in Her Ruffled Dress: it appears an astounding 34 years after my first full-length poetry volume The Transparent Body, from the highly esteemed Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. You can purchase that volume directly from me as well, along with the chapbook that preceded it, Anorexia. 

In the years between my first books and this new one, I became a jazz and groove singer and spoken-word artist, with seven albums and a number of singles featuring my original songs and adventurous versions of standards and covers, most of them interwoven with my spoken verse. Poetry, spoken word, poetic rap are all represented in these innovative music-verse meldings. I was fortunate to record with James Gardiner, who has more than 40 gold and platinum records as an engineer and is also a highly skilled producer and composer, at Pajama Studios in Oakland. Some of my tunes were composed with such artists as Wayne Wallace, Barbara Higbie, Scott R. Looney, Ben Flint, and Jeff Marrs and all feature some of the best musicians in the Bay Area. 

It's been refreshing and fascinating to return to the literary world where I cut my artistic teeth. And to compare today's poetry publishing with the indie music scene, which constantly transformed itself throughout the more than 20 years in which I've been releasing music. Of note is that I'm grateful that the fraction-of-a-penny streaming model has not penetrated literary or any other kind of publishing.

To my surprise and delighted gratitude, six fabulous poets and critics sent me supportive remarks about the new book. They are displayed in various ways here, because there's so much to highlight, and because some of you prefer images and some like text (and because, let's face it, I'm so proud). 

  

“A book of deep seeing, ‘the code inside the code’... also a book of intense listening, ‘the bright spurt of trumpet’ and the train calling like a late-night lover… a series of divine pleasures transcribed faithfully by a skilled musician and writer.” 

—D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys and Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails

_____________________________________

 

“Bears écriture feminine into the twenty-first century with grace, wit, and incredible technical dexterity.”  

—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Daylight Has Already Come and Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle

 _____________________________________

“Lisa B’s stunning new book weaves together body, spirituality, politics, and the world we live in….Fierce, feminist, and necessary...this engaging collection will stir your mind and bring you into beauty, into ‘a place so much more multiple than one god’s face.’ ” 

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Hourglass Museum and Dialogues with Rising Tides

 _____________________________________

“A dazzling lyrical demonstration... She takes us on a journey through ecstasy and pain: from the highs of great jazz performance to the zen of blood testing for diabetes.” 

—Lawrence R. Smith, editor of Caliban

 _____________________________________

“Effortlessly surprising, thoughtful, and inventive...musical and rhythmical above all...[poems on] the physicality of jazz, the physicality of spirituality, and the self hearing all her edges and hinges through illness, pleasure, and doubt.”  

—Sean Singer, author of Honey & Smoke and Today in the Taxi

_____________________________________

 

“Offers a series of superb poems about...jazz greats...[and other poems] that call down the spirit in ways that are at once promiscuous and defiant.”

—Daniel Tiffany, author of Cry Baby Mystic and My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

_____________________________________

Look for upcoming posts about poetry readings and workshops! If any of you would like to review the book or interview me, of course I'd be glad to accommodate you. 
And please contact me and/or join my mailing list for updates direct to your email box.  

New Video of "Warrior Cat"!

This past year has made us all warriors. So I've been thinking especially about "Warrior Cat." 

(And it didn't hurt that in July I adopted two outgoing, affectionate tortoiseshell kittens after the untimely death of my beloved German Shepherd in April. Back to the universe of cats.)

"Warrior Cat" explores, models, leaps on how to be a warrior -- not in the tanked-up way most often presented in our culture, but a warrior in the way a cat is, and the way a writer is. 

With grooving music by Scott R. Looney and me, powered by live drumming by the late, great Paul van Wagenginen. Engineered and mastered by my longtime compatriot James (Jim) Gardiner, of Pajama Studios, twice Grammy-nominated and with 42 gold- and platinum-certifed records.

The tune came out on my 2006 record, "What's New, Pussycat?," about the feline side of being human, or put another way, about cats actual and symbolic. Magic, cool, warm, transcendent, domestic. 

2020 has been tough. So I made a new video for the year of the warrior cat.

 

"Reverberant: Poems & Music": Latest Videos and News

With the growing prevalence of Facebook and Twitter, I haven't been posting as much as I used to. Ah, the early days of blogging! 

But I wanted to come back so you might be able to find this. 

It's been wonderful to release "Reverberant: Poems & Music" in the spirit of finally foregrounding some of my free-verse poems originally written for the page, transforming them in performances with music. My marvelous collaborators are some of my favorite musicians -- pianists Ben Flint and Scott R. Looney, bassist Marcus Shelby, drummer Jeff Marrs, and the masterful Jim (James) Gardiner playing all of the above and more as well as contributing his expert, nuanced engineering skills (42 gold- and platinum-certified records plus lots of work since then will earn you those).

Many of the poems from the record appeared in esteemed literary magazines: Brilliant Corners, Caliban, The Kenyon Review, Lilith, and Sequestrum. 

These pieces all focus on reverberation, both literal (resonance) and metaphorical (repercussions). They are jazz homages (Max, Cecil, Billie, and a bassist modeled on Ron Carter) and tales of spiritual self-realization -- sometimes both at once. 

Here's a mashup of selected cuts on the record, organized by the motifs of sound, loneliness, light, and singing.

 

Check out the press "Reverberant" garnered here and the radio play it achieved (and I'm still adding more)!

Extra fun of late has been creating new videos for the selections on the new record that include my singing: "Some Things To Do with Pain" (a true guided meditation with a groove and visuals), "Lisa's Lord's Prayers," and "Billie Goes Home/Lover Man." Check 'em out below.

Please comment, find me on social media, or go to the contact page on my website to say hello. 

I appreciate your attention and feedback. Truly. 

New Single Release: "I Am an Orchestra: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor"!

The legendary pianist Cecil Taylor passed away almost a year ago, on April 5, 2018.

To honor him, I released this new single: a poem to the accompaniment of brilliant pianist Scott R. Looney. Engineering is by my longtime collaborator, James (Jim) Gardiner, at Pajama Studios. 

You can check out my blog post reminiscing about my personal contact with Cecil in childhood and thereafter. Plus there you can find a written version of the poem we just recorded. Reading it, I see it took on another life in multiple dimensions existing in this musical dialogue with pianist Scott. 

Here's some of where you can hear (stream, download, share) this exciting music, or see all platform links at right:

OpenSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5w7pssjYLBjdMBTIWL8Oc4

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PM8N1XZ/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp

Apple/iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/i-am-an-orchestra-feat-scott-r-looney-single/1456219888

Please let me know how you like it! And share this post! 

May this piece send up a flare to the utterly unique genius of Cecil, wherever he is. 

Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor, copyright Lenny Bernstein

I met Cecil as a rather young girl—he was a friend of my parents and a visitor to my home. He asked me, the then-classical-piano-student, to play Beethoven for him, but I was too shy to sit down and do it. Cecil probably was even shyer than I back then; he made the request through my Dad and couldn't really look at me. So we were then two shy people of very different ages wanting to connect. He did speak, though, about his childhood of practicing Beethoven and other composers, and how strict his mother was with him about it, which was a bit scary to me as a child.  

I heard (and saw) him perform with his group around the same time, unable to really process the music but deeply affected by it. Such physically, emotionally, and mentally cataclysmic sound!

Years later, as an adult, I saw and heard him many times, at Kimball's and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and the old Yoshi's and the new Yoshi's in Oakland, among other venues, both onstage and backstage. Cecil visited my folks' home again, bought a number of my Dad's gorgeous photos of him, and commented kindly on my poems. And my parents had all of his recordings.  

Cecil Taylor, copyright Lenny Bernstein

Of course he was an unforgettable genius, and my experience of music was changed forever after hearing his as a child. Like the work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil's showed that poetry and jazz could be united onstage, and not just by blowing some words over an unconnected jazz background. Though I felt that his music was more evolved than his poetry, that lesson marked me deeply.

As a character, a creator, a person, there was no other like him. 

Thank you, Cecil.

Cecil Taylor backstage, copyright Lenny Bernstein

In this previously unpublished poem about him, the quotes from Cecil are not actual quotes, but rather my poetic expression of what I imagine to be excerpts in his inner voice and about his internal journey—though the part about the backstage gossip is literally true (and a mere fraction of the other tales he told, dramatically, thoughtfully, ruefully, as the true storyteller he was). 

Cecil Taylor: I Am An Orchestra

BASH the affectionate

black-and-white scale of his Bosendorfer

keyboard is raked right to left—oh

voices are

calling

and he is marvelously

replying.  “I

—I am an orchestra,

a brontasaura,

and the scales fall

from my fingers,

groaning and sighing,

falling from the San Francisco skyline,

this afternoon's sunlight-on-shingles

lifting from silver cupolas—”

The din

orchestrates

a rent in time

through which the heads

of Horus, Osiris

travel, dragging their little dogs

“It’s my world,”

says Cecil,

“not my undoing.”

In the dressing room,

too delicate to pull the peach chiffon

curtains closed along the rod,

he is slyly telling stories

on Oscar Peterson.

But before the crowd

hear in the crashing

body body

ribs fingers

arrayed keys black pressed

grapes hear in this

jade black wine

rage forgiving its own sadness.

“Hear me smash

through the tombs

future and past

and—

a glimpse

of a human heart”

then he bends his head

as if entering a low door

through the shiny black

Bosendorfer’s hull

elbows rise and fall

rowing

then throwing back

his head

—laughter

rollicking under the chords.

“Must one always

have a chord,

a world, a

richness?

Remember, mama,

though I’m not past practice,

at last the world listens

as I cavort

like a girl

let me break

let me take off

my imaginary robe

let me line up

the clusters series of choruses

forests faces each a door a

poem a

BOOM

.”

copyright 2018 Lisa Bernstein

How I Found the Courage to Sing

I was a pretty bad singer for a long time after I found the guts to start officially singing.

How did I stand it? 

How did I tolerate the torment of trying to sound good, of knowing I had failed, and, even worse, knowing I would probably keep failing publicly, over and over, for some upcoming period of time? The embarrassment! The disappointment! 

And I’m talking just about the art of it. Forget the additional travails and rejection and dead ends of the marketing and collaboration required to get gigs and then actually do the shows.

By “officially singing,” I mean taking a Beginning Singers class, many years ago, at the wonderfully welcoming Blue Bear School of Music at San Francisco’s Fort Mason. I could justify this step to myself: I was giving frequent poetry readings, and taking a singing class would improve my performance.

It would be fun, though scary. But the fun part wasn’t enough for me. I needed some kind of productivity angle. I was a bit driven, as my mother would put it – focused on perceptible achievement and problem-solving ever since I was a toddler. As a young woman, I still felt compelled to get things done, make my mark, even while honoring my inner creative impulses.

Singing wasn’t going to be an art I would dedicate myself to. It was just, I told myself, something I wanted to explore, a basic skill set that would help my career as a poet, which was starting to go somewhere. Singing would be a way to expand my literary performance abilities.

Sure, I had a foundation in music that I could stand on. I grew up hearing jazz and lots of other kinds of music that my parents, and then I, played on vinyl, radio, tapes. I had spent time with some genius jazz musicians who were friends of my folks (Jackie McLean, Cecil Taylor, Elvin Jones, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago actually visited our family home, some quite often). I had studied classical piano playing, gained a grasp of music theory, even written a couple of songs as a child. 

And I had sung along to all kinds of music as a youngster in our living room – musicals like “West Side Story” and “Funny Girl,” singers such as Aretha and Carmen McRae, even the melodies of John Coltrane (“My Favorite Things”). And as I grew a bit older, I sang along with vocalists spanning Billie Holiday, Robert Plant, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Al Jarreau, the Supremes, and the great avant-garde jazz singer Jeanne Lee, to name just a few.

But actually become a singer? Impossible.

I didn’t have the voice. There was a lot about my singing to cringe over. There was no way I could measure up. Especially at the late age of 30. That would be like deciding to shoot hoops in the NBA at age 30. Who did that? Or so I told myself.

In singing, I felt far more exposed than in poetry writing. Even while singing a song by someone else, I felt much more vulnerable than I did writing, and performing, a poem about my deepest secrets.

For one thing, I could show my early drafts of poems to a supportive circle of teachers and fellow poets, then revise them. By the time a poem lay shivering on the page awaiting the judgment of strangers at literary magazines, it was completed. I felt a baseline confidence, because my respected fellow writers understood the work and approved it. Even amid the sting of rejection I could think back to those trusted readers and feel buoyed by their backup.

Not so with singing. A performing art, singing had to be done through the body. My body. In that moment. And this body was so damn variable. There was no perfecting a song in private. Practice, yes. Finished product, no. I could sound good one day and bad the next. I could control certain things sometimes and not others. Who knows what would happen that day, on that gig, in that lesson? A song was never finished.

And it took a lot longer, with a lot more repetition, to train the body and acquire the technique I was slowly learning via classes and vocal lessons than it did to use my mind (and other equipment) to write poetry. The body was dumber. Slower. Bigger.

As my longtime vocal coach Jane Sharp put it, there is an initial “cringe factor” period that most singers experience as they develop. It lasted quite a long time, it seemed, in my case. I had musical and interpretive ideas galore, but my “sound” came and went.

Do you remember the first time you listened to a recording of yourself speaking, or, if you’re brave or a professional, singing? A shock, right? This isn’t how you heard yourself in your head as you were blithely vocalizing away. It couldn’t possibly be this bad.

I suffered the torments of the damned whenever I listened to tapes of myself, whether from my early jazz and R&B band workshops at Blue Bear or my actual gigs a bit later. No, I couldn’t really sound like this! I suffered, I cried, I listened closely, I hid out, I worked with Jane and on my own to correct and expand my skills.

How did I stand all this mortification, without much evidence that I would improve?

Well, I had a secret source of courage. An ally beyond what I’ve mentioned. Not just drive. Not just ears filled with excellent music. Not just dedication to acquiring a bedrock of technique. Not just proof via my poetry journey that hard work could pay off artistically and careerwise. Not just knowing that part of what I was here on earth to do was to honor my creative path as an artist.

It was something I had recently learned in the psychic training that I had begun the same year I enrolled in that first singing class.

“Be in kindergarten.”

That was probably the most crucial lesson of the clairvoyant training I was undergoing. And it was revelatory. Maybe I had never really been “in kindergarten” even when I was in kindergarten – I remember being beset with the buzz of ideas and drive in my own head and body even then.

You see, it is impossible to start accessing and using your own psychic abilities – which, trust me, you too have – without this core technique. And it is a technique. “Be in kindergarten.”

As opposed to “being in effort.” Effort kills clairvoyance. If you try, you can’t see a thing. Try harder, as you have been taught to do in the rest of your life, and you will discover that you are way down in a black hole being blind.

“Be in kindergarten” also is opposed to “being an adult.” Admittedly, we do want to bring some adult behaviors to a psychic reading or a musical rehearsal, such as taking turns, not running around the room, paying attention to timing. But now that I think about it, we learn a lot of this in kindergarten too. 

I guess what I really mean by “being an adult” is being analytical and serious and highly responsible. Those skills aren’t bad, and you do need them. But you can at least consider complementing them with the very different approach of “being in kindergarten.”

Kindergarten encompasses allowing yourself the spirit of play, adventure, openness. Of entertaining the unpredictable.

And, maybe more important, it means not judging yourself. You don’t have to measure up to anything much. You just get to be. You get to have the freedom of a child (at least, according to the image of childhood I gained in my developed-world, middle-class culture).

Another way to put it is to “come as a little child,” as Jesus is said to have taught his followers as the way to enter the kingdom of heaven (which, by the way, is supposed to be within yourself).

“Beginner’s mind” is another similar idea, from Zen Buddhism. Be open-minded, eager. Stay away from the expectation of being an expert. Be a beginner.

Armed with this approach, I let myself off the hook. The hook of having to be accomplished as I started singing. Of having to meet certain standards. I could stumble, bumble, screw up, choke, be off pitch, forget the words, forget the melody, have an unpleasant tone. And keep plunging ahead, open my voice, and sing. OK, I would suffer over all this. But it was permissible nonetheless.

At the same time, I was working as hard as I could to sound better by honing various other vocal techniques, and seeking to gain other singerly skills. (Such as being able to learn the melody. Understand who my character was as I was singing. Listen to the band in various ways while singing and not singing. Figure out how to write musical charts and be a bandleader. Blah blah blah. A whole new world.) It was a new kind of fun to do both at once as a singer: be in kindergarten, while becoming more accomplished.

The psychic model of relaxing in order to see clairvoyantly had a parallel in singing, where being relaxed was crucial in the making of sound. But you also had to be energized. As both a psychic and a singer, I needed to cultivate a state of energized relaxation. Who knew?

This state turned out to be one I’d been entering for years as a poet too, though I didn’t call it that. I would trick myself into just scribbling something, drafting anything. Then I’d look at my output. Often I found it to be bad and put it aside. But at least I had written something. Then, six months later, I’d look at that draft again: maybe it wasn’t so bad. So I’d draw on my skills and start revising.

So it turned out that “being in kindergarten” was a technique I had unconsciously used as a writer. It was just another tool. Meanwhile, it was a technique among others I was practicing in clairvoyant class. All three of these disciplines – singing, psychic reading, and poetry writing – required me to both act like an adult and to come to them as a little child.

And then there’s the jazz musician part. For that, you really do have to be in kindergarten, because you have to improvise. That requires having integrated a lot of cool melodies, chord structures, and scales. Yet without the kindergarten part, your improvisations would be rote and boring. To create on the spot: the spirit of kindergarten.

For me, singing itself was giving myself permission to play, and include my body in that play, and it was reserving a part of the experience for the tolerance of failure. Not merely private failure, as in poetry writing, but semi-public failure. Yet I could melt through the profound fear of failure by trusting in the technique of cultivating a childlike attitude. It was OK to screw up. Loudly. Embarrassingly. Because to be a child was to have the freedom to just play without achieving anything.

The courage to regain the childlike impulse to “just do it,” forgiving myself for not meeting certain achievement standards initially, also meant realizing that I had other inherent things to give while honing my craft in public. I couldn’t suppress those other appealing qualities – because they were part of myself. They weren’t the result of effort but there to be expressed. 

I discovered that my presence, my own wisdom, if truly revealed and expressed in a song, even if imperfectly, were meaningful to others. And I know in my gut that this ability to be present fully on stage is linked to the ability to be “in kindergarten.” The performer, like the child, reveals part of her authentic self, no matter what veneer or costume she also employs.

To do what we want to do as singers, as creators, as humans, we need all of what I’ve written about here: determination, hard work, talent, trust in our inner talents, a solid set of techniques, the support of teachers and peers, and the opportunity and time to grow and improve.

And we need that other ingredient, which isn’t emphasized much in our culture of achievement: the freedom of the child within each of us, before doubt or shame or outer strictures have corrupted it. We need to be in that space where learning and playing are the same thing.

Try being in kindergarten when you do something you already know how to do. Cooking. Petting a dog. Some activity you do on your job. What does it feel like to revisit that activity in a fresh, more open, un-self-judging way?

And try pretending you’re in kindergarten while doing something you don’t already know how to do. Notice how that feels.

I’m imagining you considering doing this now as if you’re staring up at a rollercoaster. It’s big, it’s rattling, screams of excitement float down from above you. Riding it is risky. It’s playful, it’s unknown. Go buy the ticket.

I did start to sound a lot better, and sing well more reliably. And I learned to get used to (freak out less over) the body’s natural variations, and to keep taking risks as a singer and record producer. 

As I write this, I’m in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign to help launch my sixth record as a leader, “I Get A Kick: Cole Porter Reimagined,” due out on the Jazzed Media label in January 2018. Asking my tribe(s) for help is a risk. But since I now am fairly practiced at being in kindergarten, I put my head down and went forward with it, letting myself enter the unfamiliar territory. 

If you’re reading this before Thanksgiving 2017, I hope you can join me there. I offer many different perks; one of them is a discounted coaching session in which we can work together on making your own goals come true – and finding kindergarten along the way. 

copyright © 2017 Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)