Alison Luterman April. 28th 12-1pm

http://bit.ly/essentialconvos

Come join us for an enlivening and inspiring conversation with Alison Luterman  We will offer this broadcast live on Crowdcast, an interactive webcast platform.

Alison Luterman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Her books include 3 poetry collections and a collection of essays. Alison has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, the Esalen Institute, and the Omega Institute, as well as at high schools, juvenile halls, and poetry festivals.

Please RSVP here for our free online event : http://bit.ly/essentialconvos

We’ll have the community chat box open for questions, and invite a few viewers to join the broadcast through a live video feed to interact with Alison and myself.

Anna Noack will provide technical support for viewers joining online;  and Janet Wepner will host the online community chat during the broadcast.

I am excited to be hosting our Crowdcast interview in this particular form, and I am especially delighted to have Alison Luterman as our esteemed guest.

As well, I am looking forward to seeing familiar names and faces in the community chat room, and welcoming those of you who are new to our web broadcast community.

Hope to see you on Saturday, April 28th, 12noon EST!

Michael Mervosh


Michael Mervosh,
Executive Director

———————————————

Facebook Blurb: Come join us for an enlivening and inspiring conversation with Alison Luterman  We will offer this broadcast live on Crowdcast, an interactive webcast platform.

Alison Luterman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Her books include 3 poetry collections and a collection of essays. Alison has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, the Esalen Institute, and the Omega Institute, as well as at high schools, juvenile halls, and poetry festivals.

POEMS and supporting references

The New Breed– for Emma Gonzalez and the other student activists

I see her on TV, screaming into a microphone.
Her head is shaved and she is beautiful
and seventeen, and her high school was just shot up,
she’s had to walk by friends lying in their own blood,
her teacher bleeding out,
and she’s my daughter, the one I never had,
and she’s your daughter and everyone’s daughter
and she’s her own woman, in the fullness of her young fire,
calling bullshit on politicians who take money from the gun-makers.
Tears rain down her face but she doesn’t stop shouting
she doesn’t apologize she keeps calling them out,
all of them all of us
who didn’t do enough to stop this thing.
And you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power
contort, utterly baffled
to face this new breed of young woman,
not silky, not compliant,
not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.
And she cries but she doesn’t stop
yelling truth into the microphone,
though her voice is raw and shaking
and the Florida sun is molten brass.
I’m three thousand miles away, thinking how
Neruda said The blood of the children
ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Only now she is, they are
raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho,
and it’s not that we road-weary elders
have been given the all-clear exactly,
but our shoulders do let down a little,
we breathe from a deeper place,
we say to each other,
Well, it looks like the baton
may be passing
to these next runners and they are
fleet as thought,
fiery as stars,
and we take another breath
and say to each other, The baton
has been passed, and we set off then
running hard behind them.

–Alison Luterman

I CONFESS

Alison Luterman

I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket,
beaming peach like the North Star.
I wanted to ask “What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis—”
but we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”
From Alison’s website:

“I’m inspired by my neighborhood, by things people say to me and snatches of overheard conversations, by folks glimpsed in passing on the street or at the store, by the borderlines where cultures bump against each other, and by love, most of all by love.”

Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle

(Sun Magazine 2010)

Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side,
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim through obstacles like a minnow
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have that to look at all her life,
and keep going, keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren’t allowed at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
will be a young man, at a wedding on a boat
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he’ll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to a larger story,
because if something is in your way it is
going your way, the way
of all beings; towards darkness, towards light.
This poem first appeared in The Sun magazine in January 2010.

Jack Kornfield + Alison Luterman video

https://vimeo.com/103393703

Jesus Incognito

Don’t tell anyone, but I love Jesus.

I love his big dark Jewish eyes, so full of suffering and soul,

like an unemployed poet’s, and his thick sensuous Jewish lips,

and his kinky curly hair, just like mine, uncontrollable despite conditioners,

and the way he always argues with everyone

and will go to hell for love.

He’s just like that Buddhist god Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion,

except his name is easier to pronounce.

When you’re in trouble it’s hard to remember to yell for Avalokiteshvara,

but “Oh, Jesus!” arises naturally

every time a crazy driver hot-dogs past me on the freeway.

I know I should say the Shema when I’m about to die,

but will I be able to remember Hebrew at a time like that?

I don’t want to die saying “Oh, shit!”

I’d like to leave my body consciously, like a Tibetan lama, sitting in full lotus

with my head turned toward where I’ll reincarnate next.

But let’s be realistic: I probably couldn’t meditate enough to become enlightened

in the however-many years I have left.

Jesus seems easier.  All you have to do is love everyone.

Well, seems is the key word here.

Sometimes the more you try

to love people, the more you hate them.

Maybe it would be better to try

not to love people, and then watch the love

force its way out of you like grass through cement.

Anything is better than organized religion.

I don’t like the singing in churches — all those hymns in major keys.

I don’t think religion should sound so triumphant.

It should be humble and aware of the basic incurable pathos of the human condition,

and in a minor key and sung in a mysterious ancient language, like Sanskrit or Hebrew.

Is it OK for me to love Jesus but not be Christian?

I could try to open my heart and give away all my possessions.

It’s not that different from being Buddhist, after all, except for a history

of witch burnings, the Inquisition, the subjugation,

rape, and pillage of indigenous peoples all over the world,

not to mention twenty centuries of vicious antisemitism. That’s a lot to overlook

to get back to a baby born among animals to a Jewish mother, Miryam.

And what about that other Mary, the sexy one? Jesus, I don’t believe you died a virgin.

I think you needed to taste everything human, to inhabit the whole mess:

blood, shit, flies, regret, envy, why-me.

I owe you and all the other bodhisattvas and sages

and newborn babies a debt of thanks

for agreeing to come back and marry yourselves

to our painful predicament again and again —

and I do thank you, bowing to the infinite directions.

SF Weekly interview

https://archives.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2016/01/14/the-write-stuff-alison-luterman-on-owning-up-to-your-mistakes-and-moving-on

 

Guest Preparations for Use of Crowdcast Software for Online Video Broadcasting

https://www.crowdcast.io/setup – This is the “test” feature, to make sure your computer’s microphone and camera are working properly.

http://www.speedtest.net/ – this is the internet speed test, to check speeds.

https://tlk.io/herosjourney – this is the link to chat for tech support. (open a new tab)

Event Preparation – ½ Hour Before Event

  • Host, Community Chat Hosts and Guest(s) get on Crowdcast.
  • Guests are welcomed to the “Green Room” – check headsets and view of background, make any other audio or video adjustments.
  • Chat hosts deal with pre-welcome, tech questions etc.

Event Launch – Going ‘Live’

  1. Pre-welcome by Hosts in the Chat: Thank people for joining and let them know what time things will kick off. Ask people to share what locations they are joining from as they enter the chat, and while they’re waiting.
  2. Welcome: Broadcast host (Michael) introduces himself. Mention guest’s name and the topic. Thanks attendees for joining.
  3. Instructions: Introduce Crowdcast forum, walk them through the features and where to participate. If they are to hold questions until later in the event, let viewers/audience know; tell them where to submit questions.
  4. Formal introduction of Guest: Introduce Alsion and give perhaps a short bio? Introduce the topic and it’s relevance to today’s life, and our own evolution.
  5. Bring Alison live online.
  6. Janet to Host Community Chat, Anna to host tech support on a separate chat. https://tlk.io/herosjourney
  7. Q&A and wrap-up: We will provide a link to stay informed about our ongoing Essential Conversation series, and to any books or workshops Alison would like to promote!

Contact Email

aluterman1 at aol.com

aluterman1 at gmail.com