Performance Poetry - The Collaboration

A water photograph and female portrait by Gabriela Grech.
This is one of the pieces in the NHCC exhibit that the four poets responded to
- and will present to the audience on Saturday evening.

When I last wrote about the Women and Women performance I'm coordinating at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the three other poets and I were in the throes of cutting up sentences into phrases, phrases into duets and triplets of words. We compiled our varied texts, all responses to the photos on display -- a thought from me here, and then a thought from Val or Shelle or Jamie. We moved words in and out until it became difficult to tell who wrote what.

We happily created something entirely new, something equally poetic, but somehow more than anything we could have done on our own.

The performance is this Saturday, March 19th at 6:30 PM. We will be offering our intermingled text in the room where the photos are - at the Domenici Education Center, an open, light-filled gallery at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on the south edge of Albuquerque. It's a glorious space. It will feel intimate. It will be powerful.