Hi, everyone!
I had a lovely experience at Luna’s Café last night for their Thursday night open mic poetry readings. For this blog I would like to share my experience with you (which is also my essay for my class) and give you all some information about this wonderful establishment. Luna’s Café and Juice Bar is located at 1414 16th St, Sacramento, CA 95814. I highly recommend this café for their great food and drinks and the opportunity to have your poems heard and listen to other poets. Discover cool dishes like the Cabradilla dish a goat cheese Quesadilla, the Botanadilla appetizer, their Lemonberry beverage, and their LemonJade (to name a few).
For more information on Poetry Unplugged, go to “Joe Montoya’s Poetry Unplugged” page on Facebook or www.lunascafe.com.
Poetry Unplugged from Luna’s Café
The room was small but the atmosphere for art pleasantly overwhelmed the little café. People of all ages sat and stood around a small stage and listened to the poets who read from the spaces of their minds and hearts. Pictures of art and posters for Women Wisdom Projects displayed the plain white walls. Here, people communicated in silence; ears and minds opened wide for the reflections of others to welcomingly invade their thoughts. A small bar resided in the far back of the room and a little kitchen area worked alongside of it. Drinks and words were flowing just as easily as applause and acceptance; no judgments were uttered. Different voices and different styles of expressions walked the stage. Luna’s Café is the longest running open mic poetry reading establishment in northern California that began in 1995 by Joe Montoya, ;it’s home to a lot of local and out of the area poets who come in to be heard. This experience has given me a broader interpretation of poetry and birthed light onto new styles and ideas.
As I sat and listened to the poems of several poets along with the feature poet, local poet Nancy Aidé González; I absorbed many different ideas, reflections, and emotions. Expressions that ranged from love, loss, betrayal, anger, and mystic revelations. Nancy Aidé González is an editor staff reader for the Tule Review at the SPC (Sacramento Poetry Center) which gives writers the opportunity to expand their growth as writers and gain the experiences that pave their way towards becoming a published poet. Their ultimate goal is to provide tools to help artists improve themselves. More information on the Tule Review can be found online at www.TuleReview.com. There was no specific tone that set the mood of the room but the fog of conscious that made the air. The fog hovered over everyone and reeled us all in to this exotic experience that was getting into the minds of others; actually putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and walking into this poetic visual of someone’s story and someone’s ideas. Topics included: humorous mind bending politics, love stories, betrayals, the pairing of two historical icons that meet for a bar-themed affair. From friendships and unbreakable bonds to strength derived from angst. From collecting memories of a son’s view of his father and his own version of “Rocket Man” fused with a guitar and a harmonica; to a reflected wishful cigarette addict, guilt ridden by his own incarceration. From nature lovers whose minds wonder on secluded tracks to the lonesome train ride of depression that adds more and more lost wanderers mercilessly. From touching social issues involving the challenges immigrants faced to society emotion genocide. Presentation was also the center of diversity; people presented their poems softly, tenderly, with rage, with angst, with longing, and with humor. The man who spoke of incarceration sang a song of a love he mourns before diving into his heart wrenching story of his relationship with cigarettes. I even pushed my nerves aside and read two of my poems, debuting my first reading at Luna’s Café. People undressed their souls nude; revealing the moments where their souls crumbled and became reborn again.
I sat down to talk with the owner of Luna’s Café, Art Luna, after the open mic was finished. When I asked Art, what was the inspiration behind the making of poetry open mic night or Poetry Unplugged, as he calls it? He answered, “Joe Montoya Jr. who is the son of a well recognized visionary poet, Jose Montoya, wanted to explore the form and function of poetry. He wanted to bring new energy and break the mold of poetry to create a limitless free speech except for hate speeches. He also wanted to be open and to encourage people to do more poetry. It opened a line of poetry venues, people saw the success and they wanted to open more venues.” I then asked him, what was his goal for establishing poetry nights? Art replied, “The goal for me was to create an art café, a venue of a combination of arts. I was part of the Boards of Records for the la Raza [the race] Galleria Posada. It was like a Chicano art gallery that was established in the mid 70s where I was working at the Flamingo in the bay area, which was like a jazz scene. The la Raza was made up of cantos, singing in flowery-singing, an Aztec word meaning poetry. While I was doing Luna’s Café, I met Joe twenty-one years ago and we partnered up to do the poetry open mic. It brought local and international poets to the café which was a goal to promote poetry more. The major goal was art and the exploration poets expressed through their own ideas, and also, to give poets a chance to express themselves and push themselves out of their limits.” When I asked him what was his favorite part about poetry nights and what was the biggest thing he took from it, he replied, “The two major things are one, I love the variety of poetry and the various poets and two, I love feature poets- poet masters that come in from Los Angeles, San Francisco, the bay area, and the east coast. New York invited Luna’s to be a part of the archives for published works in a poetry museum.” I then asked him what was his most memorable moment so far that made him feel proud for being a part of the poetry experience. He answered, “The magical nights, the music and the art; so many great nights of poetry and so many people being here. It’s a combination of new poets reading well and being well received, and master poets having everyone hanging on their every word.” In my last question, I asked him how many people come in on poetry nights. He replied, “In the old days when poetry was more of performance poetry where people acted out their poetry with animation, the café would get so full or the reading list would be so long that I had to close the shop and call it a night because we would go on until two in the morning. Nowadays we get from fifteen to twenty-five readers.” He also added, “Music was also a part of poetry. Joe was in a band called Tatted Love Dogs where his poetry would be their songs. Joe’s father played guitar and he was a huge influence to him. We would get poetry police, people coming in and making a fuss about our poetry being too loud or too wild. To me, songs are poetry, people write from experiences. Back then we had hip hop, jazz, and other genres backing up the poet.” In his final thoughts of the night, he ended our conversation saying, “Words create images, with the use of word-smithing and these images took people on a trip with gracefulness. Like a bird taking flight or a bird swooping down and taking fish from the water. There was sourness for the fish losing its life but it all becomes something else, there is no death because it will turn into something else. It’s like a cycle and to me that is what poetry is.”
This hour interview and two hour reading experience helped broadened my interpretation of poetry because it also made me think of the evolution of music when a new generation blossoms and changes the old traditional ways. Performance poetry reminded me of the Velvet Underground, like a theatrical and animated way of self expression that was different from the traditional ways of standing still in front of a mic and reading with a mellow pace. Every poem that was read was freestyle, the goal Joe and Art set out to do. It was the listeners too that caught my attention because everyone listened to the poems differently. Some people closed their eyes, some stared intently at the speaker, and some stared off into space at some object in the room while they internalized the poem. Some poets came up to the mic with their poems already published in books and it inspired me more because I want to do that! Whether my poems sell or not, I want them published, observed, taken in with reflections and ultimately, taking someone on a trip. After hearing some of the poems like the mind bending humorous but in depth thoughts that sometimes didn’t rhyme, it inspired me to want to try that style and try performance poetry and see how carried away I can get; drifting in the endless sea of creativity. I want to bring people down in the undertow of my thoughts and make them think. It was an educational experience and it made the artist in me starve for more experience. To me poets are like Phoenixes, they die a little in their art so they can shed themselves and be reborn again. That’s why I love poetry so much and that’s why I want to be a part of it.
Until next Friday,
Ashley 🙂
That’s me reading my poems. Sorry for the poor quality, I took this picture from a video.
Moments in Our Lives 