A poet laureate is an ambassador for poetry, and for that reason Michael Castro was a fitting choice for St. Louis’ first poet laureate.
Castro is a Sephardic Jew who wrote an important book about American Indians in poetry (“Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American”), is married to an African-American artist (Adelia Parker-Castro), co-translates modern Hungarian poetry (with Gabor G. Gyukics) and mixes well with poets and people of every background.
In a fragmented region based around a city so notoriously divided by race and geography that we have a name for it (the “Delmar Divide”), Michael Castro is a uniter and a connector. He is the poet laureate we need now.
Castro’s deep community connections can be seen in the cast of poets who will perform with him in his first public reading as poet laureate, to be held 7:30-10 p.m. Saturday, February 21 at the Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar Blvd. (right on the south bank of the Delmar Divide).
He will share the bill with two African-American poets who have been friends and colleagues with Castro for decades: his counterpart across the Mississippi River, East. St. Louis Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond, and legendary performance poet Shirley LeFlore, author of the collection “Brassbones & Rainbows” whose past poetic affiliations include Black Artists’ Group, Warrior Poets and Word in Motion.
Redmond describes Castro as “a poetic souljourner occupying formidable ritual ground: ancient, American, multicultural. A confluence of drums, cantors, griots, cellos, shamans, koras, xylophones and shakers.”
Castro also will be joined by African-American performance poets from the next generation: Cheeraz Gormon of Screwed Arts Collective and Alchemy 7 Creative, MK Stallings of UrbArts and Literature for the Halibut (on KDHX 88.1 FM), and David A.N. Jackson of Spoken Word Groove (and many other creative projects), among others.
Castro has performed alongside black poets his entire adult life. Newer to the ranks of his fellow poetic travelers is Thai poet and translator Noh Anothai, the pen name of Anothai Kaewkaen. He is the recent winner of the inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multilingual Texts awarded by Lunch Ticket, Antioch University’s online review of writing, art and social justice. He won the prize for translations of three Thai protest poems: “It may be nebulous now, its form murky, but at least a movement is taking shape.”
Also on the bill is a poet from Castro’s own tribe, ethnically speaking: Rabbi James Stone Goodman, a spiritual leader at Congregation Neve Shalom and Central Reform Congregation, and a multi-disciplinary performer who combines story, poetry and music. An early Ferguson protest supporter, Goodman wrote that he found in Ferguson “stirring and a hollering, a message of resistance and purpose, an expression of social critique and intelligent vocalization of perceived wrongs.”
The February 21 reading is the first in a planned “Unity Community” series, intended to bring St. Louis’ diverse poetry communities together for “honest-talk, spirit-talk and playful talk,” Castro said in a release, as “a microcosmic model for the macrocosmic dialogue between its communities, which is much needed in St. Louis.”
No question: Michael Castro is just the poet we need to get this much-needed dialogue started in St. Louis. As Redmond writes, in his self-created lingo, “this bardic scatman’s conch/us/nest offers high yields of love; beams in on abuses of art, humankind, & planet—& dreams us toward painful clarifications.”
Complimentary hot beverages at the February 21 reading will be provided by St. Louis specialty roaster Blueprint Coffee. For more information, contact Syrhea Conaway at Regional Arts Commission, 314-868-5811 or visit www.racstl.org. The St. Louis poet laureate site is http://www.stlpoet.org/.
