TICKETS WILL BE FREE & AVAILABLE FROM THE SECOND CITY BOX OFFICE SOON!

“As a poet once observed, “Poetry is the music of facts.” Kevin Coval’s poetry rings with that music. From the grit and turmoil of everyday life, Coval constructs a new beauty that inspires and transforms.” BERNIE SAHLINS, FOUNDER of The Second City & Author of Days and Nights at The Second City: A Memoir

why jews celebrate x-mas
i. it’s the only time of the year all my mom’s people could get off work.
ii. it’s a production.
a. my grandma’s spread took days to lay out:
swedish meat balls in a hot and sweet brown sauce.
brisket in au jus (of course). mustard dip. farfalle
primavera. caramels, cookies and plenty of vodka.
iii. the main event was held just off the dining room
iv. the adults gathered for highballs and martinis (even though my
grandfather, a liquor salesman, never drank.)
v. this was the night he worked all year for.
vi. a room of family and a wall of presents, that cost money he made.
vii. proof he provided for his children and grandchildren.
viii. things you could touch and say my papa gave me this, this thing.
ix. this is the night, he felt most american
x. most fully
free.

from the forth coming collection, Schtick, Spring 2013, Haymarket Books

pre-order here: http://www.amazon.com/Shtick-Kevin-Coval/dp/1608462706

http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2012/10/25/kevin-coval-chief-keef

from the Preface:

Every institution in Chicago fails Black youth. Our city, as the young poet Malcolm London writes, is “a tale of two hoodies”: a segregated and systematically inequitable city, “a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of burg” Nelson Algren would say. A town where white kids exist in an increasingly idyllic new urban utopia and Black and Latino kids—whose parents are working and not, due to the lack of jobs and job opportunities on the West, South and East sides, and the increasing abduction of men of color for prison industrial slave labor—weave and dodge through a war zone. Chicago is in America and this is not a new story. It’s a story as old as the country itself, stuck on repeat, blaring out a loud speaker.

Come to the chapbook release party FRIDAY Oct. 19 7pm @ Young Chicago Authors 1180 N. Milwaukee

Purchase a copy &/or Classroom set of the book from Haymarket Books here.

The revolution will not be standardized.

The assault on public education started here.

It needs to end here.

Karen Lewis, CTU President

of course the teachers march

in Chicago. they know

& inherit

& honor the history

of the many standing

against the tyranny

of the few

this is a union town

Most radical of all American cities:…

Big Bill Haywood’s town

Nelson Algren would say

this is a fight

against a mayor who is anti-union

who sold unions out in NAFTA

and the Clinton white house

the teachers strike for the heart & future

of public education

in this city

in this country.

they strike

after decades of republican-democrat strides

toward charters. toward the right

of public education being privatized.

they strike against Arne Duncan

Obama’s architect of standardized education

that privileges the privileged, whose kids are in the suburbs

or University of Chicago lab schools

the teachers strike

in the Chicago Tradition

allied with trade unionists

and Pullman Porters. in solidarity

with the Haymarket Martyrs

and Republic Window workers.

the teachers honor those who died

in the 1937 Memorial Day massacre

when cops shot steel workers.

they honor those who build

the country, who ensured the 8-hour day

in the name of;

Lucy Parsons

Albert Parsons

& Rudy Lozano

in the name of;

Gene Debs

Mother Jones

Addie Wyatt &

Jane Addams

in the name of;

Stud’s Terkel

his red socks

in solidarity, he rocks, from the grave.

he would’ve been on this picket line

with the teachers

fighting the good fight

in the long haul

standing with the many

against the tyranny of the few.

standing with the teachers

firmly rooted on the shoulders of giants

in the great & honorable

Chicago Tradition:

the good fight

fighting for the future

of All

in solidarity

9/14/12

today is a perfect May.

outside families flower
and plant and seed
the front lawns. fathers
in the park, sun is over
head. the day is over due
it is to over do. a day for your Ma.
the only woman who gave you
the Chance to breath and feel
love and hurt and happy and too
many Ma’s are gone or gone
away. this day to remember
to reach out and say thank you
for me, this body, for other people’s
mamas who are here
literally thru them.

and i miss my ma
today. i wish she was
in Chicago and i wish she could live
forever. it’s now
more of my life she’s been away
than here. she is far
from home and happy
but economy and circumstance
and cancer made her leave
the city i love. i am on
the phone with her
crying, sharing with my Ma
Chance’s song

this young man from Chatham
where mothers don’t have it easy
don’t know if their boys will be back.
all mothers worry and hope, sure
but to be a Brown boy in Chicago
is to leave the house
with weapons raised against you
cops and cops and gangs
and white mayors and builders
of prisons and schools systems
have it in
to end you
it seems…

in the outro
Chance thank his homies
mamas

and i only know
first hand what my Ma
went thru with me
and my brother
single and broke
and broken.
all she went thru
to get us thru.
Chance say thank you
and i am thankful
to be my mother’s son

#HeyMa #HeyMa
i know i neva did behave alot
neva got good grades alot
and turn your hairs to grays alot

a full head of them now

#HeyMa
honors all Ma’s
for r being
for making us    be.
on this day we pause
but on all days we know
even when we don’t,     exactly
where we come from

L-VIS LIVE!

written and performed by Kevin Coval
based on his book L-Vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems
directed by Jess McLeod
part of Victory Gardens’ Fresh Squeezed Series
March 27 – April 14, 2012
Richard Christiansen Theater

for more info & tickets: http://victorygardens.org/onstage/l-vis.php

Elvis.

Eminem.

Vanilla Ice.

Al Jolson.

A whiteboy rapper like so many whiteboy rappers, L-Vis loves black art and got famous (mis)using it. Poet Kevin Coval is your guide through L-Vis’ journey from the suburbs to superstardom – with an art form that never was his for the taking. This new multimedia hip-hop solo show explores the exhilarating collision of race and art in American pop culture.

Video of: The Crossover

Reviews of L-vis Lives: Racemusic Poems

“This book is bold, brave and morally messy – twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters, implicates us all. It’s about time.”
—Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep

“A radically candid collection…daring, historically grounded, and socially cathartic poems… Coval’s air-clearing honesty about violent and insidious racism and authenticity and creativity is blazing and liberating.”
—Donna Seaman, for American Library Association’s Booklist magazine

“As insane as it may seem, much writing about Hip-Hop, especially about White kids and Hip-Hop, eschews the discussion of race or racism. L-vis Lives! is a book of poetry that honestly, beautifully, and emotionally illustrates the contours of that discussion. And it reads like heavily syruped pancakes.”
—Boots Riley

“This book reminds me the if anyone can save this world it will be the artists and poets. It is through their efforts that we really understand things, much more than just by knowing the facts. Through art and poetry we can understand other realities and experience them through all our senses. This book explores the complex meanings and motivations of cultural appropriation of black culture by white youth in America. Like many “whiteboys” who have felt the aesthetic power of black culture, hip hop being the most recent form, Kevin Coval has followed his desire and admiration to emulate the creators of the genre without losing himself. By loving and honoring his idols, and studying hip hop culture and the context from which it emerged, he can imagine himself walking in another’s shoes. And by acutely observing himself and his own responses, and those of other artists who have crossed over, he has been able to analyze the American racial dilemma more deeply than most and to see what a country in denial refuses to see, that white supremacy is alive and well in America… Perhaps only through writing as honest and lucid as this, through art as perceptive, can we ever come to terms with our history.”
—Henry Chalfant, producer, Style Wars, and photographer

“Kevin Coval brings artistic taboo to the light in his new book L-vis Lives! His courage and fragility shows why he’s one of Chicago’s most talented writers.”
—Rhymefest

“The figure of the White Boy at the center of L-vis Lives! is a beast of line-beat-breaks, an ambitious and naive thief, equally loved and dissed in his unattainable odyssey for black cultural props. Kevin Coval rips the black skin off of hip Whiteness. Part Norman Mailer’s White Negro (“urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts”) and part social aesthetic-activist (but branded a terrorist) determined to continue the Unfinished, Collected Works of John Brown. Real or imagined, as a poet, this White Boy operates in a complex, Contemporary Confessional mode which means he is a snitch, one who straddles the line between escapism and cultural betrayal, a poet who tells bravely and honestly on the self even as he is being haunted by the inheritance of the swinging hips of a legend. Kevin Coval may not have wanted to but he has proven, at a time when many poets use metaphor and restraint to tiptoe around the tough issues of identity and borrowed race, that most L-vises (especially the ones falsely hardened by their own often rejected love of Hip Hop) have Souls.”
—Thomas Sayers Ellis, author, Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems

Kevin Coval’s L-vis Lives! is an unstinting excavation of race and culture, art and ownership. It offers poetic affirmation of Ralph Ellison’s signal insight, made forty years ago, that “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” Though some, either out of optimism or of ignorance, have dubbed our nation ‘post-racial,’ Coval reminds us that America is a country in which race is always receding from but ever returning to the center of our consciousness. With poignancy, humor, raw insight, and no small amount of soul, Coval has fashioned a poetry for the present. His voice demands our attention.
—Adam Bradley, co-editor, The Anthology of Rap

“This is a relentless book, brave and uncomfortable. Nothing like it has ever been written. No one really talks about these white men of color. No one considers their origins or the source of their craving. No one has bothered to label this pursuit of Blackness a meaningful tribute or a persistent dysfunction. L-vis Lives! is a cultural touchstone, a book that will easily move into a space that’s been waiting for much too long.”
—Patricia Smith, author, Blood Dazzler, finalist for the National Book Award

“I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is ready for a thoughtful and brave discussion of race in America today. On a side note…Nobody I can think of in poetry today can pull off a slant rhyme like Coval and deftly tie your tongue into a knot around a story that rattles with what it means to be human. When you pick up this book, prepare to be schooled and delighted by Coval’s wordplay and to be challenged by his stories to think critically about your own position of power (or lack there of) in society.”
—Muzzle magazine

“A stunning, and very personal, piece of literary work that should be required reading in every high school in America…. This little book is a hammer to beat down the wall between the one and the other. It’s also a compelling confession, and a living text of alienation born of the schizophrenic American cultural mind.”
—Impose magazine

“Kevin Coval, Chicago bard, inspired teacher, and Pied Piper of poetry to a generation of hip-hop urban guerrillas, does with L-vis Lives! what good art demands: I was in orbit.”
—Bill Ayers, author, Fugitive Days

“Kevin Coval’s poetic novella teaches us the traps of life, allowing us to love our reflections, filling us with the joy to live, to struggle for life. The world is ours.”
—Vijay Prishad, author, The Darker Nations

“Tough and smart, real and surreal, aching and funny, in-the-tradition and startlingly original, the trials of L-Vis show us the challenges of giving up on whiteness–a process at once monumentally hard, too easy, and absolutely necessary.”
—David Roediger, author, How Race Survived U.S. History

he runs south on a northbound one-way

right in the middle of Sacramento Ave.

he lives just to the east in Ravenswood Manor.

i live just to the west in Albany Park.

i am walking the dog.

we turn right (west) on Sunnyside

he is walking, now, back east.

he says hello and asks if the dog is friendly.

overly, i say. they bow to meet.

i ask how far he got today.

about six miles, he says.

my name is rod rod says

i’m kevin i say, and this is Brooklyn

the former governor of illinois who tried

to get paid to fill a senate seat, laughs.

it is near winter in the greatest city in the world

the air a right kind of cool, a still

the body can sweat and glide thru

the body alive, a part of

rather than apart from.

the body ventilates.

the body is brilliant.

                                  i live

down the street rod says

we banter about weather, running

you guys should come over, we’re neighbors

the invitation seems sincere

and desperate. i think

all politicians are sinister

self and wealth

in their crown

all the time.

the rod on tv is still

petting the dog.

i have not knocked

his door. but still see tv

trucks outside his home. i still

see lights on inside the beautiful

blonde brick on Sunnyside.

one night his wife opened the door

for a food delivery, Chinese. i think

i heard a horrible thunder

on another late night walk

a fight between a man and a woman

something horribly human

there is something horribly humbling

and idiotic about us, something

inept and embarrassed

a hand in the cookie jar

a craze of isolation

of lonely, the kind

desperation that allows

the fallen to invite a stranger

home. the hope for anyone

to see, the desire

everyday on the train

furious for another’s eyes

to rest on your body

breathing. to see you

in the streets. to hold you

in some fleeting embrace

until the end (until the end)

until the run

is over

Kevin Coval offers rhythmic guide to racial landscape in ‘L-Vis Lives!’

It is an extraordinary experience to watch a poet grow before your eyes, and that is what Kevin Coval has been doing ever since a meeting on an “L” platform in 2004. He was then, like many young poets (he was not yet 30), filled with enthusiasm, as expressed when he said: “The power of the spoken word enables us to see beyond the traditional distinctions of race.”

He has performed his work and published at a steady pace since, exploring that idea in such collections as “Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica” and “Everyday People.”

His latest is the wildly ambitious, thought-provoking and tremendously satisfying “L-Vis Lives! Race Music Poems,” which also contains some prose pieces. It is, Coval writes, “a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music.” It is a trip into what he calls “post-racial America,” a place “where Black art is still at times only accepted in a white face.”

Coval is white, as you can tell from the photo nearby, a product of Northbrook, not known as a hotbed for hip-hop poets or black culture. He is keenly aware of this and he has created in the title in “L-Vis!” a persona melded from of such real-life characters as Elvis Presley, Vanilla Ice, Eminem and, naturally, himself; an imagined person who proves a forceful and forthright tour guide through our complex racial landscape.

At once appealingly self-effacing and acutely self-aware, as in this from the poem “Posing,” “nose still too big/ for my face. chin hair/ I’d call a go-tee/ struggling for articulation,” “L-Vis Lives!” is funny and honest, a confession of sorts.

In the book’s final section, “whiteboy I could have been: a suite for John Walker Lindh,” he tackles the wildly complex and confounding motivations of Lindh, the young U.S. citizen captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan where he was fighting with the Taliban, and his own feelings about him in searing and haunting words.

One of the astonishing things about this poet’s life, and his accomplishment in this volume, is that he has been increasingly devoting time and energy to things other than writing. In this way he resembles his friend and mentor, Marc Smith, who might have sacrificed many more poems than have already come from his own pen by creating and running the internationally known concept of the Poetry Slam.

Coval teaches at the School of the Art Institute and at various public high schools. As the co-founder and artistic director of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, he is charged with organizing that annual event. He is also starting to spread the word worldwide with the help of a brilliant film about the event produced by local documentarians Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs and airing in early January on the Oprah Winfrey Network. He does some radio work for NPR, performs frequently around the country and has a steady girlfriend.

That’s a full poet’s plate, which makes this new collection an even greater wonder than it is.