Kyle "Guante" Tran Myhre
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I mention the three new videos in the post, but here are some direct links:
Find even more activist-oriented writing prompts here.
Another new zine, another ongoing work-in-progress. I’m sharing some of my favorite writing prompts: for poets of course, but also for songwriters, emcees, and writers of all kinds.
It’s probably clear that my list favors political, movement-oriented, and activist-leaning prompts. There’s a reason for that: things are bad right now. They were bad last year, and every year before that too, but we should also be clear-eyed about the immense amount of work and struggle in front of right now. As always, art isn’t the only thing we need. As always, we do need art. Writing can help frame issues, shift narratives, and just bring people together. It won’t just happen inevitably, though; let these prompts be invitations for us all to be proactive and intentional.
Only other thing I’ll share here is that I also tend to favor “non-traditional” writing prompts. I like prompts that don’t point the way to a single poem or song, but rather to an impulse, a way of approaching our writing. These are prompts someone could use more than once, and write completely different pieces every time.
Here’s a link to a PDF for anyone who wants to print, cut, and fold the zine version (some directions here).
AND HERE’S THE FULL TEXT OF THE ZINE, PLUS SOME ADDITIONAL LINKS:
Continue reading “Let Every Word Be A Wrench In Their Machine: Writing Prompts”This year was bad! But good work happens during bad years too. As is tradition: a few highlights from 2024, for people who are interested in what I do but may have missed something here or there.
It’s a long story, but as you may know, I’m on two songs by producer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Fred Again. This year, I got to perform one of those songs, “Kyle (i found you),” with Fred during his MPLS tour stop at the Target Center. Absolutely surreal; that’s what the photo above is from. The other song, “Berwyn (all that I got is you),” is on Fred’s album “Actual Life 3,” which won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album back in February.
My friends try to tell me I should just go ahead and say that I’m “a Grammy-winning artist” since I’m a writer/performer on the album, but the humble midwesterner in me is going to run with “appears on a Grammy-winning album.” Either way, it’s kind of cool and not something I ever expected to happen.
Continue reading “2024 recap: New album, Target Center performance, Grammy (kind of), zines, videos, and more”
I basically decide to make a zine when I’ve had so many conversations about a topic that a shortcut would be useful. Not that the conversations aren’t fun; I just want to make sure people can share these resources/ideas beyond the conversation. The newest zine in my library is maybe a little more niche than the others—it’s a collection of resources for people who are looking to start some kind of creative-writing based group: like a high school poetry club, a writing circle, etc.
As always, there’s no one way to do that, and not everything in this zine is going to apply to every person in every situation. But my hope is that there’s something useful in there, at least as a starting point.
One brief note: This is a traditional, 8-page, “z-fold” zine. If you want to print/cut/fold some yourself, here’s a PDF (note that it’s formatted for 11×17 paper). I have a different 8-page zine that’s all about getting involved in spoken word for people who are new to it. I have also, however, combined the two 8-page zines into a single 12-page zine (cutting some of the overlapping content), that I will have with me at shows/events for the foreseeable future. If you’re a teacher, event organizer, etc. who might be interested in a bulk order, feel free to get in touch using my booking form.
As always, here’s the full text of the zine:
Continue reading “All the Threads Between Us: The Power of Poetry Clubs, Writing Circles, Open Mics, and Other Collective Efforts (Zine)”
Kind of a National Poetry Month post. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll keep it short: it times of great crisis, I think poets have more to offer than poems. We should still write the poems, of course, but we can also “be mobilizers. We can be movement-builders. We can use our networks to spread information” and on and on. One way this plays out in our everyday work, for me at least, is the practice of kicking off events and performances by bringing someone else’s voice into the space.
I’ve done this here-and-there through my whole career, but it’s felt like a real necessity over the last five months. If I have 20-60 minutes of stage time at an event, I’m not really interested in just jumping into my own material. I want to acknowledge context. I want to acknowledge that the audience’s hearts might be in two places at once. Opening a show with a poem from a Palestinian poet is a small thing, a tiny thing, but I think it matters. A big part of my own pedagogical approach has been the idea that poems are excuses—they have value on their own, of course, but beyond that, they are footholds, opportunities for us to look at something we weren’t already looking at, to think deeply about something that would otherwise be ignored. If we’re not doing that as a bare minimum, what are we doing?
This post is just a list of links—both to short poems I’ve been returning to, over and over recently, and some articles/interviews on how poetry can be used in this moment. I use that word, used, intentionally. It’s not just about what we can say via poetry; it’s about what the process of writing and sharing poems can help build. Hope these can be useful:
A note on the selections: Any time I make a topic-based list, the list is not exhaustive. This one does not feature every great Palestinian poet, or every poet who has written about war and peace (indeed, the ones listed here are not all by Palestinian poets, and they are not all from the last five months). The list is, very specifically, a small sampling of poems on this topic that have been useful to me in my work as a performer, educator, and facilitator. I’m less interested in the “best” poems, and more interested in poems that can be generative, that can lead to good conversations, and questions—poems that can open doors. There are so many others, and I’d encourage all of us to make these kinds of lists and share them.
Also, while there are a ton of books I could include here, I want to specifically shout out this anthology featuring multiple voices: Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi)
A few highlights from 2023, for people who are interested in my work but may have missed something here or there. It was a bit of a “between-projects” year for me (though I did mark the one-year anniversary of my book by making a section available to read online here), on top of the fact that self-promo has been the furthest thing from my mind over the last three months, but here are some links.
**UPDATE: Danez Smith picked this poem as the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” for August 6, 2024! It feels like when an offensive tackle lines up as an eligible receiver and randomly scores a touchdown.***
This past July, I got to open up for Rudy Francisco here in Minneapolis at Icehouse, and used it as an opportunity to formally “debut” a poem I’ve been working on for months, probably my favorite new thing that I’ve written since my book came out. As always, I like the share a few notes on the process.
I used to more frequently do “here’s what I’m up to” posts, but that feels like a relic of an earlier internet time. Still, there’s a lot happening, so I figured I’d share some info here so it can be in a central place rather than a bunch of random social media posts.
Check it out! Fred sampled my poem “Love in the Time of Undeath” for the song “Kyle (I Found You)” and the result if gorgeous. It’s the first song in his set, and I even appear as a video ghost performing the poem.
While Kyle (i found you) uses a sample of my work, we did a proper collaboration for his song Berwyn (all that i got is you); my poem/voice comes in during the second half of that song.
Uhhh and hey check out this video of me up on the big screen at Lollapalooza!
Continue reading “Tiny Desk appearance, National Poetry Month performances, new video sampler, etc.”
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