spoken word

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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)”

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Some upcoming opportunities, food-for-thought, and resources:

1. First, to contextualize everything else here, a few thoughts on what it means to recognize National Poetry Month during a genocide. What are the role(s) of poets in times of crisis? What are some concrete, specific things we can do, in the spaces we move through, with the audiences we have access to? A few tactics and resources in the link (it goes to a nine-slide IG carousel). Related:

2. Second: A few local appearances, online opportunities, and more coming up. So much of my work is on-the-road, at schools, colleges, and what basically amounts to “private” events. But these are ones that are more open. Details below:

a promo graphic for "midwest poetry mash-up: finals hosted by kyle tran myhre aka guante; get your tickets today: tinyurl.com/MashUp2024; April 19-20 at Strike Theater in MPLS.
a promo image for the unfold writing series: 2024 guest host: guante (kyle tran myhre) workshop: anthemic writing: monday, april 29, 7-9pm cdt. become a member: bit.ly/unfoldwriting
promo image for "out loud at the library" w/ sun yung shin, kyle tran myhre, kashimana ahua and desdamona: "free creative workshops led by artists throughout may; wednesdays from 6-7pm at the george latimer central library
Continue reading “National Poetry Month 2024 Links”

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A collage of poem titles: What I Will by Suheir Hammad, If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer, Picking up Rocks by Rasha Abdulhadi, What is Home? by Mosab Abu Toha, Naturalized by Hala Alyan, Mismarked by Tariq Luthun, Don't Step on My Feet Again by Basman Aldirawi (via the book, Light in Gaza), Birthright by George Abraham, Antizionist Abecedarian by Sam Sax, Red Sea by Aurora Levins Morales

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 FEW POEMS

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.

A FEW OTHER LINKS

Click through for even more examples:

an IG post with the text "art for palestine challenge: for artists and art makers of all kinds to keep attention on palestine and help amplify palestinian voices! (1) write, illustrate, sing, play music, recite a poem about something you saw in the news or on a video about Palestine. You can also choose to amplify Palestinian voices by creating art based on their exact words. Make sure to give them credit and cite your source! (2) Post your creation and tag #ArtForPalestineChallenge
An IG post with the text “Share your art on and offline! Plaster your city! Ga*za is calling all creatives: use your art to tell the world the truth. With increasing censorship, your role as an artist is more important than ever. Tag @palestinianvoiestoday in your art & we will share.

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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.

a photo of KTM projected onto a big screen at the Lollapalooza festival.
Text: "five notes for artists and musicians who want to speak out about Palestine but aren't sure how"
a photo (by Aaron Vincent Facundo) of KTM speaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Continue reading “In Case You Missed It: 2023 Recap (and 2024 Booking)”

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Survival is not a fortress; it is a garden.

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, as well as the full text below.

Continue reading “When It Really Is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation”

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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.

NPR Tiny Desk Concert as part of Fred Again’s set

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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a photo of the book "not a lot of reasons to sing, but enough" next to lego representations of the book's main characters, Gyre and Nary.

This piece is from my book. Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough is more-or-less a poetry book (find all the poems/videos we’ve released from it so far here), but it’s written from the perspective of various characters; sometimes, those characters do other things beyond writing and performing poems—they have conversations, get into arguments, tell stories, and participate in panel discussions. In this excerpt, the robot poet Gyre has been invited to be part of a panel discussion; Gyre doesn’t want to, though, so makes their apprentice Nary do it instead.

All Advice is Bad Advice, Including the Advice that All Advice is Bad Advice

The Library of the Road has brought together three professional wordsmiths for a panel discussion on advice for aspiring writers. The three writers, along with a moderator representing the Library, sit on stools inside a communal hall where a few dozen attendees sit on benches. The Library’s traveling collection of texts lines the sides of the hall; a few wanderers browse through the books and scrolls.

Continue reading “All Advice is Bad Advice, Including the Advice that All Advice is Bad Advice (Book Excerpt)”

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This kind of magic changes you when you touch it.

A quick note: the video here is the most recent performance; I did also share this one right when the poem first came out. Thanks to Button Poetry for capturing it!

I know you’re not supposed to explain the poem before sharing it. But I also never liked the notion that poetry is a puzzle to be solved. For me, it’s more about expression and communication, so here are a few brief framing notes:

  • This is a contrapuntal poem. So it’s one poem, set next to a second poem, that can also be read side-by-side as a third poem.
  • The first part is about BTS, a Korean pop group. If you know, you already know. If you don’t, I share some recommended listening below.
  • The second part is about Warhammer 40k, a dystopian, ultra-violent, sci-fi series of tabletop games, video games, and novels. The 40k refers to it being set (more-or-less) 40,000 years in the future.
a graphic featuring the text "bts 40k: a contrapuntal poem by kyle tran myhre: IG: @guantesolo. Plus a stark, black and white clip from BTS' "fake love" video featuring the group in silhouette against a chaotic backdrop of white marble arms. The image is sideways.

During the first few years of the pandemic, I listened to a lot of BTS and played a lot of the video game series Total War: Warhammer (which isn’t actually set in the 40k universe, but opened the door to that lore for me), and ended up trying to write two poems about these pieces of pop culture that were so helpful to me in very dark times. Eventually, I figured out that I was actually writing one poem—that juxtaposing the most joyful and most nihilistic pop culture I could think of could be a doorway into thinking more deeply about hope and collectivity. The contrapuntal is a weird form, but it just made sense for this concept.

I wrote this before BTS announced that they were going on hiatus in order to begin their mandatory military service. The militaristic imagery in the piece might make it seem like it’s some kind of commentary on that, but it’s not intentional. I could imagine someone writing that poem, but I leave that to more appropriate and talented writers.

I assume that the venn diagram between BTS fans and 40k fans is quite small, and maybe no one will “get” or like this poem. But sometimes you have to write the thing that’s just for you.

A final note on the text: I’ve included the traditional, side-by-side version below, but I’ve ALSO included a separate block of text for the three poems as separate pieces. I did this because as someone who primarily writes in order to perform, there are a few moments in the poem that just kind of “work” better when performed aloud than on the page, especially concerning punctuation and emphasis.

The video is embedded above; here is the image of the poem’s proper layout + text of the poem below it:

An image of the text of the poem "BTS 40K" also available on this web page as text.
Continue reading “BTS 40k (A Contrapuntal Poem) – Text, Video, and Zine”

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Ugly music can be beautiful. A simple song can kindle a complex memory. A living creature gave its skin to that drum.

This is one of the first poems in NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING, BUT ENOUGH. Like everything in the book, it’s written in-character. I feel like I always have to add that caveat, since so much spoken word is driven by first-person, poet-as-voice-as-poet approaches (which I don’t think is a good thing or a bad thing; just one approach), and this book definitely doesn’t do that.

Kind of a table-setting piece for the book, a way to do some exposition without just a big info-dump. Beyond the narrative function of the piece, though, it’s also about the importance of… not just art and culture in general, but more specifically: spaces for art and culture to live. So much of this book goes back to the idea of the open mic, the poetry slam, the concert, the mural, the party, the dance, etc. and the role(s) that those spaces play in resisting, disrupting, and dismantling authoritarian impulses, in both the society and the individual.

Thanks again to Button Poetry for releasing all these videos. If you liked this one, the newly updated “poetry” page on this website has a list of some of my most popular pieces, followed by a list of other poems from this book.

This is also the last video of 2022. You can find a 2022 recap post featuring some “in case you missed it” highlights here. Thanks for watching/reading.

The full text:

Continue reading “All the People I Want To Say “I Told You So” to Are Dead (Video + Text)”