Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe

Apocalypse Mouth

2005-06-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

Apocalypse Mouth
Review of Molotov Mouths by Saab Lofton in Las Vegas City Life

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, once said that poets and kings can't be friends, because a poet's job is to say things a king wouldn't want publicly known. This is exactly why the Outspoken Word Troupe -- the collective of authors from the anthology Molotov Mouths: Explosive New Writing (Manic D Press, $13.95) -- aren't likely to be invited into Oprah Winfrey's book club. Even though they more than deserve to.

Why do they? For far too long, the poetry circuit has been dominated by spoiled white kids whining about insignificant things. How many more times is the world supposed to applaud yet another poem about how breaking up is hard to do? "Life is cold, the night is dark, my soul is empty ... blah blah blah!" It's damn near apocalyptic in the suburbs, huh?

Molotov Mouths' Ananda Esteva was born in Chile -- where life actually was apocalyptic (because America put Augusto Pinochet in power) -- and in her piece "Memorias Chilenas" ("Chilean Memories"), she writes:

I see bodies

pale and bloated

floating down the Mapocho River

bodies of socialists, of teachers, doctors,

poor folks, your folk, and poets

immersed in swirling waters

red foam residue

Something a little bit closer to home? Dani Montgomery is a "queer" teacher from Tucson, who offers the following:

our america

gets up each morning

even though today she may be arrested

and he may be deported

even though she can't afford the rent

and he can't pay to see a doctor

even though death hovers low on the horizon

our america continues

to insist on itself

and with every morning

rises

A common theme found in both Esteva and Montgomery's work is the rapacious nature of the prison-industrial complex. In the opening poem, "Scent of Magnolia," Esteva asks: "How can we rise up when we're locked up?" While Montgomery's "A Question to the Guards at Juvenile Hall" asks: "How do you go home in the evening and hold your baby, touch your lover, cook food with the same hands that this afternoon fastened shackles around the wrists of a fifteen-year-old girl?"

James Tracy is probably the co-author with the most front-line experience, being a longtime organizer and coordinator of Right to a Roof (a part of San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness). His 15 "New World Orders" are to die for and should be on the walls of millions of homes in poster form. Here are a couple of examples:

15) If voting could change the world, it would be outlawed, but if it were completely ineffective, George Bush wouldn't have had to steal the election in Florida.

13) If most Americans have to ask "Why does the world hate us?" then we may already be doomed.

11) Patriotism means never having to say "I'm sorry."

And so on.

The last word should go to Raw Knowledge, a woman the book describes as "a working-class firebrand proud of her anarchist politics." In the poem "Fashion Starvation," she might as well be speaking directly to those who write poetry about nothing:

You sit there a slave to fashion, sigh, and say to me, "I don't want to spend my life fighting for a change that may never happen." MEANWHILE ... as another victim dies from starvation in exchange for your "sense of style," I hope you wanting to hasten the death of your own life is worth murdering others."

Saab Lofton's column Fear No Evil appears weekly in CityLife.

SF Weekly Oct 29, 2003

2005-06-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

From sfweekly.com Originally published by SF Weekly Oct 29, 2003

Molotov Mouths: Explosive New Writing
A verbally incendiary band of activist-poets' fresh, passionate, revolutionary collection
BY PETER BYRNE

By James Tracy, Dani Montgomery, Raw Knowledge, George Tirado, Leroy Moore, Ananda Esteva, and Josiah Luis Alderete

Aficionados of San Francisco's spoken-word scene will know Molotov Mouths, a verbally incendiary band of activists-slash-poets who have been regaling local audiences with their brand of political poem-raps during the reign of George II. The poems and short prose pieces that make up this collection are not likely to appeal to people who actually like the suburban-angst type of poetry that is the staple diet of, say, The New Yorker. As Molotov Mouther George Tirado recently told a radio interviewer, "We drop political bombs."

A few of the pieces are also artistic bombs, in which rhetoric and cliché triumph over content, but the book as a whole is fresh, passionate, and revolutionary, albeit without promoting any particular dogma.

Set largely in the Mission District, the stories and poems are about drug addiction, transgender sex, anti-war protesting, Latin American death squads, gentrification, disability discrimination, and other capitalist depredations. These works are unified by the strong foundation of human compassion that runs through them, forming the material for the righteous rage that leaps off the page in places.

In Tirado's poem "Silent Friend," the poet asks a dead friend if Death's personality was frightening. "Were his eyes soft and kind?/ Did he hug you? or touch you?/ Did he wipe the sweat from your forehead?/ Such a private moment to be shared by someone/ who did not even know you."

Josiah Luis Alderete's streaming prose "Don Miguel" portrays a proletarian cook in a taqueria who has worked 9,733 lunch shifts. He stands back where "the faucets drip and the pots boil and the fryers fry don miguel's got tiny eyeballs stuffed full with miles and miles slickback jetblack hairstyles and a smooth profile taken right off a bullfighting velvet painting, a brown forehead full of sayings that'll probably take me years to really figure out and even if the devil were burning his feet he'd still wave buenos dias to you."

Housing activist James Tracy is at his best in his poems "Pressure," about a polite panhandler, and "Some of Our Best Friends Are Cannibals," a mockery of the anti-affirmative action movement. And Dani Montgomery's poem about strife-torn Belfast says it all: "nights molotov cocktails shriek over the razor wire/ hurled by unseen hands/ mornings the kids brush their teeth/ and eat cold cereal in the kitchen./ this is the ordinariness of war:/ a mother sweeps broken glass off the pavement/ calling be careful as her children march to school."

From the Philadephia Weekly: August 15, 2003

2005-06-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

Lock up your gutterpunk baby sister. The Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe is in town.

The San Francisco-based performance poetry team was formed on a dare two summers ago, when co-founder James Tracy worked up the nerve to cold-call a local venue and got the as-yet-nonexistent group on the bill with the legendary John Trudell. Now with the book Molotov Mouths: Explosive New Writing under their belts, they're taking on the rest of the country.

"Our tour is crazy/wonderful," said Tracy from day one on the road. An antipoverty activist, he's also the editor of Manic D Press' Civil Disobedience Handbook. Joining him is a group of poets he describes as 'pan-radical,' including George Tirado, Solidad Di Costa and Josiah Luis Alderete. Tracy says they're carrying on the tradition of socially conscious writers like Luis Rodriguez, June Jordan and Nikki Giovanni.

The most intriguing thing about these guerrilla artists is their willingness to deal with mainstream types who could very well decide to throw tomatoes. Their first gig was at a juvie hall in San Francisco, but they'll round up the tour at the popular Bumbershoot Festival, a major music event, with Macy Gray and R.E.M.

"We're populist poetry in the sense that one day we're in a low- income housing development, the next day we're performing at venues where Sarah Jessica Parker just happens to be in the audience."

But can politics really be interesting enough to the average person to work as entertainment? One answer is that for these poets, at least, the political is too real to ignore. The work of Chilean-born Ananda Esteva, for instance, is informed by the experience of fleeing deposed dictator Augusto Pinochet with her family. And the title of Leroy Moore's spoken-word recording, Black Disabled Man With a Big Mouth and a High IQ, kinda says it all.

As for the performance part, the Mouths aim for energetic, not frenetic. "Only one member has actually actively participated in the poetry slam scene, which is not a 'dis' on the slam scene at all. We're high-octane enough to slam, but sometimes we go over three minutes."

Heh heh. Okay, cool. Wait. Sarah Jessica Parker?

"It's true! George sold her a book at our Seattle show and had a conversation with her about radical community groups."

Booking Information

2005-06-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe is available for performances and workshops in your town. If you are interested in booking us, please send an e-mail with the following information:

Date, time and place of event
Payment and lodging arrangements
Reliable Contact information
Length of set
Description of event

We’ll get right back to you to confirm the show!
Thanks for your interest in our project!

molotovmouths at earthlink dot net
or 2202 Bryant Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Performance Vitae Molotov

2005-06-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

Bluestockings Books, NYC, Carlito's Cafe, NYC. Great Labor Arts Exchange, DC Counterpulse Space, Mayday Festival, SFWestern Workers Labor Heritage Festival, San Jose CA UCLA Cooperage Hall, Los Angeles May Day Event, Counterpulse Space San Francisco Bolshevik Cafe, Berkeley CA 25th Anniversary Harvey Milk Commemoration San Francisco, CA Bumbershoot Festival Literary Stage, Seattle WA Red and Black Cafe Portland OR (w/ Madigan Shive) St. Mark’s Poetry Center New York City (w/ The Welfare Poets) WBAI On Air Appearance Flywheel Arts Collective in Exile Easthampton, MA (w/ Eric Petersen and the Can Kickers) Lucy Parsons Bookstore Boston Robin’s Bookstore, Philadelphia PA (w/Samantha Barrow and Maleka Fruen) Olsson’s Bookstore, Washington DC NOTASQUAT, Washington DC Youth Guidance Center, San Francisco, CA Poetry Workshops, Community Housing Partnership, San Francisco CA Poetry Workshops, School of the Arts, San Francisco CA , Dreaming Revolution, San Francisco CA Julip Bar, San Francisco, CA Alameda County Juevinile Detention Center San Leandro, CA National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, UC Irvine, Irvine CA Little Sister Activist Security Conference, Vancouver, Canada Balazo Gallery, San Francisco CA Pacific Stock Exchange, Boycott the Bell Rally Prison Activist Resource Center Benefit, Oakland CA Anarchist Cafe, San Francisco Soft Skull Press Publishing Party, San Francisco CA Poor Magazine CD Release Party, The Lab, San Francisco, CA National Association Of Street Newspapers, Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA UC Berkeley Popular Education Conference, La Pena, Berkeley, CA Anarchist Cafe, St. Martin De Porres, San Francisco, CA Justice for Judi Bari Benefit Humanist Hall, Oakland Laborfest, San Francisco, CA Mayworx Festival, Wise Hall, Vancouver BC, Canada Under the Volcano Festival, Vancouver BC, Canada Sugar Refinery, Vancouver BC, Canada Poetry Above Paradise, San Francisco,CA Intersection For The Arts, San Francisco, CABrainwash Cafe, San Francisco, CA Bookbeat, Farifax CA Foolscap, Eugene, OregonRed/Black Cafe, Portland, Oregon Sit And Spin, Seattle,Washington Spartacus Books, Vancouver BC, Canada Sugar Refinery, Vancouver BC, Canada

Who Are the Molotov Mouths?

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Ananda Esteva was born in Chile and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. A gifted storyteller, she intertwines bilingual poetry and song to paint a picture of life in Las Americas. She has performed and published internationally and co-authored Poetry For the People, ground breaking curriculum based on the teachings of June Jordan.

Leroy Franklin Moore Jr. is a disabled African American writer, poet, and community activist. He has been sharing his perspective on identity, race & disability for the last thirteen years. His work began in London, England where he discovered a Black Disabled Movement which help led to the creation of his lecture series; "On the Outskirts: Race & Disability." Leroy F. Moore Jr. is also the Founder of Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization, (DAMO) in Oakland, California. He has studied, worked and lectured in the field of race and disability in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa. Leroy currently lectures for Speak Out, a national speaker's bureau.

His readings, lectures and workshops are a mixture of personal, historical, political and cultural experiences and the raw reality of being Black and disabled in the U.S. In his workshops and performances he looks at crimes against people of color with disabilities.

James Tracy is a long time organizer active in anti-poverty work. He is the author of The Civil Disobedience Handbook: A Brief History and Practical Guide For The Politically Disenchanted (Manic D Press), The Donut Hole (Kapow Press) and Tourist Traps of the Twenty-Third Century (Kapow Press). He has written articles for Sheterforce, Race, Poverty and the Environment, Maximum Rock and Roll, and Processed World. His short history of dot com era displacement in San Francisco was recently published by City Lights Books in the anthology The Political Edge.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho Indian who refries his beans and poemas in Spanglish. Although a proud son of San Francisco’s Mission District, he currently resides in a gigantic poema somewhere in East Oakland.

The Extended Molotov Family

Dani Montgomery has taught creative writing and ran a youth internship program for the San Francisco Arts Commission's WritersCorps program. She also worked for The Center for Young Women's Development, an organization that works with young women involved in the juvenile justice system and underground street economies to promote social change and self-determination. She has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, including: The Civil Disobedience Handbook, The Santa Clara Review, and Anything That Moves. Her poem "Dear Brother" convinced her brother to stay out of the military and was awarded a
"Best of the Bay" Award by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Raw Knowledge is not only an amazing poet performer, but also delivers the hip-hop goods as part of the Entartete Kunst collective (under the name 187). Check out their CD States Of Abuse- for some of the hardest hitting anarcho-polemics ever set to a beat. She has a full length CD entitled Nemesis to Silence and also appears on the compilation Bread and Roses. If she ever finds the time, we would love to share the stage with her again.

Jewnbug came with us on our first West Coast Tour four years ago and has since given birth to a child and remains part of Poor Magazine’s Po Poets Project.

Solidad Di Costa is a Bay Area spoken word artist, trans activist and active in the Global Justice Movement. She has several chapbooks and CDs under her belt and helped to produce "We Interrupt This Empire," a documentary about the anti-war direct action protests in San Francisco.

George Tirado helped to found the Molotov Mouths, and will not be turning up at any shows in the future.