Kuwentuhan (Talkstory)

Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo read from their poetry, continuing a collaboration between artists, audiences and The Poetry Center, as a way of enlarging this circle beyond ethnic boundaries, in contested urban spaces.

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) takes the Tagalog term, a phoneticized form adapted through the colonial Spanish, as its title, proposition, and starting point. Kuwentuhan (“necessary step toward big talk,” by one definition) is orally based, informal in nature, usually spontaneous, and is always an opportunity for people to converge and share. It occurs in all kinds of social spaces as talkstory circle.

The project’s aim is to open up precisely the kind of human space that barely exists in our technological and “globalized” culture, by allowing a select group of American poets out of widely disparate and polyglot cultural and geographic backgrounds to actually talk face to face, sharing stories, poetry and conversations among themselves and with audiences. They are interested in work that originates from a communal basis, and in shaping a project that encourages collective creation, by putting into action mechanisms for creating “live” person-to-person exchange between and among artists and audiences.

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) is a project of The Poetry Center and Reyes, supported by the Creative Work Fund.