Justin Kibbe Starts the Year of Black Water Dragon

There will be magic and mystery and shock and awe... when? On Sunday, January 22, 2012, at Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave., Tujunga, CA 91042, from 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. Justin Kibbe is the Featured Poet for the Village Poets Monthly Poetry Reading.

Just Kibbe is a 21st century poet, a literaphic artist. Sometimes he feels like a photographer of words, searching for one in a thousand that speaks the inner drama of his awareness into a visual context for others to see and become aware.

Just Kibbe is the creator and curator of Curing The Pirate Pig, the first visual-narrative-poetry-exhibit (On Display in Fall 2012). He also designed and produced a Baby Obama Doll (limited edition of 500), which uses toy and packaging to make an interactive poetic statement about Americans’ relationships to political media.

Books by Just Kibbe include Elite Speaking Turquoise Monkey, a collection of text message poetry, printed side-by-side with equivalent English translations; Any Color Is Fine As Long As You Can See Through It, a coffee table book of collage art, written and designed with Rubik’s Cube as the mechanism which organizes the waterfall of original and stolen images and text into six chapters, each exploring a different phase of our lives’ cycle. His two chapbooks are Good God: Forbidden Poems, short poems with interpretive illustrations by Christopher Paul Russell, and Public Urinal Poetry Tour, a series of poems hand-written onto public urinals and photographed.

Just Kibbe is the current poet/artist in residence at Eliot Middle School in Pasadena; and he teaches alternative creativity classes at both John Muir High School and ARTworks in Pasadena as well.



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After eleven

a poem for our anniversary

In bed we sleep, a mass of twisted spoons
baptizing our skins with chameleons you’ve carved from apples.

When you are clean I want you the way a banker wants money, the way little pigs want blankets, the way rivers want the ocean.

When I am dirty I want you the way a shark plays pool.

When I am clean, I want you the way cats want kittens,
the way an Angeleno drives the freeways, the way a snake wants legs.

When you are dirty, I want you the way a bear wants salmon.
I want your dirt in my teeth.
I want your head on an ice cream cone.
Make it a triple scoop. Sing to me.
Drown me with your strawberry rhubarb voice.

After eleven years, you are the sky to my skyscraper
the nitrogen to my gasoline.
I am drawn to you like earthquakes to California
like mirrors to your face.

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JUST KIBBE

Creator
Original Baby Obama Collectors Doll
www.BabyObama.com

Founding Captain & Publisher
Pirate Pig Press: An International Visual + Literary Portal
www.PiratePig.org

Managing Editor
THE Magazine: Pasadena Foothills Region
www.THEmagazine.biz

Founding Board Member, Past Board President
Indelible Ink: A Vanguard Performing Arts Series
www.IndelibleInk.net

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Telegram Collage by Justin Kibbe, used by permission.

Justin Kibbe's portrait with an Emu painted by Susan Dobay, (c) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk.