Tonight was pretty great. Patricia Smith is, as per her reputation, incredible. "The Blood Sonnets" are a perfect example of why the page/stage divide is not a wall but a malleable and thin structure. Her last two poems, persona pieces dealing with Little Richard and John Coltrane, emphasized what performance can do that a page cannot. Jeffrey McDaniel also drove home a really good reading of poems from The Endarkenment. Christian Drake was his usual bombastic and bassic self, and I enjoyed the two pieces he performed.
I only got to do one piece, "ADD TV," and more than a few jokers tried booing me off stage within the first thirty seconds. Most of the crowd figured out the game and was amused once I started changing channels, but some contingent just didn't get it. It was amusing in a way, to see Patricia Smith laughing heartily during the PBS censored portion, and to hear from somewhere in the crowd "Where's your words?" I know, there's a Green Mill style, and I haven't done a poem in the Green Mill style at that venue since a poem I did on the open mic a number of years ago. Still, I think my piece divided the crowd like no other tonight - some folks got snapped slightly more or less than me (snapping is a sign of disapproval at the Uptown Poetry Slam), with most of the snapping coming from the same area of the bar, but I'm pretty sure that I really skewed audience reaction.
Was nice to briefly meet Kevin Higgins from Ireland, who is a friend of Todd Swift over at nth position.
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