Brandeis gig

I just got the call to play a gig at Brandeis University. On March 9th I'll lead a workshop from 8-9pm, watch the open mic, give my featured performance, and then host the slam, which will consist of the Brandeis team vs 1-3 visiting teams. I haven't played a college/university gig in a while - this should be a blast!

a priest, a minister, and a rabbi

I've been on Indiefeed's Performance Poetry podcast twice before today, once with a creepy piece, once with a slow and philosophical one. I decided to do what I usually do, which is present another side to my work*, and sent Mongo a couple of funny poems from my feature at the Cantab. Both pieces will be featured on the podcast, and today it's "a priest, a minister, and a rabbi." I just really wanted to begin a performance piece with a joke, and this particular joke gave me a lot of room to be creative. It's a short piece, under two minutes, and the whole track only lasts about five, so this is a good one if you just want a quick jolt of kinda-funny-kinda-thoughtful.

*Most poets I know work at a particular style until they feel they've mastered it. I'm somewhat unusual in that I'm always trying on different styles and techniques. My page poetry ranges from concrete to free verse, formal to experimental. My performance pieces are quiet, loud, funny, dead-serious, political, everyday, theatrical, restrained. You can find threads amongst all my stuff, but you'll never mistake one poem for another. Since I'd already done two serious pieces, it was time to give another side.

Poem in 45 Parts

At NorthBEAST this weekend, I noticed a growing subgenre of performance poems in multiple parts. Six parts. Nineteen parts. Sometimes indicated by actually saying the number out loud (more common with greater numbers) or by indicating silently with a hand count (more common with smaller numbers). In the hour between the end of my workshop, Beginning with the Body, and the open mic, I decided to go to the extreme end of one of these poems in parts. I'll post the poem first, then a few thoughts on the creation thereof. Incidentally, the numbers should be read aloud, with almost no break between the number and the text that follows.

Poem in 45 Parts

1. In 3rd grade you made a mosaic.

2. It was supposed to be a fish.

3. It looked like a fish exposed to Chernobyl.

4. Seven years later you made a lamp in art class.

5. It didn't work.

6. Four years later you met me.

7. We kissed.

8. You tasted like ash.

9. You made a vase.

10. There were no flowers in it.

11. You made an ashtray.

12. It worked.

13. I fixed the lamp.

14. You said your lungs felt like Chernobyl just before it melted down.

15. You only showed me the fish once.

16. Two years later we moved in together.

17. I put flowers in the vase.

18. I realized I was the only one who ever turned on the lamp.

19. I asked you why a fish.

20. You said you mistook pieces for Pisces.

21. This was not the first lie.

22. This was not the first truth.

23. I forgot to turn the lamp on.

24. You didn't notice.

25. You didn't empty the vase.

26. Nor the ashtray.

27. I asked you why you left them full.

28. You said you mistook full for fool.

29. I asked.

30. You said you mistook ask for ash.

31. I asked.

32. You said you were having a meltdown.

33. You said you mistook born for broken.

34. You said you were drowning.

35. I replaced the flowers.

36. You threw the vase out the window.

37. You threw the ashtray.

38. You threw the lamp.

39. You threw the fish.

40. I looked at them shattered in the street.

41. I said you mistook me.

42. I said I was never trying to fix you.

43. This was not the first lie.

44. This was not the first truth.

45. I said I was just trying to keep track of the pieces.

If I was going to dive into a poem in multiple parts, I had several major considerations. First and foremost, there had to be a reason to divide this thing up. In this case, I came up with the first and last images first. Coming up with some kind of emotional fracturing would add a new layer to the idea of pieces. I wanted to keep with the mosaic concept, individual bits that resemble each other but bounce around so as to actually justify division into so many parts. Thus the jumping ahead in years and so forth. Secondly, I wanted to keep the language simple. If there were to be this many parts, then the structure itself should be the complex part, and the individual moments simple (a concession to a listening audience, since this is meant to be read aloud).

I'm not explaining this particularly well. Read it out loud to yourself as a somewhat brisk pace. It'll fall into line best that way.

The applicability game

There's water on the Moon.

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In related news, I just finished submitting manuscripts to the Bakeless and Yale Younger Series competitions.

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In unrelated news, the feature at Stone Church was great.

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In related-to-that news, no video or audio was recorded, which is probably for the best, given my inter-poem banter. I'm not sure that one family will ever be the same...

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In unrelated news, my dad is on business in China for a few days. We're trying out Skype. I'm liking it so far, much better than telephones.

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In related-to-China news, got a new Monsterpocalypse piece, Gakura:

Yes, that's a giant ape wielding a passenger train as a flail. I love this game.

Last feature for a while

I'm featuring tonight at the Zion Hill Reading Series at Stone Church in Newmarket, NH. This will be the longest set I've had outside of classroom performances at high schools and universities - a full forty-five minutes. I plan to do the 30-minute set I did at the Cantab, Poets' Asylum, and Got Poetry, plus a Russian fairy tale that I've heard as "The Soldier and Death" but which I change up a bit and call "The Wanderer." There may be some time for an improv or two as well. I'm excited.

With any luck, the whole thing will be recorded (both audio and video). If there's video, expect me to try to turn this into a (relatively inexpensive) DVD in the near future. If there's just audio, expect tracks to appear over the next few weeks for free.

Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.

Much Love for the Cantab

In case anybody from the Cantab comes across this blog as a result of buying my chapbook or Googling me or Facebook linking or whatever: thank you for an awesome night. You laughed when I hoped you'd laugh. You went dead silent when I hoped you'd be listening. You played along with any requests I had. You multiplied my efforts. You were, in short, an ideal audience, and I was so glad to have been there from the beginning of the open mic to the end of the slam that followed my set. Thank you.

Set List

If you saw me last night at the warm and welcoming Poets' Asylum in Worcester, this is the set list you heard. If you're going to see me at the Cantab on August 19 or at GotPoetry! Live on September 1, this is the list you'll hear*. I really like how it turned out - it has a progression (with the exception of the first poem) from simple to complex performance. That is to say, the pieces get more and more involved in terms of motion, tone of voice, use of persona, etc. It really lets the audience slowly build up into the complicated pieces, all the while bouncing back and forth between serious and silly so as not to overwhelm with one tenor. All told, the set lasts about half an hour (give or take a couple of minutes depending on improvised banter between a few poems, but I try to go from one to the next without much interruption).

Vom Kriege
Icarus comes in first
Icarus applies for a grant from the DoD
in absentia
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi...
Love After Marriage
Mother Earth
[scheduled banter about truth in poetry]
Esteban Peicovich and the Theory of Relativity
Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys
[option for There will be no reinvention of the wheel depending on the audience]
Sign of the Turtle
ADD TV


*If you go see me at the Zion Hill Reading in November, you won't hear this list. Instead I'll be telling a Russian fairy tale for about 20 minutes.

A Neon Icarus, An Old New Date

The cover image for The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus series is now viewable at the Seven Kitchens Press blog. Instructions for pre-ordering (it hits at the end of the month) are available there as well.

Oh heck, I'll put up the image, too:



Again, this is an accordion-fold chapbook, so you can read through my poems, turn it over, and keep going with Crystal's (or vice versa), hence the double cover.

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I just rescheduled my appearance in Providence, RI. I'll be at Blue State Coffee September 1st. Check the sidebar for times and links and so forth.

Poetry (Jam) is Doomed

From Scott Woods, former president of Poetry Slam, Inc, in reference to the recent "Poetry Jam" at the White House:

In fact, poets should be applauding that poetry is getting any attention at all at this level. That’s what some poets keep telling me anyway.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? We want our art form shared, but we want it to cover our agendas, not Def Poetry Jam’s (and by extension, Brave New Voices…which just sounds like louder, more cynical versions of the Tired Old Voices). We want voices that sound like ours, that tell stories other than the ones that slams and open mics have become sick with and made us easily lampooned. We want these instances to express our many senses of humor, not just our redundant pains. We want the world to see our exceptions that weren’t always exceptions. We want them to hear us emote with a whisper, not just a cracking and loud bluster.

Read the rest of this installment of Poetry is Doomed here.

Improv Poetry

Inspired by Tony Brown's reading in Manchester last night, I suggest a variation on something we used to do weekly at Revolution Cafe in Bryan, TX - improv poetry.

By this I don't mean the whole night should be improvised, but perhaps a ratio of 8 "prepared" poets followed by 4 poets who agree to do work written that night, based at least in part on the poems that precede them and/or input from the audience.

The concept here is to reinvigorate old hands. You have to listen in a very different way if you know you're going to riff on someone's material, and so there's a level of both respect and playfulness that comes of this activity. It also can provide some indirect feedback for the first eight poets, insofar as lines remembered by the improvisers are often some of the best ones from a poem. Lastly, if you have any poets in your venue who come back and do the same poems week after week, this is a way to find new life for those creations, essentially remixing them.

Also, and this is where the inspiration from Tony's rip-up-reading comes in, it gets back to one of the (core) tenets of slam, that it's about giving something to an audience. If you improvise, there's a very good chance that this will be the only time a particular piece is heard. It's a gift to the audience, whether it works (in which case the gift is the poem/performance itself) or doesn't (in which case the gift is opening oneself up in a way even slammers rarely do).

[cross-posting this to the What's Next for Slam Poetry group on Facebook]

5 + 2 Performances =

Oscar Bermeo blogged the best list of influential works that I've yet seen. He went beyond the typical confines of the meme that made its rounds a while back, choosing not only influential poetry books, but nonfiction, recorded performances, and live performances. I won't try to one-up him here, but I would like to present 7 performances, live or recorded, that resulted in the version of me that gets up on the stage.

These first five occurred while I was an undergraduate. They set the stage (har har) for the style I developed in earnest later on at Revolution Cafe.

1. John Firefly. Open mic at the Underground at Illinois Wesleyan University. Various poems. John was/is a local homeless poet in Bloomington, IL. He was also the first person I saw really invest himself in a performance, really give life to the words on the page. I have a few poems of his that he mailed to me, including the one that got him banned from campus (let's just say he really, really insulted the then-head of the English Department). But it was that first open mic at which he cut loose that made me go, "Hmmm. Sound." What I most got from John was a sense that he was channeling words, even if reading them off the page, and using himself as an amplifier. It was a far cry from the staid readings I'd encountered before.

2. John O'Leary. Walking around IWU campus. Various poems of his own, plus passages from Milton and Shakespeare. Whereas John Firefly opened up the possibility of sound to me, John O'Leary brought home the concepts of memory and tradition. He wrote these fractured sonnets, as he called them, and revised them in his head. They worked on the page. They also worked out loud. Not only did he know his own work, however, but you could walk up to O'Leary, say "Paradise Lost, Book IV," and John would begin reciting it from memory. It was impressive, not gimmicky at all. I still haven't memorized as much work as I now know I ought to. You can listen to an interview with John on Cross Cultural Poetics #60.

3. John Firefly. Barnes & Noble Bloomington, IL. I invited both of the Johns to read at the Barnes & Noble at which I worked part-time during my undergraduate years. They arm wrestled to see who would go first, which drew a crowd. One poet, homeless, and another, looking homeless, about to burst blood vessels in the Starbucks. Firefly ended up going first, and proceeded to lead off with a poem about watching himself in the mirror as he had sex. Little old lady gets up and leaves. Followed by another. Followed by another. We had more complaints that night than any other in the history of the store. Lesson learned: words have power. Not always that lovey-dovey, power-to-move-you-positively power. But people will react even to poems.

4. Taylor Mali. Poems from the Like-Free Zone. "The the Impotence of Proofreading" and "What Teachers Make." Playful and smart, in the way that a young George Carlin was. Combine this with his attention to teaching stories (by which I mean both stories about teaching and stories that teach), and this wannabe-teacher was hooked on phonics. Or at least the presentation of potentially arcane material in such a way that the audience accepts and even appreciates it.

5. muMs da Schemer. Def Jam Poets at IWU. Everything he did (just kidding about the last of those three links - there was no classical music at the performance in question). muMs was a revelation. His theatrical style, use of persona, and the smartest sound poetry I'd heard to that point all made this guy my #1 influence when I started developing seriously as a performance poet. I don't give him enough credit on Arts & Crafts, and for that I'm genuinely sorry. He did one piece, whose title I can't recall, that ended with him miming an eagle, screeching, and slowly the screeching became beeping and the eagle an EKG meter flatlining. It was amazing, and "ADD TV"'s ending owes a lot to the ending of that piece. Actually, all of the four or five pieces I do that specifically explore opening and/or closing poems owe a lot to that piece.

These last two are performances that struck me not only for their incredible quality, but for the inspiration they gave me to create two of my most well-received poems.

6. Flying Words. Slope. "Language" (to see/hear it, check for the judges in the Slope issue). The first American Sign Language poem I'd ever seen that wasn't an interpretation of written/spoken words, but actually devised from the start to work with both spoken and signed language. Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner stand one in front of the other (Cook, the deaf member, in front) and co-sign a poem, while Lerner speaks from the back (his head is covered). Everything about this poem was intentional, from the way Lerner's and Cook's hands formed the sign for language (because you need two people to have communication), to the banter with the audience (at one point, three hands are engaged in playfully signing "poetry" over and over - while this is going on, Cook uses his free hand to point at someone in the audience and ask whether that person wants to get a drink later). It was kinesthetic, or better yet, kinaesthetic. "Sign of the Turtle" owes its specifics to Genelle and KellyLynn, but the manner in which I deliver it comes from Flying Words. I have a three-person ASL piece I want to perform some time that was inspired by "Language" as well. Some day...

7. Shira Erlichman. Famecast.com season 2. "Daddy's Parking Lot Sermon." I'll keep this one short, simply because I bring this poem up so often. The first time I saw it, I was checking out my competition in Famecast.com's Spoken Word contest (incidentally, I came in 10th out of 80 poets, but learned to seriously dislike Famecast's model - I recommend never, ever competing at that site). I immediately reacted to not just the delivery, but the poetry, calling fellow graduate students to come watch. I remember Roger Reeves pursing his lips and going, "Ohhh she's a real poet." This poem inspired "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." The bad male figure is the obvious link, but here's the real connection, the epiphany that I had that made Shira's poem more than just a good-creepy persona piece. You ready for this? Listen to the poem again, and realize that the "daddy" is using the exactly same kind of langauge as the son. Perhaps even more poetic language. There will be no reinvention of the wheel, indeed.

If you can find any of these people, live or in recordings, you owe it to yourself to listen.

All that Jazz

Last Thursday, I participated (unexpectedly) in a fundraiser for Jazzmouth, the upcoming poetry, music, and art festival in Portsmouth. I'd attended in order to see some new poets, to contribute a few bucks, to hear a couple of poets who already interest me, and to indulge in a newfound love for live jazz.

I've never been fond of jazz. Blues, absolutely. Sit me down with a recording of Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, and I'm in hog heaven. The jazz I heard on the radio in Chicago was always too light for me. I'll read poetry that is intellectual without having heart, but I can't take music that's all head and no gut. Hypocritical? Probably. But it didn't change the fact that the closest I'd get to improvisational music was, well, 8-bar blues and a decent guitar solo in a rock song.

I'd been proud of this fact. The only autobiographical note in all of "ADD TV" is the line that kicks the whole thing off: "My music is not jazz / but rap." I'd performed a one-off poem at Mic Check once that lauded the grounded improvisation of Blues over what I perceived to be an elitist and ironically mindless following of jazz - "Famous poets always talkin' 'bout jazz / Famous poets always' talkin' bout jazz / Famous poets, they love to talk about jazz / But baby, I wear a Bluesman's hat."

I realize at this moment that I'm still capitalizing Blues but not Jazz.

Then I attended Beat Night, at which Groove Bacteria, which seems to range from 5-10 musicians, takes instruction from a poet and responds musically. Now, I'd been to the Green Mill in Chicago on nights when the three-piece (piano, bass, drums) band backs up the open mic. But I'd never seen anybody except Marc Smith really work well with the band. Maybe I just went on the wrong nights. But at Beat Night, I finally heard someone say, "Play like the house is underwater" and heard that from the band AND the poet. I finally heard someone say, "Punk gospel" and saw the poet come alive because of the music in a way I hadn't seen before (I mean this literally in this case, having seen another well-done performance of this particular poem by this particular poet).

At the end of the regular portion of the fundraiser, there was room for an open mic, so I signed up. I walked up to the mic planning on doing something light and funny. I'd performed at Beat Night before, but did "ADD TV" and not to music. I can't do that piece to music (the musicians agreed). At the last moment, I decided to do "Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys," with the request to the band "A music box that was in a fire." Not only have I never performed that poem better, but I got ideas on how to improve it, from a fellow poet in the audience and from within my own head. I finally got the improvisation, which is something I've been exploring in my spoken word lately.

And, to my surprise, not just from my own performance but the other readings that night, I'm starting to enjoy Jazz.

Space and Light (part 1)

Something was off with AWP this year. I've been trying to put my finger on it, and it's not panels (there are always good and bad in terms of content, and I went to both), it's not the bookfair (didn't have to eat larvae lollipops for journal subscriptions, but played games, met editors, and made contacts), it's not the location (walking the ten or so blocks from Union Station was actually invigorating each morning). It was in fact the physical confines of the rooms.

The bookfair in New York took place, at least in part, in rooms above the lobby. Two of the bookfair rooms even had extra high ceilings. No matter how many people were bustling about, no matter how "conferency" the tables appeared, there was a hint of natural lighting and enough space above my head to feel open. The Chicago bookfair was in the basement. OK, it's not precisely the basement, but it's belowground, such that you have to go down stairs or an elevator and then go down stairs again - which produces an opposite effect to going up several stairs/elevators to reach the NYC tables. The lighting was adequate but totally florescent. It was largely subliminal, but it wasn't as comfortable being in the bookfair rooms this year.

The rooms in which panels took place were comparable to NYC's. Some rooms were better than others. But none of them were really designed to take advantage of multimedia (this is the same as last year, when an electronic literature panel found that its room had not been granted internet access). Once again the Afterhours Slam was provided with a podium, not a mic on a stand. Once again some rooms were oriented so that there was a pillar blocking line of site to the podium if you sat in the back-center of the room. Low lighting in the morning may be kind, but also lends itself to making us even sleepier at those 9am sessions.

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The Green Mill is a good space. You can understand a lot of the Green Mill's style, or any other regular venue's style, by examining from where people perform. The stage is raised, so a poet looks down on the audience. This doesn't necessarily equate to developing a "better-than-thou" approach, but it does lend itself to authority. It's harder to get up there, where you literally have to get up there, and then do self-effacing work. It's also difficult to be dramatic in terms of moving around. The stage isn't very large, and if the three-piece jazz band sets up behind you, you've got almost no room to move. Getting out into the audience is difficult, as one poet discovered by bending over, slamming his hand down on a table for emphasis, and knocking over someone's drink. The audience is not invisible (the spots aren't too bright), but individuals beyond the tables closest to the stage are hard to see. An anonymous mass develops the closer one gets to the bar, which not surprisingly is where most of the heckling begins. Again, this isn't a critique (meaning negative appraisal) of the Green Mill so much as it is a critique (examination of hows and whys) of the connection between the room and the type of poetry that is most at home there.

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Performing at IWU was difficult. I could say it's because the students have become more respectful since I graduated, trained to not react at poetry readings. But it had more to do with the Turfler Room. The lights cannot be trained on the reader/speaker. You've either got lots of light on everyone in the room or a little light on everyone in the room. The mic was set up far from a group of tables, making it look like the furniture was attending a junior high school dance. I went off-mic almost the entire time, standing as close as I could to the tables (moving among them at times) without sitting in someone's lap. The room has several entrances - the door to enter the room for the event was behind where I was supposed to use the mic, which would have been awkward had any latecomers interrupted a poem - and the other entrances were massive doors that led to the dining hall (even though they were closed, they dominate their space and pull attention to themselves). Even if you wanted to be raucous in that place, the room itself tries to get you to settle down.

AWP Day 1 / Out of Sequence 2

The New England Review reading was great. The fiction writers in particular gave life to their selections, and the audience laughed. A lot. This is important.

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Some panels, which will go unnamed, were not so good. This is a sketch of a bad panelist about to neuter the poetry s/he claims to love:



This is a sketch of a series of panelists so in love with themselves that their egoheadballoons begin floating up through the empty room.



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Got to meet C. Dale Young and John Gallaher in person. Yay nonvirtuality!

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Received an email from one of the high school students I performed for yesterday. He was too shy to raise his hand when I asked if there were any budding writers in the audience. He notes in his email that he's been trying to look at things differently, like looking at a tree stump and instead of thinking "a tree was there" thinking "a homeless man's stage." This kid gets it. I haven't responded yet, but I'm very excited.

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Talked with my veryvery good friend Logen, who expressed disappointment on how fame works. Specifically, how the production of one good volume of poetry can get a poet "in" with a press, which then gives that poet seeming cart blanche for publication. Yes, we were oversimplifying a bit, but there's something about the sequence of publications that is disturbing. The work doesn't always improve. It often gets worse.

I added some comments about my performances at the high school yesterday and how changing the order of poems affects the reception of later ones. If I performed "Ma'am please put those jeans down" by Glenn Phillips (since I have it memorized, and it's rightly a crowd-pleaser) or "ADD TV," the kids would go crazy for anything else I did after that, even if I screwed up. Maybe the masses aren't quite so fickle as we think? To a/our fault?

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Incredible Hulk Quandary Haiku

rippling suddenly
with verdant musculature
what would you do first?

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I'm officially coining the term "nah-vant garde." So there.

February Performances

If you'd like to see me live, check the schedule in the sidebar (to the right of this entry). I've got a few performances - featured act and otherwise - coming up around AWP in Chicago. If you run a venue (slam, university, open mic, high school, whatever) and are looking for a last-minute act, drop me a line, and we can talk.

Out of Sequence

Kate and I went to a local bar called the Press Room on Saturday to listen to a 14 piece band play music from the Depression. As in "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" and "One Meatball." It was great. We then watched Springsteen rock the Superbowl halftime show (on TV).

Every kid who wants to grow up to be a musician/singer/rockstar needs to watch Springsteen live and listen to a good jazz band interpret old songs. This weekend was an exercise in letting the music/performance flow through you - you might not get every note right, but good gods you're having such a great time up there that it's no longer about ego, even as your body is the instrument through which people are entertained/moved.

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I will go back and comment on the ordering of those four poems from a couple posts back. Promise.

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Anybody else out there have songs that just kill other songs for you? If I put my whole collection on shuffle and end up listening to, for instance, The Cranberries' "Zombie," I just can't listen to anything light and poppy afterwards for a good long while. That particular song is just so intense and dark and "real" that most other contemporary music feels like some kind of betrayal to listen to.

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No. No you're not.

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At poetry slams, there's an effect whereby one poet can draft another's energy, but it only lasts so long. For example, the first poet up does a funny poem. The second does a funny poem as well, one that is just about as good or better than the previous, and the audience reaction is better than if the second poem were a one-off. This drafting effect can go three, four poems at the most before there is almost invariably a downturn in energy and the poem-topic/style has to shift or suffer the increasing wrath of the audience.

I realize now that I designed certain poems like "ADD TV" to be draft-breakers. It's so unlike most of what I'd see on stage that it would break the slam's momentum. It's not an easy poem to follow insofar as the next poet can't go "Ah, I've got something funnier than that poem's funny parts" or "I've got something that refers to pop culture in more ways than that poem." At the same time, it's not "Zombie." Nobody is left feeling as though they would be wrong in trying to top it somehow.

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Mike Guinn has a poem that begins "There will be no more funny poems tonight" and goes on to describe some of the horrible things he witnessed as a social worker. It often works. All other poets are afraid/respectful enough of what he says to not try to be funny on that same stage.

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When Springsteen took the stage at halftime, did the physical presence of a stage matter as far as his owning the space? I mean, if he had just rocked out on the grass, would we have reacted as strongly to him? I mean, not because that's an inappropriate place to play rock and roll, but because it would have appeared to be on loan to him? Or did he channel energy such that he could have taken over any space in which he played?

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[This space reserved]

Arts & Crafts samples

In the interest of

A) trying to keep at this blog on a regular basis
B) show off something interesting
and C) practice my html skills

today's entry consists of two samples from Arts & Crafts. The first is my poem "There will be no reinvention of the wheel," which was a featured poem on Indiefeed's Performance Poetry podcast (show #396 if you want to get specific). If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear bits of an essay I wrote and posted regarding "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." I informally expanded on that essay in audio form, and on the forthcoming "album" they will be tracks 2 and 3. More on track order and intangible albums in the next post...

In the meantime, this should, if it works, offer you the choice to stream the audio or download it.



Download "There will be no reinvention of the wheel"



Download "Persona (essay)"

If you're able to listen to this in the blog (i.e. using those nice embedded Google media players), would you let me know? Linux is acting up on me, and I can't seem to load them myself.

-JeFF

UPDATE: OK, it's confirmed. The media players aren't working. Does anyone out there know of a good embedded player I can use here or on my website?