First drafts of poetry, as well as commentary on poems, poets and poetry-related randomonia.
Been sent some interesting names for the show so far, with early favorites Performance Anxiety, Breaking Form and Word of Mouth. Send more.
Haven’t heard back from Jackie Sheeler yet about the length of tomorrow’s feature so I’m getting a little antsy about my set. There’s a big difference between 20, 30 and 45-minute sets. I don’t like 20-minute sets as I never feel like I get in a good rhythm and always have to leave out a couple of my favorite poems. 30-minutes is solid, enough time to present a range of work without feeling rushed. 45-minutes can be daunting as you have to really nail your flow to keep the audience engaged but it’s also a fun challenge. The longer the set, the better feel for a poet’s style and range you get. Three-poem slam wonders generally flounder past 20 minutes as the bombast gets old and the lack of depth becomes more and more apparent.
I’ve been reading through a lot of my old stuff recently and was surprised by how long it’s been since I’ve read some of them out loud. Read Celluloid Childhood at Acentos on Tuesday and, despite the obvious rust, remembered that it was one of my favorite pieces at one point. The combination of pushing for the new in slam with allowing my own output to take a back seat for so many years has left me in the weird position of having to reconnect with almost all of my work as if it were brand new. Hopefully tomorrow is at least a 30-minute set so I can do a nice mix of the old and new. Well, newish! 😉
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Work Is Love Haiku Four foot eleven I love her like few others Ishle is the bomb! Ishle's CD release party for Work Is Love was a lot of fun. It was the first time I'd hosted something at the Bowery Poetry Club and a nice turnout (Ishle's always had a strong following, though the crowd was a bit light on, um, slam scenesters; short memories, I suppose) caught Edward Garcia, Taiyo Takeda, Bassey and Ed Bok Lee open up for an amazing set by Ishle, with musicians backing her up on most of her pieces, adding another dimension to…
So I've gotten into yet another flame war with Danny Solis on the poetry_slam list. Why can't I just leave that shit alone? The whole PSI thing, I mean. Solis is this big-ass, dreadlocked Mexican poet, currently out of Albuquerque, NM. If you saw SlamNation, he's on the Austin team, in that fun little group piece they do. Not someone you want to piss off, especially if he's been drinking. The irony is, as much as I've virtually fought with him over the years, I think he's a pretty good guy. He's a very good poet with a strong sense…
Have you ever heard me live? Fulano. Listen to the live version, recorded at the 1999 NPS Semi-Finals when we were facing the Nuyorican in the most intense slam I've ever been in. The studio version, done on minidisc in Soft Skull's original Shortwave store in Tonic, sucks. There's also the nycSLAMS and 5 PAST 13 CDs, with Prodigal Son and Breathless, respectively. Catch me in person in a rare NYC feature on Friday, July 25 at the Cornelia Street Café. That's the closest I get to self-promotion! Have a nice weekend. :-)
Now THIS is weird. For me, at least, who's more used to technical emails ("how do I get booked at...," "how do I get published...," etc.) than personal ones. Today, I got two separate emails asking about my poem, Confessions of a Serial Killer. It's an old poem that I wrote back in 1997 and have probably read publicly less than 10 times, and only once in the past four years, at Acentos a couple of weeks ago. Both emails asked why I wrote it, the first actually asking (jokingly, I hope), "did u really kill biggie smalls?" My answer…
I love this song, although, reading the lyrics, I realized I had no clue what the hell it's about! Abortion, maybe? Definitely a suicide in there. THE VERVE PIPE The Freshmen When I was young I knew everything She a punk who rarely ever took advice Now I'm guilt stricken, sobbing with my head on the floor Stop a baby's breath and a shoe full of rice I can't be held responsible 'Cause she was touching her face I won't be held responsible She fell in love in the first place For the life of me I cannot remember What…
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. -Thomas Jefferson Some would say - and have, at times - that I've always lived something of a charmed life, had luck on my side, a guardian angel watching over me. I'll be the first to admit that there's been times when things have inexplicably gone my way but I like to think it's more about karma than luck. Both good and bad, of course. That whole circles thing. After a hellacious 2002, when it seemed all the calls were going…
