My poem Prodigal Son is being featured on IndieFeed as "Part 4 of a 9 part series, celebrating the release of Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through 20 years of the New York City Poetry Slam by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz!" It's the live version from the nycSLAMS CD (2000), but it includes some great (and extremely flattering!) commentary from the host, Mongo, and Cristin, and is worth a listen even if you fast-forward past the poem itself. NOTE: Mongo's reference to "Prodigal Son II" is actually the revised version of the previously untitled "Yankeee" poem I wrote back in October after A-Rod opted…
[Going through the archives trying to figure out what to read tomorrow at the Nuyorican and I came across this little ditty, a typically belligerent, sophomoric effort from that crazy Summer of 1998! Backstory here.] Why I Slam... Hi my name is Guy and I’m not an alcoholic I just drink a lot. Can you spare some change? Drinking is an expensive habit that poetry just doesn’t support begging the question...Why? Why poetry? I pondered over this one humid summer night halfway through my second draft of a cold pint of inspiration reflecting on that first poem way back when…
...for the time being, at least. I'd say it's a 50/50 shot right now, which is actually a little better than what I thought a week or so ago. Keep those fingers crossed! In other news, I need a vacation. And another 3 hours added to each day! Ugh. PS: Cleared out 12,000+ emails from my loudpoet.com email this weekend, dating back to March 2005, when I abandoned it to an overload of spam. Caught a few emails of interest in my deleting frenzy, though - batches of 200, sorted by subject, made for some interesting anecdotal marketing research -…
I hadn’t seen him in a few years, drifting apart when we moved to Virginia and never reconnecting after we returned, and had no idea he was sick, much less dying.
He missed his 30th birthday (today, Saturday) by one day.
I’ll always remember the carefree Peter who let it all hang out when the music was playing and he was surrounded by friends. The Peter in the picture here (at the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, 1999, courtesy of David Huang), who stood by me as a friend that entire season when ‘a little bit louder’ was born into a community divided. The Peter who could go toe-to-toe with me in a debate without ever letting it get personal, because in the end, we were fighting for the same thing.
The Peter who introduced me to a kind of spirituality that didn’t demand a church or a bible or any outward symbols, simply a desire to connect with something larger than one’s self and draw strength from it.
The Peter we always joked about being my gay twin brother, and who, despite his own insecurities about his poetry and his performances, inspired me every single time he got on stage. The Peter who brought me to full tears three different times with one of those performances, more than any other poet I know.
The Peter who had a way with words and never, I think, truly realized how special and talented he was.
Not even death can take that Peter away from me. Or from anyone else who knew him well enough to call him friend.
Rest in peace, Peter.
And if there’s anyone who could figure out a way to come back now and then and watch over his friends, I believe you’d be the one to pull it off. So I’ll be looking for you every time the music’s playing loud enough to get me on the dance floor; for that sign that it’s okay to let loose sometimes and simply enjoy the moment.
Thank you for your friendship. You’ll be missed, but never forgotten. (more…)
Just emailed the first draft of my comic book story to Erech, the artist putting the aforementioned anthology together. Second draft actually, as I handwrote (!) the first draft during lunch last Thursday and did a lot of revising while typing it up. I like what I'm trying to do with it, but have no idea if I pulled it off, what with this being such foreign territory. In the immortal words of Charlie Huston: "I'm not fucking Joss Whedon! This is my first fucking comic book, motherfucker!"Seriously, though, I was way more confident - though admittedly, wrongly so -…
It's no secret that creative types can be pretty thin-skinned when it comes to their art, especially when they're in their early developmental stages. Personally, when I first got into the poetry slam scene - competitive poetry readings, for the uninitiated, where original poems are performed and then judged on a scale of 0-10 by five random members of the audience - I was pretty thin-skinned, ready to curse out, throw beers at, or fight judges who gave my poems low scores. After awhile, as happens to most poets on the scene, I matured, wrote and performed better poems, and…
The Chapter One contest I'm one of the judges for is finally wrapping up. 125 manuscripts, the majority of which, like a poetry slam, went the maximum 20 pages! The panel wasn't able to meet in person so the contest coordinator is...um, coordinating our top six choices, trying to come up with a representative final four. The other two judges had two finalists in common, while neither had any crossover with my list. Should be interesting. With so many manuscripts to read, I developed a three-stage weeding process that netted about 15 solid "yes" entries, from which I had to…
