dir/newschool/rant: Poetry Read

I am a conventional, finger-snapping, drink and smoke in hand reader. The old school is more distinguished, a formal club of aloof, quiet folk, who more often then not carry poetry deep in their pocket and still feel a bit of shameful pride about their minority status in the creative scheme of things.

On the other hand the Slam poets are an extreme, covering the more colorful and competitive spectrum of expression. Slammers put their voice and body into their work. Their pieces are not necessarily something that electrifies the binded interior of a book and I often times call them Stand up Poets. It is also no plus -to me that the Slam poets compete, but I'm an only child, competition and scoring and judges and hustling for cash so that I can go compete with other Slam circles and fight other cliques has little draw for me. The old school mingles and develops quiet little syndicates, which have little to do with anything other then occasionally gathering to read work, drink and sometimes fuck.

The Slam folk are good people, they are inclusive, they want to involve their audience, they like to get the energy going and the crowd moving.

And while I cannot cover everyone that read or the whole experience in it's entirety, I will try to cover the scene and some of the highlights of the read.

First, Jonathan turned me on to the read, he's been trying to get me to go for awhile and I've been acquiescing to go but had little interest, so I put him off the first few weeks he wanted me to chill with him and ride shotgun. In the old school you go solo, you take a partner to cover your back or you bring your fans with you, and after working ten hours and making Jonnie wait an hour outside my apartment for me to get home, I had little time to choose much work. This of course is always the course of how I do poetry reads. I don't endorse spontaneous reading, but I've found that sitting down with time to my advantage has never made going to a read, picking the material or mentally preparing myself any easier a task. It also doesn't help that I only believe-for whatever reason- that maybe ten percent of my work translates well to the spoken word and spoken aloud poetry.

I've heard Bukowski read, I've heard Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and a lot of the old school masters as they recorded their work vocally. But I don't seem to follow their patterns. For one I edit my written poetry for the stage and typically have to practice it to get the cadence down, but I don't memorize my work either, so it's not for memory, just to find rhythm. I also think a lot of my work is just fine on paper but spoken aloud I seem to be far more judgmental.

The ritual; Jonnie will print his work out and then very decisively fold the sheet of paper with the poem in half, I've always watched him with a bit of odd curiosity, he does it the same way every time, print, look, muse, fold, and that's it. I can dig that. I tend to go through the same thirty pieces, consider adding two or three wild cards, print a dozen in standard twelve point size and then another in a "large print" edition, in case the lighting sucks.

The drive was treacherous and while Atlanta is experiencing an eight-inch deficit of rain fall, you couldn't tell as we were caught in a torrential downpour. We chatted about some sample dialogue I'd written for a script. Usually while in the car I'd drive and read my pieces aloud, trying to hammer down the work I felt good about and for all my other reads of the past two years my trip has typically been an hour long and about a sixty mile stretch this one was less then ten and we would have no time to get in character.

On the way to the read we stopped and purchased some "The Bomb" burritos from Quick Trip. These are some tasty dollar sixty-nine burritos. Jon and I agree that they seem to wreak havoc on our digestive system, but as the anti-hero poets-we imagine ourselves to be, cheap burritos seem to be a fitting meal. We wolfed the burritos down, both self conscious of not getting bean paste on our clothing and showing up to a read looking like two slobs. We finished the meal as we parked and Jonathan offered me his last bite, which was most excellent.

The weather was moist; at a hundred percent humidity, it had our clothes clinging to our body as we made the short jaunt to the read. Like two suckas we chose our first table in the middle of the Caribou Coffee where the read was gonna take place. Jonathan immediately disclosed that he had no interest in our seating, I agreed and would have preferred a more convenient location next to a power outlet. After five minutes with two scorching cups of black coffee hanging in the balance of a rickety table, we traded our table for another.

When I was a citizen of public transportation, I knew this guy who would get on the bus. This guy wore army glasses, always wore a knit pullover hat, even in the middle of summer, along with a nylon jacket. For the six mile and twenty stop route that I rode with him, he would stand every few moments, twist in a circle, sit on the edge of his seat, as if he had some hemorrhoidal angst and then he'd hop up again and then twist around one more time. Initially I decided he was just a strange white guy, later I decided he was retarded and eventually just realized he was in fact a strange white guy.

I thought about that strange white guy when Jon and I switched tables and I felt a bit self-concious. We then realized we were just in the shittiest most uneven portion of the patio and still so far from an outlet that nothing but thirty feet of orange power cable would get my laptop juiced up. The read started, we put on our attentive faces and began to listen. Twenty minutes later, I spotted another table, in the corner, far from anyone else, our coffee was now cool, and we made a dash for it. I could go on and talk about how much I love Caribou but have always found their corporate designated, metal mesh chairs to be both uncomfortable and unbearable, but it's enough to say that it was too fucking hot and uncomfortable to be outside at a poetry reading.

One of the first poets of mention did a interactive eulogy for a dead squirrel, this poem skit involved three poets and had little of what I'd call poetic content, but it was fun and firmly entrenched in my head the notion that we were in fact no longer in the poetic equivalent of Kansas.

The Squirrel Singers left and some guy came on and did some song…a capella, then he did a Metallica song. Metallica sucked right after they did their self titled album and went from being a hard core heavy metal band to top forty friendly. Blah. Jon says the horrible thing was when he tried to add emphasis. I thought it was interesting and bold and I've been to poetry reads, which have been part poetry, part singer song writer event, it was the first one where someone choose to cover metallica.

A few energetic poems went through rotation and one guy did a great sex piece, as a matter of fact there were a number of really good sex pieces, but the first guy did his with a excellent rhythm and pace, where he hung his words, but no one clapped out of order, thinking or hoping he was finished.

This was one of those poetry reads with other black folk at it, which was great. It was a whole big posse of them. You gotta love that sentence and the notion behind it. Slam is interracial, which is good, cause for a long time, I was one black bean in a bowl of white rice. The Slam scene has been mistakenly taken as being some academically interpreted street soliloquy, risen from the intermediate culture of the rap generation, and based on some "kumbaya" singing, tell the story in song, fucking approach that only liberal academics can come up with as they try to shoe horn it into some category. Fucking awful interpretation if you ask me. While Slam does redeem the nature of using rhyme in poetry, something which has been delegated to song sentence hooks, limericks, greeting cards and exactly how ninety percent of the poetry writing population composes a piece. Slam is just a telling of something you feel and how you feel it.

The crew broke out a good set, I didn't like everything but each of the readers had a great stand out piece and many of them had a way of involving an audience without asking us to do anything. That's the good part of what Slam poetry is to me. The bad part of course is when it does become '"kumbaya" singing, tell the story in song, fucking approach' I hate that shit, but I've begun to learn that it's just the seemingly mass and mediocre approach that any genre spawns, there is a lot of good to be experienced from the new school.

Our MC a college student and corporate employee of Caribou Coffee had a casual approach to the reading, he'd introduce not every individual, but the clans which had come forth together, so the table of black readers became "the table of black readers" Jonathan and I became "Paul and Jonathan" it was a bit weighed on how the thematic groove resulted. Their was a lump of funny shit, a lump of songs, a lump of slams and and some old school intermingling through out the read.

By the time the Slam crowd had finished their portion of reading which involved more then four people and about a good hour of reading, The Read had run out of time. We were all now cut from being allowed to read three pieces to reading one piece. That's not unlike telling me that when I go take a shit, I can only pinch out one log. No knock now, the joint was closing and the vibe was good, a poetry read with more then a dozen poets and more then three singers was like having a block of time on the locals only stage at Lollapalooza. I felt honored to be at a read like this, but I'd sat in a corner for over two hours agonizing about which three pieces to read.

Jonnie being the semi-passive he is with crowds, bit the bullet and went up to read one piece  and read a poem which he has never had the nerve to read and it is a very good piece of his, which received a rousing response, which was great since he followed a very energetic group and this was a tough act to follow with an old school.

I always like to start my reads with a monologue, if you will; my own version of a introduction which occasionally borders on standup routine.  I then went on to read two pieces, listen to the MP3 excerpt here. this is a two meg file. Modem users beware.

All in all it was an excellent experience, at the end of the read, we spoke and gladhanded with a couple of the writers and I tried to work a deal, to do something web oriented with the read, something interactive with audio and graphics.

Not bad.