ZERO POINT ZERO for last week

Since gotpoetry.com is down at the moment and I’ve heard here and elsewhere from folks who wanted to read the column, it’s right here.

Zero Point Zero: Small Town Poetry

(NOTE: I’m posting the column late because I wanted to include some of this week’s events in this discussion.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in a small town between Worcester MA and Providence RI, where I run (a loose term, indeed) a twice monthly poetry event called SPEAK.

SPEAK is held in a small gallery space in the center of town. Once every couple of weeks, a group of somewhere between 8 and 15 poets gathers to read poems, some of which are centered on a theme, and talk about our work. It’s a pretty low pressure event that revolves as much around socializing as it does about poetry – which I think is a good thing; a lot of the poets who come are folks who also hang out at the slams in the area, and this gives everyone a chance to do work that’s a bit more funky, introspective, what have you.

At the same time, I have this other poetry existence – one that takes me out into the slam world, to features in Boston and New York City and Philadelphia and points south and west of those on occasion.

It’s the classic “urban poetry” experience, where the people sitting in front of you are familiar with poetry readings, slams, and shows; they show up knowing what to expect, more or less, and your reception may have as much to do with how you meet or don’t meet those expectations as it will with the content and execution of your work. (You know, you could almost make a stereotype about this…but that would be wrong. Besides, I’ve done it before.)

I have to confess that when I was a kid, I really thought this was what poetry was all about: that it was the type of thing reserved for “Bohemian” enclaves of tuned-in culture vultures.

Amazing what the media will do to you, eh?

It certainly made me look at my small hometown with jaundiced eyes; I didn’t see a way to get this admittedly over-romanticized scene in my own day to day life, and more seriously, it made me think that I’d have to go away if I were going to succeed as a writer.

Now, the fantasy may seem harmless, but I’m going to submit that it’s not entirely so; that the myth that there’s no culture in small towns has caused a self-fulfilling prophecy to be accepted by many that the suburbs and the rural towns of this country are voids composed of slack-jawed devotees of Fox TV and the Home Shopping Network.

Or something like that. (Had to get one stereotype in there, somewhere, just for old times’ sake.)

Look — I’m not about to propose that cities don’t offer a variety of experiences and cultures that you can’t get everywhere else. Hell, I’d probably move to New York City tomorrow if I had to do it all over again. But there’s a danger in our cavalier dismissal of the flyover zones of this country.

This week I had the chance to be involved in a couple of events locally that on the face of things would probably seem like loser ideas to a lot of folks.

On Wednesday of this week, I did a solo lecture/reading at the local Women’s Club monthly meeting (for National Poetry Month, don’t you know; I know a lot of us laugh about it, but it gets you into places you don’t usually get to go).

And on Thursday, a local public library had the whole SPEAK crew into a café in the next town over to stage a “poetry event” for – you guessed it – National Poetry Month.

Both events rocked thoroughly hard – both in terms of the response to my/our work as well as in the talent present in the crowd itself, from the elderly woman on Wednesday who did two entire speeches from “Hamlet” for us all to the man on Thursday who read poems and then nonchalantly dropped the fact that for his third poem he wanted to read one from his recently published novel about the area’s textile mills.

Each crowd was appreciative, polite, enthusiastic in their applause, and BIGGER than a lot of the local poetry crowds at the more established regular readings. In general, I would say that the biggest difference was this: these folks didn’t seem to take the presence of the arts in their midst for granted.

Of course, there were none of the younger crowd there either night who might be out there pissing and moaning about having nothing to do…and that made me sad. (Actually, I can understand the Women’s Club gig not attracting younger people from outside…but not the Thursday night one.) I’d love to see more at SPEAK regularly, and I think that was a miss here, if a minor one.

I’ll never give up the love I have for performing in big city scenes. But I have to say these were two of the best gigs I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of in some months; and what’s more important, I think SPEAK is likely to have a few new visitors the next time around – more of a sustaining crowd, a sustaining community for the arts is built every time some thing like this brings people together.

So next time you think there’s nothing going on where you are, I have a suggestion:

Get up off your ass and make something happen. There are others waiting for someone to make it happen. It may as well be you.

By the way, this is the regular SPEAK night, tonight…and our theme is “sacred fools”. Should be fun.