who are making comments on my personal drama right now.

I really appreciate it. I’ll keep you posted…

(I’m doing this rather than individual responses, by the way…)

love ya.

and Jessica D for a great time and a great feature set…

nice joint ya got there.

if you’re near Providence tonight, come see the fantabulous Jessica Dalzell (psyches_task) and me featuring at the Spoken Word at the Brooklyn Tea and Coffee House, 215 Douglas Avenue, sometime between 7 and 9.

We both have colds so we’ll sound all rumbly and shit. Think Leonard Cohen and Marianne Faithfull.

First trip back to the old neighborhood in years (I used to live at 75 Douglas). Have no clue — is it still the same enchanted land of shooting galleries and hookers it used to be? (This was in the heady days before Crack and AIDS…ah, how innocent it all seems now…)

Anyway, git yer butt on down and repreZENT.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174917,00.html

I wonder who they’re gonna get to forge their parents’ signatures on their report cards?

is a women’s choir from Cote d’Ivoire praising Jah in French with percussion backup.

I wish I had better luck in my use of languages other than English. I have no easy facility with them. I can stumble through French to speak read and understand; have lost most of the conversational Spanish I acquired through long exposure in the warehouse and hours of poring over bilingual editions of Neruda, Lorca, and Mistral; don’t really get German all that well.

But I have strong affinities with each of them because they each seem to reveal a different way of looking at the universe in the way they are structured and syntaxed.

Almost every day I change my mind as to which language’s nuances best describe creation at that moment for me. Most nights I settle on Spanish with its liquid melancholy. German does the job better other nights when I feel the need for its muscular definition of solid matter in the service of spirit.

I almost never choose English, as it seems to lack something of the necessary metaphysical flair. Perhaps this is why I am a poet who writes in English.

Tonight, though, it’s all about French and its difficult scaffolding of gender and address. There are times when the only way to worship is in French, because God’s so distant that only French will do for the necessary elliptical approach.

I do not know what I am talking about. At least, not in English I don’t.

Again, I think this is why I am a poet…

is shaping up as an important one. More on that later in the week.

Right now, focus on the fact that I’m doing a split feature Tuesday night in Providence at the Spoken Word reading at Brooklyn Tea and Coffee House, 215 Douglas Avenue, from 7-9ish.

I’m spliting my half hour with Jessica Dalzell (psyches_task)and we’ve got an interesting set planned…so you need to be there if you can.

In other news, sancochao (Rich Villar) did a sterling set at the Hut tonight. He’s always consistently excellent and represents a whole new generation of excellence coming out of the louderArts (Bar 13/Acentos) scene in NYC. Get your ass out and see him when you can.

‘Nuff said for now…beddy-bye.

call me a spoken word artist again and i’ll clock you one.

i am an old school, unapologetic, unreconstructed POET. it’s tattooed on my arm, my heart, and my last breath.

i prefer the narrower term because it is more precise for what i do. others can be spoken word artists and more power to them. i am not that.

This, by the way, has nothing to do with critique I’ve received here. It applies to another site where I post stuff from time to time.

I recently received feedback on a poem (the “country highway” poem) that followed all along the same lines — which is that the piece was unfinished, was too symbolic, needed more detail, etc.

One of the critics took it upon himself to riff on the poem, not editing it but creating a whole follow up stanza which the various critics agreed was better than the original and showed more of what they were talking about. One even suggested i should now move the poem to the “collaborative” poems section because of the additions that had been made. And the author of the new stanza — whose work i do respect — said he was was just doing it to show me “the poem that the sketch i had written could have been.”

Now, mind you, I’m not upset about any of this. People have their own perceptions, of course. But this doesn’t feel like useful feedback, paritally because it missed the point of how i wanted the original poem to feel — deliberately dry and academic in its approach to a powerful subject. In other words, no one dealt with the poem in front of them, but rather with the poem they would have written on the same subject.

I’m at a loss as to how to respond. How do I say, “um…no” when critique is this far off of the intent without appearing totally asinine and defensive?