a couple of notes from a disgruntled poet

I went to the Providence Poetry Slam tonight.

Some thoughts:

1. If you say you’re going to start at 7, start at 7. Don’t be knocking around with your thumbs up your asses at 8:05.

2. If you advertise Corbet Dean as a feature online, and then advertise C.R. Avery as a feature on your flyer, and THEN have neither of them for a feature and in fact have no feature, try to let people know at some point.

3. If your official slam flyer contains a ratio of 10% information about the slam and 90% information about the May 1 general strike (like, 1 column of slam info and the remaining two sides of the flyer devoted to the strike), be prepared to have someone suspect that your reading is less about the free expression of poetry and more about pursuing a specific political agenda.

4. If that someone — namely, me — is completely down with your political agenda and STILL finds the pervasiveness of said agenda obnoxious, be prepared to consider that you may not even being reaching the converted.

I scratched my name off the list and left at 8:05. I won’t be back.

I may regret this in the AM, but I doubt it.

ETA on Tuesday May 2 @ 5:30 AM: The anonymous comments here were by Bernard Dolan. I answered them all a day or two ago on the Gotpoetry.com site and didn’t reproduce the answers here, as I didn’t see and unscreen these comments till just now.

ETA on Thursday May 4 @ 4:00 PM: It’s been brought to my attention that the flyer I saw was not the official slam flyer. Apologies to all who were confused by this. Should have checked my facts better.