I’m listening to a dancehall compliation right now. I love dancehall. I don’t understand 80% of what’s being said, but the rhythm makes my toes hop.

There are certain types of music that I love without recourse to understanding the lyrics — qawali singers, flamenco, fado. This falls in that category.

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The posts from NPS this week made me wistful, but I’ve realized that it’s not my place anymore. Life’s too short for me to wade through all the mediocrity and the formula to find the gems.

The struggle for me, I think, who came into slam as a performing poet (rather than coming to poetry through slam) is to find a way to be more than a slammer in a community with relatively little connection to the larger art form.

Sadly, I think my audience is still, in large part, the slam world; but how do you maintain a career of any sort with it as a feature performer (not as an organizer or host) when you don’t want to be part of that aspect of the scene, the aspect that most seem to care so much about?

I don’t know. Frankly, any grand pronouncements about trying to reform slam, create a senior circuit, etc., are beyond me right now. And NPS doesn’t need reform; it’s just what it is, and less than I want in an event.

I won’t say I’ll never attend NPS again, although I can’t foresee that happening. I’ll likely go to IWPS again as I think the poetry is better overall. Not sure about the WOW slam — still don’t love the reserved legacy spots. Think I’ll investigate going to things like the Dodge instead — more my speed these days.

And of course, trying to feature where and when I can, and working with Faro as much as possible.

If someone wants to run with the Ken Hunt Prize, that’s up to them. I couldn’t do it this year and if I don’t go back to NPS it seems pointless for me to be involved with it.

I’m not angry, not bitter, not railing against the world here. If anything, I’m laughing at myself for thinking anything I could do would ever change anything about something so many people love and which makes me so crazy/angry. I’ve wasted too much time on this.

I’m glad you all had a good time, and I hope you continue to do so. I don’t want to convert anyone or change anything. Right now, I’m thinking of NPS the way I would something like Burning Man — an interesting subcultural phenomenon that might have interested me once, maybe even excited me, but doesn’t hold much interest anymore.

It was fun though. Thanks for the ride.

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Have I mentioned that I love dancehall?

1. Slam Charlotte, NC
2. Killeen, TX
3. NYC louderARTS (Bar 13)
4. Denver, CO Slam Nuba
5. NYC Nuyorican

I don’t have scores or anything; newsflash from Gotpoetry.com.

Danny Sherrard of Seattle won the Indy title last night.

I wasn’t there, so I won’t comment other than to say congrats to the winners and that personally, I’m sad that louderARTS (my other poetic homeland; even though I’ve never slammed or been a regular there, it’s still my favorite slam other than Worcester) didn’t come in first.

Any news yet?

Read and comment here or there…

http://dj-muse.livejournal.com/123146.html?style=mine

that I saw John Waters riding a bike in Provincetown on Wednesday. Positive it was him.

He didn’t make the stir that the nearly naked men did walking down the street a half an hour later, but it was still cool.

Just got back from Nantucket and Provincetown, where we watched people from various subcultures wearing funny clothes and doing strange ritualized things.

And to think we could have been in Austin.

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My facial paralysis is no better. I keep straining to smile but the most I can manage is a twitch in my left cheek that you can’t see unless you’re staring at me. I think I understand something about amputees’ ghost pains now — I feel like I look like the Joker when I smile, but nothing happens.

My mouth isn’t working right — I bite my lip constantly, sometimes to the point of blood, and I’ve become a very indistinct speaker. I sound pretty much like Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama and have taken to saying “Hooray!” a lot because it’s the funniest thing I can manage.

My left eye’s drooping and waters constantly — it doesn’t close well when I sleep, either.

Not good. I know it’ll be better eventually, but this is embarrassing to say the least and frankly, the strain of trying to keep my face looking “normal” without drooling and weeping all over myself is pretty tiring. I want it to be over soon, and with less pain (the nerve is regenerating and when it gets cooking it twitches imperceptibly to others but with a pretty good amount of discomfort to me).

Add to that the two days of walking around that’s aggravated my foot injury a bit and I’m not a happy camper.

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Taking the ferry from Nantucket to Hyannis this afternoon, I watched a young woman reading one of those celebrity magazines and the titles of the articles have got a poem brewing in me…keep yer eyes peeled…

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I also broke out my old film SLR for the trip. Can’t wait to see what I managed to remember about taking a decent picture.

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Home now, exhausted, and ready to sleep…see y’all later.

Hello, radioactiveart.

Here’s the poem from which the name is taken.

The Radioactive Artist

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s campaign stood by his assertion that bombing holy Muslim sites would serve as a good “deterrent” to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from attacking the United States, his spokeswoman said Friday.

“This shows that we mean business,” said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. “There’s no more effective deterrent than that. But he is open-minded and willing to embrace other options. This is just a means to deter them from attacking us.”

On Tuesday, Tancredo warned a group of Iowans that another terrorist attack would “cause a worldwide economic collapse.” IowaPolitics.com recorded his comments.

“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack.”

Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.” Tancredo was widely criticized in 2005 for making a similar suggestion.

i’m coming out to Costa Mesa for work on September 20, will be there at least through Sept. 21, leaving (I suspect) the AM of Sept. 22. Any gigs out there?

Radio story right now on NPR on one of my favorite musical artists, the Pakistani qawali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

He died ten years ago this month…I never would have imagined that it’s been that long. He was 49…

Time sense shifts as you get older, but his work suspends time.

Some basic info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusrat_Fateh_Ali_Khan

I make a lot of noise about my ambiguous relationship with the world of slam poetry. I love the people and the energy and it’s still the single artistic community where I feel most at home. I hate the formulaic, hidebound, conservative place it’s become (yes, I mean conservative in the sense of having a commitment to maintaining the status quo) and the too frequent confusion between the concept of “what wins” and “what’s good.”

So why do I stick around?

For all the high minded reasons I could state, I have to confess that I harbor one unfulfilled slam ambition: I’d like, someday, to perform this poem as a sacrifice at Finals. Just once. Just one chance to speak to the whole assembled community at once.

I know it won’t happen now, and I’m OK with that in most ways…but you can always dream.

MISSION STATEMENT

Our mission is

to act up at public gatherings
toss stones at the comfortable
sneer at the television
and afflict the generic

to dance naked in the clean laundry in the great steam room of the world
to get LAID/ to get LOVE /to get NOTICED
to waltz against the knives of war and greed
as they try to cut us loose from the church of our freedom

to look each other in the eyes at 2 AM
speaking like flowers and acting like idiots
to write rants missives novels novellas epistles
and advertisements for our huge and tender egos

to find a child crying alone and offer a hand
to get an old woman up from her electric rocker
and hear stories of the holocaust in her lonely patriarchal days
to stop bullets with a single line and make them over into pencil leads

Our mission (should we choose to accept it)
involves us – all of us – even Bill Gates
(in theory)
in a mass chain improvisation
leading a dance of tongue and cheek and bump and grind
Amos Andy Sacco Vanzetti
skatepunks riot grrls and anyone else
hurling epics and haiku into the face of bland conformity
rap snapped like a chalkline straight line
double time quick rhyme from the victim to the stage
a whisper of erotica sliding us home
end rhyme as tightly matched as lips
the right words cut and shaped to fit
into white hot bursts
of short sharp verse
and the longline wasted pseudo Beat nonetheless pure at heart stories of pain and gargantuan gothic gallows laughter

Our mission friends is
poetry
and we are on a mission only we can define

so dig, daddio:

Listen:
poets in other places and times have died
doing what we do here tonight so casually
They stand at our elbows every time we pick up that pen
step to the mike or
(God Forbid!) listen to one another
so: do not let anyone define your voice
and if you want a leader then lead –
you lead
And many voices will come together in one mission
The way storm clouds come together to make lightning
And when lightning passes it leaves thunder
And one day
they will say the same
about us