I placed second in the Worcester Semis tonight.
Bill MacMillan beat me for first place. He sees fit to crow about this in his LJ.
I would like to point out that I made second place:
— after going second in round 1 and drawing a 2.5 point time penalty that left me in seventh place;
— using three out of four poems I’d never performed before, let alone slammed with.
Personally, I feel pretty good. But hey, if it makes him feel better…
I came home after the session and passed out, I was so tired…not nearly enough sleep last night.
Gotta get something to eat and then hit Staples to get something copied for class.
In the meantime, I’m thinking that there’s gotta be another poem in the countryside around here, but I haven’t been able to find it.
I did pass a sign that said: “Sheep Shearing Festival this Saturday!! Sheep! Music!”
I’m assuming that the sheep and the music are separate attractions.
outside the truck stop
two men
arm wrestle on the hood of a car
one is named yankees
the other bethlehem steel
if their t shirts are telling the truth
when yankees pins bethlehem
with a grunt
they slap backs laugh and go back inside
a guy standing there shakes his head
says they do this all the time
and yankees always wins
but bethlehem keeps coming back
because it’s the only thing he’s got to do
since the factory closed
so yankees always gives him a game
it’s dark in pennsylvania
it’s going to rain tonight
and you know what they say
some will rust
some will get rained out
but they’ll keep coming back
in Hanover, PA after a LOOOONG fucking drive. Working for two days at Tyco Electronics, teaching a class.
I’m here for tonight and tomorrow night, then driving back on Thursday PM. Then, it’s moving time.
I’m lonely. But you could have guessed that.
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My comment on the inherent conservatism of slam esthetics seems to have touched a nerve.
Several people asked what could be done about it.
Beats the fuck outta me. I mean, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and slam again; I’ll be doing the Ken Hunt Award again; other than that, we’ll see.
My own artistic energy is really focused on Duende right now, so I see this all as a bit of a sidetrack. But I’m willing to try shit if I think it might help.
What ideas do you have?
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I cross posted my request for info about on page vs. off page performance to the PSI forum. I was struck by the number of people there who gave me memorization tips and ways to improve my memory in response to a post that specifically said I wasn’t looking for those things, but was trying to gauge people’s perception of how much of a handicap being on page is.
It didn’t really happen here, which says something, I’m sure. Or not.
I’m always struck by how people answer the post they think they read, rather than the one that was posted.
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I have this weird poem brewing right now that involves a man named “The Yankees” arm wrestling another man named “Bethlehem Steel.” It came to me somewhere outside Reading PA around 8:30 tonight.
No, I don’t know what it’s about yet.
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Early AM tomorrow, so beddy bye for me.
I looked like my mother
when I was growing up,
curls framing the boisterous
mouth I’d gotten from her Tuscan base.
When I got older I took after my father —
surly and fed up with some
unexplained hole in my center.
It started when I was twelve, walking
an old trail on
an old reservation, the sign out front
proclaiming that “these four and one half acres
have never belonged to the white man, having been
granted to the Nipmuc Tribe by King George the Third…”
and although I wasn’t Nipmuc
and my dad’s reservation
was twenty-five hundred miles away,
the light became as sweet
as cornbread and my eyes grew fat,
clogging so much
they ran over,
and I did what little I could, climbing
a small hill to stand and face south,
singing a song my father had taught me
from an old vinyl record,
a Johnny Cash song
about drums, Indian drums
just on the fringe of hearable sound,
singing softly enough myself so I couldn’t be heard
ten feet from where I stood,
and I stopped crying.
I stopped calling myself “white” that day.
I told myself:
I will not be two at once.
I will choose the song I mean to be.
So for years I worked that way
and I thought I had it all together,
until I walked into the Pequot casino
for the first time
and saw the people spending money
in hordes,
the sound of cash bell and buzzer
playing a crazy dog dance,
saw the exhibits on loan from
the new cultural center and saw
people looking hard at them for once;
then saw the Goliath crystal
Indian
shooting a psychedelic arrow into the atrium
every hour on the hour,
and I knew:
there is a gap I will never learn
to live in, a place
between the anthem I learned
and the dirge I never heard.
The song on the hill,
the private song that made me swell with tears
and feel as though I belonged,
never taught me that being split
could mean
something other than choosing pride
in one side or the other,
could be
harder than simply choosing
to stand on a hill and sing
and decide I’d gotten it right for all time.
I sat down because my head
was cloven
and King George The Third,
disguised as a drunk on a park bench
in the indoor orchard
by the Wampum Rewards booth,
laughed at me and said:
Creating America was a bitch,
but creating you?
That was easy.
The poetry slam phenomenon is one of the most conservative self described revolutionary art movements ever.
Discuss.
I am having a great deal of difficulty memorizing my poems lately. Unusual for me, as I tend to be able to get a poem off page with very little effort. Even things I’ve read a million times are becoming challenging.
While I could (and should) put some of this down to age, I do know (from conversations with my doctor) that there’s a greater than even possibility that at least one of the meds I take regularly is having its own effect on my memory.
Eliminating the medication is not an option.
I’m faced with the likelihood that I’ll be slamming in the semifinals next week on page. If I make it to the finals, ditto. And if I make it on the team…
Here’s the dilemma.
I have noticed, reading through my friends’ list recently and recalling other conversations over the years, that a lot of folks are deathly opposed to slammers not having their work memorized. While I’ve never held that opinion myself, and could frankly care less for myself, I am concerned that my walking up on stage with the paper in hand may harm the chances of any team I’m on.
So I’m considering dropping out of the team selection process. I find this distasteful to say the least — it is pandering to a prejudice — but I am a realist. While I know the paper is close to being an accomodation for a disability, the audience will not know that.
My question to you is not whether or not I should drop out — I’ll make that decision on my own. My question is this: is this really that much of a handicap? How strong is this perception that the poet on page is less skilled than the poet off page?
I’m thinking that if I scratch the back of my left index finger long enough a genie will pop out. He’ll be fat and awful with three wishes to offer but I’ll turn the first two down flat, holding out for the last one. He’ll shake his head and sigh and when he agrees to roll them all into a single ball of heart’s desire I’ll tell him I’m looking for a cure for the finger itch.
When the finger stops itching I’ll wonder what I’m supposed to do next and regret that I didn’t make the cure the second wish, leaving an answer to my current question for the third wish.
And a few minutes later I’ll think of how I should have asked for clairvoyance right up front and avoided all this.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to scratch that finger now…but ah, if the right one itches…
I’m up in the middle of the night watching the rebroadcast of Bill Moyers’ documentary on how the press slipped comfortably into bed with the administration on the run-up to the war in Iraq.
If you want clear evidence of how the US was manipulated into this disaster, watch this.
I think of the administration and the press and the pundits and the jingoists…and I say again that I don’t support the death penalty, but I surely understand the yearning for it sometimes.
Just ran across this article I thought might be of some interest to some of you. It’s a bit high level in terms of detail and depth, but poses some interesting thoughts.
Dark Matter 