Trent Reznor to produce Saul Williams’ next album.

Put Your Visitors on a Map!

Also: the new Zero Point Zero is up at http://www.gotpoetry.com right now. Go, hit it, respond, love, hate, whatever.

I want to talk for a moment about working in a large corporation and being outside.

I got flak, over the years, from poets and other artists and activists, about working in the Fortune 200. Here’s the way I looked at it:

I was a good boss, one who was sensitive to issues of race and ethnicity and gender dynamics and sexual orientation. And I kept educating myself — frequently, through the medium of poetry and through meeting people who woke me up even further.

When I moved into training and human resourcese, I was able to affect how other supervisors and managers saw some of those issues, as well as in basic good managment practice.

As I became more senior and had a greater impact on setting policy and practice, I was able to affect the overall company position on those efforts.

Not all activism takes place outside the corporate walls. My company had 130,000 employees. I hope I helped create a better workplace for at least some of them.

I try not to think of slam as a competition, but as a poetry showcase that increases audience particiption by the use of a sham competition.

If there’s nothing objective against which poems are measured, and the same poem delivered the same way two nights in a row can score differently based on a change in judges, the competition is meaningless as a measure of anything except the judges’ reaction.

Imagine a 100 metre dash which was judged by folks in the stadium who were asked to choose whichever runner they liked best, and three of the judges chose a runner because they liked his/her shorts. Would we consider that a true competition worth using as a yardstick to determine who the best runner was?

If we start explaining this to more people, slam might become more playful and less grueling for some.

I’m sitting here again in a poetry reading.

Not for the first time, I’m wondering why.

i keep hearing
about suicide bombers
and wondering if they are tallied
with the casualties
when the reporters
intone the body count

i picture a young man
unimpressive in a plain wooden chair
while a friend starts
the video camera
and he begins to explain himself
to the ones he is leaving behind

later on before he triggers
he notes that the world looks amazing
and he thinks of something else he should have said
but knowing now
that there is never enough time to say everything
he shouts a phrase and ends it there

when the reporters add the bodies up
is he counted among the dead or is he
just seen as the mechanism
two legs two arms with the face leached away
bearing the bomb that had so little to say
of the man who could not say it all another way

First Saturdays at the Zodiac Cafe
Saturday, May 6th
Noon to 2pm
50 Lake Ave. Worcester, MA
(just off rt.9 near U-Mass Med)

open mic & feature.
this month’s feature is
Tony Brown!!

the reading is all ages. a hat is passed.
the reading is PG.

hope to see you there!

in other words: get up and get over there!

it’s too early to be up so late.

i have been trying to write, but i’m too wired to write well.

the strangest thing about my writing recently is that i’m at this stage where i feel a change coming and i’m impatient for it to happen.

this recent series of “jim poems” is weak, i know, on the surface, but i’ve got the definite feeling that somewhere in there is the seed of something really exciting. i haven’t been putting all of them up here because i feel so odd about them right now; not sure where all of them will lead or how many will stay around.

i’ve also been working hard on the curriculum for the online course. i expect it to be completed before monday.

it’s such a strange time…i’m starting to feel really discouraged by the whole freelance/contractor process. things i thought were happening keep being postponed, and i really want to work. i’m not bored so much as i feel useless right now. after 25 years in the workforce, this is the longest i’ve been out of work ever. ever. i’m reaching the point where i might just take a full time job and forget the whole thing. it’s so hard to feel so useless.

well, springer’s on, so i can feel superior for a few minutes, anyway.

If someone is flying into an airport near you, make sure you know which airport he is flying into before you go pick him up.

As in, Providence is not all that close to Boston, so going to the latter instead of the former makes it a LOOOOOOOOOONG trip.

At least I’ve been in two state capitals today.

At some point soon, I’m going to start pulling together the Jim series as one piece, or a connected series of pieces.

And now, I’m ready to head off to Boston to pick up javabill.

Later, gators.

I seem to have stirred up a hornet’s nest on Gotpoetry.com with my comments about the Providence Poetry Slam.

Oh well.

I spent a good deal of the afternoon and a separate section of the evening with a guitar in my hand.

This afternoon was spent with my shiny new Ibanez dreadnaught, digging in and really getting to know what it can do. A good guitar makes you a better player, and this one’s doing the job for me. I haven’t spent as much time with it as I would like with everything that’s been going on. I get very self conscious about my playing in standard tuning — I need to practice constantly to feel good about it, and when I don’t have time, I fret about it a lot.

I do wish I had started playing guitar before I did (in my late 20s), because I think I could have been a pretty good player if I had. As it is, I’m a competent first position fingerpicker willing to make occasional forays up the neck when I’m feeling adventurous. I do not think I’ll ever be better than that unless I woodshed far more than I’m capable of right now, and that bugs me from time to time.

Still, it gives me great pleasure to play and write the occasional song (I worked on one today).

The evening offered a different perspective — I pulled out my 20s era Regal, “Blackie,” which I use strictly for playing slide. It’s not a piece of crap at all, but an instrument that was set up to be played lapstyle for Hawaiian music. I removed the high nut off it but continue to use it for slide.

It’s what’s called a “ladder-braced” instrument, with an open headstock and a 12 fret neck, and quite small compared to modern guitars. The fingerboard is actually numbered so you can tell what fret you’re at when it’s in your lap — kinda quaint.

This thing sounds dead as a doornail until you slap it into Open D or G and toss a hunk of brass on your finger. Then, it cuts the air like a Dobro and delivers a right-on authentic blues sound.

I love playing slide. Again, I’m not a great slide player, but somehow, I care less about that when I play; the sheer joy of chord and note experimentation and sonic pleasure takes over, and I feel far more free than I do with the big dread; it’s almost as if I forget to care about my limitations.

I think, sometimes, about the parallels between my guitar playing and my poetry. I wish, sometimes, that I had more of a beginner’s mindset with my poetry. I try to get back to it but it’s hard. I experiment but I care too much for whether I’m writing a good poem or not, rather than caring about that joyous sense of doing something because it feels good.

I need to be more of a slide poet, I guess.