(no subject)

[aslant]

i went to the radcliffe poetry event today in the pouring rain. i went to two incorrect churches before i found the right one, cursing every puddle, feeling very stupid and lost and silly for being out at ten in the morning on a saturday. i dressed up and everything.

i wanted that to be meaningful--out of the rain into the cathedral, poetry in the air etc etc. but i spent a great deal of it annoyed & homicidal, even though it was an enjoyable day. but it was seven straight hours sitting in a pew with a thousand other rainwet women (and a very few men) listening to poetry and forums about poetry. a woman almost sat on me, and then tried to look at what i was writing, so i shot her dirty looks & contemplated shoving my pen through her neck.

jorie graham & maxine kumin were pretty amazing. jorie graham laid the smack down on the annoying q&a people, the ones who stand up and are completely flaky or don't ask a question and stand there pontificating for ten minutes about nothing. she would just kind of grab the table mike and not really look at the person, and deliver something very cogent and sharp and dead-on. none of that floaty crap some of the other panelists were doling out.

it was a little intimidating to be around such a huge crowd of women poets, all of whom are from one generation older than mine, and to see the distacco between how i view poetry & how they do. i love their poetry, and on my better days i like to think that theirs is the style i'm inspired by, but i cannot manage to weave it together with what i love about performance poetry, with the sweat and grit of the rest of it.

hmm. more later.
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Comments

incorrect churches

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

i used to do open mics. i concluded it's a sort of self-help mental health service. what we need is a poetry fascist, a strong hand, to keep these yahoos in line, Il Duce. And we need more poems from the military boss (http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042).

tikrit, peshmerga, jalabja

Re: incorrect churches

[aslant.livejournal.com]

oh my god. you know, i always thought rumsfeld's speeches would sound great, remixed. such an ominous voice. thanks for the link :)

[mrbaby.livejournal.com]

i'm curious as to the nature of "the distacco between how i view poetry & how they do." is this an age thing, or a performance poetry thing, i wonder? i ask because i know several poets - both a good decade or more older than i - who are really into performance poetry - the "sweat and grit" - & yet i've always, always (even when much much younger) felt turned off by the whole performance aspect of poetry...& i totally can't explain it!!

Re:

[aslant.livejournal.com]

i think it is a little of the issues of both age and performance poetry. the women poets there were mostly in their 30s-40s-50s, many of them had held prestigious fellowships, been published, won various awards...in general they've been in more professional poetry circles since grad school. this was not a casual i-like-sylvia-plath crowd (horrible stereotype, but anyway).

i have a hard time bringing together what i love about written poetry & what i love about performance poetry. i have never been a performance poet, never performed in a slam. but i've been to quite a few, and i really love the raw emotions portrayed, and the way it is more musical, with more internal rhymes and meter than written poetry. i am turned off by excessively formalistic poetry, but when the same meters & rhythms are created onstage, and used to drive home much more real-life issues like sex and love and hate and politics (vs birds and pastoral scenes and etc found in my least favorite kinds of old school poetry).

so, i can go to a slam, and i love getting tipsy and hearing poetry spoken out loud that is written specifically for its performance aspect. but i also sit down with, say, maxine kumin's book of poetry, and i fall in love with the craftsmanship of it. written poetry for me is about condensing something, distilling its essence. slam poetry is a riff, an improvisation. slam poetry is close to the historical roots of poetry, when it was used to tell epics & it was always sung and there were physical body movements to help illustrate it. words written on a page cannot do that. i am very divided between the two, except i can't write slam poetry.

[mrbaby.livejournal.com]

i guess there's a part of me that finds poetry a bit embarrassing - or i'm embarrassed because it's perceived as nerdy, sappy, sissy or whatever...this is kind of a hangover from school days, i guess (i was the kid at the back, sneering, never handing in her homework, lol)

i'm kind of in a bit of a no man's land - i've been published but i'm in no sense an academic, not connected with academia in any shape or form; plus i don't live in london where all the poets & journos & media luvvies hang out, lol.

i've given a few readings (a very different kettle of fish from slams, of course) & hated every minute - the sense of being on display, a sitting duck, non-moving target...so i guess i just have too much personal baggage to appreciate what slams have to offer :-)

part of me likes the *idea* of poetry-as-performance, but i can't quite over the feeling that poetry is a kind of silent communication :-). (heck, i wonder what i'm even doing writing the stuff at all!!)

secretary of da-pens

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen published (http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s557272.htm) his poems (27 minutes in).