organized poetries answer to MORTAL KOMBAT

So as of the first week of next month the Port Veritas PORTLAND MAINE slam team will be going to compete nationally in Madison Wisconsin. We paid our dues we registered(we as a collective of course I didn't do anything at all) got our plane tickets and now its time. I'm not going which is great, that is a lot of pressure. To go on after the best in the game and to potentially go all the way to nationals and get your anal cavity handed to you by a bunch of long hairs from -pick obscure embarrassing American city and paste here- I wouldnt be able to stand myself. Bobby Knight and Mike Tyson would have to hold me back, i'd be furious till the umpire ejected me. I hope they have umpires. YOUR OUT!!!!!OVERLY BROAD SYMBOLIC USAGE OF A RAINBOW!!!!

Anyway, they have all worked incredibly hard at this even young shoeless Jake Wartell who doesn't ever look like he's working hard because he's having so much darn fun everywhere. He's one of the hardest working poets I've met, constantly working in both fronts performance and content. He's been very influencial to other poets who read at the North Star. He's brilliant, magnetic and he's the freaking alternate people!!! How deep are we? Deeper then the world's gas dependency issues. That's deep.

I'm not worried about them losing because a slam isn't like a superbowl where one time walks into the pantheon of history while the other becomes a shameful footnote. At nationals when the spotlight shines they will all be able to unveil the work that makes them each so unique and that taste for the audience and the other poets is what lives on. The good performers leave a slam with people buzzing not about the scores but about them and wanting more. That is the real victory that I wish for each member of our nationals team, make the audience and the judges pee themselves.

socks

You will like Jay Davis, I'm not pre-supposing on you. Your certainly entitled to come to your own conclusion BUT its going to happen. He's tall and whenever I see him he's smiling walking with a slow labored feel he won't even have to talk to you. You'll like him and when he sits on a stool on stage at the North Star in the future(its going to happen) and reads you his work you'll continue to like him it will add another dimension to the way you like him.



I put him up there with anyone, Jack McCarthy, Patricia Smith even NATHAN AMADON. That's right I said it. I always felt odd early on in the veritas days, people were reading poetry and getting big applause they would read pieces and say "GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT" and people would scream and applaud or "BUSH SUCKS" same reaction. It seemed to be about making all the anger in your life about serious issues compact and visual in your performance. I wasn't like that, I never really wrote anything in anger just long stories that ended with a sad quiet dignity or the promise of hope. My nickname early on could have been Wet Noodle.



Whenever Jay came and read I sat and stared at him trying to learn. He is the perfect mixture of sad, funny, intelligent, philosophical, hopeful, humble, EVERYTHING I aspired to be. That's how I felt the first time i saw him years ago and thats even more how I feel today after buying his book SOCKS at Longfellow Books. Leave it to Jay to create an environment in that book where a bad poem can't live, every one speaks like he does with deliberate care and purposeful humor while trying desperately to cover up the part of him thats sad. Not glum but horrified lightly by the inequalities of life, the violence, everything those kids were yelling about he hides in a dark corner of his poetry and leaves it up to the reader to find it.



I have a poem I call the nose poem that I read sometimes, its for my girlfriend and its sappy like me. I read it while Jay was there and when we both walked outside he turned to me and said "That nose piece was great. If I was a girl, I would have fucked you."



I spent the whole night giddy and waiting and when my girlfriend finally walked in I pulled her close and said "JAY DAVIS SAID HE WOULD FUCK ME!!!" Then i told her the full story.



Bottom line is if your in Portland go to Longfellow Books and buy Socks for $8 or you can go to the moonpie press website I think they have it setup so you can order it online. Jay taught me that its ok to make people laugh and that its not un-artistic to do that, he reaffirmed my notions of responsibility as an author that when you write something its your job to lead the reader to the point...if you have a point. He made me so jealous I always feel like I should have a point.

the monster

The stage is a beast. Nothing the north star cafe can do about it, you can't beat it away with a broom stick or hire an exterminator. The stage is a monster and its our fault. It happens when people get together something changes, the pressure of a collective group in attention to one spot one place one person changes everything. I have seen the most brilliant minds go up with stuff I could only dream to have written or the opportunity to read and they shake and shiver and stutter until the eyes turn away. They come off stage with a hang dog look chewed up and spit out by the monster.

The stage is magic as well it comes with the illusion, I've seen people fall in love with it. I've seen people go up and wondered if they would ever leave it, looking at their face and how happy they were to have everyones attention. I'm like that too but good enough to be embarrassed about it. The illusion is in that sugar high ego boost you get when you do it just right and people you don't know pat you on the back. Its a hall of mirrors and you walk through it confused until your like Bruce Lee at the end of Enter the Dragon and you just start smashing them.

People walk out on you to have cigarettes or just meander but you can't begrudge after all who doesn't love to meander? I've seen people change fighting the monster, they win, they lose, they win again and after a while they become grizzled vets who march up and do better then i can on their worst day. It does something to you over time and it takes a super-spiritual balanced person like Nate to really check those emotions. Its easy to feel like a star on this stage even when you were supposed to make the poem, the piece....the star.

The healthiest way to look at the monster is like this whole thing is an experiment. Like an experiment you should have a hypothesis, if your desired effect is to go onstage and arrange dirty words in a way to put people out of their comfort zone. DO IT! I've seen it before and love it. If your desired effect is to pay tribute too or run down someone in your life. DO IT! I've seen it before and I love it. You do this to see how words look in the light of other people's minds, is the idea strong enough to survive a live transition? Or is it going to live in your notebook next to the unfinished story you wrote about being a space man? I never know but I'm never scared to try, i'm nervous and my hands shake like leaves and i feel like i'm going to throw up but I don't.
I have almost cried, those are the best times what scares a group of people more then a person about to come to tears in front of them on stage? Nothing.

The key is to keep imagining keep closing your eyes and sorting through the stuff that might be good. Keep carving it and sanding it down and present it proudly. We'll all know the work you put in. Trust me.

tommorow I lose my virginity

If you do anything enough you do it better. This would probably be what i've learned above all with Port Veritas. On July 4th our first Anthology comes out, we started preparing it years ago when I would harrass Nate every night he hosted about it. "Do you need me to send you more stuff? I have more stuff!" I already had a lot of stuff, but it wasn't the stuff that we have now. I kept bugging Nate and talking to Wil about it and asking for participation from everyone but Santa.

Finally Nate turned it over to me and I began bugging the authors a lot of them without saved, edited documents they just turned over to me multiple crumpled notebooks sometimes with two or three different versions of the same piece. It was terrible because poet notebooks are all in some disgusting bombed out version of cursive. I HATE YOU CURSIVE!

I read them and re read them and sometimes i called the authors to run a part by them but in going through the process of saving them on documents and filing them under one folder I fell in love all over again with the wide spectrum of ideas that exist under our umbrella. We settled on the perfect picture to represent it just a deserted Portland street whistling with the lives of so many crossing paths sometimes incidentally sometimes purposefully and forever.

At our best that is how we are and I'm going to buy ten copies. I'm going to force my mother to read some of it. I'm going to march with it and keep beating the drum until the sound is perfect, its what we've all done. Tommorow is not a big deal in the end. Just ask Nate about next year.