?????

The oldest question in poetry is not, why do people think Charles Bukowski is a genius? It's what on earth should I write about. Anyone who picked up a pen or pounded a keyboard (or put quill to parchment for all you nerds) had to sit there and think about it. It's a jarring process, alone with your insatiable need to write but with nothing to say one can feel their most arrogant. Think about it! Knowing that you want your voice to be heard while you can't think of what you want it to say? Sounds kind of screwed up if you have to explain it, some modern poets like Andy Rooney of 60 minutes don't have to think about what topic to pick he just jabbers words out of his crazy pie hole until he's exhausted and then goes back to quiet. Now thats a pure creative process.

You can write about politics but you won't be the only one, on any side of any issue its been taken on. If your honest with yourself and your writing for an audience you end up taking into account the balance of disclosure your craft requires. People ultimately want to know about you, but not too much. They want to watch you laugh, watch you cry but they don't want to watch you poop. If you think all topics in poetry have been covered write a whole book about urinating and pooping then try to sell it. You'll learn the hard way not all topics in life are covered and if they are some are lightly touched and its for a reason. I'm very vague right now but poetry and writing in general is about balance.

Sex gets written about and rightfully so but if your too close to your own emotions while your putting it together it can end up written just for you with so much information that it cant be looked at by someone outside of your sphere with value. I don't want to give the impression that this is a lesson and that I know what I'm talking about. I was sharing my confusion on the subject with you, I've written about some amazingly stupid things(I almost wrote a whole story about a guy who paid for hookers and didn't have relations with them he just beat them at Yahtzee)

The worst part is that every profound re-defining line of inspirational poetry will have an awful aftertaste for you as a writer. You will wish on some level that you could duplicate it and if your an honest person you'll admit you wish you wrote it. If you meet and hang out with writers you admire you should grow to fear them and use your common love for writing to create an arms race. Fear that person and write better to crush them under you and then shake that shit out of your head and what you've written will be great. I THINK! I can't be blamed for any of this stuff not working because if I'm just bullshitting but one of the great things that writing has taught me is that when you bullshit you should bullshit confidently.

The deep unnatural depression that Andrea Gibson brings to me

I've seen Andrea Gibson live before, you know. She came to the North Star Cafe on a Tuesday night and all i knew is that she was a big deal. A slam poet of the top tier and sure she killed that night but she looked nothing like her poetry. Performers should look like their poetry, mine does, its jumbled and trembling but opinionated and obese. It needs to represent me and for a while I thought most people's work looked like them. Buddy Wakefield looks just as weird as his poetry trust me but Andrea Gibson looks nothing like her verse.

She is small, and I recall even sometimes feeling like she was a scared looking person. Anyone who has read at an open mic was scared and should have been but most of the top tier mask it professionally. Like Jack McCarthy before her I didn't value her as much in person as when I got her book, I guess being somewhat of a dink I looked at her and shrugged. A poet, like the rest of us trembling like a leaf to deliver the thoughts she so carefully ironed and starched. I undervalued her until I purchased her book POLE DANCING TO GOSPEL HYMNS and I have spent a lot of time combing through it. I knew from the first poem that I had fucked up, this is the T S Elliot of slam poetry I swear. The metaphors come together so well that they become a community of words calling back to one another and each line is something you want to write down and use as the basis for a new poem. They don't seem like enough, ideas she just stumbles upon are too fantastically intricate and interesting to be left where they are. I felt that way about The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and now I feel that way about at least six or seven of the poems in her book.

Great poets depress me intensely, reading this made me never want to write poetry again. I honestly contemplated going right back to the short story after the third piece it is called BIRTHDAY for jenn. I was wrong because she is like her poetry, her verse is a human being raging against her own frailty beating it and beating it with lyrical strength unmatched until she feels she can live in a world with teeth so sharp.

She makes me envious and jealous and appreciative and I just wish I she could read this. I just wish I had stood human to human with her and hugged her to be able to tell people I did.

Here is hoping any of this makes sense to the few who read it.

I've taken sides

What is poetry? Well the answer I stand by that caused great discomfort to my English teacher is that poetry is democratically elected so whatever I say is a poem is a poem. Its very similar to the way I consider the word genius, your only a genius if no really argues against you. If I go up to any random person and say Albert Einstein and Stevie Wonder are genius's I bet that person will agree. Its that way with poetry, which is why I've never understood the blanket statement that rappers or emcee's are poets.

The opposite is still not true in my eyes, to say all rappers or emcee's aren't poets is just as false. To have a distinguished career that has given depth and definition to subject matter, that is a poet. Do I want to tell people that Eminem is a poet...the honest answer is no. As clever as this dude is his career is built on fart jokes and drug references. It might not even be important to meaningfully distinguish between the two, just write whatever you feel and if it doesnt suck let that be your reward.

I have seen some people so determined to be what they consider a good emcee that they never blossom into any kind of serious poet. An emcee to a lot of people is supposed to be someone who can play with words and has a mastery of that as a skill. The problem with this is if you perfect the meaningless management of words of words you never master the pursuit of the right words for your meaning. To a certain extent I am pissing in the wind here anyone who can easily define what poetry is or being a poet is...is full of crap. Rakim already defined being an emcee in a question "How could I move the crowd?"

Some emcees move the crowd with intellectual and inspirational verse that should stand right next to the classics. Some of them make cheap and tawdry party songs and yes I am old so I don't understand the layers of symbolism in the Yin Yang Twins music. All I really want people to do is think before they give someone the title, Sage Francis, Geologic from the Blue Scholars, and countless others have balanced being both emcee's and poets(who literally were spoken word poets first) but record sales and popularity don't determine it. Don't let a watered down simplistic message spread through mass media get you drunk on someone who is taking the spotlight from great minds.

the echo of many voices

Nate and Wil have always been pushing for new voices even when we had a good crop of poets coming regularly, if they were primarily male we wanted female voices. If we had primarily hip hop voices we wanted to move away from it. Once you establish something you know is good, you have to work on your weaknesses.

The reading last week and the week before have struck me, having Marion Sprague back in the fold helps us a lot and having new people like Katianna and Tricia who go up there and challenge not just the audience but their own talent, makes me happy. It has finally felt like not only do we have talented poets challenging each other but we have a wide range of ideas.

I never understood why we were always looking for some other demographic of thought when we had so much already but I finally figured it out. There is no such thing as having too many diverse voices at an open reading, no such thing as too much overflow on a list. It means that everyone has something to say and some of it can counteract itself, we don't want to sing as a chorus we want to all have solo time. We all deserve it but we have to fight for our ideas, we have to keep bringing new things and experimenting and putting it on the line every single time. If you lose that you lose your whole voice.

I don't feel like I'm being dramatic, the power of positive thinking does apply in writing and the voice that stifles you often times is your own. Every Tuesday I want to walk in and listen to someone new who can come off the street and offend me or make me a fan or stir things up somehow. I want new people to find out whether or not this is their medium, a lot of times people aren't even familiar with it. I wasn't when I first came.

The same way numbers trail off into infinity that is the potential of new voices, the ability to speak clearly together while remaining individual. Just keep it to five minutes.

Most important day of my life

So I tried to give away a little of what I had planned for the October 14th slam in my previous post. Port Veritas means a whole lot to me and I've given a lot to it but never really fully given my talent to it, I've never focused directly on it in a way where I would become what I could be. In August I decided to change that, I picked three pieces and practiced them over and over and over until I knew not only every word and how it was said but how it should be acted out. October 14th was going to be a prepared invasion for me and I was going to make noise.

I was also going to ask my girlfriend to marry me. Why not kill two birds with one stone? I was going to marry that girl anyway, everyone knew it so I might as well do it big and not just big but proud. I'm not talking about halftime at an NBA game on bended knee. I was going to go on stage with a new piece that I know better then the ten commandments and belt it like I was fighting for my life. To let her know that I will fight for every second with her the same way I'll fight on stage, she's the concept that drives me. Whatever, thats corny I don't care.

Big Poppa E is one of the funniest people on the planet, I saw him on Def Poetry Jam over Wil's house and ever since we have been fighting to get him here. He was featuring that night and then he guest judged the slam. I asked both Wil and Nate to get him as guest judge. I wanted more pressure, marriage, relative lack of experiance wasn't enough. Put one of the most acclaimed slam poets in the nation in the front row to grade me. Part of me is an idiot that wants to push the other part to the edge of losing just to see him come back.

It went down perfectly, I am so proud of that slam because everyone did VERY WELL. Wil Antony was there and he has the best command over a crowd that I've ever seen. Jazzy was a ball of energy and a savage and Tricia was there as well to wrench hearts out of position with her tense suspenseful verse. I'm proud to have lost, lost to the man who gave me my emotions back. Wil beat me by 2 or 2.5 points and I couldn't help think of those times where my dream was to write like Hemmingway, with not a scent of emotion on the surface but maddening symbolism a cold masculine giant. Wil tore all of that out of me and left me a full person someone who could come to tears and pull back and marry the right girl. On stage.

He taught me to live life with the decency not to deceive people in my writing and to own it all every adjective. So I married my girl and I took second place and I got a spot...just a possibility in april(if i'm not mistaken) to compete for a spot on the national team. It was a great day but just a grain of sand on a beach. I've still got tons of work to do but with enough time, I'm not sure there are that many people in this area who are obsessive enough to compete with my preparation.

Beastly tuesday on 10/14

A lot of people have strong feelings about things that they would like to pass off as a certainty for the future. Some political forces are so certain in the "end of days" that they feel ecological legislation is a waste of time, some sports prognosticators can predict the outcome of a game before the season has started. I am none of these wise men, I woke up today nervous and sick in my gut but not like call out of work and barf all day sick, i'm talking about first date i wonder if I get tongue with that kiss nervous. It's for the slam coming up on 10/14.

We have a lot of hungry poets out there trying to make a point and they want to do it next tuesday, Sean just came back from taking 6th out of 64 poets at the individual slam tournament so he is hungry like JAWS hungry. The kid always gets robbed on slam scores(in my opinion) but has been getting better and better by the second and at some point will not be held back anymore, he will be the man.

Dudley is an ex-factor he's such a natuaral fun loving kid that its hard to see if he's ready to be as ferociously egomanical as a top poet needs to be(TAYLOR MALI) but he's hit a stride that could take him right into the top tier of talent we have. He's been working on seperating his singsongy stuff from his verse and he's GOOD. Jazzy and Olivia and that whole group is so talented that on a good day they can beat you with their least favorite poem, they are natural performers. I don't even want to imagine how good they will be when they are reading their favorite pieces on their best day.

Wil wins these slams a lot, i mean a lot. He's already got a spot locked in to contend FOR a spot on the 2009 slam team BUT this is what he does. He sits around and writes and writes till its perfect and then memorizes it until its flawless, he told me he was going to slam with all new pieces that he has choreographed. Secretly Wil wants someone to beat him at a slam REALLY badly so that he has even more motivation to dominate that next time.

There are always X factors in a slam and you can never fully know until you see that list who is going to participate but I feel like its big. So many people try so hard to win this thing and the prize is sweet, the winner and 2nd place member get the chance to compete for one of five slots(including the sub or backup guy) on the 2009 national slam team. Its an opportunity to flex your artistic components for the countries best, to meet and beat people that you admire or lose to them either way is better then not going.

I forgot to mention....I'm going to compete as well. I'm not competing to test who I am or how good I am at this point. I'm going for that spot.

illogically provocative

It was a very odd weekend. The league of young voters (who used to call themselves the league of pissed off voters until they realized it inhibited their diplomatic possibilities) had a show in Lewiston at a place called Guthries and we needed a ride for the poets to get there. I hustled my girlfriend into giving a blank check to fill up the car with wordsmiths and ride down on a Saturday where we had a lot else to do.

Then everyone canceled. All of a sudden the only performers were Wil and I which is weird. I will usually travel with the gang as logistical back up kind of a tour manager SLASH sexless groupie but this time it was going to have to be different. It was just going to be us too and forget the fact that the guy I'm rolling with fathered this current variation of my writing style. Wil is the champ and the problem is for an audience he is the only one they will have to compare me against. If we could have taken someone awful I would have been much more comfortable.

When we got there and Wil gathered the facts it turned out we had a 45 MINUTE SLOT I was not fully ready to split that time down the middle so we settled on the idea of him doing 3 pieces and then me doing 1 after. Wil has done several events for the league and they LOVE him they feed on the passion he has and whether or not they know it they love the craftsmanship he gives to his passion. Anyway, enough sucking up to my elders! I noticed that in this bar there are a lot of kids and I'm thinking FIRSTLY why are a bunch of kids in a bar(insert Lewiston joke) SECOND what happens when I get to the part of the poem where I yell "FUCK A DUCK!!!"

I had a picture in my mind similar to an old Robin Williams joke where you swear once and for the rest of the day these kids are tugging at their fathers sleeve and yelling up at him "FUCK A DUCK DADDY!!!" the father looks down and shakes his head blaming poetry for his childs trip to the dark side of language.

I love swearing more then I love Corn Nuts and BOY DO I LOVE CORN NUTS. I swear more then most people do and Wil swears more then I do so these kids got it from all angles. In the end its only Illogically provocative because the kids are going to learn the words anyway and if you keep them gaurded, hidden away in some box marked DONT TOUCH that will just make it more interesting. In the end I performed without editing anything because the FUCK I made with my mouth had a point behind it. That sounded disgusting.