| POETRY CURRENTS | |
Dear MUSErs... we've got a veritable collage of information for you this time from the Pacific Northwest. Events, reviews, teasers... our literary elves have been working overtime to bring you these news bits. First, an on-the-scene play-by-play from our verse-atile poetic sports reporter, Tod McCoy:
The 5th Annual Superbowl of Poetry at Auburn's Northwest SPokenword Lab (SPLAB) featured five of the most graceful and athletic poets to distract us from the defensive pressures of the day. It began with a roundtable discussion involving both poets and audience on poetry and inspiration, which ran into overtime (with no complaints from fans). Seattle 2001 Slam champion Shawn V hiked things off and demonstrated why he's the champ with his passionate and moving poems, among them a eulogy for a close friend. He was followed by Port Townsend's Mary Lou Sanelli; legendary Seattle poet Marion Kimes was optioned by Seattle's John Olson; and the captain of this squad was Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, whose crisp storytelling and attention to diction left the room doing the wave. Coach Paul Nelson, who moderated the event, packed the house with enough football widows and widowers to make a shopping mall clerk cry in his empty cash register.
Oh, and the Chargers lost to the Bucks, I think... Back to you, Danika!
Thanks, Tod.
IT PLAYS IN PEORIA PRODUCTIONS
There's much more than poetry readings and open living-rooms that takes place at the SPLAB facility. It's also home to a recording studio which many artists have used as an affordable place to record their CD's, and the Lab is in the process of creating a short wave community radio station. For more than 8 years, Paul Nelson has syndicated a radio interview show on Whole Systems approaches through his nonprofit organism It Plays in Peoria Productions (IPiPP) -- this entity also serves as the nonprofit umbrella for SPLAB. Many internationally known authors and poets have appeared on IPiPP programs, including Sherman Alexie, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Bhagavan Das, Diane di Prima, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Michael Moore, Faith Popcorn, James Redfield and many more.
Paul had this to say after a recent interview with poet Anne Waldman:
World renowned poet, essayist & teacher Anne Waldman was in town recently to speak and facilitate a workshop at an event called The Women of Wisdom Conference at the downtown Seattle Unity Church. At first glance, it may seem as if a “New Age” conference would be the last place to see Anne. But when one reads Vow To Poetry, her new book of essays, interviews and manifestos (Coffee House Press, 2001), it is clear that her notion that “feminine energy is ascendant in this culture” (p. 212) is something that would resonate at such a conference. In an interview on the book, Anne says that the receptive writing strategies exemplified by the Beat poets and their penchant for open forms can be seen as an early indicator of that new respect for the feminine:
“I think that's what attracted me, in part, to the writing, to the actual creative work [of the Beats. It] was this, as I saw it, more feminine strategies, more rhizomic, cross-genre kinds of techniques, particularly in Burroughs. And then Kerouac for me, in a way, resonates with Gertrude Stain following the grammar of the mind & the particularities and details of thinking. He has a much more vivid vocabulary and he's writing out of real experience & people & characters & so on.”
(Copies of the interview are available for a suggested $15 donation postpaid from:Vow To Poetry, combining an outrider sense of poetry with a strong Buddhist sense, is a contemporary complement to the poetics of the New American Poetry and, I feel, ought to have that kind of influence on American avant-garde poetry, and by extension, the culture. Both will be better off if that manifests.
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It Plays in Peoria Productions
14 S. Division
Auburn, WA 98001-5318
888.735.6328)
God damn that cannonball man unwoundEleventh Hour's own Community Calendar Cabana Boy, Chris Blakeley, has this to say about local Seattle darling Buddy Wakefield's new CD:
Because to rise then fall is so profound
While 2000 clowns pile out of a car
With a stretcher full of mismatched cannonball parts
But, no, he picked up his brains, his eyes and his teeth
He gathered his words and he made it all speak
--Buddy Wakefield, from “Cannonball Man”
Anyone can make a CD these days. It's easy. Now that burners are commonplace on the mid-range computer systems that you can buy from Best Buy, all you have to do is throw in a $10 microphone, a basic sound-editing program and a quiet room, and you too can make a spoken word CD. Given this, it's hardly surprising that in the past year I've probably bought as many CDs as chapbooks from touring poets. The quality, as can be imagined, varies dramatically from disc to disc: everything from professional studio jobs to a guy with a mini-disc recorder in his back pocket to the ever present tape recorder on the edge of the stage.
So now I get to talk about one of my favorites: A Stretch of Presence by Buddy Wakefield, a Seattle-based poet. Although I would have to classify this as spoken word, it is not a disc of Buddy reading his poetry in a quiet room to a microphone, nor is it a live recording (barring one bonus track). This CD sounds like a professional studio album wherein each track has a unique style, ranging from the folksy “Little Ditty Called Happiness” to the quiet, percussion-backed “now” to the monologue with atmospherics “Marbles in the Trees,” where Buddy as a cook recites his piece over the surreal sounds of a diner complete with waitress and a bad jukebox blaring in the background. I have to confess that this was initially a disappointment to me when I bought this disc -- I am a fan of Buddy's readings and to find that his pieces had been reimagined into something other than a strict reading was a shock. But this quickly gave way to enjoyment and a mute wonderment that his poems translate so well.
And the poems are unique pieces, each requiring not only a description but also a qualification. “Cannonball Man” is narrative without being simply a straight story. “All the Time” is introspective without being a masturbatory piece of navel-gazing. Buddy's voice is expository and clear without telling you everything you need to know about the poem or telling you exactly what it means, even (and especially) on pieces that come across as heartfelt rants. As a bonus, there is a track buried at the end of the CD of Buddy performing live. While the audio quality on this cut is poorer than the rest of the disc, there's something delightful in hearing him reading live and raw.
What more can I tell you about this, except that it has rapidly become one of my favorite spoken word CDs, an easy selection for long walks or trips. More importantly, it has been the stocking stuffer for several friends this past Christmas. I don't think I can recommend it enough, and at ten bucks... what a deal!
Buddy is currently touring solo and will be touring this spring (and I believe summer) with WordCore, a poetry group made up of Wakefield, Eirik Ott, Eitan Kadosh and Gregory Hischak. He can be reached at buddywakefield@hotmail.com. Listen to tracks at swot.org. (Then buy the CD, dammit!)
SEATTLE'S POET POPULIST
We love it when local artists make good.... and one of our most promising is the prolific Bart Baxter, who has made his mark not only as a performer (winning 1st place in the 1998 Seattle Poetry Grand Slam) but also as a published poet (taking 1st place in the 1999 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition and recently winning a fellowship from the Seattle Arts Commission). His books include The Man with St. Vitus' Dance, Sonnets from the Mare Imbrium, Peace for the Arsonist (Bacchae Press) and Driving Wrong.
In addition, Bart was voted Seattle's Poet Populist in 2001... which is the reason I mention him now, as we will be electing a new Poet Populist in May as part of the 2002 Seattle Poetry Festival. Bart is Seattle's second Poet Populist in three years (Bernard Harris was voted PP two years in a row).
Whether I've respected or enjoyed the work of any of our national Poet Laureates, or any city-selected Poet Laureate, I've always felt cheated when they were announced, because what did my poetic community have to do with the decision? If there were to be a vote for a national Poet Populist, how would the outcome differ? Not to sound too lofty, but in the current state of our nation I feel more and more that real people's voices are not heard. Some might say that electing a Poet Populist is small beans compared to the issues at hand... but I say cheers to anyone or any organization that can celebrate something they've created by rallying others in their community.
MARVIN BELL AT ELLIOTT BAY BOOKS
Now let's hear from my co-correspondent Chris Blakeley again. (OK, I couldn't figure out a creative segué into his report on a recent local reading by Marvin Bell, so I'm just going to say... here is Chris' response to Marvin Bell's reading at Elliott Bay Books on February 27.)
I need to say something from the beginning: I'm new. I've been writing poetry for almost a decade now (starting, of course, with the poems I wrote to impress a girl -- it worked!), but only recently hve I been taking an active role with poetry and in a poetry scene. I say this as an introduction because I have a tendency to leave poetry readings plagued with self-doubt, typically thinking something along the lines of: “The person I just heard was just so good and did such amazing things with language and what the hell and I doing playing at being a poet?” Odds are, you know this type of self-pity intimately.
Rarer, of course, is the reading that inspires you to write, where the poet is, again, so incredible and so amazing that all you want to do is sit down and write something yourself. This, in a nutshell, was my reaction to Marvin Bell's reading.
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I can't say exactly which poems he read; I was too busy enjoying the reading to take down a set list, apart from “To Dorothy.” It was a very good reading. Bell's poems are very quiet, and he never attempted to dramatize a poem or “punch it up” by raising his voice or changing the cadence to suit anything but the words on the page. Better, his introductions and explanations were never declarations of what the poem was about (something I've seen too much lately), but descriptions of the logic behind the piece or the catalyst for its writing. His history of the “Dead Man” series was especially insightful, showing just how unconscious it was, that it was an urge and not an intention.
Most important for me was that he appeared to be doing this because he loved it. He did not set out to be entertaining or insightful or deep; he just read poetry. It wasn't a sermon or a Message of Great Importance to be Delivered As Such; it was a reading. Because of this, it was educational for me. Bell showed that there can be a good reading between the hyperkinetics of the slam scene and some of the more droning voices I've heard.
As for me, I left the book shop with my friend and wrote two poems. An exceptional night....
2002 SEATTLE POETRY FESTIVAL
Lastly, dear MUSErs, I leave you with this tidbit regarding the upcoming 2002 Seattle Poetry Festival. Come on up, down or over to visit us for this spectacular event... everyone else is doing it!
The Festival will take place from Monday, April 29 to Sunday, May 5 at various locations around Seattle including Richard Hugo House, Oseao Gallery and The Moore Theater. Ancillary events begin the weekend of April 27 - 28, including the Emerging Voice Youth Reading and Guerrilla Poetry with LitRave from Los Angeles.
This year's SPF sister city is New York, featuring performances from:
- Sarah Jones & Steve Colman
- Sekou Sundiata
- Jessica Hagedorn
- Tory Dent
- Maggie Estep
Tickets go on sale April 1st for members of Eleventh Hour and April 8th for the general public. Event prices range from free to $14. Full Festival passes are $45 and there are discounts for students, seniors 65+, low income attendees and members of Eleventh Hour Productions.
For more information, please contact Danika Dinsmore at 206.725.1650 or danika@poetryfestival.org. The SPF Web site will be periodically updated, and you can stay informed by subscribing to our (e)newslist (send an email to eleven@poetryfestival.org with the word “subscribe” + your email address in the body of the message).
Yay poets!
Danika Dinsmore
Chris Blakeley
