Bumbershoot, “A Word Bath”
Bob Redmond, our own Seattle/Pacific Northwest Museletter correspondent & emcee of the Lit Stage at this year's Bumbershoot (Seattle's giant Labor Day arts festival), invites us to bathe in the waters of the Mighty Po. Come on in! The water's fine.
Over Labor Day weekend the 30th annual arts bash known as Bumbershoot happened, in all its carnival splendor. Guido Sarducci married people, musicians tooted on Trimpin-created musical rickshaws, and George Clinton, Maceo Parker, Sleater-Kinney, Joan Jett and a turntable spin-off were just some who rocked the house.
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musical rickshaws & a turntable spin-off |
Sandra Bernhard sang “Oops I Did It Again / I Am a Woman in Love,” a song second only to her cover of “Midnight Train to Georgia” -- way cool, but she was mean backstage. Jim Carroll, on the other hand, was the nicest shimmer of smoke to whisper across the stage.
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enough oomph to keep you gasping |
Here for your reading pleasure, then, is a thumbnail account of the literary arts stage at B-shoot 2000 -- because if Carroll was good, so was the whole lit program, easy to miss among 200,000 people a day, but with enough oomph to keep you gasping for months. Curated by Judith Roche, the lit program universe was huge, with constellations in Salmon, Prison Writing, San Francisco Beats, and language poetry. Let's dive in to the Festival's four days:
More of Bob Redmond on the Net:
- His poem “The Poet” is posted at the Words' Worth Poetry Program site.
- “Once Upon a Time...” is a brief history of his founding of Eleventh Hour Productions & the Seattle Poetry Festival with co-conspirator Noel Franklin.
