| POETRY CURRENTS | |
ALL AROUND THE WORLD
Hi all. Just back from the West Coast, where Lea Deschenes and I read at the Ugly Mug in Orange County and I read at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice with Viggo Mortensen, Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Regie Gibson, Mike McGee, Luis Alfaro, Marvin Bell and Georganne Deen. The reading served a dual purpose, being both a promotional reading for the book, Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Chicago’s Mark Elevad, who hosted the event, and a benefit for Santa Monica’s Midnight Special Bookstore.
By now, you’re looking back at the top of the page again to make sure that this is still the “New England” Museletter. Certainly, this was hardly a New England reading, although I live in New England, as does Gibson, and Smith used to. There wasn’t much of what people would normally associate with the SoCal poetry scene, either, although I used to live there, Williams has been spending a great deal of time there lately, Dean lives there (but she’s much better known as a visual artist) and Mortensen, of course, is more famous as an actor and painter, although he’s had a long association with the LA poetry scene.
No, there were poets from SoCal, New England, Chicago, New York, Iowa and Northern California on the stage, one of the most eclectic collections I’ve seen in my many years of poetry weirdness, with many of the poets representing more than one locale. Much can—and, trust me, will—be said about this reading, but at the end of the day, it really highlights how ridiculous it is to think of individual “scenes” as self-contained units any more. It’s becoming increasingly common to run across touring poets all over the country (Smith and I joke we never see each other in the same state twice) and, moreover, there’s an increasing amount of funding becoming available to push larger and larger groups of poets from place to place. As television, CD distributors and publishers begin to discover ways to promote poetry, it seems likely that we’ll see more of these “mega-events” around the country.
Is this a good or a bad thing? I tend to be optimistic, although I’m wary about the encroachment of commercial interests into the little poetry world we’ve constructed. Ultimately, though, the growth of resources for poets is a positive development, provided that we remember to keep one hand on our souls. And of course, there’s nothing stopping anyone from taking the DIY route toward success in this big, global poetry community.
THE GLOBE COMES TO NEW ENGLAND
The global community has been nowhere more evident than here in New England, where in recent days we’ve seen visits from Austin’s Hilary Thomas and R. Eirik Ott, as well as Genevieve Van Cleve (also from Austin), who seems to be involved with Norman Lear’s new poetry project, The Declaration of Independence.
Others to visit the Northeast recently have included Chicago’s Morris Stegosaurus, Canada’s Shane Koyczan, San Francisco’s Daphne Gottlieb and New Mexico’s Danny Solis, who read at the mysterious little reading in Fitchburg, Mass, that we keep hearing about but that we never manage to get to.
NEW ENGLAND GETS OUT TO THE WORLD
New England poets keep popping up in other places too. In addition to Gibson, Deschenes and myself ending up in California, we’ve recently seen Tony Brown in Philadelphia and Toronto, and we’re about to see Sou MacMillan at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. And of course, the stage is being set for a Boston version of Def Jam’s recent Broadway production, with several local poets involved.
The world keeps getting smaller and smaller, and that’s definitely a good thing.
