| POETRY CURRENTS | |
APRIL IN AUSTIN: POETRY STILL PERSISTS
It’s like that quote from The Godfather: I have, indeed, been pulled back in. I’m back in the Museletter mix, after a hiatus in which I had a dot-com job, lost a dot-com job, went on a massive job hunt, landed a new job, and started to get to know this little guy.
In the meantime, we’re Texas, we’re still big, and we’re heading toward broke. Essentially, our state wants your state’s lunch money. We have a massive budget deficit, and I weep for the future of arts funding in the Lone Star State. How bad are things? Let’s just say some of us are considering desperate measures. But despite this, poetry still persists. And forget April in Paris; if you’re looking to mark up your poetry calendar, you really need to look no further than April in Austin.
AIPF, 11 YEARS OLD AND STILL MASSIVE
The largest non-juried poetry festival in the nation, the Austin International Poetry Festival, opens Thursday night with its usual sumptuous feast of poetry, including the simultaneous anthology release readings at six different venues throughout town. Readings go all weekend at times and locations too mind-boggling to list here; in fact, it will take you a good bit of time to go through the schedule. While the event has always been international in scope -- though given the number of participants, it’s sometimes hard to get past the Austin part of the name -- it’s downright global this year. The featured poets include representatives from Russia, Ghana, Singapore, and Sweden. There’s even a “United Nations of Poetry” reading during the fest -- but the U.S. probably won’t walk out in the middle and start their own reading, unlike other recent United Nations we know. AIPF goes through Sunday, April 13.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL: TEXAS TWO-STEP WEEKEND
While literally hundreds of poets are converging on Austin, lured by one of the largest verse gatherings in the nation, a score of highly-trained ninja poets (that is to say, slam poets) will be converging on Texas the very same weekend to try for one of the largest purses in the slam calendar. Billed as the “Texas Two-Step Weekend,” it starts on Saturday, April 12 with one of the quirkiest slam events in Texas. The Bluebonnet Poetry Slam, now in its fifth year, brings poets to Conroe, a town 40 miles and several lifestyles away from Houston. This year, the Bluebonnet circles the wagons at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds Exhibition Hall for the first time ever. But there will be some repeats this year, including poetry slam founder and PSI president-for-life Marc Smith, reprising his role as the host. Poets are coming from as far away as New York and Los Angeles to try to wow the East Texas crowd. It can happen: last year, Taylor Mali won the money, and he’s about as far from East Texas as you can get. (Rumor had it he dressed the part, though.)
The next night, the road show moves over to Austin, colliding head-on with a cache of experienced Austin slammers in the first-ever Austin Grand Slam at Ego’s, putting $1,000 on the line for fifteen poets. And there are some fascinating sub-plots here: indie finalist and slam comedy legend Shappy versus indie finalist and police officer Corbet Dean, Boston slammaster Michael Brown vs. former Boston slammer Danny Solis (now the slammaster in Albuquerque), and GNO from Dallas returning to the place he found second-place glory as part of the 1998 Dallas Slam Team, a precursor to his leadership role with the city’s 2001 National Poetry Slam Champions.
OH NO, THAT’S STILL NOT ALL: AUSTIN SLAMOFF
On Wednesday, April 16, 7 pm, at Ruta Maya (3601 S. Congress), the Austin Poetry Slam presents its annual Slamoff, featuring the top performers of the Austin slam season duking it out for tickets to the Big Dance in Chicago this summer. Not only will it be a great show, including something special from the slam fan who very well could be Austin’s next mayor, but it will also be filmed for a proposed reality TV show called Confessions. Several networks are sending representatives to the Slamoff to try and picture what it’ll look like on the small screen. The show, as producers Mike Henry and Kyle Fuller envision it, will take a look at teams from Austin and New York’s Urbana slam series, starting with the competitions that forged them and running all the way through Nationals. You’ll get all the intrigue and the chemistry and the behind-the-scenes hoo-haa, though no one’s going to be forced to live in the same house and no one’s going to get married at the end of the season. (Actually, though, Henry and Sonya Feher, Austin Poetry Slam’s first family, are getting married May 3, and slam vets Ernie Cline and Susan Somers-Willett, who met at the dear departed Electric Lounge after a slam event, are getting married May 24.) What -- you’d rather see a slam series where people get arrested? Nonsense. Remember to call the number on your screen: that’s 1-900-LET’S PUT SOME TALENTED PEOPLE ON TV.
Next time, we’ll visit other parts of the state. If you’ve got news, or you want to confirm that my kid is super-cute, I’m at pinata@texas.net.
