| POETRY CURRENTS | |
GETTING OUT OF THE HOUSE
When your son turns eighteen months, as mine just did last week, and his thoughts turn to dragging long-forgotten, suspicious-looking electrical objects around the house, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the poetry doings anywhere -- let alone a state the size of Texas. Indeed, my poetry journeys lately have taken me / will be taking me out of Texas and into Chicago for the National Poetry Slam, to New York for the opening of Taylor Mali’s one-man show, Teacher, Teacher!, at the Bowery Poetry Club (happily coinciding with a business trip where I will dress like a tomato and amuse amateur gardeners in Jersey, Brooklyn and Long Island), and to the Bay Area for a sixteen-team poetry tournament, connected to the Living Word Festival, called the New Word Series.
But, yes, plenty happening in Texas. Let’s start with our feature city of the month: Houston.
HOUSTON: 4TH LARGEST CITY IN AMERICA, YOU KNOW
It’s not all traffic and cowboy hats -- in fact, Houston is home to a significant number of readers and writers, and two autumn events make Houston especially noteworthy for poets.
The first, of course, is the Houston Poetry Festival, which is now in its 19th year, scheduled for October 9 - 12 this year. Based out of the University of Houston-Downtown, the festival involves a number of local artists, and also strives to involve organizations and individuals across the whole poetry spectrum. In previous years, UH professor and noted poet Mark Doty was involved, as were members of the Houston Poetry Slam contingent. Details are still being ironed out for this year’s festival -- check the Web site for updates.
The second, and more extended, of the fall poetry events in Houston is the Margarett Root Brown Series, a 12-author annual series formerly put on by the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, but which is now done in conjunction with the Houston writer’s best non-profit friend, Inprint. This year’s readings are at the Alley Theater, 615 Texas Avenue, with the exception of the February 9, 2004 reading featuring fiction writer Robert Russo. The poetry part of the lineup is stunning in its significance: try Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell on November 10, Yusef Komunyakaa and Kevin Brown on January 26, and Ellen Bryant Voight and Martin Espada on March 8. The price for each show? $5, free for students and senior citizens. This is not a misprint. (On the fiction side, the non-slouches include Jane Smiley, Charles Baxter, and Ann Patchett.)
Expect more from Houston’s poetry scene in the following months as well -- in addition to the ongoing slam, organizers are gearing for a regular slam series at Rice University, one of the best and most slam-happy colleges in the state.
TAMMY GOMEZ IN THE NEWS
Another too-often underestimated Texan city, Fort Worth is home to two of the best visual art museums in the state if not the nation, and boasts a fledgling poetry scene which includes Tammy Gomez. Gomez, who was an instrumental figure in Austin’s poetic renaissance during the mid-1990s, moved to Fort Worth in 1999. Since then, she’s touched base with Austinites through annual appearances at the Texas Book Festival, and she’s traveled to numerous destinations across the country in the name of art.
Fort Worth is beginning to realize what they have. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, one of the state’s most underrated papers (note the theme developing here), featured Gomez in a glowing feature article to promote the screening of Voices From Texas, a documentary featuring the likes of Sandra Cisneros, Raul Salinas, Pat Mora, and Gomez herself. Then, in a guest Sunday opinion piece running a week after the screening, writer Richard Gonzales praised the contributions of Chicano poets, adding names like Carmen Tafolla and Jacinto Cardona to the list.
SLAMCHANNEL’S ON
The go live date for Slamchannel, the latest project from Confessions Multimedia, was September 12, and the site looks fantastic. Partners Mike Henry (who runs the Austin Poetry Slam) and Kyle Fuller have been floating the concept of a slam poetry reality TV show to a number of interested parties (read: national networks) for nearly half a year. Slamchannel, an online sampler of performance poetry, will boast various bells and whistles, including an animated cartoon of Henry running through the rules of slam (complete with accompanying mooing during the “no animal acts” portion of the spiel, and a T-shirt which magically changes to run through many of the shirts in Henry’s black-T-shirt-heavy wardrobe). Also in the works: an interactive space to mix beats behind the poets’ words.
Confessions has also put together a September 18 showcase at the Comedy Central Stage at the Hudson Theater in Hollywood (5639 Santa Monica Boulevard) featuring Austin 2003 slam team members Genevieve Van Cleve and Christopher Lee, multi-year champ Taylor Mali, crown prince of slam Shappy, New York Urbana slammaster and multidisciplinary badass Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, veteran LA poet, journalist, and hip-hop maven Jerry Quickley, 2002 National Poetry Slam finalist and current slam golden boy Rives, and performance poet and touring madman Buddy Wakefield. In other words, a good night. The next night the same group, with an additional number of LA poets, get together at the same location to shoot a DVD and material for Slamchannel.
ONE LAST LITTLE THING ABOUT AUSTIN SLAM POETS (AND OTHER TEXANS)
Congratulations to the Austin Poetry Slam Team for placing 3rd out of an unprecedented 63 teams at this year’s National Poetry Slam. The team was part of a proud, loud, and matching-T-shirt-clad six-team army from Texas. While Austin was the only one of the six to break into the 16-team semifinals, all of the teams were distinctive, memorable, and, uh, socially active. The roll call includes Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. Texans have now been on the finals stage at NPS six of the last eight years. That’s yee-haw-worthy!
By the way... in the time it has taken to write this article, my son has created a modern art sculpture in the office (composed of plastic toys, paper from the garbage can, a pair of my tennis shoes, and his beloved broom -- you read that right). He has also jumped on his mother -- who is reading The Scarlet Letter, so she can teach it later -- and changed the channel to the 24-hour Christian station, which he is inexplicably drawn to. He’s also learned a new phrase: “What’s that?” Luckily, I’ve been trained to answer just that question.
