MUSELETTER #29
4/30/2000
Please join us in bidding a fond farewell to our first Texas correspondent, Stazja McFadyen, who is moving out of Texas & has passed her post on to a most worthy successor: Phil West. As Stazja says, “Phil is plugged in to the poetry scene in central Texas. . . . He covers spoken word for the Austin Chronicle, works with Jennifer Hill Public Relations (handled the publicity for the Austin International Poetry Festival and the Texas Book Festival), is on the Austin slam council, is the VP of the Poetry Slam, Inc. Exec Council, and more.” Museletter will miss Stazja -- but we welcome Phil enthusiastically with his first report this week.
We also have a New York report in this issue from correspondent Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz -- and we hope you'll watch for her featured review of the two recent New York productions of The Wild Party on our front page next week.
Margy Snyder & Bob Holman
Your About.com Poetry Guides
POETRY IS EVERYWHERE AT ABOUT.COM
- Firefighting Guide John Lucas says of his collection of links to poems & humorous pieces for firefighters: “For those of us that need to be reminded that we are human, the resources below will provide you with inspiration, smiles, and maybe a tear.”
TEXAS
A Big Howdy to You All
My name is Phil West. Some call me Pony. Most of you know me from the Austin Poetry Slam, which I've been involved with for the last six years. I'm short. I talk a lot. The thing I keep saying over and over these days is “Timm-eh!” That damn South Park. They turn the dumbest stuff into catch phrases. They're geniuses. I even love the whole “Blame Canada” thing, and I'm half-Canadian (French Canadian, no less.)
I take over the Texas Museletter beat from the (sniff, sob) departing-for-D.C. Stazja McFadyen, who was vital in organizing this year's Austin International Poetry Festival, which ran from April 13 to 16. Imagine organizing an open registration festival with 260 poets and 27 venues, and you begin to understand the depth and breadth of the job the AIPF crew took on. Their hard work added to the total embarrassment of poetic riches we've had in Austin lately. On April 13, poetry fans had the following options: five simultaneous readings for the outstanding AIPF di-verse-city 2000 anthology, the annual Hemann Sweatt Slam on the University of Texas campus (named for the first African-American student admitted to UT; won by visiting New Jersey poet Taalam Acey), and the annual First Words reading at UT's Blanton Museum for outgoing Michener Center graduate writing students, which included yours truly. It was one of the better readings I've been involved with recently, even given the bittersweetness of missing tons of other readings going on all around me. Readers at the Blanton got to read next to the museum's copy of the Gutenberg Bible, with all sorts of marginal sacrilege happening throughout the night. But hey. It's a big state. Enough about me.
Slam: Austin
The Austin Poetry Slam still holds court at Gaby & Mo's, 1809 Manor, each and every Thursday (8 pm, $2 admission). Ernie Cline, who has christened himself “Web bitch,” is now the official (as opposed to man-behind-the-curtain for something like two years now) Webmaster of the APS -- check out his fine work at www.austinslam.com. Several veterans of the scene have recently moved to greener, colder pastures, and they'll be missed. Karyna McGlynn (from the '98 and '99 Austin Poetry Slam Teams) moved to Seattle last week with compadre Amie Hood, having scored admission to Cornish College of the Arts, and Genevieve Van Cleve (of the '95, '97 and '98 Austin teams), has moved to Ireland with new husband Ted Albracht, after an April 8 wedding that, as Cline proudly reports, came in under the 3-minute and 10-second time limit afforded to slam poems. We will neither confirm nor deny rumors that Chicago poet and “major player” Shappy, attending the reception in a striking Cincinnati Waste Collection workshirt and novelty t-shirt ensemble, caught the bouquet.
Austin's 2000 Slam Finals are tentatively set for Wednesday, May 24 or Thursday, May 25, and early reports point to the very real possibility of an all-rookie team preaching a new brand of powerhouse poetry fu. At press time, plans for the finals were being solidified, with several large venues vying for the opportunity to host one of the most engaging annual poetry shows in Austin. For updates, shake your local Magic 8-Ball or, more definitively, visit the Web site. While you're there, place your order for Tina's Fine-Ass Lingerie, a CD anthology of poets from the '95 through '98 Austin Slam Teams, recently featured on an MLA-produced radio program, distributed to a number of NPR affiliates, on the state of contemporary poetry in the U.S. MLA, by the way, stands for Modern Languages Association; they're the people that put aspiring English professors into universities via their annual hiring conference. And now, they've brought Austin slam poets to NPR. As we like to say in Austin, “Oh, Tina!”
Slam: Dallas
One of the Texas teams going to the 2000 National Poetry Slam should be decided this week -- the Dallas Slam Finals, featuring 12 competitors, takes place Sunday, April 30. Want to know who won? Go to the new, up-any-day-now DallasSlams Web site, which is, appropriately enough, located at www.dallasslams.com. (If you've visited the old dallasslams.com site, you already know that it was the Clebo Rainey Web site, with some of the best graphics I've seen on a poetry-related Web site this side of Forbidden Panda.) Regular weekly slams are still happening at the Red Room at Club Clearview, on the corner of Elm and Crowdus in Deep Ellum, Friday nights at 8:30, $2 admission.
Slam: San Antonio
San Antonio's Puro Slam, the best-attended slam series in Texas (with average crowds of over 100), culminates in the city's first ever slam finals at El Toro, 3000 N. St. Mary's Street, on Tuesday, May 23, with semis running on May 9 and May 16 from the ongoing preliminary slam field. (The regular weekly slams start at 9:30 pm; admission is a paltry $1.) The tournament structure requires eight poems from each poet who makes the team, ensuring unusually deep pockets for a first-year team. Puro Slam is also hosting its first-ever San Antonio Slam Team fundraiser and birthday celebration on Saturday, May 13, 8 pm, at One9Zero6 Gallery, at 1906 S. Flores in beautiful Southtown, the destination of choice for San Antonio artgoers. (Side note: the First Friday Art Walk, Southtown's major monthly contribution to San Antonio culture, is one of the best grassroots visual arts events around.) The organizers promise live music, wall-to-wall poetry, art auctions, and refreshments. For more info, email Jacquie Moody at quemoody@aol.com. Also, reports of Slammaster Ben Ortiz's demise are greatly exaggerated -- he can be reached at bingemonster@aol.com or ultrahype@hotmail.com, should you want to feature for a big and vocal audience, give him freelance writing assignments, or commiserate over Tim Duncan's untimely knee injury. Speaking of Tims -- and yes, that's your cue to say “Timm-eh!” -- Tim Wood, the Dallas-based author of Hollow Angels and publisher of theartsDFW, editor of The Word (a monthly guide to Dallas poetry) and gatekeeper for the slam poetry listserv, features at El Toro May 2 at 10 pm. Tim is one of the hardest working poetry organizers in the state, and I'm sure a little cartilage tear wouldn't keep him on the bench. He's an organizational studmuffin. Check him out.
Texas Writers Month
The kickoff event for the 7th annual Texas Writers Month is Thursday, May 4 at Austin's Hirshfield-Moore House, 814 Lavaca, from 7 to 10 pm. The month-long celebration of Texas writers incorporates events across the writing spectrum from all over the Lone Star State. Point your browser toward Texas Monthly to get updates on all the doings. There are many. Highlight events currently on the docket include Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz's May 4 appearance at the Dallas Museum of Art (1717 N. Harwood) and the incomparable Naomi Shihab Nye, one of the most active poets and editors anywhere, with poets from the Salting The Ocean anthology, appearing May 31 at San Antonio's Barnes and Noble Fiesta Trails branch (12635 W. IH-10).
From Thom the World Poet's World-Sized Stack O' Flyers
Austinites can always count on Thom the Prolific One for the 411 on local poetry events. A particularly notable one happens Saturday, May 6 at the Bahai Center (2215 E.M. Franklin), when representatives from 11 (!) local open-mikes gather for a reading. Included in the lineup is Da'shade Moonbeam of Xenogia, a new Eastside Austin venue with lots of potential. The reading doubles as a food drive for the righteous Poets' Pantry project, organized by local poets, which has been collecting non-perishable food items for local homeless-assistance agencies and AIDS Services of Austin over the last several months at various Austin poetry venues. Admission to the event? Non-perishable food items, of course. For more info (than you can shake a stick at), Thom can be reached at 512.416.7435 or worldpoet@rocketmail.com.
Feel Left Out?Back to headlines
Texans with poetry news may feel free to send info to pony@austinslam.com, and join the 9,000 e-mail messages currently archived on my hard drive. Put “Timm-eh!” in the subject heading for extra special attention.
NEW YORK/NORTHEAST
Little Bit Older
The Little Bit Louda Reading Series celebrated its two-year anniversary this past Monday (4/24) at its home base, Bar 13. The anniversary party was a showcase of the community that the Little Bit Louda reading series has developed. Performers that night included both poets who have been there from the beginning and newer poets who cut their spoken teeth on Bar 13 smoky stage. Marty McConnell, Seve Montenegro, F. Omar Telan, Jessica Blank, among others, shared their poetry and their memories of Little Bit Louda, and host and Little Bit Louda founder Guy LeCharles Gonzalez looked on. He thanked everyone for supporting the series, and the evening's most touching moment came when he thanked his wife, Salome, who was surprisingly absent from the evening. When Gonzalez explained why, because the couple was having their first child, the crowd exploded into applause that lasted over a minute. Here's hoping that Guy's natural offspring is as amazing and life-affirming as his creative offspring, the Little Bit Louda reading series!
New Yorkers, Meet New Yorker Poets!
To celebrate its 75th year of publication, The New Yorker Magazine is celebrating the people it believes are responsible for its success (its “writers, artists, and editors”) with a weekend-long festival. The festival, May 5th to May 7th, will feature “critics and comedians, poets and pundits, singers and songwriters, and even a magician” who will talk and perform. Many of the amazing events have been sold out, but others are still open, with tickets available through Ticketmaster. The New Yorker has decided, however, to keep one very important event free: Sunday afternoon's Poetry in the Park. Starting at 4 pm in New York's Bryant Park, the event will showcase New York's 75 years as a home for brilliant poetry. The list of featured poets reads like a contemporary poet open mic wish list: John Ashbery, Eavan Boland, Deborah Garrison, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Marie Ponsot, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, and Derek Walcott. For more information, please see the New Yorker Festival Web site.
“G” Is For Gorey
Although he is known more his gloriously macabre pen and ink drawings than for his writing, Edward Gorey, who died March 16 in his Cape Cod home, was undoubtedly a poet. Author of over 90 books and illustator of around 60 others, Gorey wrote one of my favorite pieces of all time, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” which was an A-to-Z catalog of children dying in strange ways, starting with “A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs.” Though he will be deeply missed, his legacy lives on in the many books he left behind.
The Wild Party, Take Two
Earlier this month, two Wild Parties were happening in New York's theatre world, when the The Public Theatre's musical version of Joseph Moncure March's novel-length poem The Wild Party joined the Manhattan Theatre Club's musical version on the stage. While the Manhattan Theatre Club's version has since closed (and most recently led the Drama Desk nominations with 13, including one for best musical), the Public Theatre's Wild Party opened to poor reviews, including a rather scathing one in The New York Times. How fair are the critics' accusations? Which version of The Wild Party stayed truest to its source? You'll find out next week after I scout out the newest Wild Party, and report back to you. Until then, I can tell you this much: I saw the Manhattan Theatre Club's production two weeks ago, and while I enjoyed the first half of the play, I couldn't quite hear the music for Act Two. . . since it was overwhelmed by the sound of Joseph Moncure March spinning in his grave!!!
Grand Slams
And finally, I would like to urge you all to seek out your local slam (you can find them listed at the Poetry Slam, Inc. site, where a new U.S.-wide listing is in the works), since the end of the poetry slam season is just around the corner. While some slams, like Pittsburgh's amazing SunCrumbs Readings Series, have already chosen the members of their National Slam Teams, many other series are gearing up for their big finals night, which will be their showcase of the series' best writers. These events are not to be missed, so seek them out.
Keep writing and keep reading!
