Once the afterafterafterafter party finally concluded, the entire entourage hotfooted it up to the Greatest National Art Center/Retreat in the Universe, the Banff Centre, located in the heart of the awesomely beautiful Canadian Rockies. Two hours away from Calgary, the Center is a compound of performance spaces, workshop rooms, a gourmet (and healthy!) dining hall, hotel/dorm rooms and a great gym/pool. The whole campus is set in one of the most spectacular sites imaginable. And somehow Sheri-D gets to have this place for the spoken word poets! Try imagining this in the USA -- the only thing comparable might be Thomas Wohlfahrt’s Kulturbrauerei in Berlin. Or maybe the University of Natal when Peter Rorvik’s Poetry Africa is in session. But for us in the Southland, where our cultural claim to fame is the fact that the entire budget of the National Endowment of the Arts is less than the annual budget for military bands, Banff is a dream. A working dream. A very hard-working dream!
OK, now I want to tell a story. OK. Why that it will. First,of course, we had to get there! Two vanloads of poets, and I, as an elder with Sheri-D and Lillian, travel in a private car. So what could happen to our two vanloads of poets stuck in beautiful Canada Day traffic, when hundreds of thousands of healthy, ruddy Canadians head for the tribal camping grounds? Why, they run into each other of course, a slight fender bender which practically totaled one car. They’re off to the hospital, dear Kateri had been in another accident a week before and is shaken up, and here, at last, the story.
The news of the accident spread quickly through the Banff Center campus. We had a very strict schedule, and now we were spread around the province. How can we collect ourselves? I was mulling this over what I remembered speaking with the waitress at the dining hall, Catherine, who told me that she was from just outside of Banff. When it turned out Kateri was in the hospital nearby, I asked Catherine if she knew anyone who could possibly get to the hospital to pick her up (hoping of course that Sheri-D would have the budget to pay for this). Sheri-D herself being the Great Mama of Dada that she is, was ready to drive an hour plus to pick up Kateri and power back, which of course would shove everything hours back on the schedule. Or maybe a cab, which would cost a couple hundred bucks, albeit Canadian. Hmmm....
Next thing I know we’re convening and Kateri soon showed up, delivered by her personal driver –- Catherine the Waitress’ Mama. Can you believe it? So, poets, listen up! Here are some basic rules to guide by:
- Engage with your environment, whether it’s the people serving at the dining hall or the guy setting levels on the stage -- these are our coworkers. Whenever poets manage to get a gig outside of their living rooms, remember: you are always on, you’re always a poet, everyone you speak to is part of your audience.
- Critical Path Method on how to get things going: Never let Sheri-D go to the hospital.
- Don’t be afraid to ask. People want to help poets, believe it or not. It’s one of the good parts of the poetic economy, which, so far as I know, is the only alternative to Capitalism. We write our poems as gifts. And when we need the gift to return, don’t be shy about asking. A whole new Zen, isn’t it?
- Spend the money. It’s more important that Kateri get up here. Spend the money. It’s more important that 15 poets gathered from around Canada and other sites get to work at this utopian Spoken Word Klatch than that our leader go to a hospital to pick up our one & only shaken-up poet.
And that’s my story except to say that Catherine the Waitress’ Mama of course took no money, so we showered her with chapbooks and homemade CDs. And now on to 15 poets sitting around a table, 15 spoken word poets making a stab at formulating the future....
