so Oscar asked me what I thought about Acentos, the Tuesday night reading in the Bronx. last night they featured Louis Reyes Rivera for an (ahem) intimate audience. as I explained to Oscar, I don't mind small readings at all -- but when I see greatness speaking to a small crowd, I can't help but think of all the people who *should* be hearing it.

so here's my take:

hm, thoughts on acentos.

I like the comfort level, the welcoming vibe. I think it's good to have a space entirely free from the slam.

I hope that as we re-start workshops, that people from Acentos will attend. there's a lot of potential, but a
long way to go (of course, we've all got a long way to go, myself included.)

I wonder about some ways to encourage regulars to develop new and different work. one thing we've talked
about doing at 13, but not implemented because we have so many formats already, is a response night, where
people read either tributes to poets/poems, or responses to work shared by others in previous weeks.

the biggest temptation for all of us is to keep doing what "works" and not try to bust out of our basic "style," which is a particular issue for people early in their writing life -- you think you've found your Voice, and you're not going to give it up for anything. which is lovely, but chances are you're missing out on a lot that experimentation could teach you.

I know it's my constant challenge: to push and push past the comfort zone. it's one of the reasons I value GK as my writing partner so much -- she'll look at a poem, say, it's quite good. unfortunately, I feel like I've read it before -- you're not doing anything *new* here.

so for Acentos I recommend not just bringing in the work of poets you know the crowd will respond to -- but crazy others as well. I recommend urging people to experiment with form -- maybe by doing it yourself, and reading the results there. I myself am terrible in form, but it's a worthwhile endeavor in any case.

while the crowd is still in its building phase, you have the opportunity to rally the regulars and say, let's try THIS. let's try THAT. to make it a community that challenges and pushes toward real artistic growth. That's the real movement.

lunchtime blog (between grant-writing and teacher-training-planning):

so after seeing Lou Reed and Jim Carroll and Karen Finley and others last night at Joe's Pub, I wonder: how can we advance the form of performance poetry, break new ground, experiment and abstract and do new new new and never-done things, and still maintain ties to meaning?

I thought my head was going to explode with the contradiction of wow, these people really DID things, really broke things, helped expose the walls of capital-P poetry for the rickety cardboard they were/are -- fused music and poetry and movement and nakedness (literally, in some cases) -- but WHERE NOW? WHAT NOW?

Lou Reed read one piece: his own version of Poe's Raven, and it wasn't an improvement. Jim Carroll read some excellent work -- of course, he's barely coherent in the moments between poems, with the shaking and mumbling (just say no, Jim, just say no). the guy from Sonic Youth -- can't remember his name now -- had some interesting lines, but no hold on craft or seeming interest in actually connecting with the audience.

Karen Finley with a flock of Liza Minnelli impersonators -- you gotta love New York. what a spectacle. of course, that's a little bit of my issue with it: spectacle. the piece was clearly about being the "black sheep" and embracing that, embracing others, embracing yourself -- and then, getting naked and celebrating life in the face of so many dying. interesting, but not *new.*

how strange to sit there and watch all this "radical art" taken in very calmly and appreciatively by people who could afford $60 tickets -- aging hipsters? art world people gone mainstream? successful artists? hard to tell. (we got in on the Asylum Street Spankers' coat-tails -- their show beforehand was far more genre-busting, in my humble opinion.)

what is the New? what are we reacting against now? is the highly political, narrative work that dominates slam/"performance poetry" a reaction against the experimentation of the 60s/70s? is there a way to create that doesn't take us backward?

back when I first started seriously doing the poetry/open mic thing, a woman named Lisa Hemminger told me that we poets need to journal our influences, to keep track of who we were reading while we were writing what, to catalogue where poems came from. Lisa was (maybe still is?) purposely the star of her own movie, a runaway hit in her own mind.

so this is my twist on the blog livejournal madness. here I will not talk about what I had for lunch or who annoyed me on the subway or what have you. I will post random information about what I'm reading/hearing and what I think of it. maybe some writing exercises I'm working with. that's my story, now it's over.

to start off: the poet I'm currently adoring is Stephen Dunn. "Between Angels" and "Different Hours" contain some of the most precisely beautiful language I've encountered in a long while. there's a grace to it, an effortlessness that belies the craft -- the words seem to lift off the page like feathers, but feathers placed in such a way that whole birds appear if you care to look.

who knew? figured him for stodgy, but I was wrong (it's happened before, once or twice). at the risk of probably breaking major copyright rules, check this out:

SWEETNESS

by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

(from "Between Angels")