hey folks -- what up?  what up?  what up?  warm grey day in brooklyn.  just got into the studio, airplanes overhead, feeling wired, awake, like i wanna go back to bed, but miles to go before i sleep, miles to go before i sleep. 

last week at washington state university was DOPE!  much love to bola, the salmon creek journal crew, the portland poets who came through and made the trek across the river.  nestled right between mount hood and mount st. helen's -- i was struck by what a beautiful meditative place it was out there -- and lots of poetry talent just burning in the coals just waiting to come together and ignite :)

spent a lot of time this weekend recuperating and gettiin' de-funked from travel toll on the body -- i figured out last week i spent at least 40 hours alone in planes, trains, cars -- and that ain't even counting the subway -- so i got to enjoy being still and reading to stretch the lyrical brain (finishing up augusto boal's theatre of the oppressed, major jackson's hoops, and starting david sedaris' when you're engulfed in flames) --

this is the week that i FINISH the solo show!  it's been a looong time coming, but as of next week's blog the good first working draft that i'll actually be satisfied with will be done, and infinite learning in the process between setting the tentative pen to the page so long ago to the crisp margins that will have to be further destroyed and resurrected over the next couple of months in revision and rehearsal, but feelin' good, feelin' great about that. 

ahhh, completion.  the idea of doing less with more :)  more time, more care, more quality, more devotion.  less with more.   

found an interesting essay online by dana gioia about poetry and spoken word and how even so-called page poets "publish" much more these days through performance and less so through actual book publication -- i.e. the listening public for poetry is bigger than the reading public for poetry of every genre even back in 1993 when he wrote the essay -- if you wanna peep that it's right here: "notes towards a new bohemia" -- that...and listening to a lot of 'lil wayne this week -- what'd he just say -- "i fly high like a pet canary" --? ha :)

which made me think -- 'cuz i was doing my post-performance workshop with the students at washington state university, i was breakin' down how poetry has always been a LIVING art to me -- growing up watching the ol' slam poets in chicago, you could be anyone, from anywhere, you had a right to these words, you had a right to be understood, you had a right to understand others.  poetry for our lives, for the people, for existence and beyond.  none of this disconnected bullshit, this cryptic bullshit, this you'd need to know this whole other slew of writers to understand what i'm talking about bullshit.  poetry as i believe it should be - that belongs deeply and uniquely to every one of us.

and we were talkin' about how it's too bad that when shakespeare is taught in school, when beowulf is taught in school -- it's taught COMPLETELY out of context.  beowulf was an oral tradition -- passed down to person to person -- we barely hear the rhythm and the rhyme scheme of the old greeks because of translation and more importantly we don't learn what those works might have meant to those people in the time that they were made. 

they're just held up as the classics.  these are "good" forever ever -- when what they are, are snapshots that meant something to someone, somewhere, some time.  person to person, life to life, messy, imperfect, incomplete, and human.  kinda like us. 

and in augusto boal's book he wrote about how shakespeare's plays always start with a fight or a ghost because the actors had to figure out a way to get people to shut the hell up before the performance started.  he said that most of the time people were trying to hook up at the show, there were vendors all around -- and dudes would shout to the vendors to try to buy women boxes of oranges instead of drinks (yeah, i never learned about that in school) -- so all of this goin' on, while they're trying to get the play started -- and he also mentioned to imagine what live performance was like before electricity (wow, i'd never thought of that before) -- no light, no mic, no amplification, just you and a rowdy-ass crowd of people that ain't got nothin' else to do --

not much like the orderly high-ticket-paying theater audiences of today or the readers of works hand-picked by today's literary hierarchies -- more like a spoken word, hip hop, punk, or rock concert, more like a dj, b-boy, or mc battle, more like something that's relevant to all of us --

um, hm.  that's what i thought.

here's to remembering our lives, work, and CREATIVE EXPRESSION in context --

blessings,
kells