poetry overload part two
(ok, so i stopped writing for a sec and then passed out. good, i needed the sleep. meanwhile, back at the ranch…)
32 young poets. can i say that i have always had a good time at these youth slams. explaining it to another poet later in the evening– ‘ya know, when they talk about the revolution and changing shit, they really mean it. they are not part of the system yet, they’re not bitchin’ about the government while waiting for a fat tax refund.’
only one of the 32 decided to drop an epic (4 minutes plus) and most were actually under two minutes. duv real musick, a young cat from the bronx place in the top five and i was mad happy for him as him and his boy will give me some real hope in that generation. they both support each other, their poetry and get better at each reading i see them.
ms sarah kay stepped to the mic and announced that she was new to all this and then kicked everybody’s ass! she was so fuckin’ good. me and fish are in unilateral agreement that she played the crowd to garner some early sympathy… and it worked lovely. ima start doing that when i read at new spots!
some of hip-hops over emphasis on wordplay made it on stage and scored well while conversely another hip-hopper stayed focus on his message and scored low. go figure.
a few suburban youths came up and rocked the house by not trying to act overly oppressed and held down. see, this is the cool part of the youth slam. while some of the kids are most definitely using some archetypes to work off of, none of them are copying. they are all building.
factor in the five cups of coffee(!) i had and i was more than blaring to head to ‘westside rhyme’ and spit on the mic.
my caffeine high would hit the low road as the event started late and i crashed out. the good news was that omri, the singer/guitarist i collabed with at synonymUS, was there and he agreed to reprise ‘el ultimo canto’ with me. this version really kicked some ass and i hope omri is at 13 tonight so that we can do it again.
fish kicked ‘headlines’ really hard… and we were spent.
i would have loved to stay as dianne roi, lindsay halladay, shawn and karan rockower were still do to go up but i was beat. as was fish and he was my ride so you know how that goes.
so tonight is 13 and tomorrow is acentos and i havent been really writing about acentos in that i dont want to jinx anything.
i am just hoping that all the work fish and i have done produces a good crowd and a tight open mic. guy has a new chapbook set to debut that night and i can only view that as a good omen.