www.traversepoetry.org

I just thought I’d take a moment to reassure you all that Traverse poetry slams will be back at The Front this year. I’ve updated the events page of this site with all the dates for the 2010 slams, which (fingers crossed) won’t change.

The first slam at The Front for 2010 is on Thursday 25 February.

Meanwhile, I also wanted to let you know about a couple of interesting poetry websites I’ve been to recently. The first, myslam.net, is a slam community set up by Wolfgang, a German slammer, with excellent coverage of slams around the world, particularly ones in western Europe. I’ve done my bit and added the Traverse slam to the map (I’ll flesh out the details page soon). The site seems like it could be very useful for connecting slammers in Australia (particularly touring poets) so I recommend you join up and pass on the details on to other slammers.

The second site, Poetry, Pure Poetry, is more geared to online collaboration and has some very exciting features to assist in running poetry groups. It’s all very new and fresh at the moment but looks like it could be an excellent tool for the poetry community – check it out!

Yes, these updates have been few and far between. I apologise. I’m moving to a nine-day fortnight this week so hopefully there’ll be some more time to devote to this blog soon.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago we had another good slam, with a whole bunch of new faces. In fact, our second place winner had never performed before…

1. CJ (on why he’s too boring to be a poet!)
2. James Douglass
3. Anthony

A couple of days later Daniel Ferri, David Finnigan and I ran an enjoyable workshop at C Block. About half the people who signed up turned up but, in fact, we only just managed that number in the time we had, so all was well. Hopefully we’ll see some of these wonderfully talented people at forthcoming slams!

Now, a couple of links readers might find interesting:

• Poetica – Poets of Papua New Guinea: part one and two (I found the first part more interesting than the second, but both are good).
• Visible Tweets: ‘poetry’

Each year I go through the winners of the Webby Awards (the internet’s answer to the Academy Awards) looking for interesting websites I’ve never heard of. This year I found two links of relevance to this blog’s readers: one directly and one indirectly.

Live Hope Love

Poet Kwame Dawes’s work on people living in Jamaica with HIV. The only criticism I have of this is that the poetry (recorded audio on the site as well as scrolling text) and the photos are individually so strong and interesting that they are sometimes just too much together. I suggest you close your eyes and listen to the poetry and then view the images afterwards.

Wordle: traversepoetry.org

And this is something just plain fun: choose a blog and see words magically arrange themselves into a cool clouds, such as my wordle for traversepoetry.org

Just a quick post tonight, about an excellent recording of Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Howl’, along with some other interesting pieces by Anne Waldman. Well worth checking out.

On a tangentially related note, I recently read Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Signal to Noise which inspired me to track down a copy of the Babble! program which I’m planning to have a play around with soon to generate some cut-up poetry.