Time for a bit random silliness.
In the same week I discovered (thanks to this blog) that pogonology is the study of beards (or facial hair to be precise), I also found this amusing poem from Big Poppa E on Mongo’s livejournal.
Warning: contains grown-up words! (and unadulterated beard loving!)
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.
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.
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
This week I did a spot at a CIT creative writing class on performance poetry. It was a bit rough but the students seemed to enjoy the pieces. One of the ones I performed was mentioned in this earlier post which has links to a video and transcript. On the subject of video, you can now watch the grand final of the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam on the ABC website, as well as pieces by indiviudal poets.
E-news subscribers already know this but, for your benefit, the next slam:
Friday 24 April
7.30pm – 11.30pm
The Front Gallery and Café, Wattle St, Lyneham
Featuring new local band ‘ah, pandita!’
Hope your weekend is truly egg-cellent!
Ok it’s late and it’s damn hot. Too hot to think about work or anything else (so hot in fact, three snakes tried to crawl their way into my office building today), so rather than and write anything insightful I’m going to post this video of Big Poppa E performing the Wussy Boy Manifesto, which I originally heard about through the excellent IndieFeed: Performance Poetry podcast. It’s not the best performance I’ve seen but the recording is very good and, well, you get the idea. Enjoy!
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.
Late last year a guy called Matthew Robertson contacted me to promote the Human Rights Torch Relay through the slams at The Front. Just a few months ago he sent me a link to an interesting item from The New York Times, on one teacher’s use of poetry in a Philadelphia school. It’s quite short but still heartening:
We show 32 young urban voices how to ask probing questions about a text, a formula, or a problem in their communities. We use those questions to flavor each unit plan that we prepare. The end product works much like that call-and-response piece that shouts ‘Listen!’ and quiets all sidebar conversation. The audience owns the words too. The kids are more inspired to pay attention. The artist is more inspired to bring the noise.
Hope you all have a great end of year break.
One of Bonnie’s colleagues passed on a link to this article in the Times Online about Josephine Hart’s poetry events. There’s a wonderful quote from the article selected by Bookninja that’s worth repeating:
Going to a library to listen to an actor read poems is not, she insists, an act of self-improvement. ‘It’s allowing yourself to stop depriving yourself of what is incandescently beautiful in life. To deny yourself that is voluntarily to starve your soul. And if your soul is starved it is impossible to be happy. Modern life makes it hard for people to feed their souls, and that’s what people find there. They’re on a starvation diet and they come out and they suddenly think: “My god! This is a feast!”‘
‘After all, what is it that makes us human? It is language. And poetic language is the most rare form. It’s like a gem because the wisdom and insight of the poet is compressed into it. It’s a thrilling thing that a line can set off in your mind a whole world of potential experience. Either it inspires you in terms of wanting certain experiences, or it can help you to treasure the experience within those lines. And therefore life, for the short time we’re on this Earth, is immensely enriched.
Beautiful stuff.
Hagioscope which, according to wikipedia, means:
an opening through the wall of a church in an oblique direction, to enable the worshippers in the transepts or other parts of the church, from which the altar was not visible, to see the elevation of the Host.
It also appears to be the name of someone’s blog.
I wrote it down in my journal after discovering one in Whitby.
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www.traversepoetry.org
