socks

You will like Jay Davis, I'm not pre-supposing on you. Your certainly entitled to come to your own conclusion BUT its going to happen. He's tall and whenever I see him he's smiling walking with a slow labored feel he won't even have to talk to you. You'll like him and when he sits on a stool on stage at the North Star in the future(its going to happen) and reads you his work you'll continue to like him it will add another dimension to the way you like him.



I put him up there with anyone, Jack McCarthy, Patricia Smith even NATHAN AMADON. That's right I said it. I always felt odd early on in the veritas days, people were reading poetry and getting big applause they would read pieces and say "GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT" and people would scream and applaud or "BUSH SUCKS" same reaction. It seemed to be about making all the anger in your life about serious issues compact and visual in your performance. I wasn't like that, I never really wrote anything in anger just long stories that ended with a sad quiet dignity or the promise of hope. My nickname early on could have been Wet Noodle.



Whenever Jay came and read I sat and stared at him trying to learn. He is the perfect mixture of sad, funny, intelligent, philosophical, hopeful, humble, EVERYTHING I aspired to be. That's how I felt the first time i saw him years ago and thats even more how I feel today after buying his book SOCKS at Longfellow Books. Leave it to Jay to create an environment in that book where a bad poem can't live, every one speaks like he does with deliberate care and purposeful humor while trying desperately to cover up the part of him thats sad. Not glum but horrified lightly by the inequalities of life, the violence, everything those kids were yelling about he hides in a dark corner of his poetry and leaves it up to the reader to find it.



I have a poem I call the nose poem that I read sometimes, its for my girlfriend and its sappy like me. I read it while Jay was there and when we both walked outside he turned to me and said "That nose piece was great. If I was a girl, I would have fucked you."



I spent the whole night giddy and waiting and when my girlfriend finally walked in I pulled her close and said "JAY DAVIS SAID HE WOULD FUCK ME!!!" Then i told her the full story.



Bottom line is if your in Portland go to Longfellow Books and buy Socks for $8 or you can go to the moonpie press website I think they have it setup so you can order it online. Jay taught me that its ok to make people laugh and that its not un-artistic to do that, he reaffirmed my notions of responsibility as an author that when you write something its your job to lead the reader to the point...if you have a point. He made me so jealous I always feel like I should have a point.

the monster

The stage is a beast. Nothing the north star cafe can do about it, you can't beat it away with a broom stick or hire an exterminator. The stage is a monster and its our fault. It happens when people get together something changes, the pressure of a collective group in attention to one spot one place one person changes everything. I have seen the most brilliant minds go up with stuff I could only dream to have written or the opportunity to read and they shake and shiver and stutter until the eyes turn away. They come off stage with a hang dog look chewed up and spit out by the monster.

The stage is magic as well it comes with the illusion, I've seen people fall in love with it. I've seen people go up and wondered if they would ever leave it, looking at their face and how happy they were to have everyones attention. I'm like that too but good enough to be embarrassed about it. The illusion is in that sugar high ego boost you get when you do it just right and people you don't know pat you on the back. Its a hall of mirrors and you walk through it confused until your like Bruce Lee at the end of Enter the Dragon and you just start smashing them.

People walk out on you to have cigarettes or just meander but you can't begrudge after all who doesn't love to meander? I've seen people change fighting the monster, they win, they lose, they win again and after a while they become grizzled vets who march up and do better then i can on their worst day. It does something to you over time and it takes a super-spiritual balanced person like Nate to really check those emotions. Its easy to feel like a star on this stage even when you were supposed to make the poem, the piece....the star.

The healthiest way to look at the monster is like this whole thing is an experiment. Like an experiment you should have a hypothesis, if your desired effect is to go onstage and arrange dirty words in a way to put people out of their comfort zone. DO IT! I've seen it before and love it. If your desired effect is to pay tribute too or run down someone in your life. DO IT! I've seen it before and I love it. You do this to see how words look in the light of other people's minds, is the idea strong enough to survive a live transition? Or is it going to live in your notebook next to the unfinished story you wrote about being a space man? I never know but I'm never scared to try, i'm nervous and my hands shake like leaves and i feel like i'm going to throw up but I don't.
I have almost cried, those are the best times what scares a group of people more then a person about to come to tears in front of them on stage? Nothing.

The key is to keep imagining keep closing your eyes and sorting through the stuff that might be good. Keep carving it and sanding it down and present it proudly. We'll all know the work you put in. Trust me.

tommorow I lose my virginity

If you do anything enough you do it better. This would probably be what i've learned above all with Port Veritas. On July 4th our first Anthology comes out, we started preparing it years ago when I would harrass Nate every night he hosted about it. "Do you need me to send you more stuff? I have more stuff!" I already had a lot of stuff, but it wasn't the stuff that we have now. I kept bugging Nate and talking to Wil about it and asking for participation from everyone but Santa.

Finally Nate turned it over to me and I began bugging the authors a lot of them without saved, edited documents they just turned over to me multiple crumpled notebooks sometimes with two or three different versions of the same piece. It was terrible because poet notebooks are all in some disgusting bombed out version of cursive. I HATE YOU CURSIVE!

I read them and re read them and sometimes i called the authors to run a part by them but in going through the process of saving them on documents and filing them under one folder I fell in love all over again with the wide spectrum of ideas that exist under our umbrella. We settled on the perfect picture to represent it just a deserted Portland street whistling with the lives of so many crossing paths sometimes incidentally sometimes purposefully and forever.

At our best that is how we are and I'm going to buy ten copies. I'm going to force my mother to read some of it. I'm going to march with it and keep beating the drum until the sound is perfect, its what we've all done. Tommorow is not a big deal in the end. Just ask Nate about next year.

To Saul

Dear Saul Williams,

First of all I should thank you, because if Slam poetry is an artform then to be legitimate every artform needs its Louis Armstrong. A talent to blow harder and more passionately then anyone else of his time in a way that leaves everyone after touched by the influence.

Thank you for performing live at Brandeis University, if I hadn't seen that show I wouldn't know the truth. That through the blistering words and hand motions through the metaphors and raps it is a man giving them not a prophet or a god or even a celebrity.

I saw you laugh and stumble, mess up and go back again like we do. It was like seeing Samson pick a wedgie. I was only mad that I could share this with all the other people that know you as MISTER BAD ASS POET SUPREME that memorize your lines and constantly repeat that write their own but are all tied to yours. We're all tied to you and so some of us watch old tapes or read the old poems and say "I find it kind of pretentious now" but I don't know if we believe it. We're writers too scared of losing the past to degrade it too far but never willing to value someone on such a large scale together. It seems weird.

I even bought that weird industrial album you sold over the internet with the cover of u2's Sunday Bloody Sunday..........yeah...I look forward to you moving in new directions.

Some of us aren't as in love with the industrial sound as you are.

It's so scary that after all these years your still the face of us, so much work so much progress and we can't get away from that. SHA-CLACK CLACK I WAS BEFORE THAT!!!!

Thanks Saul

the kid

My memories are balls of yarn they tangle up into each other over time so things are hard to differentiate. I have to start at the start. When we first started performing at the North Star Cafe we couldn't believe we noticed this kid behind the counter and strangely enough he would sign up and perform at the end of the night. Poets don't like people so a lot of us grumbled and to us he was "one dimensional" with too much "gun talk" but Wil liked the kid.

Everytime Wil and the kid worked together that next week he come out even better then before even more determined. The kid's name is Sean and he was 17 at the time, Wil and him started hanging out and since I hang out with Wil I got to see him work. He worked harder and better and faster then any of us ever anticipated so we kept pushing him. Little by little everyone got excited I think all for different reasons.

The night that all this introduction wraps into is the night Sean got his own full feature at the North Star Cafe on our night. He had gone from background to best kept secret to feature and he represented all of us on that night. Everything he did right we had encouraged and pushed him so we all won with him. I have never seen the North Star that packed. I remember seeing people looking in from the windows, not smoking just drawn in by him. I wish I could describe it right and I tried, Wil and I wrote dueling introductions for him and read them one after another on that night. I still have mine here it is.

I'd call him Kid Kinetic if i had to throw a nicknamethe type of dude that's loud even in a moment of silence
Eighteen going on thirty, fuck an old soul his is just worldly
like it got popped with shots and got up off the gurney
The kid is in motion learning as he goes that's the scariest part of it.
When i see him suck all the air out of the room i'm thinking fuck, he's not even at his peak.
Not even trying to spit game just lace every line with enough slick shit to incite sickness he can't make the blind see but he makes loud people quiet
uses dramatic pauses like pro players use balco to cheat I should tell you the kid is dope in its pure form Hot in a snow storm I'd call him that cause ain't shit more valuable then dope thats why you can flip it The same adverbs from my hand to his get hotter now that's pushing hard weight in a serious way The best part is his best work is what he just finished so every pen stroke marks a new day for me I'm watching one man develop exponentially and behind the icy delivery and firm tone there is a great tragedy in the background of each poem It's what makes you think why is this young man so old? The triumph over adversity that you can hear verbally and the pain that comes through wordlessly its perfectly poetic accuracy cause you can personally know him as well as anyone by just listening.

He went on after Wil and I did the introduction and his sisters were there and everyone was spellbound, by the quiet shy swagger of this project kid. A kid that never smiled enough on this day was all white teeth exposed. Outside he hugged Wil and I and said "That was soooo Thorough. " I hope it was, I hope its somewhere near as thorough as we all pictured ourselves being not to get attention from people but for the advancement and betterment of others. We did a small thing for Sean that night that he pays back everytime he takes that microphone. Its a good deal.

Back from the dead like the democratic party

So I was on vacation in Puerto Rico for a week because my job makes me take vacation and I figured if i traveled I could help this flaundering American economy. WORKING LIKE A CHARM by the way, but I'm back and ready to run down memory lane with the people that i force to read this.

It starts at Wil's house just sitting around as a lot of stories start, a lot of us would find ourselves there listening to music and comparing notes. Its like it must have been for old comics starting out where Rodney Dangerfield see's Richard Lewis and says "Hey I got this new one, tell me what you think." We all wanted to know what each other thought before we went on stage and worked it. Reading something for an audience that sucks but you didn't know it sucks until just then really does suck.

Will Antony is kind of a man for all seasons, he can sing like he knows what he's doing, dance the same way, and when he lines everything up he can dance down some amazing poetic notions the one's we've all tried before and he can do them better. Somehow we were talking about the deadliest word in language. The C-word, now if you dont know what i mean by this I am not even allowed to explain it, that is how untouchable this word is right now dont think elliot ness untouchable think lowest class in India untouchable.

One of my friends had written a piece a long time ago where he calls his girl the C-word and then she slams the door in his face. Crowd still wasn't happy, even the exchange of one word for a wood door to the face didn't seem even. I stay away from the word altogether, so does Wil and most of us agreed but working with words as long as a lot of us have...well...having one out there that you know you can't touch...its just unnerving. Will Antony had done it, he leveraged his piece with so much positive uplifting inspiration that by the time he said the C-word he was confident the women in the crowd would unite around. The sentence was "have the nerve to call your woman ho, bitch, C-WORD and then kiss your mother with them lips." So you get the idea, for once scratching our heads like apes we felt we had done it. Or at least he had.

Boy did he deliver, on that tuesday he went up on that stage and belted it out lamenting the poor communications between the sexes and all the time I've got sweaty palms thinking HE IS GOING TO SAY THE C-WORD and god bless him he did and there were about three women in the crowd that cheered like John Lennon came back and sang the most beautiful song about C-Words ever. He nailed it. They loved him. They still do.

Last time I talked to him I really had begun to feel the deep strange uniqueness of Will Antony everyone I know knows him from somewhere and you know what? They all love him, you just can't help it. He's just someone who likes to end a conversation with a smile and something happy and ends a poem most times the same way.

The real Dear Mama

All of the moments I've thought about writing for this blog feel like the biggest and most important when you think of them individually. This one even moreso then some others, I know Wil Gibson a lot of people do that have attended Port Veritas. He's more then a regular or a core part of the group like Juba he's one of great monuments for us like the grand canyon.
I know him outside of this context I've seen him work, seen him memorize and plow forward just as hard offstage as on. On one Saturday hanging around with him at his place(in a terrible part of town a block from where I live) he read me a new poem he had written and I was unprepared for it. It was too much for me at the time, i told him was him hitting a "next level" just because I knew that It was so beyond where I could ever go.

That next tuesday came around and there's no point buying a fast car if your not going to pick a lonely highway to ride it on. He was destined to do the unveiling and Nate was hosting which was perfect. Nate will always be that top dog that forces Wil to surpass his best continually. Nate introduced him briefly and stepped aside so it could start.

His voice was low and he coughed out some of the words, I was getting it this time letting it connect to me. It was so scary because it could, no it will be me. Wil had written a poem not to be a poem at all but as a simple letter to his mother. Its scary because Wil loves his mother like I do, like no one or nothing ever touches that not even Dad not even faith not even GOD.

She's dead. She died a long time ago but as he read he was singing to us the song of constant sorrow the side of you that never recovers from the most important thing being gone. Dear Mama, he said and he appologized for not being enough for not amounting to the greatness she gave him every day. It wasn't just me who felt that shit, everyone was blown right out of position people were crying and wiping away tears. It took everything for him to hold together thats how I knew and how he knew that this was the perfect piece. When he left stage Nate was speechless and took a moment...Nate's a pro and he doesn't usually need a moment.

He read that piece again for me a while ago and its always frozen in the moment, after he was done he had to put his notebook away. It takes a lot out of him. It takes a lot of all of us but it puts a lot back in, a lot about being human.
thanks Wil.