the great diction of nick fox

Last night we had the last slam we will have that is an actual slam before the big and all important national slam competition. This next month we will indeed have a slam but it will be a song slam that features the competitors performing their favorite tunes in spoken word form so that really can't too well prepare you for the demands of nationals. A bunch of important things transpired last night in the immense build up to nationals.

The members of the portland slam team are going through the frantic process of looking over everything they have with a fine tooth comb and deciding if they like it, love it, or will fight to make it work. A few of them decided to slam and test the material they had. It's a good deal better then testing out an anti-catholic piece in an all catholic area(as a hypothetical example).

Nick Fox came up to feature and we were very pleased to have him, I hadn't heard of him until Wil came back from Nationals last year and had met him and come back wide eyed and inspired. He would relay to me the functional practical and poetic advice that had been given to him in all kinds of situations each time referring back to the wise Nick Fox. By the time he came I had in my mind that this was Yoda I was meeting. Nick turned out to be a tall buy in a goofy hat who is soft spoken and savagely intelligent.

Nick has perfect execution. Amazing diction and his words are so powerful he doesn't need elaborate hand motions or funny dances he can just say it and you'll listen. The people their listened and gave a standing ovation for the first time in the history of our organization. We've managed to bring in some unbelivable folks but none of them had gotten a standing ovation, it was the process of getting to know his humor, and then his seriousness and heart and then learning all over again until you really liked him. I was already standing.

I hope the Slam team took it in the same way the audience did, sometimes its better to just be a reader, a viewer, a listener and later on once you've absorbed everything and your face to face with a blank pad of paper...be an artist again.

I do not support local artists

I support artists. I don't care what region you are from and just because I know you or met you in Seven Eleven and know that you rap/paint/write poetry doesn't mean a thing to me. I don't begrudge artists who are jerks, turds, or layabouts as long as your content is there. If you missed it there was a four elements hip hop show to sponsor our 2009 slam team put on this Tuesday and all of the artists were great. Grant Street Orchestra whom i had never seen before really were very impressive getting the crowd pumped up and playing flawlessly. Its hard to have that many people on stage and have it all make sense. A-Frame gets better everytime I see him perform but the focus for me was on Ill by Instinct.

He just put out a new album this month called Maiden Voyage and although Portland does have a strong hip hop scene sometimes it feels like a collective of talented battle rappers impressing each other and occassionally opening for important acts when they come through. Ill by Instinct dropped a REAL SOLID and well produced album the best I may have heard to come from a Portland MC.

Last night he showed up and gave a fantastic performance taking the stage with masterful control but deferring it to his DJ and to his crew to get their time in as well. It was amazing to see a guy who I used to slam against, who we all thought had talent but never knew how much, fully realize his skills and talent himself. Maiden voyage is an album that see's him doing what he's comfortable doing like battling(Feeding the engines track 6) but showing humor(Chastity Belt track 11) and changing the tempo from a dark beginning where he illustrates one man's problems fitting into a whole world of troubles to the latter part of the album that hums, sings and dances in mock celebration of the flaws we gather.

I'm not all pumped up on Ill by Instinct because I saw pieces of his maturation over time. I'm pumped because I spent $10 on an album I will be listening too for a long time and I found an artist who can make more and they might be better.

---------GO TO AMAZON.COM and buy the album via MP3 or find it locally

God has no genitals

Nate is going to kill me for this one. I had a different blog planned but I scrapped it, firstly, I have to appologize to anyone who reads this nutty thing I have been lacking in my blog posts and I am catching up TONIGHT!!



I run into a lot of weird people and our society has an amazing fascination with gender, when I was a kid we were a misogynistic group set on making women feel bad about their bodies but somewhere along the line the same group of marketing minds decided limiting this guilt education to women was cutting their demographic potential in half. Now we are just a society of awkward celebrity swimsuit pictures with funny captions on the bottom. This filters through the magazines to E! News network to the little guy. Those are my friends the little guys and sometimes they ask weird questions like what if god was a woman?



WAIT...you were assuming god was a man all this time? You seriously pictured god as a big almighty Lou Ferrigno stark naked just dangling for all to see. How big was God's penis in your estimation? Now that you made god a woman how big is her vagina? When I die can I get a job as one of god's vagina janitors?



These are the questions I think about. What the hell would god use a penis for? I thought genitals were created for reproduction, who is god going to reproduce with? The question has its grounds in that pseudo-intellectual what if god was one of us arguments about taking an all powerful being and turning him into someone you could drink a beer with or go to baby gap with.
I am not someone who has god all sewn up in my mind as a certainty or even as fiction but the religious people I admire spend more time begging the advice and less time finding out the details of gods junk.

Look at me!!!!!

Everything I have learned in my short time working with poets in the realm of Slam can be summed up in the title. If you haven't heard this slam piece you need too, don't look it up and read it you need to have it performed for you. Its the like folklore that lives through the stories enthusiastic parents tell to their children, every slam poet that reads it on any stage pulls heads towards him and for the first time it clicks what we do here.

The goal of slam is direct dialogue with the audience. Poetry like everything else is cut into sub genre's of people who do the same thing but think they are so different they wouldn't spit on each other to put out the fire. Academic poetry is what we call it. I would like to call it something else, calling any poetry outside of slam academic poetry makes it sound like Slam poets dislike the education system at large and this is not true. The argument we would have is against the overstructuring of poetry, the restriction that exists in adhering to thousand or two thousand year old formats. Slam poetry is more popular then Formal poetry(like my new term?) and it should be, its less convoluted and you can begrudge the simplicity and ease of not having a format if you want too but it reaches more people.

Lenny Bruce understood that there are certain things you can say on stage that the audience can't ignore. Swears. Jarring imagery and volume or lack of volume. If you can gauge what the audience thinks is normal and then do the opposite you will have them interested. This is the complication of simplicity because one you LOOK AT ME I have to say something important.

bad poetry

The dumbest idea associated with poetry is that somehow the very existence of poetry and it being makes it somehow beyond the concept of good and bad. Sometimes this happens with art where a guy walks in and throws a bunch of paint at a canvas and claims its art and for a minute everyone scratches their heads until one free thinking common sense pioneer says "Sure its art its just not good."

The idea that there is no bad poetry is tragic in the sense that if there is no bad poetry there can be no good since having nothing but "good" poetry would destroy the terms distinction. In the nature of full disclosure a lot of people i have heard say there is no bad poetry write nothing but what most consider bad poetry and fear being labeled appropriately.

I want to give a few broad components of what poetry really stinks so that I won't leave people thinking that i'm just on here vaguely maintaining that some poets suck. The most widespread problem is the fault of factuality, a poems basis has to be true if an audience is going to listen and accept it especially read from the stage. If you are reading a poem about your love for someone else the audience will accept it but if I was to read a poem about how Arby's sauce gives me superhuman strength and people should fear me I would be dismissed. Not saying that most poems fail due to false Arby's sauce statements but this holds true for people maintaining facts no one else has. If you begin your poem by telling me that JFK was killed by French Mafia assasins hired by the government I can't help but wonder why no one else but you knew that. It's hard to think about a need for factuality in poetry since most of us think of it as allowing us complete fictional creative control but your audience inhibits that with expectations especially in slam which was founded to combat overly sophisticated none sense poetry.

Second, a poem can be too aware of itself. You can track at times when someone is dropping imagery into verse not to bolster a point or the theme of the piece but for the charm of the imagery. Indeed some poems are taken over completely by the potency of constructed contrast in images made with no point at all but to work words in a pretty way. That is bad poetry. I don't care what anyone thinks poetry and literature in any form is supposed to be a heightened form of human communication and the bottom line is what are you communicating? Flowers are beautiful? Blood is weird? Molotov Cocktails? If you don't connect it you should work on it or walk away from it.

if your better at sex then poetry your not working hard enough on your poetry

So the big showdown went down and we had the most diverse group of nuts judging since Michael Keaton and his friends broke out of the nuthouse to experiance life(the movie Dream Team) I didnt agree with a lot of stuff but Tina Smith did a new piece which I thought was going to end up biting her in the ass. Doing a new piece at a big event can make you choke on it but she delivered and people loved it, it was a superb piece.

I don't know if anyone had as much guts as Jazzy who literally guts herself on stage night after night pushing her performance further and further. Jazzy does not inspire me to write she scares me away from ever wanting to be up there, how could i match that energy? The cool part is she is still developing and I can't wait to hear her stuff years from now as she explores new content.

Sam Tietel I felt got robbed I love everything he does and sometimes I feel like the audience doesn't attend his words enough. A lot of his stuff is jarring and uncomfortable but to not score him highly enough because of that is running from the simple fact that life is full of uncomfortable shit you have to deal with. Anyway he still got a spot on the team.

Nate was Nate and if I brag about how good he is too much more i'm going to start to feel like Alicia Silverstone from The Crush chasing after the dude from the princess bride.

Wil made a concious choice as all the poets who came up started speaking louder and louder and signifying to get everyone's attention he pulled himself in and whispered to them. The motion worked and it was like a secret that everyone wanted to hear all of a sudden. He took it to the house and came back with a 29.8 which is .2 away from a perfect score.

Sean chocked by the way, no pleasant way to say it. Did exactly what I tell everyone not to do, started (a new piece) and then when he lost his place walked off stage. In the second round he left 59 seconds into his big blockbuster father piece. I was unhappy about it VERY unhappy and a lot of people were especially after his first round heroics but the kid sure did provide a lot of drama through this thing and he is such a complex character that the riddle of Sean might be fun to think about but have no answer. I thank him for giving us his incredible work and I can't make fun of him for screwing up in the second round, some of us didn't even make it there.

To those who made it congratulations, now the preparation begins.

hot and heavy

That is most likely the weather that the selected five people who win tonight will suffer through August 4th-8th in West Palm Beach Florida when they compete nationally in the SUMMERSLAM OF POETRY JAM'S!!! I just made that up but i am not copyrighting it if they are interested in using it. The final 8 are an impressive bunch with Wil leading the way followed by the New Hampshire Hammerhead Sam, Ripcord Ryan and Natradamus amadon. I didn't give Wil a nickname because honestly....isn't that just what he wants another freakin' nickname i say NO MORE!

Sean made the bravest comeback since comic book movies became popular again (YEAH!) and the number nine person(me) was .3 away from making it to #8 which just means YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE it was awesome. You should be at the north star cafe tonight around 7 just to give yourself time to get amped up for the big joust. Poets poking each other with words, it will be a sight and the top four are on the team while the 5th gets to be the alternate.

I will be doing the duties as host and I can't tell you how nervous these guys are tonight it is everything they worked for and worked VERY hard for and they are putting it all on the line, one mistake one pause that lasts too long can cancel everything. All the time i spent projecting out in my head who would get what spot is meaningless now. Its up to circumstance.