Hey all,
Sit tight. It’s going to a longer one.
I used to do it a lot of testing out poems at reading series around Ottawa before the Great Crash of the Year I was Dead, and moved out of the province. I used to get out a couple to a few night a week year round. There was such a bubblebath of options. Unless you wanted a series at 8am, you were probably in luck.
The spoken word scene was packing rooms, halls, auditoriums with hundreds. John Akpata said he performed to 1200 in Ottawa back then.
It was a thing for a poet to pull in 60 or 80 people, sometimes more. Sometimes only a dozen but it’s the reaching a person, not the bums in seats that matter, well, except for funding applications.
The thing is every good thing runs on volunteers and volunteers wear out, get jobs, get sick, die, move on and planned succession doesn’t always get the torch across the river of time. And some trends pop like bubbles. A lot of reading series have folded and crowds shrunk.
Some events still are mercifully on zoom that makes for wider access. Facebook may be less functional for reach about events but still works to a degree.
Even having said that much, I don’t understand how people post weekly or more with salient things to say. (Or not in the case of a couple newsletters I unsubscribed from, not.) Even the energy to put a sentence together that’s clear can be taxing. (Boy, am I complaintsy today.)
What I came here about was to reflect on National Poetry Month more broadly.
I set myself the challenge of poems that stayed with me over at bluesky. With walls of books, there must be some I’d want to write on the interior ineffaceably. There must be among them pivots I treasure, moments that made me. Not promoting what’s new and cool but personal chestnuts of what others gave to the culture. When that challenge was over, I kept on more #NPM sharings. The account was originally for not-poetry but since I deleted twitter’s remains, I let poetry out over there too.
It seems I’m not exempt from the profundity hook. Meaning and significance is becoming more important to me again. Whatever could that mean?
Next I’ll write of the last reading I did then I might fall silent until the flip side of the next later-May event.
I’m thinking for fall I may restart phafours press from hiatus. So maybe a chapbook or two coming out for November.