waxing poetic on performance poetry

Tonight's reading was fabulous. I really enjoyed everyone's work and it was great to see some old friends. Particularly rockin' the house were CA Conrad, Marty McConnell and Guillermo Castro.

Afterwards, I got to have dinner at Maryann's with four very cute boys. We chatted about fashion, art, bad poetry, sex, relationships, the usual. I realized I hadn't hung out with a group of guys in a while. We laughed a lot and enjoyed the always awesome Maryann's fare.

Recently, I went through a box of keepsakes and found some old poetry reading flyers dating back to 1993! I was 20 years old and that summer I started using the name Cheryl B. and doing open mics at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, eventually being asked to do the big Friday night Slam and winning multiple times, without ever making it into the semi-finals thus earning me the title "the Susan Lucci of the poetry slam." But slamming and performance poetry opened up a whole new world of creativity, community and friends (also lots of crap that I won't get into here) but for the most part it's been fantastic. As a performance poet, I've quite literally traveled the world, made awesome friends in so many different cities, been treated like a minor celebrity, been paid obscene amounts of money to read (very rare, but on occasion), and basically had a ball. At this point I know that I'm never going to be one of the big spoken-word stars but I feel that I've been blessed beyond reason and luckier than most of the writers out there.

I left the Slam scene many, many years ago and I'm feeling less like a "performance poet" these days and more like a prose writer. Still, I love poetry. The worlds it can create with so few words, the transformative nature of a good reading, the amazing cosmic connection it can make with an audience. Okay, I'm sounding a little too new-agey here, but I think it's true.