I’m interested in adding audio equipment to my writing toolbox. So, I think I need some gear. I’m posting this to solicit any advice from musicians, technicians and writers: what works and what doesn’t? How can I do these things sufficiently well, on the smallest possible budget?

• I have a decent XLR microphone. I have a computer with a decent sound card. What is the best way to connect the two?
• I want to manipulate voices. Is that done with a vocoder? Do I need hardware or software for that?
• I want to be able to edit recordings. I’ve used Garage Band, and it’s nice, but I don’t have a mac. Is there something that is comparably user-friendly for the PC?
• With all of these things, I don’t want to get overwhelmed by tinkering with equipment. The point, for me, is to get down to creative work.

I’ve been working up to this for a while, now. When I interview people for articles, I always bring along my handheld MP3 audio recorder. I just love that thing. Sometimes, I also use it to record spoken word performances. The spoken word album, of course that required the use of some (more advanced) audio equipment. Recently, while working on the script for a play, some friends of mine used an iphone to record a cold reading of the script, which will allow me to “hear” the characters for the first time. Also for that play, I’ve been listening to a lot of strange music, to give myself a sense of setting.

About four years ago, I lived in a “live-in studio space” a warehouse loft in a Baltimore building they call The Copycat. I had so much space! I actually had several spaces while living there, but the last one was about 800 square feet and I devoted most of it to a writing studio. Now, I live in a very different space, and I am not so interested in the space itself as I am with tools that are available to me. In particular, I’m interested in adding audio tools to my writing toolbox. Even so, I think it will be fun to figure out how to set up a more audio-friendly writing space.

I got the idea for “writing with audio” during my visit to New York a couple weeks ago, I learned something interesting about The Wooster Group. I have a friend who works with them. They’re an experimental theater group who incorporates video into many aspects of their lives: they take direction in some sense from video of all kinds, they video blog during creative retreats, their vlog has all kinds of stuff in it, the performances are recorded by video and in some sense the performances are also a response to all this video. So, for these guys, video opens up a lot of creative possibilities. I think audio would be the thing for me to open up creative possibilities.

WORMS

If you don’t know what WORMS is, you’re about to. WORMS is an interactive literatary magazine in 3D. WORMS is The Champagne of Beers of Literary Readings. Do I have to spell it out for you? Ok. It’s spelled W.O.R.M.S.

Anyway, the next installment of WORMS is next Wednesday. It will feature the words, faces and voices of Erin Gleeson, Jesse Heffler, Ashlie Kauffman, Robert Schreur.

That’s WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16 at The Bell Foundry (1539 N Calvert) in Baltimore. Admission is free, but you’ll want to have some $ on hand to buy independent publications, concessions and the like. Oh yeah. Wear a nice coat.

A video interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air” created by Eclectic Schlock.

Play Audio

Spoken word, cut-up text, by William S. Burroughs

Tonight, the flamingos will be flying with Baltimore’s best “Death in Hampden” poetry, along with bands Midway Fair, Baltimore String Felons, and Vib!

Come out to Frazier’s on the Ave at 7:00p.m. for A Flamboyance of Flamingos. Hear a flock of poets and three stellar bands, all while supporting the city’s Health Care for the Homeless. At $5 at the door, we’re an evening of gloriously kitschy entertainment!

Wear your best Boh, Utz, Hon, or flamingo impression and rock the joint with your awesomeness. Participate in our flamingo-calling contest–don’t know what a flamingo sounds like? Neither do we! Make one up, toss back a shot, and have at it, hon.

I was the featured poet for !SPEAK YOUR PIECE! on Wednesday, July 14, 2010. This weekly, featured poet and open mic poetry event takes place every Wednesday night at Singer’s bar & Restaurant in Mount Vernon, 227 West Chase Street. The event is always preceded by an open mic.

I read a selection of poems from my first spoken word album, Strange Punctuation. I also read a few pieces, some published and some from a manuscript I’ve been working on. The final piece was a work of performance art involving six telephones. I wrote about my plans for this piece, almost a year ago. Its title is “Yes, No, I don’t Understand” but the performance setup is something I like to call “A Piano Made of Telephones” I imagine that I can do several things with the old telephones.

poem: Answering Machine Message
Download audio file (04-Answering-Machine-Message.mp3)

prose: Augury
poem: This Poem Isn’t About Wine
poem: An Acquired Taste
poem: Eviction
poem: A Game of Musical Chairs
poem: Make Your Own Fun
poem: Clouds
prose: A Piano Made of Telephones

Play Audio

It was an enjoyable challenge to create this spoken word album.

I brought a manuscript of poems to the recording studio, along with some very old notebooks. In the first session, we recorded words only. In later sessions, we edited the original recordings by adding layers of other sounds to them. It was important to be associative rather than strictly illustrative.

Along the way, I discovered that editing sound is very much like editing printed words. You can add, subtract, rearrange the sounds in very much the same way that you can on the page. With sound there are other ways to edit. You can revise the speed, pitch, volume, echo and decay of the words. It was this discovery that prompted me to title the album “Strange Punctuation”.

I’m about to release my first spoken word album! Its title is “Strange Punctuation”. All but one of the tracks are finished, and I’m working on a chapbook that will fit into the CD cases. It was an enjoyable challenge to create this album. Here are some notes about the process.

This spoken word album began as a manuscript of poems. After I had finished collecting all the poems together into one printed set, I had grown frustrated with the manuscript. Then, Curt Seiss at Magnanimous Records called and asked if I had any material for a recording. I brought my new manuscript to the recording studio, along with some very old notebooks.

In the first session, we recorded words only. Between readings, Curt left the microphone on, and captured a lot of random conversation. The original idea had been to dissect this conversation, for its miscellaneous syllables, and to use those syllables as though they were musical notes. This, of course, would have removed the sounds from the context of language. They wouldn’t be words anymore. We abandoned that idea.

In the subsequent sessions, we edited the original recordings by adding layers of other sounds to them. At first, this felt to me like “illustration”, although Curt encouraged me to think about sounds in an associative way, rather than to find literal sound effects to accompany the poem. I guess one exception to that rule was “Clouds”. With that piece, we added all the sounds of an open mic night at a bar. At the end, we added a heckler who laughs at me. It really does sound like this was a live recording!

Along the way. I discovered my favorite part of the entire process. Editing sound is very much like editing printed words. You can add, subtract, rearrange the sounds in very much the same way that you can do that with the characters on the page. With sound, though, there are some new ways to edit. You can revise the speed, pitch, volume, echo and decay of the sounds of the words themselves. It was this discovery that prompted me to title the album “Strange Punctuation”.

Now that most of the studio work is complete, the final piece of this project is coming together. I’m going to print a small chapbook to accompany the spoken word album. To illustrate the chapbook, I’m collaborating with a photographer – a lifelong acquaintance of mine, Molly Humphreys Aguilar. Again, the goal here is not to illustrate, but to associate. We had a brainstorming session last week at a coffee shop, and we discussed the thematic elements in the various pieces, and wondered what sort of imagery should accompany each one. Molly’s photo studio, Piccadilly Posh, specializes in natural light photography. Of course, most of her imagery comes from the outdoors. I can’t wait to see them.

I’ve included one of the tracks in this post. Take a listen, and please tell me what you think.

This is a recording from Sunday’s experimental music performance by Second Land. Second Land is an audio/visual collaborative effort between Luke Hazard, Curt Seiss and Dani Seiss. They use a vast array of vintage tape machines, acoustic instruments and electronic devices to perform an improvisational live set. I was honored to join them for this set. My musical instrument was a short wave radio, and I performed spoken word through a delay petal at low volume.

Second Land’s first, eponymous album is scheduled for release this winter.

Hot off the heels of a spoken word album that isn’t even hot off the presses yet, I’ll be on stage to perform from that album. As luck would have it, I’m the secret fifth member, for one night only, of an experimental music quartet namedSecond Land. My musical instrumentation is likely to include a radio and a slinky. More to the point, I’ll be lending spoken word to the performance.

That’s Sunday, Jan 25th at Pyramid Atlantic. 8230 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring MD 20910. 6:30 P.M. Other acts includeCannot Be Stopped, and the wonderfully titledThis Bag is Not a Toy.

It’s all part of a larger movement called Sonic Circuits.

The Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music was initiated by the American Composers Forum (ACF) to provide DC’s music and art communities with the opportunity to sample experimental and avant-garde electronic music, with an emphasis on improvisation and artistic use of new technologies.

Now heading into its eighth year, the festival includes electroacoustic compositions, experimental jazz, noise rock, electronic drone and experimental folk, as well as live video and film programs.

The Baker Artists Awards celebrate Baltimore’s artists on the Web with an ongoing exhibition of its diverse artistic practice, and the Mary Sawyer Baker Prize will establish Baltimore’s reputation as a creatively rich and vital place to live with a civic commitment to value its individual artists.

Please take a minute to visit my work on the Baker Artist Awards web site. As a Baltimore artist, I am eligible to win the significant Mary Sawyers Baker Prize or maybe bragging rights as Baltimore’s Choice. Either way, please follow the link and vote for me… and, if you live in Baltimore, you could also Nominate your own work! Now go sign-up and vote to help me get my work out there!

Visit my nomination at http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nomination/view/dylan-kinnett

Poets and spoken word performers from all over the United States are getting ready for the National Poetry Slam this August.

An exploration of poetry, scat, spoken word, cadence, and even rap and scat. Word to your mother!

Here it is folks, the video from episode 5 of the Ed Schrader Show. Here I am performing my spoken word routine. Enjoy.

Like I said before, I’ll be performing on the Ed Schrader Show on September 13th, at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore.

The Lineup

The Ed Schrader show always features a variety of shenanigans and this show should be no exception.

Honnie Wells & The Hundred Quart will perform music that has been described as “making Tom Waits look like a sissy”, with a bluesy raspy sound.

The more obscure Teeth Mountain will also perform.

The manager of Baltimore infamous night spot, The Talking Head, will make an appearance, presumably to discuss the reopening of the aforementioned night spot.

Baltimore’s self-styled vigilante super-hero, Blue Leader is sure to bring some gut-busting laughs to the whole affair. Check out his “Do The Math Comics” for even more laughs.

I’ll be performing spoken word, as well.

On Thursday, September 13^th at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery, I’ll be featured on the Ed Schrader Show. I’m really excited about the opportunity to perform some of my new spoken word material, in front of a live, televised audience. What should I perform?

I auditioned with the latest version of my perpetually-in-progress piece entitled “The Outside Talker“. With such short notice, I’m not sure I can come up with the entire garb I’d need to really pull it off. “The Outside Talker” is an imitation of a carnival barker, or sideshow announcer. I’d need a top hat, at the very least. I might decide to perform something else, instead.

I’ll need to practice, maybe memorize (yeah, right). Whatever happens, you’ll just have to see the show for yourself. If you’re not in the neighborhood, don’t worry, the whole show is usually syndicated online via YouTube, etc..

Since it’s a late show, there are sure to be plenty of gags and jokes, and perhaps some room for the kind of quick promotional suggestions that guests usually make on that type of show (I’ve got two, as it happens).

Again, I’m still not totally set on what to perform. Any requests?

Download audio file (thoughts-on-a-suitcase-1.mp3)

My first recording session was last Saturday, at Magnanimous Records. Normally, I suppose recording sessions are reserved for musicians and the like, but this was a spoken word recording. The goal is to eventually produce an album of some sort, but since it was the first time, we took it easy, and simply made recordings. Often, between takes, we digressed into conversation and jokes, and recorded some of that too.

Playing the recording back, I’m glad that there is some conversation on there. All too often, I think that writers read their work in a special voice, a voice they reserve for the solemn act of reading words on a page, and that voice is very unlike a normal voice. The recording shows me that I am guilty of that crime too. As a result, my favorite recording is actually a piece that I hate; I read the thing in an ordinary voice. What a difference that makes!

I’m excited about making this spoken word recording. Next time I read, I’ll know what I sound like, and I’m sure that helps.

The Spoken Word Page now includes:

• Spoken Word Defined
• Recordings of Spoken Word
• Information About Spoken Word

Before further ado, I give you: the Spoken Word page at NoCategories

You see, I got an email from Dan who writes,

I found your website very interesting on the things you have listed for Spoken
Word Poetry. I wrote down some of the links you gave so I can check them out. I am glad that
I came across your website. It seems to hard to find any sites with, or, about
spoken word poetry. Maybe somebody should start a site called the spoken word poets alliance or
something, that way we could all be found much easier.

To that end, I have created a place for that sort of content, a page, for now, on NoCategories.net. I’ll start by collecting resources, for people who want to find out about spoken word. That list will probably grow to include links to podcasts, homepages, and MP3 recordings by spoken word artists themselves. If the whole thing ever outgrows all that, I suppose it coul dmove to its own home, where it can grow to include a forum/bulletin board for spoken word enthusiasts (unless there’s one already?)

Believe it or not, there’s a music video to accompany a rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, with vocals by none other than William Shatner himself!

This post continues from a previous post.

I’m taking notes along the way toward recording some spoken word, and so far my notes have brought me to take a good look at Hip-Hop, and its various lyrical subjects.

Hip-Hop has been described in terms of a rich history, including: jazz scat; blues lyrics; street jive; even the African Griots’ tradition of using lyrical rhymes to brag, or to put-down their enemies. Such oral traditions have survived into today’s hip-hop music, but there are others.

Hip-Hop’s origins include DJ’s, whose primary function was to play the beats to please the crowd. Second to that, they’d talk out loud. At first, a DJ might find a clever introduction, give an occasional shout-out, or act as a caller might at a square dance and offer the audience instructions for what to do with their bodies.

These things are all common oral traditions in today’s hip-hop:

• the introduction,
• call-and-response,
• the boast,
• the dance-call.
• There are probably others.

The Introduction

Eminem is notorious for introducing himself, although many rappers do it. Eminem has several introductions, for several moods and personae: Marshall Mathers, his real name; Slim Shady; Ken Kaniff, his screen name; and Eminem, presumably taken from his initials. The title of one of his introductions is, ironically “The Real Slim Shady”:

“May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
We’re gonna have a problem here..

Y’all act like you never seen a white person before
Jaws all on the floor like Pam, like Tommy just burst in the door
and started whoopin her ass worse than before
they first were divorce, throwin her over furniture (Ahh!)
It’s the return of the… “Ah, wait, no way, you’re kidding,
he didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?”…
…
I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up?
I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up?”

He introduces himself when he calls his act “the ‘Ah, wait, no way, you’re kidding,
he didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?’” That’s his whole shtick, well introduced. In Marshall Mathers, he puts the act aside for a moment and introduces himself this way:

“You see I’m, just Marshall Mathers (Marshall Mathers)
I’m just a regular guy,
I don’t know why all the fuss about me (fuss about me)
Nobody ever gave a fuck before,
all they did was doubt me (did was doubt me)
Now everybody wanna run they mouth
and try to take shots at me (take shots at me)”

You can see the parenthetical echoes in that last quote, which brings us to the subject of call-and-response, that oft-cited element of black music, where one voice responds to another. Notably, in hip-hop, this can occur when an entire group introduces themselves, or when a pair of voices share the lyrics as a duet.

Over the next few days, I’ll be writing about these.

I’m gearing up to make an audio recording of poems read aloud, and along the way I found some very interesting stuff.

When searching for recorded poetry on the internet, it is difficult to decide which keywords to search with. It seems that the recorded poems out there in the world get classified differently, and since I firmly believe that “There are no categories”, the creative challenge here is to find a way to take my favorite elements of each of these groups, and go my own way with them.

It seems, in general, that recorded poetry can take one of three forms: cultural, sub-cultural, or pop-cultural.

Recorded Poetry

I’ll call “recorded poetry” the works of the so-called “major poets”, for lack of a better term. These are works that are typically published in print first, and later read aloud by the authors, who typically have some amount of literary notoriety.

Poetry Archive is an excellent primary source for this material. Poetry Archive an internet collection of, in their words, “the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past.” The archive allows its audience to encounter the contents in a variety of interesting ways: poems organized by poetic form, for example, or poems organized by theme, in addition to the traditional organization by title or by author. Unfortunately, there is no chronological arrangement, yet. The Poetry Archive project is still in its youth.

Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University recently blogged an introduction to the archive: ” If you’ve never heard Yeats or Tennyson reading in their own voices (on wax cylinder recordings), now you can for free.”

Andrew Motion, the Poet Lauriate of England, is involved with the Poetry Archive project, and has written about it in “Hearing the Masters’ Voices” for London’s Times.

I thought it was a pity that no one had thought to record poets in a systematic way, from the time that the technology first became available in the late 19th century.

That way, some of the lamentable gaps in our sound heritage would have been filled…. “The living part of a poem,” [Robert] Frost says, “is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation . . . It goes and the language becomes a dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length, there is no denying. But the accent of sense supercedes all other accent, overrides and sweeps it away.”

These convictions lie close to the heart of the Poetry Archive, which at the time of launching contains almost 100 voices: the great majority being new recordings that we have made ourselves, alongside a good many “historic” ones. (By “historic”, we mean recordings made before we began our project, ranging from the late 19th century to more recent times.) We intend to record many more contemporary poets and also to track down and add all the significant historic recordings we can find. If anyone has Hardy’s voice in their attic, please tell us.

Spoken Word

In an informative article that interviews major players in The Spoken Word Movement of the 1990′s, Mark Miazga takes a stab at the diffficult task of defining the spoken word movement.

It was a renewed fascination with the Beats in the 1990′s that was an important catalyst for an oral poetry movement that swept through the United States youth culture scene. … This has a number of similarities with the 1990′s oral poetry movement, … The term given to this visceral, in-your-face style of contemporary poetry of the nineties was spoken word. Up until then, the term only described non-music sections in music stores that contained non-music comedy, plays, or famous speeches. In fact, there have been a number of issues with the breadth of the term spoken word, which The New York Times has called “pointlessly stiff,” and the relationship of the term with poetry. For example, all poetry read aloud is spoken word, but not all spoken word is poetry. Sometimes, it is difficult to discern where spoken word ends and poetry begins. … This issue of defining and classifying spoken word, and how much of spoken word can actually be termed as poetry, is a problem even for the artists themselves. … that spoken word is, “a blanket term that cover(s) monologues, poems, stories, rap, etc. I like the term precisely because it is so ambiguous and broad.”

Maggie Estep is one of the important names to remember in the spoken word scene. Maggie has recorded two spoken word CDs, NO MORE MR. NICE GIRL (Nuyo Records 1994) and LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL (Mercury Records 1997). She has given readings of her work at cafes, clubs, and colleges throughout the US and Europe and has also performed her work on The Charlie Rose Show, MTV, PBS, and most recently, HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam“. (There is an interesting interview with Maggie Estep published at Suicide Girls.)

Speaking of Def Poetry Jam, it seems to be the last basion of major media coverage for spoken word preformance, after the demise of MTV’s Poetry Unplugged in the late 90′s. NPR also created one of their patented miniseries on the subject, entitled “The United States of Poetry”

While it may not be media-friendly enough to remain in the rankings of pop culture, Spoken Word performances are still supported globally by audiences of the poetry slams, and in places like The Nuyorican Poets Cafe

One of the major fascets of spoken word poetry that’s touted around is the fact that it is decidedly not as literary as the published variety of poetry. Caryn James wrote a New York Times review of the aforementioned MTV Poetry Unplugged show. The review posits Spoken Word as a bridge over the gap between Rap and Poetry, (a relationship I’ve borrowed here) and says:

But most of this is disposable, evanescent poetry. The special is called “Spoken Word,” not “Written Word,” for a good reason. Most of the poems won’t endure for decades, and why should they? Their purpose is different. “Unplugged” assumes that rap is street poetry and that street poetry is a vocal, visceral expression of contemporary life.

“Spoken Word” is just one manifestation f the renewed interest in poetry. In John Singleton’s current film,Poetic Justice, Janet Jackson plays a young woman from South-Central Los Angeles whose poetry expresses her emotional isolation and heartsick response to the death of everyone she has loved. As Mr. Singleton has written in “Poetic Justice: Film Making South-Central Style,” a new book about the making of the film: “Most of the girls I knew growing up, their main creative outlet was writing poetry. Whether they were good at it or not.”

Justice is obviously supposed to be good at it. Her poetry was written by Maya Angelou, now known as the Inaugural Poet.”

So there you have it, Maya Angelou can write, has written, some of this stuff. Do you suppose it will stay “disposable” forever?

Hip-Hop

I’ve said this before, in my thesis:

The realm of aesthetics is one of the playing fields for the ongoing question of meaning in the modern world. For example, the new modern generation uses hip-hop as a form of discourse, often as an expression of anger. By comparison, The Iliad is a similar expression of anger. Both are long and lyrical. Both use death, violence and the possession of women as central themes. Now, bring both forms of discourse to your typical literary pundit and he or she will call one of them art, extolling its universal themes and virtues. The other item will be largely ignored, except perhaps to be passed onto a sociologist. The Iliad, being an immaculately crafted example of the oral tradition epic formula at its best, does deserve its reputation as a beautiful work of art. Any given hip-hop song might even deserve to be dismissed, on the grounds that it doesn’t say anything that every other song in the rather formulaic genre hasn’t already said. However, it should be noted that the genre is new, still formulaic, and while the formula may have some serious problems, there is an undeniable potential there for unrivaled lyrical beauty. Nevertheless, the genre gets largely ignored by the critical eye.

If I were to turn my critical eye toward Hip-Hop, to examine its literary merits, it might help with the task at hand, which is to look for anything helpful for my upcoming poetry recording, but I’m afraid the task would be a daunting one. I’m largely ignorant of the genre.

I found a clue to where those merits might lie in an essay entitled reverse-gentrification of the literary world, which is the preface of a book by Miles Marshall Lewis

Hiphop as a culture and art form graduated from subculture status during the early 1990s, significantly figuring in the lives of worldwide youth and ending its standing as an underground phenomenon. With its mainstream success came more radio-friendly beats and rhymes, and certain characteristics that appealed to its wider audience were forefronted: crass bling-bling materialism; violent rap rivalries that extended beyond records into real-life shootings, stabbings, and murders; the objectification and denigration of women in videos and song lyrics. Furthermore, most modern rap music aficionados had no appreciation for aerosol art, deejaying, or breaking–sidelined aspects of hiphop culture whose former prominence I remembered fondly from the seventies and early eighties. I began to embrace more of a post-hiphop aesthetic, as if a new youth subculture was right around the corner and hiphop was on its deathbed.

Conclusion

My intent was to discover the best elements from a selection of recorded poetry styles, but I’ve only begun to understand the styles themselves. The next step would logically be to find examples of each, and learn to tell what I like from what I don’t like. I welcome any comments that might help with this.

I got up on stage last night to do a spoken word performance, and I think the crowd liked it! Normally, when I do something between musical acts, the audience is thin. People go to the bathroom or the bar between bands, and they expect anything they hear coming from the microphone to be a mike check, or silly stuff about how the band’s CDs are for sale.

I went up after Lizz King, Vox Populi, and before the N.U.R.B.S., and I was armed to the teeth. I’ve spent the better part of the last week digging through a pile of everything I’ve ever written.
My recent move to Baltimore has given me an opportunity to have everything I own in one place, for the first time in almost ten years. With all my notebooks and boxes of papers together again, I could spread them out on my floor, and sort them. Honestly, I threw most of those papers away. Many of them were redundant copies, obsolete drafts, notes, etc. Many more of those papers were bad teenage poems.

My best friend Luke called me last night to say that he’d been reading over an old issue of Apocalypse Playground. He was laughing, right at me, when he called. He has a point, though. In retrospect, a lot of that stuff is laughably bad. What was it we liked about that stuff again?

I managed to find a fair number of surprises in that pile of paper, though. I took them to the stage last night, and aired them out.

I’m going to the beach this Thanksgiving, but while I’m gone No Categories will faithfully publish a collection of poems that I have rewritten and salvaged from that enormous pile of paper.

What should I do with the bad ones?

Inspired in no small part by my friends’ performance at The True Vine, and encouraged by the time I’ve spent this week, digging through piles of my old poems, and finding some gems, I’ve decided to give another poetry reading. The last reading was a sucess, but it has been a while. I’m out of shape. I’ve been thinking of doing some “covers”, which should fit right in, considering that the next likely venue for such a performance is Saturday’s jam session at the other end of the Copycat Complex.

These are three songs whose lyrics I would like to perform as spoken word:

Re-humanise Yourself

Words by Sting

He goes out at night with his big boots on
None of his friends know right from wrong
The kick a boy to death ’cause he don’t belong
You’ve got to humanise yourself

A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself

I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Billy’s joined the National Front
He always was a little runt
He’s got his hand in the air with the other cunts
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself

I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself

A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself…

Darkness

Words and music by Stewart Copeland

I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark
I could be replaced by any bright spark
But darkness makes me fumble
For a key
To a door
That’s wide open

Instead of worrying about my clothes
I could be someone that nobody knows
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

Invisible Sun

Words and music by Sting

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

It’s dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with me head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

And they’re only going to change this place
By killing everybody in the human race
They would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

This is the flyer for my next reading, in Shepherdstown at Reynolds Hall on Saturday, 9 PM. The performance will also be broadcast on 89.7 WSHC FM.

my set of poems for the event

I would like to help everyone who helped me pick them out. It wasn’t easy. For some reason, I’ve been nervous about this.

• Eviction
• a poem in progress
• Excuses Not to Speak
• Drowned in the loud

The Poets

Ethan Fischer edits Antietam Review and teaches English at Shepherd University. His book of poetry,Beached in the Hourglass, was recently published by Bunny & Crocodile Press. Ethan’s poems have been published in many literary journals, including Pembroke Magazine, Potomac Review, Tuscarora Review, Dickinsonian, and Mountain Pathways. His work was honored by inclusion in Wild Sweet Note: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry.

Todd Young is currently an adjunct professor of English at Shepherd University. Todd has performed his poetry in various venues around the Shepherdstown area and has most recently appeared onstage as Falstaff in the latest production by the Rude Mechanicals Medieval and Renaissance Players. Performing poetry with musicians is something that Todd enjoys, having been involved in several local experimental music projects such as Vox Populi, A Thousand Names, and Veritas.

Dylan Kinnett has been an active writer, poet & performer in the Shepherdstown community for a decade. Dylan spent the late nineties producing the local zine,Apocalypse Playground. He has written a stage play about a street preacher, several published short stories, and the occasional dirty limerick on a bathroom wall. Dylan is currently writing a novella in hypertext, To Win, Simply Play which began as an undergraduate writing thesis.

paradigm9 is a group of sound designers and recording artists who, for the last 6 years has produced music for films, plays, eclectic art installations, and the occasional good old fashioned live rock n’ roll show. Dani Seiss, Jim Pilato and Curt Seiss started the Shepherdstown-based experimental music label, Magnanimous Records in 1999 and have since grown to include a modest roster of both local, national and international recording artists. Recently paradigm9 composed a score to local film-maker Lars Wigren’s “Animus” and have just completed their fifth original score for the (not-so) traditional Rude Mechanical Medieval and Renaissance Players, directed by Shepherd University’s Dr. Betty Ellzey.

Normally, I rant rather than rave, and today I’m raving, so take note. I should rave about Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo, who is a Nigerian-American poet/singer.
She gave one of the all-time best performances on a stage that I have ever been privileged to see in my life. I shit you not. I’d put her right up there with B.B. King on the list of stuff that rocked my world. Her song goes “la la la la la, but it sounds like revolution!” what a voice! what poetry!

Here’s a bit of description from iyeoka.com

“Combining her vocal talents, passion for writing and theater background, she captivates audiences with pieces that touch on a wide range of issues-love, women, culture, struggle, relationships, among many others. Iyeoka’s performance was described at the National Poetry Slam as “a conversation stopper” and a “refreshing return to the essence of good spoken word poetry.”

Sooner, rather than later. That’s when I should have attended the Lizard Lounge poetry slam. I’ve been to a lot of slams, and this one, finally, this one deserves all the hype that gets piled onto the notion of poetry slams. I got my pulse raised. I got my mind expanded. I got my five dollars worth.

First of all, the environment is a comfortable one. Yes, this slam is in a basement bar, but there is just enough “atmosphere,” or, whatever. The MC of the whole show is the saxophonist for the band, which plays alongside the open mike, so its jazz poetry, then.

The jazz is high quality and unobtrusive. These guys are really skilled at what they do. They actually play accompaniment to the poetry, even though they have never heard the poetry before. The accompaniment is appropriate to the mood, style, and rhythm of the poetry, almost lawlessly. This kind of ability can only come from skilled improvisational artists, and these guys, The Jeff Robinson Trio , they have definitely got what it takes.

Look out!
I don’t mean the window,
I mean the helicopters overhead,
the buzz on the phone,
and the police at the door.
Achtung!
The sky is falling
from the atoms they have taken
from the air.
The trees cut to build temples
to oil.
The brown water no longer
fit for fish.
Look out!
When freedom is just another word
for what we have lost.
When peace is another brand
of bomb.
When the national animal is no longer an eagle,
but a sheep.
Achtung!
The Republicans are coming.
The Republicans are coming….
Coming to put us away
in the funny farm that’s not so funny.
In the nuthouse.
In the terrorist jail.
On my conspiratorial horse,
I am Paul Revere passing Dachau on the train.
And the Republicans are coming.
The Republicans are coming….
Look out!
The Germans are hip to White House tricks.
They punched the bully in the nose.
They cite Bukowski and Chomsky
as the philosophers of the age,
instead of Wolfowitz and Bush.
And Dachau is empty
just waiting to be filled up with
the American rich.
Achtung!
Let’s put them all on the Autobahn
without brakes.
On top of the Zugspitze
without skis.
On the bottom of Starnberg Lake
with mad Ludwig.
In the middle of Munich
without clothes.
In the throne room of Neuschwanstein
without thrones.
Look out!
Everything you see is not what it seems.
This is a bad dream.
And everyone is asleep.
Democracy is fascism
spelled backwards.
Politicians are speaking out
of the sides of their mouths.
TV is a frontal lobotomy.
Hollywood is a new religion.
Caesar has risen from the ashes….
Achtung!
Look out!
The Emperor has new clothes,
and it’s all the rage.
Achtung!
Look out!
It’s a new world order.
It’s an old world cage.

Munich to Pfaffenhofen
Spring, 2003

I attended a poetry reading this evening (14th) by Thomas Rain Crowe, with whom I had the honor of sharing my lunch today earlier today. He’s a real bona-fide beatnik, drinking buddy to the stars: Ginsberg and company themselves. That alone was impressive, I suppose. He shared with us some selections of his fiction and his poetry. He told us about his rock band. and his first volume of translations of the poems of the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, ( Hafiz )According to his bio: “Following six years as Editor-at-Large for the Asheville Poetry Review, he is currently writing a memoir in the style of Thoreau’s Walden based on four years of self-sufficient living in the wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982. He currently resides in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.”

Lines I caught: “I will not live in a world without whales or dolphins” and “we are what we aren’t.. Or how else could we intend one thing and do another. We are what we aren’t” “Autchung!” was an inflammatory rant against the current political status quo, not however, against the complacency on the part of most people which what seems to have incensed more than a few audience members. One woman busted out: “and why aren’t the creative people of the world stepping up and doing what the media isn’t doing?” my question is, rather, why aren’t you, lady? You don’t get off saying “oh, I’m not creative,” I’m sorry but you don’t. If you want a world unlike the one you have, and you want it brought to you without being willing to do anything to create what you all – I shouldn’t assume that about her. She interrupted him. “Are you scared!” she meant him. he shook his head and grabbed the microphone “no I’m not scared, or else I would not have read that poem!” she was looking for someone to blame for something. She was a stranger. He spoke about four years living in the mountains, back-to-the-land style.