Piles of Paper
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?
Tags: baltimore, editing, music, performance, spoken word
