Category: poetry

Wildwood Writers’ Festival

One of the perks of being a student (as opposed to having one of those “job” things) is that if I feel like skipping class, I can. It doesn’t happen often, but when I heard that Jack Veasey and Barbara DeCesare were going to be reading on campus as part of the Wildwood Writers’ Festival, well, it was clear that I wouldn’t be attending my Macroeconomics class. And when I subsequently heard that Gene Hosey was going to be reading immediately after that, Comparative Politics went out the window. And so it happened that my morning yesterday was spent listening to some very fine poets.

The combination of poets was wonderful. Jack with an incredible gift for seeing the world from the inside out, treating his subjects with such an honesty, gentleness, and disarming wit that they themselves become the poems, riding on his tender eloquence. Barbara with her frank cynicism and ebullient reading style, shattering expectations and illusions. Gene with his jaded hopefulness, recognizing absurdity and challenging us to keep going anyway (maybe this is Camus’s definition of hope?).

And then there was Joe Weil, the surprise of the day. I don’t know how many people there were already familiar with him (someone must have been, right?), but I’d never heard of him. This guy, it turns out, is real and raw, funny and moving, and one hell of a poet. I hope some of the local hosts are able to get him to come back.

The biggest drawback to the event was that so much of the audience was required by their professors to be there. While it meant that the room was pretty full for most of the day, it also meant that the energy level was lower than it could have been. I also didn’t attend the open reading the followed the last session of the day, so I don’t know what that was like. If you were there, post a comment and tell us how it went!

Today is the second and final day of the festival. I’m half considering going in at noon to hear Philip Billings, who I’ve heard is good, but, ultimately, will probably not end up doing so. So if you do, let me know how he was.

Heavyword Poetry Slam

Last night marked the Fifth Annual Heavyword Poetry Slam, held at the Appalachian Brewing Company.  I didn’t take notes or anything so I can’t give you a lot of detail, but there were some good performances, and even a couple of great performances.  Chris August won the competition, as well as the People’s Choice award, with his theatrical narrative rants, a stylistic departure from most of the other performances.  It was clear that he is a seasoned slammer while many of the staples of the Harrisburg poetry scene are more accustomed to non-competitive lower-key readings.  I can’t complain too much since I didn’t enter the slam, but I would really love to see some Harrisburg poets work on improving their slam style so we can compete with the amazing performers from York and Baltimore. 
 
Kudos, though, to the Heavyword Society for putting on yet another fun and successful event!

New Poetry

As the title of this post would imply, I’ve updated the poetry section. Some of them are new, some of them are old. What they all have in common is that I read them last night at The Alley. They’re even in the order in which I read them.

As a side note, the reading last night went very well. Snow surprised me by having Sara Bozich come in to introduce me, which was very cool. Sara and I were very close in high school as we were both discovering a love for writing. While I cringe to think about some of the things I wrote back then, having friends who shared my passion was important (as, of course, it still is) and passing notes full of poetry back and forth throughout the day did a lot to keep me sane.

Maybe a year or two before Sara and I were passing notes in German class, the father of a friend of mine brought home a box of chapbooks by a co-worker of his named Gene Hosey. It was just starting to occur to me that maybe I thought poets were kinda cool when I saw that box, and though I don’t think I ever did read the chapbook, it was my first introduction to the idea that there were some of these kinda-cool-poet-folks in a world at least adjacent to mine, if not actually in my world. Last night was the first time I saw Gene read at any length and he very much reinforced this crazy idea I have that poets are pretty okay. His work is sharp, funny, human, and crazy. I spoke with him a bit last night, and my impression is that he is much like his poetry. It was an honor to be featured with him.

Self-promotion

Poetry at The Alley

I probably should have mentioned this earlier but, well, I didn’t.

I’m going to be a co-feature at Poetry at The Alley this coming Saturday, along with Harrisburg’s first Poet Laureate, Gene Hosey.

It’s a good venue and we’re going to have lots of fun, so come join us! If you’d like more info, send me an email or follow the above link and call the restaurant itself.

Kevinus is the best

spam poetry generator

A few months ago, I started noticing that a lot of the spam I received contained seemingly random words at the bottom, in wonderful combinations like, “feverish interruption symphonic assyria headway argentina whom bragging rendezvous effusion peking bernardo california ellison”. I got excited — these were free words being sent to me every day.

Inspired by Jonathan Schwanbeck, I asked Kevin Gaughen if he would be able to help me at some point create a perl script that could take these spam words, insert random prepositions, conjunctions, etc., and random line breaks to create “poetry”. He said he could and told me what I could do to get started on it, but I kept pushing it off until I have more free time. A few days ago, he surprised me with the page I’ve linked above. Below is an example of poetry it created, based on the sample words in this post.

she
headway
effusion rendezvous
bragging
but

peking. or
interruption
symphonic california bernardo in front of
whom; argentina