SATURDAY APRIL 22 (EARTH DAY!):
Interactive #1a
Sheridan
Opera House / $15 / 8-9:30 a.m.
Listening to the Songs the Ancestors
Sing
Kava Circle and Discussion with Scott Nicolay
Kava (aka kavakava, 'awa, yaqona) is the
traditional ritual drink of much of Island Oceania, and is intimately connected
with the practice of ancestor veneration that is central to all peoples of that
region. In Hawai'i they say 'awa restores the umbilicus to your
ancestors. In parts of Vanuatu, kava helps 'man ples'
(traditional person) acquire new songs from the ancestors. Come share the drink
of peace and explore a traditional connection to the muses with poet Scott
Nicolay and kava from Hawai'i and Papua New Guinea.
Interactive #1b
Miramonte Building / $15 / 8-9:30 a.m.
The Limitations and Bewitchments of Language According to
Wittgenstein
Doug Staton
A poet's
purpose is to employ the bewitchments of language to no good use. This
presentation will explore the limitations of language according to the
philosophical methodology of Ludwig Wittgenstein in order to identify some of
the more mysterious methods of our craft.
Interactive #2a
Sheridan Opera House / $15 / 10-11:30 a.m.
Poetic Boot Camp: Made Up Artistry
Day Acoli, Oracle Speaks
& Bianca Mikahn
We will walk attendees
through three crucial steps in performance poetry: 1) writing about personal
experience, 2)mastering vocal inflections in your writing, 3) connecting to
your spiritual self in performance.
Interactive #2b
Miramonte Building / $15 / 10-11:30 a.m.
Obsession, Intuition, and the Pleasures of Marrying Sound and Sense
Wendy Videlock
Wendy Videlock
explores the sonic devices, rhythmic tensions, powers of repetition and subtle
effects of pacing that allow poems to creep in through the pores, rattle
through the bones, shake our rigid cores and become what every red-blooded,
grave-fearing lyric longs to be -- seductive, musical, necessary, and
ultimately, memorable. Bring a couple of your own poems and a couple from the
shelves. She'll bring the parchment paper and
inkwells.
Eat Our Words Show
Sheridan Opera
House / no charge / noon-1:30 p.m. Emcee EAR
Aaron Anstett
Wendy
Videlock
Danny Rosen
Ellen Holly Klaver of Tzotzollin
Katie Bulfin
Sarah Setzer
  |
Come all ye poets and speak
your hearts! |
THE HUMAN heart has ever dreamed of a fairer world than the one
it knows. No man, however dark his spirit, however cramped his senses, is quite
without the yearning after wider horizons and a purer air. In a happy moment
earth seems to hold for all the promise of larger things. The moment passes;
and the world closes in again, actual, bare, unyielding, as before. Yet among
men there are some endowed with vision, an insight more penetrating and more
sustained. To their liberated spirit the world unfolds a farther prospect.
Earth clothes itself for them in radiant vesture, mute forms are speaking
presences, the riddle of life resolves itself into a meaning. To them it is
granted to arrest the moment of illumination, otherwise so fleeting; and,
gifted further with a shaping power, they are able to re-create the moment in
enduring forms. The men of vision are the seers and prophets; the shapers of
the revelation, re-creating it, are the artists and the poets. 1 What each of
us is seeking the poet has already found. Poetry is the step beyond, which we
were about to take, but were not certain of the way. In our experience from
year to year, we are not without glimpses of beauty in the world, a sense of
meaning somewhere within the shows of things. Of this beauty and this meaning
poetry is a fuller revelation. The poet gives us back the world we already
know, though it is a world transfigured; he draws his material from stores to
which we all have access, but with a difference. His vision, clearer and more
penetrating, transfigures the facts and discloses the beauty only waiting to be
thus revealed. His fresh sight of this beauty quickens in him an emotion of
wonder and of joy which impels him to expression. Seeing the world in new
combinations, he selects from the common store of experience certain images
colored by his mood. Of these images he weaves a pattern of words, which
re-create the beauty he has seen and are charged with that deeper significance
he has divined within the outward manifestation. It is just because he sees
farther and feels more intensely that he is a poet; and then because he is able
to phrase his experience in words which have the power to create the vision and
the meaning in us. So the poet fashions that fairer world of which the heart
has dreamed; and by the mediation of his art it becomes ours for an enduring
possession.
—Carleton
Noyes, 1909
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Interactive #3a
Sheridan
Opera House / $15 / 2-3:30 p.m.
SLAMMING
Ken Arkind
& Panama Soweto
Interactive #3b
Miramonte Building / $15 / 2-3:30 p.m.
Sneak Up and Surprise
Yourself
Aaron Anstett
Robert Frost
wrote, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." In this
workshop, we will use a variety of exercises to write poems that explore the
unexpected. Bring writing materials and a sense of
play. |
Interactive #4b
Miramonte Building / $15 / 4-5:30 p.m.
Letting a Poem Grow
Larry Goodell
Larry is a pioneering poet of performance. He's a funny poet,
yet serious. There's irony, wit, and wordplay. Each poem has a moral which is
the good feeling you have at the end. That's just the way he writes 'em. And
there's poking fun at himself and the establishment, any establishment. Some
poems are downright satirical and sometimes have the smell of Corral
#5.
Larry is 70 years old and has
been spoofing the whole system religiously for over forty years. He's been
writing songs on his new Roland keyboard and he's been sticking his head in the
clouds to try to find God. No luck so far. So he meditates on the Medicine
Buddha and just simply writes poems when a new line suddenly lands in his head.
He lets it grow like a seed and fosters it and this is what you
get. |
Stewart Warren of Del Norte,
