iWPS : Part 3
(Trying to finish these tonight before they become distant and irrelevant.)
1.
And on the second day, he rested.
I woke up early, as usual, but earlier than usual: I was up around 5:30, which kind of sucked. 5:30 is a boring time of day to be up if you’re in a hotel room with no computer, minimal cable and a phone that charges for local calls. Even the over-priced hotel restaurant wasn’t open yet.
I turned on some television, dolled up, and generally bumped around my cell for a couple of hours. The hotel slides USA Today under the door, so I cracked that open and wouldn’t you know it: I’d missed the first round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am! Phil Mickelson broke a PB record the first day and was KILLING the tournament! I’d forgotten that it was the same weekend as iWPS, and I was going to practically miss the whole thing! I immediately turned on one of those nutty ESPN recap shows and they gave me all the highlights and such, but I was determined to get in at least a couple of holes that day.
Made it down to breakfast and ordered a grand meal, went over the previous night’s results (click here) and generally relaxed. I wanted to meet Corbet Dean down there (we’d decided to try to have lunch or something the night before and get to rap one-on-one), but he wasn’t coming down until about 11 and it was only 8:30 or so when I conspicuously stopped getting refills and figured I’d better retreat. I was about to jet back to the room after about two hours of gastronomic decadence and sheer laziness when Gabrielle shows up and sits down. She tells me Marsh and Erik Daniel are on their way down, so we move to a table and I’m down there another hour or so talking it up with them. We compared organizing notes and generally agreed that the iWPS05 crew was running the HELL out of this show. Talk turned to any number of other topics, and then the dreaded secret came out: Scott likes golf.
I won’t dwell on the virtues of golf here because you can read my essay on it here, but my taste for the sport has developed a great deal since then, and bears pointing out (mostly because Marsh was so taken aback by the idea that I would like such a sport. Daniels mostly just jumped on the kick-me pile).
My golf fever has been mostly sustained by playing the Tiger Woods 2005 game on Playstation. Once I figured out the controls and began to develop my player a little, I got hooked. That the game captures some real golf courses with eye-popping detail and care really ties you into the culture of golf; you wonder what these places must be like in real life, how much it would cost you to play on such a course, if the waves really crash up on the rocks like they do in the game...that sort of thing. It’s a zen-like, pristine game that sneaks up on you if you watch it from the beginning, and while it doesn’t require a great amount of strength to play, it does possess the one element that sucks me into almost any good game, and that is a reliance on strategy. Strategy belies intelligence and I love a smart sport. While I don’t expect to ever actually pick up a golf club, I’ll be watching it from now until Tiger starts losing his teeth. It’s incredibly relaxing to watch, but still has the power to make me jump up and admonish some guy in cleated church shoes like it’s a football game.
Marsh, however, sees none of this. To him, it’s a boring-ass game, and I can’t argue that. It’s just that the boredom is its charm for me. And just when I assumed the matter closed, Corbet Dean comes down and joins us, and isn’t in his chair for five minutes before Marsh is asking him, “If you had to guess what sport Woods is into, what would it be?”
Corbet started thinking on it, and assumed it must be something weird or Steve wouldn’t have asked. “He’s from Ohio, so does it involve sledding?” That sort of thing. Har-de-har-har. In the end, Corbet invited me down to stay at his place and have his dad adopt me and turn me into a golf pro. Joke’s on the cop: he thinks I’m not weighing this option. Hell, even a moderately good player can make some pretty decent scratch (another part of its appeal: everyone believes they could play it if they wanted to). You know how many Playstation games you can buy with 9th place AT&T prize money? Let me tell you, pal: ALL of them.
Fact: The AT&T was formerly known as the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am.
Bob Moyer came down and joined us as well, and he always brings a little bit “Paper Chase” class to the action.
Fact: Bob Moyer and Steve Marsh are almost wholly responsible for Columbus, my teams and I being involved with PSI , NPS and any of this at all. It was their grace and fatherly ways way back in 2000 at the first-ever Rust Belt that caught me. Had I known that they were rarer souls than first believed...well, I'd still be around, but certainly in different capacities, I am sure.
2.
After a breakfast of shits and giggles, I went back to my room and really lounged, I mean HARD. Did some reading (“Used and Rare” by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone), switched back into bed clothes, watched some golf and at some point that afternoon, figured I’d better look at some poems for the bout later that night.
3.
When you don’t memorize your poems, rehearsing looks a little different than it would if you did. For me, it mostly consists of running through the lines, working on the voice inflections and timing (because my voice has to do the work my body can’t), and editing the poem itself. People who memorize generally do this stuff too, but when you don't have to memorize it (or only have to memorize key parts) then you can arrange your energy a lot differently. My bout that night was going to be a lot more manageable than the night before because I had plenty of competitive 3-minute poems. On top of that, I was under the assumption that I was no longer in contention for a finals slot, so I had nothing to lose. My goal was cemented now: represent. Be the best you. I was working under that premise before getting there, but now I had to live up to the mission I didn’t live up to the night before.
So I went through my 3s (lots) and 2s (not as many as I would have liked, but enough to slam with and have options). I edited lots of lines from some key pieces (“Jesse”, “The Purpose of Kenny G”, “Judas, After Seeing The Passion of the Christ For the Fourth Time”, “Elementary”, et al.). I didn’t have a stopwatch, so I put a CD in the hotel CD player on the desk, turned the volume down, hit play and did the poem. When I was done, I had a time (plus one second, since I hit it, wait, then start…just in case a time keeper is overzealous). Good thing; some of these I wanted to really take my time with, but to do so meant cutting even more lines to get it down to what I call a “Slow 3-minute”. My performances have slowed down in recent years as I’ve tried to really drive home the stories and language of my work, so the poems have to be shorter at their source if you want to use them in slams. For a feature you can be liberal and do full versions at any speed, but in a slam? You want to be absorbed. So I tend to stay away from the burnouts these days (unless I’m trying to prove a point or it serves the poem better). Like I said, I don’t crowbar a 3-minute+ poem into 3-minutes. I edit.
After about an hour of that I could feel my throat humming, which means it’s ready so don’t push it, and I felt GREAT. I was well-rested, I wasn’t starving, I wasn’t irritable, I wasn’t nervous, I liked what I’d done that afternoon…I was Phil Mickelson on the Spyglass front 9, popping an eagle, baby.
Now all I had to do was hold on to that cool energy until the bout started.
4.
I pulled a regular poet move and didn’t show up until about 5 or so (my bout was at 7). People were milling about, but nothing was actually happening. The Friday daytime events had concluded at this point, so it was all about hanging out until you did your thing.
I talked to a number of people in the lobby there, but probably the most warm bit of it was what I call the Black SlamMaster Summit. Me, Kahn Davison (Detroit), Versiz (Detroit), LoGic (Ann Arbor), Dan Vaughn (Milwaukee), Ria Thompson and Marcel Murphy (both of Texas) and some other black poets who came and went were having a HILARIOUS discussion about wack stuff poets do, venue woes, egos, touring tales and just general poetry madness. It was a cipher without the tag team poetry, a loop of mad energy and love and experience that I hadn’t felt at one of these events, ever, not like this. This was black people from different walks of life, different views and different voices all talking about the one thing we all loved and could have talked about for hours: poetry. But not the easy stuff, like whether or not performance poetry is better than page poetry, blah blah blah…that’s white folks stuff. We talked about cats who bum rush the mic, out of control MCs, Def Poetry Jam submission jokes, venues that close on you at the end of your show…real funny stuff, but stuff you had to go through to be able to talk about. No egos, no spittin’ poems, no freestyling…just beautiful black people talking about how they navigate the world of poetry as it manifests in their world, and discovering that you aren’t the only one who has to deal with “that cat”. I’m sure we looked like a gang or something, but, well, we were.
5.
My bout that night was yet another 7:00 bout, but with fewer of the obstacles of the previous bout…in fact, almost none of them.
The theater was well-lit (Tazuo Yamaguchi was filming in there, so he made sure there was some good light). Despite the trumpeting of the midnight hour by overpaid meteorologists, there wasn’t any snowfall. It was a Friday night, so general audience would be more inclined to show up. I was in a bout with “names”, so we were assured some kind of audience. I’d rehearsed and rested, so I felt good. The whole affair was about 175 degrees from the bout the night before…in more ways than one.
6.
Because I went dead-first the night before, I was guaranteed to go dead-last in the second bout (for the 3 minute portion of it anyway). The bout was:
10 poets @ 3 minutes
10 poets @ 2 minutes
Ryk McIntyre was the MC and Nick Fox was the Bout Manager; great support system for any bout.
I hadn’t seen a number of the poets in my bout perform yet that week (if ever), so I was going into the bout with little more than their ranks (and all of my crazy statistics) from the score sheets. I was in the bout with 3 of the current top 12 poets, and I was going against LoGic again.
The 3-minute round is, theoretically, every poet in the competition’s strong suit. It’s the format we’re all used to and that many of us write toward. Any poet now had the opportunity to read any poem they’d ever done in a traditional slam, so poets were expected to whip out their big guns for this fight. I was sitting on some good stuff, but some older, proven stuff I didn’t even load up. I didn’t feel as if I could prove my current worth with stuff I did three years before, no matter how well it might - MIGHT - do. So I settled on later stuff in the immediate chamber, with the rest of my notebook as back-up if suddenly, say, the judges seemed really hot for an anti-black power black poem (“I, Nightmare”).
Before we got started, I realized that one of the poets in the bout - Stephanie Weber - was sitting behind me, so I introduced myself and we talked a little before the bout. She was more nervous than I was (a feat), and we talked about where she was from and what she does. Very nice young lady. I wished her luck and then we got into some gangster shit:
3-minute round
(sacrificial) George McKibbens - 22.7
Ouch. George ain’t no slouch, man. If the judges were hitting him like that, we were in for a long night. I started having flashbacks of theater A already.
1) Rachael Kann- 25.2
Lower than her entourage wanted her to get, but not a bad score for coming right out the gate.
2) Stephanie Weber - 24.9
3) Buddy Wakefield- 26.9
Buddy was last year’s champ and a firm contender for this year as well, and he pulled out the stops. He did “Pretend”, nailed it, and took the lead.
4) LoGic- 27.2
LoGic and I joked after the first bout that we didn’t have anything to lose the second night. We were wrong; we had personal pride to lose. LoGic came with the heat and took the lead here with a heartbreak poem, knowing he didn’t have a chance in hell of going to finals. He just had to go out in a blaze of glory, was all, and blaze he did: he took the lead here.
About this point I started pulling out poems to consider performing, shuffling them around as the room lit up or softened, and after the scores came out settled on two poems: “Jesse” and “Queen Takes Black Knight”.
5) Jus Caus- 26.3
6) Jerri Hardesty - 26.2
The night took a turn toward the dramatic at this point, subject-wise. The scores dipped here, but not frighteningly so.
[ Aside: Jerri was the winner of this year’s haiku head-to-head match (MCed by Tazuo Yamaguchi, the resident haiku pro), which is a pretty coveted title. She’d been chasing that win at NPS for a while now and nailed it on the merits of her scary-good haikus this year at iWPS. Congrats, Jerri! ]
7) Michael Guinn - 26.8
8) Bluz- 27.5
Bluz came in strong and took the lead, edging out LoGic’s lead by a mere .3 (which, in a competition field this size, isn’t really that small, since every PIECE of a point counts).
9) Andy Buck- 27.4
Andy did his now-infamous “Janet Jackson’s Titty” poem, which I’d heard about but never seen. I loved it. I’m SO glad I wasn’t considering my own poem on the same subject. He’d have nailed me to the floor with the lunacy and sheer snarkiness of his piece. He took second place, edging everyone else down a slot.
10) Scott Woods - 27.6
You saw that right, holmes: 1st place.
I performed “Jesse”, which wasn’t my first pick until about halfway through Bluz’s poem. At that point, I was sold this was the way to go. Not sure why; just seemed right.
I really nailed this piece. I mistimed a step, but most people didn’t catch it since most of them hadn’t ever heard it before. It’s a funny piece about being Jesus’ childhood friend that ends with some seriousness. It’s a solid piece that I love performing. I cut about 15 lines out of it to get it under time, and added a couple of words to pad out the character a little. All in all, it was the right poem at the right time, cut to the right fighting weight. I can’t read too much more into why things played out the way they did than that. I could normally point to a lot of deficiencies in the poets I slammed with or something, but this bout had really, really strong action.
I felt 100% vindicated. I could have gone home at that point and not read another poem. More important than the scores/rank were the props. Reading that poem changed my weekend, since people were coming up to me and telling me how much the enjoyed it. I felt really, really rewarded by that response more than anything.
My cornfield had prop circles now.
6a.
It occured to me about this point that if I kept my slot up, I might actually make it into finals after all. With the 1 in my pocket now, I had a total rank of 13. If I got a 1 in the next round I was moving forward.
As the saying goes: Mo' money, mo' problems. Just as I was using my failure from the previous night to fuel my performances on the second night, THIS little pressure popped back into my head. A welcome pressure, but a pressure.
7.
Round 2 was a 2-minute round, and because I had 1st place, I had to go first in this round.
Right before getting called up, I was torn between poems. I had “Judas...” and “No More Jazz Poems”. I wasn’t sure which way to go. I thought Judas was strong, but I didn’t want to look one-note-ish. Plus, “Mo More Jazz Poems” (actual title: “Rebirth of the Uncool”) was funny and biting in some spots. Both had received strong edits to get them down to a fighting weight, but I was really torn.
So I walked across the aisle - literally - and showed them to LoGic.
Of all the people in the room, LoGic is probably one of only two people who were familiar with my work to any significant degree. The cat owned my last CD and both poems were on there. He, too, was in the midst of battle, so he’d understand what I was striving for. I explained to him my dilemma and he dug that, suggesting I go with “No More Jazz Poems”. I opted for “No More Jazz Poems”.
1) Scott Woods - 27.1
Good reception, and when I sat back down Michael Brown told me he really liked that piece. See? That’s more important than the scores, dammit!
2) Bluz - 26.8
3) Andy Buck - 27.3
Lost the second round lead here to Andy. Bluz’s slots were dropping fast on him here and it looked like he might not make it to finals if this kept up.
4) LoGic - 27.6
5) Buddy Wakefield - 27.9
LoGic took the lead, but lost it immediately to Buddy. This put me in 4th place, with 5 poets to go.
6) Michael Guinn - 28.3
Grabbed the lead by the throat.
7) Jus Caus - 27.2
8) Jerri - 26.8
Jerri tied with Bluz at the bottom of the ranks here.
9) Rachael Kann - 27 TP
10) Stephanie - 26.9
So the final combined rankings for this bout were:
Michael Guinn = 7
Buddy Wakefield = 7
LoGic = 7
Andy Buck = 7
Scott Woods = 7
Bluz = 11
Jus Caus = 12
Rachael Kann = 16
Jerri Hardesty = 17
Stephanie Weber = 18
All in all, a FINE bout. I wanted to run back to the hotel and call home, but I stayed and watched the next bout. I even recorded the scores and such, but I’ll save that for an addendum.
NEXT: Saturday day events, deep and dark conversations, things I collected, Finals night, and some kicking it afterwards.