The 24-Hour Feature Setlist
The venue - the ACME Art Company - was like an airplane hangar; long and large, and curved like one, too. The performance space was concentrated all the way in the back, with couches and chairs at the stage. There was a makeshift bar, and Doug was the man of the substances. Larry Wyatt was the god of sound. Gerard Cox made sure we were taken care of all around.
Let me be clear: this show was no David Blain trick; this was not merely spectacle or fundraising or charity. This was time traveling, using art to surf the tide of connection. You can either perform for 24 hours or you can’t. I didn’t know if I could, no one knew if anyone could. That’s the mountain. There were numerous missions at play here: personal challenge. The combat of art. An attempt to touch God. Education.
Because of the time change (spring forward), I set up the reading to run from 11:00 pm - midnight of the next day. When I advertise a 24-hour reading, I deliver a 24-hour reading.
I had a great crew helping out with the food, drinks, staying up with me when no one was likely to be there, etc. Vernell, Liz, Louise, Donielle, Dave, Shaun, Dan and, on her own steam, Kim White. Thank you all for hanging in there. I was equally amazed at the number of poets who came in and stayed for hours, or came in and came back hours later. Donielle, Louise and Joanna Schroeder participated in the Jazz Slam and STILL came over to the 24-hour for, well, hours. Kim came from her job and stayed until NOON. People came in from out of town. Maranda practically came out of the hospital. Shaun MCed the Jazz Slam all night, then showed up the next morning. I was immensely humbled by all of this.
Didn’t have a watch on, so we had a wall clock laid down on the stage that I could see from wherever I read a poem.
One of the cool things about this format is that it makes it okay to introduced poems, gave some back-story to poem, did some poet biographies, personal anecdotes with poets I’d met, etc.; to marinate. So we got to not only test my mettle, but hear some cool stories because I almost never marinate.
I only spent about two honest days picking poems, right before the reading. I was picking poems in the hours preceding the reading when I was supposed to be sleeping. I kept thinking, “Need more poems!” I should have been picking poems weeks ago, a few here, a few there. Didn’t happen that way. I’ve just been ripping and running too much on the road and at work (11-12 hour days when not traveling), so I had to cram. Fortunately, I’m a (pseudo-) librarian.
The first two hours was all original material, as was the last hour. I have been recently surprised by the number of local poets who have never seen me feature, poets I hang around a lot. I figured this was as good a time as any to resolve that particular dilemma.
The show was dedicated to the memory of two poets: David Citino and Angela Boyce.
HOUR 1
11:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Scott Woods - Elementary
Scott Woods - Whuppin’s
Scott Woods - Jesse
Scott Woods - Woodsmen
Scott Woods - Black Country Club: Boyd’s Barbershop
Scott Woods - How to be a Famous Poet
Scott Woods - The Delacroix, Louisiana Barbecue and Funeral Session
Scott Woods - Shaman
Poems: 8
I started out sort of low, with not a lot of power, but respectable. About average performance at, say, the regular Writers’ Block open mic. I figured I’d have to save my strength.
At the end I only took a five minute break since we started a little late (11:15). I’d make up the time as we went along.
HOUR 2
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
Scott Woods - Swimming with the Whales
Scott Woods - Serenade (or, Egyptian Slow Jam Tape)
Scott Woods - When I Gave You Jazz
Scott Woods - Devastation in the Key of A#
Scott Woods - Judas After Seeing The Passion of the Christ for the Fourth Time
Scott Woods - I, Nightmare
Scott Woods - Embraces
Scott Woods - Menu at Ray’s House of Ribs & Boom Boom Room
Scott Woods - Captain James T. Kirk Johnson, Weedhead
Scott Woods - Oral Elemental
Scott Woods - The Gospel According to Saint Brut (By Faberge)
Poems: 11
I found myself performing the second hour a little more powerfully than the first, and it felt good, but I knew I’d pay for it later.
I’ve switched out Ol’ Dirty Bastard with Bobby Brown in “I, Nightmare”, for the record.
I’ve had “Menu…” sitting in my folder for about a year, but never read it. It is easily the nastiest thing I’ve ever written. It wasn’t originally intended to be a poem, but it works.
I was going to do the greatest hits up front, but mixed it up with some older stuff.
“Serenade”, “When I Gave You Jazz” and “Devastation in the Kew of A#” are really ancient poems. Since I didn’t rehearse any of the stuff for this show, it got real jazz-like; re-interpreting the old with a new instrument, a new voice, new experiences, new emotions, a new mission. Doing the old poems as the poet I am now - with the instrument that I am now - was a fascinating thing to experience.
HOUR 3
1:00 AM - 2:00 AM
William S. Burroughs - The Mummy Piece
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Maggie Estep - The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With
Rev. Pedro Pietri - Uptown Train
Rev. Pedrio Pietri - Telephone Booth # 102
Rev. Pedrio Pietri - Telephone Booth # 227
Rev. Pedrio Pietri - Telephone Booth # 507
Rev. Pedrio Pietri - Telephone Booth # 905 ½
David Allen - The Revolution Was Postponed Because of Rain
Matt Cook - Science Was Invented by a Bunch of Guys Who Were so Ugly They
Couldn’t Possibly Believe in God
Jayne Cortez - So Many Feathers
Poems: 10
My voice began to husk up a little.
Let me answer the obvious question: Yes, I read the entire poem. It was 21 minutes and 17 seconds long. This poem would cost me a lot of strength in the following hours.
I stumbled in the beginning with the Burroughs piece, but what’s cool about as event like this is that you can stop, fix a line or make a joke about it, and then pick back up where you were because everyone understands that you’re doing a TWENTY FOUR READING. When you’ve done a couple of hours and you have 22 left to go, you’re allowed to dust yourself off in public.
HOUR 4
3:00 (2:00) AM - 4:00 AM
Larry Wyatt - Defining Moments
Toi Derricotte - Bookstore
Toi Derricotte - For Black Women Who Are Afraid
Lynn Emanuel - In English in a Poem
Patricia Smith - What It’s Like To Be a Black Girl For Those Of You Who Aren’t
Patricia Smith - Blonde White Women
Etheridge Knight - Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal
Insane
Etheridge Knight - The Idea of Ancestry
Etheridge Knight - For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide
Frank O’Hara - Why I Am Not a Painter
Billy Collins - You, Reader
Billy Collins - The Revenant
Billy Collins - The Trouble with Poetry
Billy Collins - The Lanyard
Billy Collins - Nostalgia
Billy Collins - Workshop
Billy Collins - Advice to Writers
Poems: 17
The time change happened in this hour.
The sound guy, Larry Wyatt, had a poem and asked if I would read it. I said, of course. He told me afterwards that he was inspired to write more often. That’s the mission of my night being fulfilled, there.
HOUR 5
4:00 AM - 5:00 AM
Thylias Moss - Nagging Misunderstanding
Jim Northrup - Shrinking Away
Pearl Cleage - Turning Forty
Maggie Estep - I’m An Emotional Idiot So Get Away From Me
Thomas Sayers Ellis - Faggot
Thomas Sayers Ellis - Block Party
George David Miller - Before I Read This Poem
Jack McCarthy - Careful What You Ask For
Jack McCarthy - Cartalk: A Love Poem
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Hard Bargain
Staceyann Chin - I Don’t Want To Slam
Mursalata Muhammad - Last Days of a Slow Cooker
Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus
Jeremy Richards - Sylvia Plath’s Gangster Rap Legacy
Eugene B. Redmond - Love Is Not a Word
Poems: 15
I’d already set some kind of record at this point, but that’s not the show I was doing, so onward we went.
I love doing Maggie Estep’s work. It’s the performing equivalent of sniffing coffee beans.
HOUR 6
5:00 AM - 6:00 AM
Stephen Dunn - On Hearing the Airlines will use a Psychological Profile to Catch
Potential Skyjackers
Stephen Dunn - How To Be Happy (Another Memo to Myself)
Stephen Dunn - Waiting With Two Members of a Motorcycle Gang for My Child
To Be Born
Stephen Dunn - To a Friend in Love with the Wrong Man Again
Stephen Dunn - Briefcases
Stephen Dunn - At the Smithville Methodist Church
Stephen Dunn - The Substitute
Stephen Dunn - To a Terrorist
Stephen Dunn - The Sudden Light and the Trees
Kim Addonizio - Ex-Boyfriends
Kim Addonizio - Chicken
Kim Addonizio - This Poem wants to be a Rock and Roll Song So Bad
Kim Addonizio - Fuck
Kim Addonizio - Aliens
Kim Addonizio - The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of
Revision
Kim Addonizio - Intimacy
Kim Addonizio - Night of the Living, Night of the Dead
Morris Stegosaurus - It Is Just a Salad Bowl
Morris Stegosaurus - This Poem Is Dedicated to the Cute Guy Who I Once Saw Read a
Poem That Went: “I Tried to Write a Sensitive Poem, but Nothing Rhymes with
Genitalia”
David Colosi - Sun With Issues
Poems: 20
This was, unintentionally, my Hour of Quirk. 1/4th of the way through, we needed a shot in the arm. This was that hour.
I’m a Dunn man. I’ve related this in the past. More people should be. Same with Addonizio. I mostly just read the room and determined who they needed when, and how much. It was all very much like cooking.
During this set I became distinctly aware that The Girls had pompoms.
I had a cheering section.
HOUR 7
6:00 AM - 7:00 AM
William Butler Yeats - The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats - Adam’s Curse
Robert Frost - The Oven Bird
Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken
Carl Sandburg - Chicago
Carl Sandburg - Grass
Wallace Stevens - So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
William Carlos Williams - The Red Wheelbarrow
Dorothy Parker - One Perfect Rose
Dorothy Parker - News Item
Tony Brown - Mission Statement
Scott Woods - The Two Deadly Kung-Fu Venom Masters of Larry’s Bar & Open Mic
Scott Woods - My Man, My Mellow
Scott Woods - Singing Phyllis Hyman’s Lament
Angela Boyce - Love Songs
Corbet Dean - Letter My Dad Never Gave Me
Angela Ball - Jazz
Sharon Olds - His Costume
James Richardson - Vectors: Forty-five Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays
Poems: 19
A quiet hour with small audience, so I started with some classics. The banter was fun then too. “Remember the 1890s?” I said, in reference to the earlier-read Billy Collins’ poem “Nostalgia” after reading Yeats. Sandburg I did Marc Smith-style, which is to say, loud and with marked intention.
The Girls were fading fast: the applause stopped and I started getting nothing but pompoms from The Reclined. They would be sleeping soon. When I finished this set, I walked off the stage. When they didn’t hear anything for a minute or two, they jumped up, wondering what was going on.
I miss Angela’s voice.
HOUR 8
7:00 AM - 8:00 AM
Muriel Rukeyser - Waiting for Icarus
Gwendolyn Brooks - We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks - A Song in the Front Yard
Gwendolyn Brooks - The Boy Died in My Alley
Miguel Algarín - Quarantine
Sandra Cisneros - I Am On My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My
Husband For
Allison Joseph - Soul Train
Allison Joseph - Wedding Party
Maurya Simon - Coward
Charles Coe - Yo Poets
Charles Coe - The Weight of Word Unspoken
Charles Coe - In the House of Echoes
Frank Lamont Phillips - Stolen
Afua Cooper - Faded Roses
Robbie Q. Telfer - Ballad of the Aqua-Pussy
Michael Salinger - Glasses
Michael Salinger - Shotgun Shiva
Sidney Jones Jr. - Haiku 123
Sidney Jones Jr. - Haiku 142
Sidney Jones Jr. - Haiku 143
Poems: 20
The sound is not as good as before on the recording of this hour. I was sitting at the reading station at this point, which had a different mic.
Doug from the bar came up at the beginning of this hour and did a short, funny poem.
Took my first dose of Stay Awake at the beginning of this hour. Way in the back of the venue, I could see through the plate glass of the front door. The sun was rolling over, making everything blue before it woke up proper. By the end of the hour, the day would be present and accounted for.
HOUR 9
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Edgar Allen Poe - The Raven
Walt Whitman - When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Emily Dickenson - 340 (280)
William Carlos Williams - This Is Just To Say
Marianne Moore - Poetry
Pamela Stewart - Martin
Willie Perdomo - Papo’s Ars Poetica
Wendy Rose - For the Angry White Student Who Wanted to Know If I Thought White
People Ever Did Anything Good for “The Indians”
Ryk McIntyre - Seven Haiku for Spontaneous Human Combustion
Sarah Versau - Bitter Orange Picasso
Paul Beatty - Why That Abbot and Costello Vaudeville Mess Never Worked With
Black People
Craig Arnold - Why I Skip My High School Reunions
Bob Hicok - Over Coffee
Julia Kasdorf - Eve’s Striptease
Peter Spiro - Cause and Effect
Hayden Carruth - On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam
Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes - Mother To Son
Denise Levertov - Talking to Grief
Ogden Nash - The Trouble With Women Is Men
Gail Taylor - Taking Her
Poems: 21
Fact: the size of the text in most of the books I read is about half the size of my poems.
Whenever I felt the need to reward the room for sitting through some of the drier material, I gave them some fun stuff. This hour shows that theory in action.
“The Raven” ran just under eight minutes. Beatty’s poem is the shortest of the entire day.
HOUR 10
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Robert Pinsky - The Figured Wheel
Li-Young Lee - A Story
Victor Hernández Cruz - Today Is a Day of Great Joy
Stanley Kunitz - The Portrait
Gary Snyder - I Went Into the Maverick Bar
Amiri Baraka - When We’ll Worship Jesus
Ana Castillo - Seduced by Natassja Kinski
Sherman Alexie - How To Write the Great American Indian Novel
Sesshu Foster - You’ll Be Fucked Up
Siegfried Sassoon- They
Jean Toomer - Harvest Song
Robert Graves - Love Without Hope
Langston Hughes - Harlem
Weldon Kees - When the Lease Is Up
Mark Doty - Homo Will Not Inherit
Nicole Blackman - Daughter
Jeffrey McDaniel - Logic in the House of Sawed-Off Telescopes
Poems: 17
Dave appeared this hour. He made up a bunch of signs, like a football game. Hilarious.
HOUR 11
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Christopher Marlowe - The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 71
Thomas Campion - I Care Not for These Ladies
Phyllis Wheatley - On Being Brought from Africa to America
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan
Dylan Thomas - In My Craft or Sullen Art
Dylan Thomas - Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Philip Larkin - Talking in Bed
Philip Larkin - Sad Steps
Philip Larkin - This Be the Verse
Peter Porter - A Consumer’s Report
Diane Di Prima - April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa
Ishmael Reed - Earthquake Blues
Rick Mulkey - Why I Believe In Angels
Andy Buck - Culprit
Leonard Nimoy - untitled, from We Are All Children
Matt Cook - James Joyce
Leonard Cohen - Democracy
Anne Sexton - For My Lover Returning to His Wife
Todd Bannon - Letter to My Students
Poems: 21
Campion has the most unintentional nasty line of the Old Schoolers I read. Go find it.
Yes, that’s Mr. Spock. I couldn’t help it.
HOUR 12
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Charles Bukowski - First Love
Charles Bukowski - What Will the Neighbors Think
Charles Bukowski - Society Should Realize
Charles Bukowski - Rosary
Taylor Mali - Proofreading Your Peppers Is a Matter of the Utmost Impotence
Taylor Mali - As Far As Words Go, or How to Revise Your Paper
Charles Bukowski - The Weak
Charles Bukowski - A Tough Time
Charles Bukowski - Pay-Off
Charles Bukowski - Thanks to the Computer
Charles Bukowski - Returning to an Old Love
Kenneth Carroll - The Truth about Karen
Kim Addonizio - This Poem Is In Recovery
Kim Addonizio - Cat Poem
Victor Hernández Cruz - Problems with Hurricanes
Naomi Shihab Nye - The Art of Disappearing
Thomas McGrath - Ars Poetica, or Who Lives in the Ivory Tower
W. S. Merwin - The Drunk in the Furnace
Poems: 18
I did a “rewind” on the first poem after stopping in the middle to make sure the CD recorder was running. I don’t do a traditional rewind, though: I fast-forward through whatever you’ve heard, then pick back up at the regular speed. With Bukowski, it’s funny to hear if you’re dong the rest of it in his style. I enjoy doing “A Tough Time” because it has three different characters, all with lines.
I put the Taylor Mali in there, not because it was a perfect fit, but because the person who requested some Taylor Mali had to be at work at noon. I kept it interesting for myself by doing one he’s known for and one, not so much.
The end of this set marked the halfway point, and I’d caught my third or fourth wind
HOUR 13
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Daphne Gottlieb - My Mother Gets Dressed
Joy Harjo - Crossing the Border
Sterling A. Brown - Old Lem
Ron Silliman - The Chinese Notebook.
Poems: 4
High noon…and the hour of the now-infamous “hour-long” poem.
It’s a poem that is many, many pages long, and that’s in small type. It has 223 distinct parts, all numbered, and it actually only clocked in at 47 minutes and some change. It just FELT like an hour.
This was a great challenge for me, and I really felt something significant had changed for me after this poem. I did this hour sitting and watching the clock, as I read right through my normal break time. My voice was strong again and I was performing the hell out of this insane and insanely long poem as if it were the first hour. If I could do that, I thought, I could do anything, even make it to the middle of the night. I had tapped my first pure reservoir here. “Howl” was long, but this was more than long. This was never meant to be performed, and I had done it.
All of this, of course, got Ron Silliman’s name from then on pronounced as “Silly-man”. I’m not sure what my name became.
HOUR 14
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Audre Lorde - Moving Out, or, the End of Cooperative Living
Audre Lorde - The American Cancer Society, or, There is More Than One Way to Skin
a Coon
Audre Lorde - Love Poem
Audre Lorde - Poem for a Poet
Audre Lorde - Paperweight
Audre Lorde - Scar
David Citino - Magnetic Resonating Imager, University Hospitals
David Citino - Charms against Writers Block
David Citino - My Son’s Violin
David Citino - Flying into Billings to Read My Poetry
David Citino - Sister Mary Appassionata Lectures the Eighth Grade Boys and Girls:
The Family Jewels
David Citino - Sister Mary Appassionata Lectures the Science Class: Fossils, Physics,
Apple, Heart
David Citino - Sitting in the Sixth Grade at Ascension of Our Lord School in Cleveland,
Ohio, Reading a Pamphlet Entitled Possession in Iowa
Poems: 13
Lorde taught me a lot about craft at an important time, so she got a lot of play here.
Citino was Columbus’s equivalent of a Laureate. He passed away last year.
HOUR 15
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost - Nothing Gold Can Stay
Theodore Roethke - I Knew a Woman
Randall Jarrell - Next Day
Frank O’Hara - Ave Maria
Gregory Corso - Marriage
Ruth Stone - Some Things You’ll Need to Know Before You Join the Union
Dudley Randall - Ballad of Birmingham
Asha Bandele - In Response to a Brother’s Question about What He should do when his
Best Friend Beats Up His Woman
Kell Robertson - The Old Man Goes Home
Lawrence Jospeh - Sand Nigger
Jimmy Santiago Baca - The Handsome World
Shane Koyczan - Beethoven
Poems: 13
Dan Thress, drummer king and the DJ for our open mic night, entered at this point with instruments in tow: congas. Next hour was going to be fun.
My right eye started twitching this hour. I was genuinely scared for my health briefly. My body was rebelling against having had no sleep for over two days already, and I still had nine hours to go. The rendering I did of Beethoven” was probably the slowest anyone’s ever heard it.
This hour I started taking 15 minute breaks instead of the regular 10 I’d been taking. Ten minutes wasn’t much, especially when people want to talk to you.
HOUR 16
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Baron James Ashanti - Just Another Gig
Paul Beatty - Sitting on Other People’s Cars
Christopher Buckley - Playing for Time
Frank Marshall Davis - Jazz Band
Cornelius Eady - Hank Mobley’s
Cornelius Eady - Jazz Dancer
Marc Smith - Underdog
Peter Spiro - Work
Martín Espada - The Lover of a Subversive is also a Subversive
Charles Bukowski - Poetry Readings
Charles Bukowski - Upon Reading a Critical Review
Charles Bukowski - How to Get Rid of the Purists
Charles Bukowski - Candy-Ass
Poems: 13
The “Music” Hour.
Dan Thress had his drums set up in front of the stage and much of this hour was with music (first 8 poems). It was magical. I suddenly; had my voice and direction and I was laying this tuff out with the drums. We’d arrange the beats like we were in a studio session, and we riffed and we blasted. The more we did it, the more complex and wild we got. It was wondrous.
If you got a band with ya’, you got to do a Marc Smith poem. I imagined myself standing on chairs and barstools and leaning on the shoulders of a Sunday evening Chicago crowd.
There were two people in the audience this hour. Most people kicked themselves later for missing this part.
HOUR 17
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Pablo Neruda - Morning
Pablo Neruda - I Like For You To Be Still
Pablo Neruda - Poetry
Pablo Neruda - Walking Around
Pablo Neruda - Leaning into the Afternoons
Pablo Neruda - Adonic Angela
Pablo Neruda - Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks
Pablo Neruda - Ode to a Beautiful Nude
Nizar Kabbani - When I Love You
Nizar Kabbani - And I Do Not Protest
Nizar Kabbani - Questions to God
Nizar Kabbani - Love Will Remain My Master
Rusty Russell - Superman in the Nursing Home
Safiya Henderson Holmes - Good Housekeeping #17 (Kitchen Fable)
Sandra Cisneros - Letter to Jahn Franco, Venice
Billy Collins - Victoria’s Secret
Poems: 16
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Neruda is the Luther Vandross of poetry, Kabbani is the Teddy Pendergrass. Even with that much love-goodness, you need to break it up with some spice. That was Rusty’s job.
HOUR 18
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Robert Bly - A Third Body
Marilyn Chin - How I Got That Name
Joel Brouwer - Steve’s Commando Paintball, San Adriano, California
Kathryn Takara - Cows and Alabama Folklore
Yumi Thomas - Love Poem to an Avocado from a Tomato
Colleen J. McElroy - This is the Poem I Never Meant to Write
John Ashbery - The Painter
Michael Palmer - I Do Not
Dana Gioia - The Next Poem
Michael Cirelli - San Diego Zoo
Sara Holbrook - How to Write a Love Poem
A. B. Spellman - When Black People Are
Oscar Bermeo - Viewing the World from the Back of a Turtle
Poems: 13
The Bermeo poem came to me just under the wire courtesy of Rich Villar. I was more than happy to accommodate my tan brothers from the east, who, alongside Patricia Smith, saved me in New York last year.
HOUR 19
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Sherman Alexie - Elegies
Sherman Alexie - Marriage
Sherman Alexie - Last Will and Testament
Sherman Alexie - The Sasquatch Poems
Sherman Alexie - Going to the Movies with Geronimo’s Wife
Najma Mohamed - Write
Steve Marsh - In the Queue
Scott Woods - Scott’n’Tony 4: Streetlights
Scott Woods - Chief Engineer Scotty’s Lament
Poems: 9
Dan (the drummer) is a school teacher by day, and one of his students - Mohamed - gave him this poem to be read at this show. I was honored that she cared. She’s in the 6th grade and the poem is very good.
You’ll notice I did two high-powered poems of my own at the end. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and I wanted to celebrate, so I did a couple of pieces that would have normally sapped my strength, but here just seemed to wake me up again. I’ve read them both better before, but they’re respectable.
HOUR 20
7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Gertrude Stein - Christian Berard
Melvin B. Tolson - An Ex-Judge at the Bar
Carl Sandburg - 107 from The People, Yes
Charles Bukowski - The Poem
Charles Bukowski - The Powers That Be
Danny Solis - Untitled
Michael Brown - That Would Be Me
Erik Daniel - A Pack’s Worth of Time
Jack McCarthy - A Modest Proposal
Carolyn Kizer - The Ashes
The Haiku Year - “4 haikus”
Poems: 11
Our bartender, Doug, returned after going home earlier. I think he only missed a few hours in the middle. He was asked how he could stay up so long. He said, essentially, “I served in Vietnam. You learn to stay awake when people are trying to kill you. I just imagine Scott’s trying to kill me.”
HOUR 21
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Christopher Ryan Trudell - Jedi
Bill MacMillan - R.A.M. Upgrade
Lincoln Schrieber - Lunch Lady Blues
Stephen Berg - Glass
Sidney Jones Jr. - The Latter Years of Huggy Bear, Supa Fly and Dolemite
Patricia Smith - Building Nicole’s Mama
Jason Bayani - A Poem That Sure Could Use a Pretentious Title
Octavio Paz - As One Listens to the Rain
Lucille Clifton - Fury
Daisy Zamora - Mother’s Day
Kenneth Carroll - D.C. Nocturne
Kenneth Carroll - Theory on Extinction (What Happened to the Dinosaurs)
Denise Duhamel - Bicentennial Barbie
Bruce Jackson - Shooting, Killing, Drug Busts, Cover-ups, Fuck-ups, Lighter Sides,
Weather and Sports
Jonathan Johnson - Eclipse
Patty Seyburn - You and Them
Poems: 16
HOUR 22
9:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Jessica Hagedorn - Latin Music in New York
Marie Howe - How Some of it Happened
Sharon Olds - The Promise
Li-Young Lee - The Gift
W. H. Auden - If I Could Tell You
Dorothy Parker - The Lady’s Reward
Robinson Jeffers - The Day Is a Poem (September 19, 1939)
Charles Bukowski - Bum on the Loose
Charles Bukowski - The Young Poets
Stephen Dunn - Eggs
Jacqueline Berger - The Gun
Lisa Buscani - Miss Mary Mack
Billy Collins - I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of “Three
Blind Mice”
Audre Lorde - Power
Poems: 14
I was getting loopy here when I wasn’t reading. My voice was dropping, going soft.
The spaces between poems were expanding as I looked for my next poem. I was feeling the burn, and it burned. They could tell I was fading, so they did a “Give me an S” cheer tat spelled my name.
Part of it was hidden exhaustion, looking for any opportunity to break free, some of it was knowing that, once the 10 o’clock hour hit, I was home free on poem choice. At ten, I could do anything I wanted, understanding that I was going to do an hour of original work to close it out. I had been saving a lot of slam stuff and fun stuff for the 10 o’clock hour. More people being there for the end was a motivating factor, but so was going out with a bang. I just needed to get there.
Lee got a clapping cheer from the room. Where were they when I read him, like, 20 hours before? Bukowski and Dunn were attempts to shake myself aware (I was awake, but not aware, and that’s dangerous) while still moving in a low gear. I had to restart the Dunn after the first line. The. First. Line. I was becoming angry with poetry.
Most of you have no idea what it’s like to be in a room, watching the sun rise, then go down again, in one sitting.
When this set ended, I flopped onto a futon on the side. Kim covered me with a blanket. I slept - the only time I slept in about a day and half - for ten minutes. I didn’t mean to, but it was an opening, and exhaustion took advantage of it.
HOUR 23
10:00 PM - 11:00 PM
Bob Holman - Praise Poem for Slam: Why Slam Causes Pain and Is a Good Thing
Morris Stegosaurus - Poem for Nick H.
Nikki Allen - NYC
Dawn Saylor - Take You To Brooklyn
Lynne Procope - Flectere - On Ending
Charles Ellik - My Bloodshot Eyes
Jim McKay - Why I’m Not a Real Poet
Jeremy Richards - T.S. Eliot’s Lost Hip-Hop Poem
Rich Villar - Blue Jesus
Louise Robertson - Not the Day for the World’s Best Poem
Cynthia French - Why People Are Fat
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Ode to the Person Who Stole My Family’s Lawn Gnome
Gina Blaurock - Like a Butterfly
Bill Abbott - Poultry Slam
Andrew Peterson - In the Yin
Kimberly Brazwell - Love Letter to Bert from Ernie
Mikelle Hickman-Romine - Mason Jars
Buddy Wakefield - Convenience Stores
Steve Marsh - He’s a Pussy
Poems: 19
The only time I slept during this event was in the break preceding this hour (for about 10 minutes), and it showed in my performance. I was slow getting back into the groove, but once I woke up a few poems in, something changed.
I transcended.
Something inside of me snapped during this hour. There was no weariness after the beginning. You could have thrown poems at me for another five hours once I caught my wind. My body - with just the ten minutes of sleep - had reset and I was in a zone. It’s hard to describe. I just know that I should not have been able to do a Buddy Wakefield poem after 22 hours of reading, and fresh off more than a baker’s dozen of other slam poems (y’all). But I did, and killed. And following that with Steve’s “Pussy” poem? Shouldn’t have been able to do that, either. This was as close to God as I’ve been with art, well, ever. I did about 66 minutes of poetry here before Louise stopped me so she could change out the CD.
I read right through my break this hour and straight into the next hour, I was so not myself at this point. I was a machine that looked at poetry and sought a way to regurgitate it into space.
This hour was my love letter to Slam. Thank you, Slam, and thank you slammers. You have given me more than I could ever give you. Without Slam, this event was not possible, for numerous reasons.
I also did some local cats’ work, and that was fun, too, knowing that some of the authors were in the room, hearing their words come (some for the first time) out of someone else’s mouth. This hour was their valentine as well. For some, it was thank you, for others, goodbye.
The crowd showed up. They came for a train wreck. They walked into church. We went there together.
HOUR 24
11:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Bill Campana - Bob Ross Goes to Hell
Mary Whi-Chi Kim - Here in the Garden
Scott Woods - Loving a Lesbian When You Have a Ding-a-ling
Scott Woods - Why Nobody Buys Your Chapbook
Scott Woods - Retarded Sade
Scott Woods - Discount
Scott Woods - The End of the Further Adventures of Jimmy Fontaine
Scott Woods - Fine Art
Scott Woods - Queen Takes Black Knight
Scott Woods - Half Mast
Scott Woods - D-Nice Ducked (Elegy for Scott La Rock)
Scott Woods - Theme Song for a Drive-By Deferred
Scott Woods - The Purpose of Kenny G
Scott Woods - Jesus Is My Quarterback
Poems: 14
Like I said, this set really started after 11:00, so I ended up doing something closer to 50 minutes of original work to close out rather than an hour. Sue me.
What is most notable is the way I took to poems I hadn’t read in years. “D-Nice” was an on-the-spot request that I happened to have in the folder, mostly for looks. I haven’t read it in years. Finding new rhythms in the old power pieces with a new voice, new experiences, was a lot like re-interpreting music with your favorite jazz band backing you up.
I am not the person I was two days ago, and the poets who showed up, even for a little while, were changed. This event showed that there is more to poetry than we’ll ever be able to absorb, and that there is talent and strength within us that we do not challenge.
“Discount” was the wrong version, so the ending was off. I’ve got clean out that notebook. Also, I didn’t pull out the third page for “D-Nice” and had to make an ending up on the spot. There’s your freestyle.
The last line in “Jesus Is My Quarterback” is:
My God, it’s...a miracle.
Exactly. I have never felt more like a poet than I do now. It was the purest poetry thing I’ve ever done, and it’s not just history made…it was truly a journey within and without. Thank you everyone who came on that journey. We, literally, made history, and not just poetry or Slam history, but honest-to-God history. And you only get to do that once.
NOTES
- It was cold, so they had heaters running off and on. Because of this, the audio is sometimes perfect, sometimes with a little “wind” in the background. Personally, I like the sound speed bumps; it captures the moment.
- I didn’t rehearse any of this stuff. I was on the road a lot and just barely had enough time to pick enough poems to read, let alone rehearse them. Plus, I didn’t want to rip my throat out before the show, so I read almost all of this stuff cold. Read them all? Of course. Performed them all? Absolutely not. Much like jazz, I did my interpretations.
- All of the heckling was top notch.
- There was never a point when I thought I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t know HOW I was going to do it.
- I envisioned that I would finish the 24 hours, but that I would do so with a ripped throat and bags under my eyes so big that you could carry all of the luggage of a 747 within them. That’s not what happened. Sure, I had some rough hours, but once I set it in my mind that at 10:00 o’clock (pm) I could go for broke, that was my new goal. Get to ten.
- I used Post-Its to mark poems I wanted to read, about 460 by the end of the crunch hour (about three hours before show time. My house is still suffering from the effects of that tornado). But as the show unfolded and putting on a good show each hour became more and more important than trying to simply set a record, I ended up not using a number of them. I picked around them; reading the room, flipping the pages…reading the room, flipping the pages.
- People came up and asked - or shouted out from their seats - who some of the poets were again that struck them as they were read. A lot of people were exposed to a lot of poets they might not have ever heard of. That? I am very proud of.
- Everyone who attended this event was changed. I’m not mad at anyone who didn’t show; I pity them. This was the envelope of our art not only being pushed, but ripped open, re-licked and sent back to God’s mailbox.
- Total # of poems read: 338