If there is such a thing as a "Force" and poetry has its equivalent, then I feel the impending doom, the disturbance, the unnamed darkness coming over the hill ( Read more... )

Bill Campana's feature tonight was, no joke, mind-blowing.

Forget that he bought me genuine Mexican food yesterday or that he told me he liked my feature last night.  Forget all that.  I can certainly post in my journal without kissing anyone's hind parts.  I could have bypassed his whole feature here if I wanted to.  I don't want to.  It was ( Read more... )

So Tony put up this depressing post the other day and I've been  mulling it over.  We tend to be so in the pocket on so many things that I wonder how it is I'm so involved in Slam and he's not.  It's weird, but then again, I'm Scott-Motherfucking-Woods.

What's worth looking into for me is how much of the state of Slam do we attribute to Nats, and is ( Read more... )

Dear E,

Please forgive my delay in repsonding to your letter, in which  you wrote:

i have a question to ask you about Nationals. i made the XXXXX team this year...YAY! thats right, this year the badge around my neck will say poet and not volunteer. my question to you is this:

HOW DO I GET RID OF THE BUTTERFLIES THAT HAVE FOUND A HOME IN MY STOMACH!!!

( Read more... )

A great poet - Lee Knight, Jr. - once wrote about that sad, gut-wrenching dynamic that follows most people out the door of the last poem of a large poetry slam event.  It is the soul-sucking return to the common.

You hang out with dozens (or in the case of a national sized event, hundreds) of people who are dedicated to the thing you love to do.  ( Read more... )

This is a retread entry, but I've been having a conversation with someone lately who needs to hear this, so I'm making it handy. I think 3 years in the vault is long enough to be buried.

http://scottwoods.livejournal.com/14057.html

How To Become Famous To The People Who Really MatterI ( Read more... )

Something else I hate to see poets do, rant #115:

Self-censored curse words.

What I mean:

I'm listening to the new Les Nubians album*, Echos: Chapter One: "Nubian Voyager", which is a divergence from previous records in that it's not them singing so much as them featuring poets over music. Naturally, once I was made aware of this, I was drawn ( Read more... )

Artists should only be told what they should do with their art by their audience, their agent, or by the artist's request. People who walk around looking to give artists advice like some kind of Jedi master are mostly inconsiderate twits. Well-intentioned twits, but twits nonetheless.

I've been working with various poets over the past few weeks in varying capacities and this little bit of advice I felt like sharing ( Read more... )

1 ( Read more... )