i don’t know how to do this shit
Posted on | July 21, 2009 | No Comments
Well,
Here’s yet another youtube video. I decided to improv some poetry because… well why the hell not? It was something I used to do a lot, and now don’t because I’ve gotten noticeably lazier as time has gone on and for the simple fact that I don’t really write all that much poetry anymore. I’ve been writing some for my one man show Scratch (coming in November!) and god, it is exhausting. Says something, doesn’t it, that I pretty much stopped writing poetry around the age of 25 or so. Burning down the fires of youth. Put me in a bad place for a while, one where I went from band to band to band to band trying to figure out the formula for whatever it was that would make me artistically fulfilled.
Only to come… full circle? I was really happy with this performance, even though it was, by the standards I have for myself, only O.K. But it’s along the lines of what I really want to be doing. I feel like I forced myself to learn music because it was fun and aggressive and something to do while high. Not that I didn’t genuinely enjoy it and have moments of complete rapture while either playing or composing. But there’s something about poetry that has its own rhythm, and there are places I can get to with poetry that I can’t get to with music… perhaps if I studied music intensely and took composition and really busted my ass practicing. But it feels like to me poetry works with my natural rhythms. I’m more comfortable pausing as a poet than I am as a musician. When I play guitar on stage, those banterless in-between-song moments are awkward and I hate them.
Live at penny’s open mic! 7/7 I think. ***N.B.*** I only put “slam” in the title of the video so that it will come up when people search for slam poetry. I’m well aware that people will call some of what I do slam, but I don’t consider myself a slam poet. I think that any time you call yourself something, someone will come along and say you’re not that, and those arguments are so retarded that it just makes me want to avoid them all together. You’ll notice that my music videos are tagged “punk” too, not because I think I’m punk, but because someone searching for punk videos could plausibly be interested in an aggressive guitar player, drunk, pleading, in an underground black box in New York City.
I may be wrong though.
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Tags: penny's open mic > poetry > videos
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