d 19 in idea barrages

I feel very protective of spoken-word-only open mics. Yes, poetry & music are intermingled & there’s nothing wrong with occasionally lapsing into song as a PART of your poem, as punctuation, I know people who do that beautifully and I love hearing that but… when someone ONLY comes up there to sing, because to their egos it’s just another place for them to show off something welcomed everywhere, to steal time from the spoken word in one of its few small refuges… there are just SO MANY places where people are welcomed to sing, there are so very few for poetry. It feels like a violation of a sacred space somehow. It feels like an armed robbery.

Be as sparing as you possibly can be in your introduction of yourself, in the origins and intentions of your work, as you can get away with. It can water down. It can distract. Art isn’t about explicating your meaning exactly, that’s technical writing, that’s architectural drafting. It’s about creating a thing that challenges an audience to think their own thoughts about it. At best, only half of a work is what you put forth. The other half is the audience’s interpretation. Let them do that work, to the largest extent that you can. That’s how you actually engage. That’s how you art.

It kills me how much better I am at performing my work than my work is on paper. You have no idea how much I would love to be the kind of writer whose stuff can shine without performance, standing alone. You have no idea how much I wish, in D&D terms, I could cast from INT instead of CHA. You have no idea.

Just once, I’d like the commercial that says “Critics are RAVING about Movie X” to just cut to film critics frothing at the mouths, screaming gibberish and banging their heads on padded walls. Health care workers looking on with pity and concern.

A rage room, but you break things with archery instead of melee and you call it The Ranged Room.

I don’t think I could ever understand writing well enough to teach someone how to do that, there are so many different ways to do it, I only know a couple of them. But, at this point in my life, I might be experienced enough to think I could help people learn how to better perform what they’ve already written…

Why call Scott Summers, the leader of the X-Men “Cyclops” when you could call him “Mister Beam”?

If the snow isn’t sticking yet, it doesn’t count as snow, you’re from the snow belt, you all should know this. Until it sticks, that’s just pavement-activated rain, bay-BEE!