WordXWord Recap
Aug. 19th, 2012 04:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osirusSo, this weekend was the conclusion of Pittsfield'sWordxWord Festival, which is a huge celebration of the spoken and written word, with amazing poets who came in from all over the country. And this year, unlike 2010, everything was free. The workshops, the small events, and even the big feature presentations. Thanks to sponsors, everything was free. So that's awesome, and you should all take advantage of it next year.
Well, damn near all of you. Berkshires-ites: This is seriously one of the best things going in the Berkshires. Non-Berkshires-ites-but-still-literary-folk: This is seriously an amazing event and if you were considering visiting the Berkshires anyway, WordXWord is a fine week to do it.
As usual Taylor "What Teachers Make" Mali was there, but this year brought perhaps the best crop of other poets yet, including my new favorite Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who is charming like a sexy female Gilbert Gottfried, a comparison I did not make to her because I do not know if she would be flattered (poor Gilbert, so brilliant, so underappreciated), but seriously I saw a show where she featured and read 5 poems, and every single one of them was brilliant.
Anyway, this year's festival was bittersweet for me, because I participated in the poetry slam, and was eliminated in the second day (irksome 1-round days) due to score creep. (Judging is always done by random audience members, and the rest of the audience tends to boo low scores and cheer high scores, and scores tend to creep ever higher over the evening. I went second out of eight, and got a great audience reaction. But scores kept rising, and the last four poets to read all advanced, and the first four did not, me included.) Still, numerous people came up to me and said they loved the poem, so that was nice.
And tonight I participated in WordXWord's first ever Poetry Olympics, a bizarre melange of physical and poetical challenges, and after watching poets eat 40 jalapenos while reading a poem, trying to recite a haiku through a mouthful of marshmallows, and acting out a poem as it was read, the final relay had me pushing another poet on a tricycle, running a lap around the audience, and falling off-stage before breathlessly reading my final poem of the evening, all on the same stage as the aforementioned amazing awesome poets, and the Berkshires team, although defeated by Cristin's team USA, defeated Taylor Mali's team NYC, so that was awesome.
And then on the way to the afterparty, Taylor said to me, "Have you ever freestyle battled against Curtis Asch?" (Curtis, my teammate in the poetry Olympics, won the slam this year.) "No," I said, "I didn't even know he freestyled!"
"Yes he does," said Taylor. "Maybe you should do that tonight."
"I would love to," said I. "You have enough pull here to make things happen, so you should make that happen, and I will be glad to do it."
So, about an hour into the afterparty, the music stops, Taylor walks to the corner stage mic and announces that Curtis and I unbeknownst to each other were freestylers, and we should rap. Curtis had a beat on his iPhone hooked up to the sound system, I solicited starting topics from the audience ("10 Bucks" and "Battlestar Galactica"), and then we traded off random freestyles for a few minutes to a crowd full of poets, and it was the most fun I've had in a long time, and the audience liked it (even the famous poet types), and we hung out for a couple more hours before the bar closed and kicked us out.
And then I came home to a very tired![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_star_fish who I was glad to see seemed to be feeling better.
Oh, and here's last week's column about how I fail to eat healthy.
Well, damn near all of you. Berkshires-ites: This is seriously one of the best things going in the Berkshires. Non-Berkshires-ites-but-still-literary-folk: This is seriously an amazing event and if you were considering visiting the Berkshires anyway, WordXWord is a fine week to do it.
As usual Taylor "What Teachers Make" Mali was there, but this year brought perhaps the best crop of other poets yet, including my new favorite Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who is charming like a sexy female Gilbert Gottfried, a comparison I did not make to her because I do not know if she would be flattered (poor Gilbert, so brilliant, so underappreciated), but seriously I saw a show where she featured and read 5 poems, and every single one of them was brilliant.
Anyway, this year's festival was bittersweet for me, because I participated in the poetry slam, and was eliminated in the second day (irksome 1-round days) due to score creep. (Judging is always done by random audience members, and the rest of the audience tends to boo low scores and cheer high scores, and scores tend to creep ever higher over the evening. I went second out of eight, and got a great audience reaction. But scores kept rising, and the last four poets to read all advanced, and the first four did not, me included.) Still, numerous people came up to me and said they loved the poem, so that was nice.
And tonight I participated in WordXWord's first ever Poetry Olympics, a bizarre melange of physical and poetical challenges, and after watching poets eat 40 jalapenos while reading a poem, trying to recite a haiku through a mouthful of marshmallows, and acting out a poem as it was read, the final relay had me pushing another poet on a tricycle, running a lap around the audience, and falling off-stage before breathlessly reading my final poem of the evening, all on the same stage as the aforementioned amazing awesome poets, and the Berkshires team, although defeated by Cristin's team USA, defeated Taylor Mali's team NYC, so that was awesome.
And then on the way to the afterparty, Taylor said to me, "Have you ever freestyle battled against Curtis Asch?" (Curtis, my teammate in the poetry Olympics, won the slam this year.) "No," I said, "I didn't even know he freestyled!"
"Yes he does," said Taylor. "Maybe you should do that tonight."
"I would love to," said I. "You have enough pull here to make things happen, so you should make that happen, and I will be glad to do it."
So, about an hour into the afterparty, the music stops, Taylor walks to the corner stage mic and announces that Curtis and I unbeknownst to each other were freestylers, and we should rap. Curtis had a beat on his iPhone hooked up to the sound system, I solicited starting topics from the audience ("10 Bucks" and "Battlestar Galactica"), and then we traded off random freestyles for a few minutes to a crowd full of poets, and it was the most fun I've had in a long time, and the audience liked it (even the famous poet types), and we hung out for a couple more hours before the bar closed and kicked us out.
And then I came home to a very tired
the_star_fish who I was glad to see seemed to be feeling better.Oh, and here's last week's column about how I fail to eat healthy.
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Date: 2012-08-19 09:57 pm (UTC)