Every now and then, a new opportunity, a new role, comes along. Tonight I hosted poetry night at The Well for the first time. The Well, for those who don’t know, is a quirky little hybrid place in downtown Victoria, part restaurant, part health food store, part bookstore, art gallery, clothing store, and most importantly, performance space. It is currently transitioning from a commercial venture into a not-for-profit society. Full disclosure: I’ll be chair of the first Board of directors.
Way more exciting, of course, is the opportunity to be the host of a poetry night in a hotbed of poetry. You have no idea….
So tonight I led off with:
Invocation
Grant me inspiration
Wash me in the river of creativity
Let my eyes see truth
Let me appreciate beauty in all its many forms
Grant me the grace not to hold tight but to give away
Allow peace to enter my heart
Let me give away my love unreservedly
Let me receive love unconditionally
Illuminate my path in the dark of night
Shade my way in the heat of the day
Grant me wisdom borne of struggle
Bring me tranquility in tragedy
Grant me inspiration
Devorah Stohl followed with several very good pieces including a Bill of Rights for poets. Next up was the past Poet Laureate for the City of Victoria Linda Rogers. She read a variety of wonderful pieces as fresh as today’s headlines and still glowing from the vicarious pleasure of Obama’s win. Richard Olafson, publisher and poet, followed with a retrospective look at his poetry from the early years to the present. Richard charmed us with his time travel return to being twenty years old again, fascinated with the moon. Finally, the city’s current Poet Laureate, Janet Rogers honored us with her readings. Janet is not just a poet but an activist, a performance artist, radio personality and so much more. And later I found out that she used to live just a block or two away but has since moved, pity!
Amin, who operates manages the food operations at The Well, closed with a poem in Bengali which, although we couldn’t understand it, moved us all.
My final offering was:
Eruption
Words cascade like flowing lava
Tumbling in a red hot fireglow
Out of a parade of mouths that strain
Implore
Cajole
Inform
Subvert and shock,
Not that anyone here shocks easily,
This room resists tectonic movement
These poems come crammed full of ideas
Concepts
Inner truths
Self-loathing and
Self-love
These words spill out overflowing
Like a broken levee spilling turgid water onto sodden streets
The more the better
Jam packed
Into impossibly long poems read from a single page
And I think that the font must be pretty fucking small
And their eyesight must be damned sharp
For one page to contain this jambalaya of wordfeast
While what I set down on my pages is sparse and spartan
Graphically arranged
Where phrases and words all need their space
And the space between the spaces informs the composition
While these chatterbox beat fiends fly paper kites in the light of the moon
Powered by the breath of a muse
These poems arrive in rhythmic cadences delivered
Naturally as a vaginal birth
Or pulled protesting from the womb in c-sectioned blood
While dilated irises betray the nervousness and fear
That shake fingers clutching just too tightly to a page
These lines explode over our heads like fireworks on a summer night
Briefly illuminating our dark thoughts and secret places
Synapses firing like bullets over Damascus
Punctuated by gentle heckling and raucous rebel yells
Roaring applause
Snapping fingers
Table thumping
While the red hot stream congeals into rock
A rock that will be mined and crushed and used for
Ornamental landscapes
Driveways
Pathways
Recalling the fluid past when rock was molten
Flowing in tongues of fire from the crater into the night
