Stuff from 2001, perhaps in ascending order of chronology.
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Saturday, November 17th, 2001, 8 PM

Open Mike Poetry Benefit at Electric Earth Café for
Médecins Sans Frontières
(Doctors Without Borders)
 and it was packed with poets! who read until nearly 1 AM. Thanks to Rusty Russell for organizing the whole shebang, on his birthday, yet.

CLICK HERE FOR INFO

terra flag

September 11, 2001: It Can Happen Here.

Click above for poems and other writings in reaction to the events of that date.

The poetz.com NYC calendar & e-newsletter has determined the official answer to "a crucial, irksome, endless, so-far-answerless question: is it Open Mike? or Open Mic?" The answer IN VERSE, submitted by she whom you metaphorically behold before y0u, must have been the best or the funniest, because it won their contest!
Click here to read it.

Angela Rydell won the 2000 Poets & Writers Writers Exchange Program Competition – spoils include a $500 honorarium and an all expense paid trip to New York to meet with publishers, editors, agents and poets in the area. The trip culminates in a reading in NYC. The judges were Martha Rhodes for poetry and Sherman Alexie for fiction. Poets & Writers sponsors a Writers Exchange Program Competition in a different state each year. "Quite a unique opportunity for a small-town girl like me." Angela says. You callin' Madison small?
Charles Cantrell has received a partial fellowship for the Vermont Studio Center. His poem Sartre In The Hayloft has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Gwen Ebert won the 2000 4 Way Books Prize for her poetry collection, tentatively titled Days of Gracious. She also won a Pippistrelle Small Press Award for a previous book of poems, The Twig Songs, as did Marilyn Annucci for Luck, both published by Parallel Press. Gwen also just received second prize in the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for her poem This Lie, This Dark Man, This Mother, published in issue #48 of the Bellingham Review.

On July 31, local TV station WYOU hosted a poetry slam which they will televise at some later date—the idea was to dress up as your favorite Wisconsinite and recite Wisconsin-related poetry. Ourhost cross-dressed as Tammy Baldwin; the judge came as Russ Feingold (plus his lovely intern); and the two contestants were both Ed Gein (Benjamin Pierce & Jeannie Bergmann). There was also a lot of beer, and they ended up eating all the sausages brought by one of the Ed Geins. The other Ed Gein read extremely interesting poems that made extensive use of the words "flensing", "menses", "moon", and "scalpel", which had apparently preceded the occasion. We hope to see this happen again, on a larger scale (with multiple Jeffrey Dahmers?), perhaps at Hallowe'en. Pester Daniel Cashin at: dcashin@students.wisc.edu.

X Announcements from our City of Madison Poet Laureate, ZAndrea Musher, the successor to John Tuschen: The Tape Release Party for the Spring Poets featured on the Poetry Buzz was held on Sunday, July 1, 4-6 pm, with readings, refreshments, and original music: the premiere of Elden Louis Steele's "Serenade #1 in G" performed live by a harp, clarinet, oboe & bassoon quartet trio. At Canterbury Booksellers, 258-9911, 315 West Gorham St.

Either the Spring Poets tape or the first quarterly recording, the Winter Poets tape, is available for $10.00 at A Room Of One's Own bookstore, 307 W. Johnson St., Canterbury Booksellers, 315 W. Gorham St., or e-mail to order; we'll ship and bill you. Buy both for only $16.00!

WE ROLLED OUR OWN BLACKOUT

In protest of George W. Bush's energy policies and lack of emphasis on efficiency, conservation and alternative fuels, there was a planetary voluntary rolling blackout on the first day of summer, June 21, 2001, from 7pm - 10pm in any time zone (rolling it across the planet), as a simple protest and a symbolic act. Let your government representatives and environmental contacts know we want global education, participation and funding in conservation, efficiency and alternative fuel efforts – and an end to exploitation and misuse of the earth's resources. A poetic act, endorsed by none other than Archibald MacLeish: read You, Andrew Marvell.

Missed it? here's a photo:
It's too late – for a hugely entertaining, immensely inspiring (and Freudian) experience, reeking with possibilities, that occurred in the greenhouse at Birge Hall, on the UW campus. The enormity of the effect on poetic stimulation cannot be exaggerated; anything whose name means "giant deformed penis" is inherently worthwhile. To quote a local poet (who is not the site perpetrator) "To heck with cucumbers; I'm gonna get me one of THOSE!" The Titan Arum bloomed at the beginning of June; expect the next Corpse Flower in a decade or so.
It maxed out at
8' 5"!


Amorphophallus titanum
photo by fibitz

Spring's End Poetry Party on May 31st at Café Montmartre organized by Sean Welch to benefit the Wil-Mar Community Food Pantry; lots of us local poets read, including Jonathan, Quinn, Jeannie Bergmann, Joey Dunscombe, Daniel Roop, Elise Rose, Rusty Russell, Dave Scheler, and Sean himself – let us know if anyone was left out.
sean welch
Sean Welch
dave scheler
Dave Scheler
jonathan
Jonathan
elise rose
Elise Rose
joey dunscombe
Joey Dunscombe
jeannie bergmann
Jeannie Bergmann
Photos by Bowe Berge

Winners of the 2001 Youth Poetry Competition.

Robert Pinsky and Madison's Favorite Poems
On May 2nd, 2001, Robert Pinsky gave a public presentation as well as a lecture on the Americans' Favorite Poems Project. Here are the favorite poems sent in by local residents. Highly recommended!

On April 8th, 2001, at Barnes & Noble, Jennifer Jones read from her biography-in-progress, A Major Woman: The Life of Anna Wickham, Poet. Sybil Robinson, Professor Emeritus at UW-Madison, read some of the poems of Anna Wickham.

The April 2001 pages for those who missed all the fun!

Definitely My Hero Dept.
The president of the University of Alaska, Mark R. Hamilton, has issued an admirable statement unambiguously defending free speech following a controversy over a poem on child sexual abuse, Indian Girls, by Linda McCarriston, a creative-writing professor at the Anchorage campus. Protesters characterized the poem as racist and demanded an apology. Hamilton, a poet himself who had work published in the same issue of Ice Floe where McCarriston's poem appeared, said in part, "…to 'investigate the circumstances,' is unacceptable. There is nothing to 'check into,' nothing to 'investigate.' " He stated even more forcefully "As soon as you place a caveat on free speech, you curtail it. And then you're going straight to hell." You betcha.

Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers can read this article on the Web; if you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web site, a special subscription offer can be found at: http://chronicle.com/4free Use the code D00CM when ordering.

X From our official City of Madison Poet Laureate, ZAndrea Musher, appointed as the successor to John Tuschen: The Russian poet and political activist Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited in Madison; Andrea read a poem composed in honor of the occasion to introduce his reading at Edgewood College. He has been named an honorary citizen of Madison by our mayor, who proclaimed Wednesday, March 21, 2001 to be Yevgeny Yevtushenko Day.

Censorship is an issue that's relevant to all of us as poets and artists. Here is part of an article by Victor Infante, reprinted from poetry.about.com's MUSELETTER #55. THE RETURN OF VICTOR'S SOAPBOX: …I did, however, get to see one of my all time favorite writers, Neil Gaiman, read in a charity benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is a non-profit organization that protects the civil rights of comic book retailers and artists from the forces of censorship. Whenever I cringe a bit about the amount of money I paid for two tickets to this reading, I remind myself of something: poetry, like comic books, is an extremely vulnerable art form, lacking in large amounts of resources to protect the 1st Amendment rights of the artists whose work might offend the sensibilities of some. I was reminded of this in a recent online discussion about the slam, and about measures to outright disallow performances which were really just rants or dramatic monologues. But really, this is one of those "thin wedge" areas—where the worst need to be defended because once they are subject to those whose agenda is cultural control, we all are. Let me switch back to comic books by way of example. A young man in Florida, whose name escapes me right now, was arrested in Pensacola for distributing an independent comic book of his own creation. By all accounts, it was overly violent and not terribly good, and he sold maybe a couple dozen copies. Despite legal support from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, he lost in a Florida court, and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment (suspended, but on his record), psychiatric counseling at his own expense, a $1,000 fine, and—perhaps worst of all—he was (a) not allowed to come within 10 feet of anyone under the age of 18, costing him his job, (b) legally prohibited from drawing, and (c) subject to spot searches at any hour, so the sheriff could ascertain that he wasn't "committing art." Stalinist-sounding, isn't it? The Supreme Court declined to hear his case, but he was eventually allowed to move to New York City, where the police have better things to do than make sure someone's not drawing. Still, his life is ruined. What does this have to do with poetry? Everything. If we, as hosts, present something as "open," then it damn well needs to be open. Minor restrictions on language are one thing (it is, after all, a public space) but to make a snap decision—on the spot—as to whether a piece of writing is art or not brings us one step closer to regulating political content. Works that comment on racial issues, the largest source of slam's rhetoric, might well be deemed not worthy of legal protection in this scenario. If that were to happen (and listen to the subtext of some political speeches lately to realize how likely it is), it would be a tragedy and we, as poets, would bear some responsibility. It is a failure of art and freedom which I, for one, could not tolerate. The other side of this is one of slam's underlying tenets: that everyone has the right to their own opinion. Do I think too many people take the results too seriously? Yes, but that's an irrelevancy. As a slammaster, it's your responsibility to mind the talent that's not getting attention from the judges. Feature them; promote them. Tell everybody they're flipping idiots for not realizing their genius. Whatever. Slam competition should not be the be-all and end-all of a poetry scene—just another door into it—and the slammaster, like any host, has responsibilities beyond seeing that the reading runs. This is one of them.
Victor Infante ocvictor@earthlink.net Buy Victor's book here.
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/01/06/books-schoenkopf.shtml Neal Pollack http://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/vcp/who.html Brendan Constantine
http://www.cbldf.org/pr/001024-gat-la.shtml Neil Gaiman
http://www.cbldf.org/ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund