If you missed last night's SpoFest reading, here's the video. Hearty thanks to our host James Bryant! It was an honor for me to read with Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour, Missouri Poet Laureate Karen Craigo and former Missouri Poets Laureate Walter Bargen and Aliki Barnstone. I begin around the 1:27:00 mark.
Video permalink: https://www.facebook.com/SpoFest/videos/1077209229398979/.
Very much looking forward to reading with these fine folk as part of this year's virtual Bronx Book Fair on October 5th 2020 at 5 p.m. Eastern. Many thanks to Executive Director Lorraine Currelley!
Click here to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEscuGurj8uH9ftls0kVzjc1vQkQuIP4ZRZ.
Featured poets: John Burroughs, William F. DeVault, Igor Goldkind, Deborah Tosun Kilday, Tammi Truax, Chryssa Velissariou.
I am grateful to be part of the latest episode of GAS: Poetry, Art & Music, hosted by Belinda Subraman. The program also features work by Gail Newman, Sugar Whiskey (Dan Nielsen and Georgia Bellas), Peggy Rush, Ken Clinger, Jason O'Toole, Rigoberto De La Mora, and International Beat Poet Laureate Chryssa Velissariou. You'll find me around the 19:30 mark, where Belinda interviews me briefly and I read my poems "Flagging" and "Tell Them I Am Sent You."
In it I read three timely poems: "Food for Thought," "Faith Without Works Is Dead" and "I Am Not Ready to Die."
Video permalink: https://youtu.be/9_iHHfi6f7w.
You can also see me read the same poems live on the complete Day One video.
To see many more videos of participants and honorees from around the world, including readings by and interviews with this year's new Beat Poets Laureate, check out the National Beat Poetry Foundation's YouTube Channel.
Thanks again to Debbie Tosun Kilday, Chryssa Velissariou, Paul Richmond and Shaw Israel Izikson for outperforming Sisyphus and rolling this rockin' festival all the way up and over the top despite quasi-Herculean challenges.
1:00-1:05pm EST
• Debbie Tosun Kilday introduces the start of the festival
• Host Shaw Israel Izikson
1:05-1:10pm EST
• George Wallace, Long Island, 1st US National Beat Poet Laureate (2015-2016)
1:10-1:15pm EST
• Chryssa Velissariou, Greece Beat Poet Laureate (2019-Lifetime)
1st International Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2018) - Greece
1:15-1:20pm EST
• Bengt O. Björklund, Sweden Beat Poet Laureate (2018-Lifetime)
1:20-1:25pm EST
• Aprilia Zank, Germany Beat Poet Laureate (2018 - Lifetime)
1:25-1:30pm EST
• Daniela Voicu, Romania Beat Poet Laureate (2018-Lifetime)
1:30-1:35pm EST
• David K. Leff, New England Beat Poet Laureate (2018-Lifetime)
1:40-1:45pm EST
• Kate Lamberg, Long Island, NY Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
1:45-1:50pm EST
• William F. DeVault, US National Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2018)
1:50-1:55pm EST
• Chris Vannoy, US National Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2019)
San Diego, California Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
1:55-2:00pm EST
• Paul Richmond, US National Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2020)
Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate - 2017-2019
2:00-2:05 EST
• Donna Anne Allard, Canada, International Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2020)
2:05-2:10 EST
• Ernel Grant, Connecticut Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
2:10-2:15pm EST
• Carlo Parcelli, Maryland Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
2:15-2:20pm EST
• Daniel McTaggart, West Virginia Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
Intermission (5 Minutes)
2:25-2:30pm EST
• Debbie Tosun Kilday welcoming attendees to the 2nd half of the program.
2:30-2:35pm EST
• Annie Petrie Sauter, Colorado Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
2:35-2:40pm EST
• Viviana Duncan, New York City, NY Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
2:40-2:45pm EST
• Ngoma Hill, New York State Beat Poet Laureate (2017-2019)
2:45-2:50pm EST
• Darlene Fernandez, (Dee TruePoetry) Connecticut Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2020)
2:50-2:55pm EST
• Tammi Truax, Maine Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2020)
2:55-3:00pm EST
• Richard Wayne Horton, Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
3:00-3:05pm EST
• Lori Desrosiers, US National Beat Poet Laureate (2016-2017)
3:05-3:10pm EST
• Ron Whitehead, Kentucky Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
3:10-3:15pm EST
• John Burroughs, Ohio Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
3:15-3:20pm EST
• Nordette N. Adams, Louisiana Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
3:20-3:25pm EST
• William David Sovern, Indiana Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2021)
3:25-3:30pm EST
• Barry Graham, Michigan Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2020)
3:30-3:35pm EST
• Larry Jaffe, Florida Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2020)
Written by Nelson Gary: 
Rattle and Numb [2019, Venetian Spider Press]
Cover art by Emma Anderson
Rattle and Numb: Selected and New Poems 1992-2019 by John Burroughs, Ohio State Beat Poet Laureate, is a collection filled with the poet's powerful, pervasive energy. With it, he rebels against conformity to middle-class values while also showing the poet's medals and wounds as a result of that war. After World War II, especially taking the Holocaust into consideration, how poetry could be written at all, let alone with rhymes, was taken into major critical consideration on a moral and an ethical basis. How could the human soul be responsible for so much death and so much inhumane death at that? The very question of the existence of soul after the destruction of civilization, which was World War II, came into question.
On the dust jacket of Burroughs's collection, A.W. Graves writes that he does not like modern poetry much because it is "lifeless and soulless" as well as lacking "originality and intimacy." He goes on to say that he likes Burroughs's work because it is full of what most modern poetry lacks. I wholly agree with Graves about Burroughs's work as it pertains to certain poets today who have no motive, will, or design in depicting the "lifeless and soulless," other than sometimes imitating examples in terms of form (design) of preexisting works, be it under a teacher of a workshop or from the shelves of a library or university bookstore. What makes Burroughs's form lively and soulful is its rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay, which do, at times, come across as comedic, but it is comedic in a layered way that is akin to the moral outrage of Lenny Bruce and his brand of black humor: insightful, disturbing, and heartbreaking, if not tragic, not to mention, of course, funny. Intimacy on the page is created by the conversational tone of even the most philosophically profound poems in Rattle and Numb, and there are more than a decent number of them.
One could make an argument that Burroughs's free verse rhymes are anchored in a unique sense of the variable foot, and this would be an excellent argument, one which I would not deny the validity of, but it is really a surface point, though one necessary to make. One must consider the history and nature of rhyme, excluding off-rhyme, from the assessment. Rhyme has such a long and prolific use that the current value of it is not mainly the sight and sound of it at the end of lines or even in the middle of them, internally. The power of it is in how and why it connects thought, emotion, idea, image, alliteration, and rhythm. While it is much more difficult to make this connection (consistently at the end of lines) in accentual or syllabic verse and maintain intelligibility at the very least, it is difficult to make rhyme work on a technical basis in free verse, especially to do so and be taken at all seriously as a poet. Burroughs, a poet worthy of all taking seriously, makes rhyme work in a unique and visceral way through sheer instinct. I do not know his deeper reasons for doing this, but what it results in is an experience of body and soul, the at times excruciating and at times ecstatic dislocation and connection between them. Bob Dylan said that the best people carry themselves like boxers, and in this highly autobiographical work, this is how John Burroughs carries himself page after page.
Burroughs's style is
inordinately powerful, elevating the work to a higher place than either
comedy or tragedy: tragicomedy. His regular form, consisting of
wordplay, rhythm, and rhyme, meets what is central to the best of Rattle and Numb's content at times in a discordant way, other times in a
harmonious one, but in a way, that is altogether fulfilling to this
reader. The centerpiece of this collection is "Identity Crisis."
Ultimately, what Burroughs's work shows is the relationship between the
one and the other in terms of the one's formation of identity in an in
inimitable and memorable way.
* * * * *
I am grateful to Scot D Young and Rusty Truck for giving this recent piece of mine a home:
I Am Not Ready to Die.
Topic: Awenites featuring John Burroughs
Time: Aug 9, 2020 02:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82157517296?pwd=RUJqRTg4MnFMS3lkcjJzZnRiaTh1Zz09
Meeting ID: 821 5751 7296
Passcode: 64S42a729R
Questions? Contact the event host, Doc Janning, Poet Laureate of South Euclid, Ohio.
To be notified about their future events, follow Awenites on Facebook.
