Some came here looking for it, asking for it, basking in it and bleeding it. They packed their bags and hopped a plane or train wearing their I’m-going-to-go-off-the-deep-end trunks. Some came here for other reasons—jobs probably—and heard its whisper rise to a cry and threw their brief cases out the office window and flipped off their boss in their late night imaginations while turning in their two week notice the next day.
I delay.
But only because I want to find a word better than “art” to refer to “it.”
Poets and troubadours: Hook us up with a jar of new superlatives. Please deliver them to the English language. Make them light on the tongue, but heavy in our pockets and lives, with syllabications that sing in combinations of aesthetic articulations that even Grumpy George and his water buffalo frown will not be able to refrain from putting them on his tongue.
As the saying goes, Every bear in New York writes their own zine:
I saved on Carbon emissions and whales this weekend by not taking an impromptu excursion to Washington, D.C. like last weekend. This weekend made up for it in verse. Friday, after a 14-hour day that stretched from the Bronx to Long Island, I set my tough man bag down at The Peanut Underground Art Gallery on what may have been the Lower East side (I just follow my phone). At the PU, was the JUJO, monthly poetry/prose readings put together by soon to be graduated MFA student Liz Axelrod for the graduating students of The New School MFA writing program.
Tracing back how I came to be friends Liz excavates a lot. I met her through writer Ted Hesson, whom I met in Guatemala on the connect of my editor at The Expeditioner, Matt Stabile, who I had met after submitting an article on Cuba to his travel site, a trip I took as a tribute to my recently deceased poet-Grandmother who first got me excited about literature by replacing my Hardy Boys books with Hemingway paperbacks. And the chain links on. I have amigo’d up with Liz’s boyfriend, James, and together we are cooking up plans to use poetry to heist the Crown Jewels from their lonely London Tower.
Liz has a talent not just for writing, but for bringing people, namely poets, together on the same page. Only those who have been tasked with teaching a herd of cats to sing in a benefit concert raising money for sick dogs know how uncommon that ability is.
Readings around here tend to towards rad, but being part of this one, where the audience was comprised of people scrambling up the same granite stairway, was like looking down and seeing underneath the cap of life that you’ve won a free Sprite. I’m fairly sure, that most of the words heard on Friday at The PU will make their way to the pages of books. Everyone there had not just the touch of talent, but that hunger of fermented fervor that led to them chasing down an MFA in the student loan infested hallways of higher education where a single objective pursued vigilantly can carry most days.
Poetry are the words we speak to fill perfectly good silences. The sound of verse is a sort of silence. It is the murmur of our thoughts, the taste of tea, the bucking of the bronco and what we are left with after catching a glorious glimpse of the shooting star after a particularly inspiring make-out session.
Sometimes poetry looks like this:
On Friday, it looked like this:
Stay sassy New York.
