night of a handful of poets

One of the ideas I struck while in Los Angeles was a concept called "Night of a Thousand Poets"...the concept was to get just about every poet in the LA area (and there are bazillions of them...and I am not talking about every yahoo who wrote a poem once, I'm talking about book-published poets, or at least lit-journal published poets) to do an evening where each poet gets up, reads a poem, and steps down...

Then I hit an idea when I was working with the poetry group in Bay St. Louis...it was called "Attack of the Street Poets"...where we'd place a performance poet on as many street corners as we could and let them do their thing, all on a pleasant summer's afternoon...unfortunately, I left before I could make that a reality and what my absence didn't undo, Hurricane Katrina helped bury...

Now I'm working with a few people on an idea I call "Night of...(TBD) Poets" similar to the first more than the second, but there is, believe it or not, a substantially smaller pool of published poets in Morgantown, West Virginia (population less than 30,000) than Los Angeles (population about 7,000,000). So we shall see what the formats allow for.

I do know this, and thanks to Alan for the inspiration...if I am going to spend time here, I am going to shake things up on the arts front. For too long the resource of the extraordinary talent and people of this region has been squandered. Many have tried and some have succeeded to raise the bar, artistically, around here...I'm throwing in with them, indirectly...I don't play well on a team, too mercurial, but I will send as many shock waves as I can through the local community.

Right now the schools and the public library system are being completely non-cooperative to me (they accept my books, but not me...wtf?)

Many of the local arts groups are top-heavy with WVU-affiliated people who believe the only way to accomplish anything artistically is to spend your tax money and student fees to have it imported from out of the region. The local music scene seems to be driven more by a desire to create a homogenized flow of artists that won't make you spill your drink.

And there are those who think that any art that does not focus in mason jars, trains, coal miners, trucks and moonshine is not about the people of West Virginia. What balderdash. I do know people who "can" their own vegetables and jellies and jams, but not many. I know coal miners and people who have ridden on trains, but not many. Moonshine? Beer is cheaper to most.

Our insularity, our self-enforced insularity and belief somehow that "backwards is better" is not sane. It keeps us in the lower tiers economically and were it not for legislative champions like Sen. Robert Byrd, we'd be down the tubes long ago, drowning in our own prideful ignorance, left behind by the 21st century.

I love the culture of the hills, but we must be affirmative, competitive and creative. There's nothing wrong with the culture of the region, as long as it accepts the fact that, inspite of anyone's wishes, the clock keeps ticking and new artists rise and walk away, embittered by the constraints of a myopic worldview.

Let's get with it, fellow Montagnards.