The theme this month is performance poetry. In the Gor series, poetry is performed, and the identification of poets with singers reinforces the notion that poetry was considered a performance art. Many cities, at least in the United States, have performance poetry venues, so the art of performace poetry is not lost. Mercury Cafe Poets places perspective on “open mic” presentations, while this edited version of After a Bad Poetry Slam chides certain “slam poetry” practitioners. I am Out finds the performance poet confronting his/her ultimate irrelevance. (No animals were hurt during the live performing of these poems, although a few humans may have had their feelings bruised.)

Mercury Cafe Poets
by Hersius

Sappho wrote for the moment
and spoke to the ages.
Sandburg, Eliot, Ginsberg defined the moment
and spoke to the ages.
Sometimes,
our poor itinerant troupe of poets
juggles words for a transitory audience.
Sometimes,
in congress assembled,
we filibuster poems to no record made.
Ah, but sometimes,
our poems rub reality with such friction
that the very mind ignites
and our words rise as incense,
fit for gods.

After a Bad Poetry Slam
by Hersius

A guillotine of words.
The longest five minutes since football.
Chinese water torture using syllables.
We are inaned to death,
victims of the vapid,
another pomp-related death
narratively prosing us into emotional fragments.
...
We die of disbelief
at a promise betrayed.
We pay agony taxes to attention Nazis
when stand-up and angst pass for poems.

I am Out
by Hersius

I am out of the room,
so this poem can now talk about me
as one who admires
the intense introspection
of the Lost Generation
and the intense irreverence
of the Beat Generation
and who has no patience at all with
the intense apathetic self-indulgence
of his own Baby Boom comrades in pen.
I am out of the running,
so this poem
can now House Committee me
as one who must hover,
too old for Generation X self-discovery
and too young for Vanguard stories,
much too contradictory
for stable expression.
I am out of my league even when alone,
so this poem can now Mikado-list me,
for there is no Age of the Greats
in this Time for Everyone.
I am out of innovation,
so this poem can now dismiss me.