Every Now and Then

Received this note from a past student - I have removed the name to protect the innocent.

You probably won't remember me but my name is K. B. I was on the first Slam U team to represent Cleveland in San Fransico at the Brave New Voices poetry slam; along with, Chris Webb, Jessica, and Shawn Wright. I don't know if I ever told you thank you but I truly appreciate that experience and all the time you spent helping us to become better writers, speakers,thinkers, poets. What you taught me about performing is still embedded in me to this day.

This too was engrain in mind: "people's number one fear is speaking public . Number two is death."

Again thank you!!!!

K. B.

 That'll perk you up for a day or so.

Here's a picture of a squirrel just for the hell of it.

mgs

JFK High School Warren Ohio

When I first realized that I was booked into JFK High on the first day back from Christmas vacation I figured the day would be shot by kids unable to switch gears from the sleep late and eating goodies mode to the back in a desk mode.

 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I had a wonderful visit with the students and teachers, meeting with grades seven through eleven. I was invited by a parent teacher alliance called Artcetera who are responsible for bringing all sorts of extra curricular events to the school. I might quibble a bit with the word extra here though. The folks I met from this organization all knew that adding a little extra creativity to the school day is a very integral part of a successful curriculum.

Extra special thanks to Judi and Brian for bringing me in and for their hard work seeing that their students are exposed and participate in the practicality of the arts. Thanks to Judi for the snapshots in this post as well and good luck on the poetry slam they are holding at the end of this month.

New England!, What’s wrong with the old one?

Spent an enjoyable albeit chilly three days in the Boston metropolitan area last week. Sara visited a couple elementary schools and we both dropped in on the students and teachers at Pierce Middle in Milton Massachusetts.

This gave us the opportunity to stay with our friends Christine and Larry – Chris teaches at Pierce and Larry is her husband – so along with these two and their bookended Husky dogs – Montana and Tundra – we enjoyed the bluster that is a New England December.  We visited these two back  Halloween ‘09 when the weather was decidedly more conducive to a stroll around the commons.

I know people like to talk about winter being the dead time of year – but I think really it’s when you feel the most alive.  I mean how quick do you make it back to your car across a  windswept and snowy parking lot ? Teeth chattering shuddering from the cold is indistinguishable from vibrating with anticipation.

Now I admit, I’ve never been one for winter sports – skiing, snowmobiles all that stuff – I have been known to drag a kid up a sledding hill on occasion though but I don’t think holding up for six months under an electric blanket is the best way to pass time.

Anyway – our visit to the Milton School District was a stellar one. We worked with the kids during the day and then with a couple dozen teachers afterwards. Throughout I was fighting a cold and it probably didn’t help that prior to by busiest day (which required getting up at 5 o’this-sucks in the morning) I had a relatively late night at the Boston Poetry Slam – held since 1991 at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge.

I let the hostess of the evening Simone, know I was thinking about swinging by the set – I hadn’t been to the Cantab since 1992 – and asked her what the open mic protocol was. I figured I’d get there and do a poem watch the feature and then cut out before the slam – it was a school night after all.

Well – it wasn’t Boston alone experiencing wintertime blasts – the featured reader Ken Arkind was supposed to be coming in from Denver – but his flight had been delayed and it didn’t look like he was going to make it. So I pinch hit for him – doing a short feature set. Like Woody Allen said: 90% of success is showing up on time. Thanks Ken and Simone.

So it was a good thing I decided to pop some Advil Cold and Sinus caps and brave the elements to take the train into town – I could have stayed home toasty warm like a dog curled up by the heat hole but see, hitting the streets and meeting the wind in your face will pay off every now and then. Plus, I really enjoyed the open mic at the Cantab’s Slam, as well – one of the better I’ve been to in quite awhile.

So – in closing for no other reason than a photo op I leave ya with a pic of the Paps taken 10 minutes ago - wading the snow in our driveway. Anybody know where I can buy a teeny tiny dogsled? Montana and Tundra would be proud.

Hog Butcher to the World

Just back from a whirlwind of a visit to the Windy City forty hours which included three gigs in a span of twenty hours.

I was invited by the Chicago Humanities Festival to speak on my new book Well Defined: Vocabulary in Rhyme.  The theme of the festival this year was humor and festival director Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins found my book amusing after someone at the Chicago Poetry Center sent her a copy. So they brought me in.

Now the life of an independent teaching artist is somewhat similar to that of an airline pilot whose vocation I have heard described as hours of monotony interspersed with seconds of near cardiac inducing panic.  As the old adage goes when it rains it pours so after what seemed like weeks and weeks holed up in my home office I found myself in a blizzard of travel and engagements.  Since Halloween I’ve been in Boston, the greater Cincinnati area, Wooster Ohio and Chicago Illinois visiting schools, signing books, taking walking tours, driving, flying and riding.

After the school work in Boston I was the guest of Christine and Larry Charbonneau who walked Sara and me all over historic Boston. We visited Paul Revere’s abode, ate lunch at the celebrated Parker House hotel where Malcolm X was a busboy and JFK proposed to Jackie, visited the grave of Mother Goose (I didn’t realize she really existed either) ,and ate some pretty damn good cannolis at Mikes bakery on the North End.

Returning from Bean Town we immediately drove to Mason Ohio as chronicled in the post below. Then it was home for a couple days and off to the Buckeye Book Fair where not only did I sell out of books but got my pic taken with Big Chuck whom I mention in the post Boom Boom Boom.  Immediately afterwards I drove to Cleveland Hopkins and hop a plane to Chicago to participate in the 2009 Chicago Humanities Festival –  the past few weeks becoming a serendipitous swirl culminating in the visit to the city of the big shoulders.

I slip into Chicago as if putting on a tailored suit jacket. The city fits me well – it’s like a bigger better equipped version of Cleveland, same basic ethnic makeup, same weather, same Midwestern unpretentiousness plus the added bonus of hotdogs that are a meal. I landed with just enough time to check into the nice suite at the Seneca Hotel provided by the festival then grab a cab to catch the final half hour of a cocktail party being held in honor of the CHF’s presenters and organizers.

I am forever finding myself in water than is a little deeper than I belong and looking around this party seeing the likes of Matt Groening let me know I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I just managed to muster the restraint to keep from whipping out my Blackberry and requesting photos with the luminaries present thus not appearing the country rube in the big city – but betraying my true lack of sophistication I do kind of regret it. I did feel a little vindicated the next morning in the hospitality suite where I helped the award winning and apparently technologically challenged  New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren  print out his boarding pass for his flight back to Vermont after chatting about bikes and running.

My presentation the next afternoon went pretty well – I was not 100% happy with it but the organizers and attendees seemed to feel no need for violence afterward and to torture  the pilot metaphor a bit more – any landing you can walk away from is a good one. I even had folks line up for me to sign books afterwards so it must have been OK. I was especially happy to meet up with a former student of mine Jonathan Lykes who now goes to the University of Chicago and we had dinner following my presentation. That evening I was a featured performer at the Green Mill – the Mecca for Slam poets.

I don’t know what it is about that club but it brings out the best in me. A lot of the credit goes to Marc Smith the man who invented Poetry Slam who has cultivated and nurtured the show for over twenty years – the audiences are smart, attentive and vocal.  No wonder I ran into such slam luminaries as Roger Bonair-Agard, Marty McConnell and Robbie Q Telfer there.  It was one of the best sets I’ve done in a long time – it was good to get back to my roots per se and somewhat consoling to know I still had some chops left. I think I kinda identify a smidgeon now of how the Buddha faced Foreman felt the last time he grabbed the belt.

The next morning I visited Von Steuben High School on Chicago’s North Side where I was joined by Jonathan and we talked about poetry and performed some pieces for an assembly of students.  The kids were receptive (they even took notes!) and I was given a pretty hep t-shirt emblazoned with the school’s panther mascot. Then Mary Kate her silver Honda Civic and I chased down a yellow taxi piloted by a Sudanese driver who took me to the airport where I was able to get on an earlier flight pretty much walking into O’Hare and directly onto a plane.

Sometimes things just fall together and it just looks like you know what you’re doing…

GO PANTHERS!

Moose Goosing - Texas Style

Just back from a visit

to the Highland Park School district which hugs the city limits of Dallas Texas – We visited both the intermediate and the middle school which are joined at the hip in a state of the art complex.

Everything about the visit was great – the hotel, our poet wranglers Leesa and Sally couldn’t have been more on top of things and the students were attentive, lively and engaged. It would be easy to just gush about how peachy keen everything was – so let’s suffice to say the visit was top notch.

While there, we presented an impromptu teacher session for a rather diverse group from the district schools. We had high school English teachers, third grade classroom teachers, Spanish teachers and even some folks from the front office sit in on the session.

We talked about strategies using poetry as a tool for literacy and comprehension in the classrooms and then we ran a quick demonstration poetry slam with a handful of the attendees. Now since we hadn’t given any prior instructions to those attending the session, we provided the poems for the contestants to perform – in a real slam the participator would be performing their own material – but as we are modeling how to run one of these we give the teachers work to stage. We use verse by authors like Marge Piercy, Billy Collins, Marc Smith, Langston Hughes and our ringer Mason Williams.

The subject matter of the pieces range from rivers, bonsai trees, teaching poetry, paternal relationships to moose goosing – that’s Mason’s contribution – a humorous piece about well, sticking your thumb in a moose’s hiney. Invariably the piece about moose goosing will win the slam and we use this as a teaching moment – explaining that the chance of actually picking your best poet via a poetry slam is pretty slim. But, what we do advocate as the real benefit of using slam in schools is the fun and excitement that surrounds the whole event – making writing and sharing a playful activity rather than a source of anxiety.

So as usual – Mason’s piece won the slam and the woman who performed it had the rest of the audience shrieking with laughter and stomping their feet. Then, something very interesting happened. From what I gathered later, this participant held some sort of authority position in the school – her job required her to expedite tasks required of the rest of the teachers so she spent a lot of her day asking co-workers where this bit of info was, when will I get this, have you finished that yet…

This is the persona that the others in the room knew her by. They had no idea that she could belt out a piece about sticking an umbrella into a moose’s bottom with such gusto. It was reported to me that one teacher commented that they had no idea this person was so much fun, since all previous interactions were task expediting centered – this person even went on to say – “I think I’d like to go out for lunch with her sometime.”

THIS is what bringing the arts into the forefront of a school can do. It can change relationships, open eyes, give people the opportunity to show another side of their personality. I can really empathize with our moose-gooser. I have organized innumerable events and been the task master on many occasions. It is a lonely job at times and never garners the appreciation equal to the effort expended. We moose-goosers have to learn to be satisfied with the awareness of a job well done whether we receive public accolades or not (or in the worst case scenario – watch as others claim the glory for our efforts.)

So this post is for all those moose-goosers out there, you know who you are – the ones who make things happen on time – see that the check is in the mail – cross the T’s and dot the I’s – feed the visiting author - make those calls to the procrastinators and are general pains in the butt for the greater good. Wipe off your thumbs and point them to the sky!

Thanks for a job well done!

photos by Leesa Cole

Brave New Voices

Attended the youth poetry slam finals competition last night. First time in four years where I wasn’t MC’ing the show – we’ve turned those duties over to some of the teens themselves. I guess I’ve sort of taught my way out of a job when the students are ready to take over. This is a good thing, even though it was still kind of bittersweet - it was fun not being responsible for running the night, but then again I have never been one to shrink away from responsibility.

I’m happy to say that five out of six members of the team are students that I have coached or had in workshops. Also not being on stage this year allowed me to play favorites and I wasn’t above directing their performances and giving time cues from the audience.

I couldn’t be prouder of these kids. With all the negativity that surrounds growing up today, especially in an urban environment – it is more than a little encouraging seeing these young people speaking their minds with clarity and conviction.

I skipped out of sitting on a panel at a local college that was discussing the state of poetry in Cleveland in order to attend the finals. My partner in rhyme, Sara Holbrook, ably filled my slot there. I can tell you though – from where I was sitting last night – the state of poetry in Cleveland looked to be pretty good.

New collection of poetry from Michael Salinger

My newest collection of poetry has hit the streets!

Check it out at:

http://thewordsmithpress.com/content/products.php?poetid=26

I'm also interested in doing some readings to promote this thing - so, if
you are of the ilk to facilitate this let me know - I'll be announcing already gigs
soon at my website - www.michaelsalinger.com.