The Workshop I, a podcast

We asked the poets to Introduce Themselves

On my adventure w/ words, sound has long been important to me. Being musical but not a musician, and a poet pretending to be painter, words find their way into all my art as a jungle I know my way around, or at least one w/ familiar terrain. Words mean spell, here. Voice means Magic. Oh, I am really being flowery now. I have been talking slowly, deeply, w/ the voice from the thing that lives inside me, like Soul, something like the mud of me. We are all the same from down here, you and me and the planet under our feet. Anyway!

I had the intention of recording here, eventually, and now I am inspired. I listened to Savannah James read T.S.Eliot this morning and learned that Voice = Magic is a shared belief, bless it all, bless it all.

Burnt Norton by TS Eliot and Poetry ritual

I just made a tag of PPS here, on my newsletter, w / the intention of recording pieces shared at the Workshop events that the Queer Wizard Benjamine & I have been running w/ Portland Poets Society. That is a consistently moving thing so I haven’t reflected on it much yet but I wanted to, at least, share a few recordings of simply my contribution to the Workshop work-wise. My hope is to convert each of you to Voice = Magic so that we live in a more honest, beautiful world. My hope is also to stretch a few vocal muscles and insist on poetry more and more, for myself if for no one else. 

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I N T H E R E C O R D I N G

At our first Workshop, our prompt was as simple and open as it could be: Introduce yourself. We wanted something that anyone could attempt and interpret and have fun w/. We were so honored by the full room and the high energy and to see everyone crystal clear. In the recording above, I share both poems Benjamine & I brought in as well as the one I wrote for the occasion. I won’t be sharing anyone else’s personal work here unless cleared by the artist.

Sketched hands by Benjamine for the poster & given to me as a gift, over a page from Animal Joy / The feet of Foxspit / Screenshot from Travis Gavin's insta of the event

So far, Benjamine and I have both been providing samples of stardust w/ each prompt. This one was was pretty lose but here are the examples we brought in.

from Benjamine & I's stories the day of the Workshop

Benjamine offered Frank O’hera’s Meditations in an Emergency & I offered a few quotes from Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva & The Passion According to G.H

What I wrote:

✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.