Weekend

I know that I'm supposed to post Ninja Comics on Mondays, but so much cool stuff happened this weekend, that the poetry Gods would probably strike me down if I didn't blog about it.

The language fair on Saturday was awesome. I rocked my poem, and the group from my class did great on their skit. However when they put the names of the "winners" on the screen (we were evaluated on a rubric, and got ribbons/trophies based on our scores alone) my name was not there and neither was that of the drama group. We found out later that there was a hole in the database, and many people were not posted, that did very well. If I knew how to hack their techie would be brute-forced into the stone age by now. I got a perfect score, and the drama group was only one point short of a perfect score. If you scroll down, you can see my ribbon on the left hand bar.

That night I managed to get the money to go see the performance. Ayisha Knight was very interesting. She is a deaf poet and all of her poems are in ASL. She had a translator for all of the poems except for the first one. But that one was the most interesting. She said before she started that it was about the first people coming to America. Even though I know almost no sign, I could see that it really was about that. I could tell that it was poetry.

After Ayisha, Verbobala Spoken Video performed. And what a performance it was! There was video, acrobats, people on stilts, and lots of cool poetry. If you ever get the chance to go see them, do it.

The next morning there was a panel on poetry and voice, with the festival guests. That was very interesting. Then early that afternoon Logan Philips, the leader of Verbobala gave a workshop on perfomance, and voice. I learned lots of cool stuff, that I think affected my performance that night.

That night there was poetry slam with a 100 dollar prize instead of the normal fifty dollar one. My first poem was excellent, and I got the highest score in the round. So I got to choose whether to go first or last in the second round. I chose first. That was the first of many mistakes, and unfortunate circumstances that got me low scores on my second poem, a poem that normally gets high marks. But I really liked my performance for the first round and that is what I am choosing to remember about that night.

Today's cookie goes to the person who can tell me what two poems I did at the slam. There are ways of figuring it out even if you weren't there, but if you were there, then this is an easy one. You don't need to tell me titles, just enough information so I know what poem you're talking about.