Monday night I was visiting my grandparents in Lynchburg, Tennessee, where the salads are iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, which is the only thing I dislike about Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Tuesday night I was in Shreveport, Louisiana, for a gig at Centenary College, where a cushioned porch swing is hung beneath a picturesque gazebo, and sometimes it’s said the students smoke there.

Wednesday night I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the rainfall swelled the swamps to the bottom of their bridges and my gig at LSU was cancelled due to I don’t wanna talk about it.

Thursday night I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Wal-Mart epicenter of the world, where my gig at U. of Arkansas was cancelled due to I REALLY don’t wanna to talk about it.

Friday night I was in Manhattan, New York, to tape for Def Poetry Jam.
And don’t even MENTION Houston, Texas…

This was my third time back at Def Poetry Jam, and the show’s fifth season. My car picked me up at La Guardia and dropped me off in front of the Edison Hotel with about 13 minutes to spare before rehearsal, and that’s why I still smelled like Arkansas and a random Atlanta layover. The most specific thing I can say about Def Poetry Jam is this: The makeup lady has a kit with about 32 different skin tones in it for base, or foundation, or whatever the heck that stuff they put on your face is. The tones range from, say, “Notorious B.I.G.” to about “Halle Berry,” which is still quite a few shades darker than “Token White Boy,” which is what the makeup lady has to fish around in a drawer to find for me.

The Green Room at The Supper Club is blue. This is the hallway you walk through to the stage, like a gladiator—except for that makeup. There are stars and crescent moons woven into the carpet, but the arrow is made of masking tape.

Black Thought from The Roots watching the monitor and waiting to go on.

Suheir Hammad getting a mic check from Steve the sound guy.

J. Ivy rehearsing by the dumpsters just off the Green Room. How’s that for glamor? A lot of the veterans warm up here because it’s the only place to pace. We mutter and pass right through each other like ghosts and sometimes we spook a rat. Last season a Def Jam poet had to take an emergency pee in a mop bucket.

Bassey Ikpi rocking an Ossie Davis shirt, in memoriam.

Mos Def. ‘Nuf said.

Four straight nights of fruit plates, Lincoln Town Cars and colossally big-ass bodyguards. Just who pays for all of this, anyway?

Andrea Gibson was a consensus kick-ass at Nationals last August. Sonya Renee obviously thought so too, and she quotes Andrea in her Poet Profile (Feb. 22, just below) in response to the question What’s your favorite line, right now, by someone else?

So I e-mailed Andrea, and she graciously sent me an excerpt from her poem. Turns out—it’s different from how Sonya remembers it and… I’m intrigued like an alchemist how often that happens in the world of spoken word.

Do you remember verbatim all those adorable lines from other poets you’re always quoting? Yeah–me neither.

Sonya Renee won the Individual Poetry Slam championship at Nationals last year, and no one else did. Sonya Renee has always looked to me like she could do a bad-ass doo-wop. Sonya Renee called me out of the blue one time, and immediately made me wish I knew her better.

Find out more at: www.sonyareneeis.com

I did a gig at Rolla University in Missouri last night. It’s a geology and engineering school, and the guys outnumber the ladies 8-to-1. The school mascot is a miner with a six-gun in one hand and a slide rule in the other. No kidding. It’s the kind of place where 10 people fight over who gets to set up the karaoke sytem, but then no one wants to sing.

There’s nothing that smells quite like a burned-down building.

It’s acrid, but almost sweet, just for a second. After that, you feel it sprinting up into your sinuses, hear it setting up bivouac, laughing in advance at the feeble attempts you’ll make later to scrub your shoes. It’s a smell you never forget, especially when the contents of the building meant something to you.

For those gentle readers that don’t know, Slam Planet: War of the Words is a feature-length documentary following two teams of poets (from Austin, TX, and NYC) through their summer and on to the 2004 National Poetry Slam. Also features tons of footage from that very event, which a certain team from Hollywood won, and interviews with lots of cool folks including Marc Smith, Russell Simmons, Norman Lear and many more.

Two weeks ago, and see, here’s where the story comes back around, there was a fire. Started in the room next door to our edit suite and wrecked everything we own. Everything we own now looks like this:

So, I’m writing to let everyone know that we’re all still alive down here in Texas, and that this movie is going to be amazing. And that if you’d like to help us survive this fire, know that we need it, we appreciate it, and that you can hook us up via PayPal.com. Send to: [email protected]. Don’t think that a couple of bucks won’t make a difference. It will.

Thanks. Over and out from Austin.

—mike henry

Okay—I will be taping for HBO’s Def Poetry Jam on Friday, February 25th during the 6:00 pm show at The Supper Club in Manhattan. Sorry—I don’t have any more tickets to give out, but I will post directions for how to catch the show (and others that tape that week), just as soon as I get them from the notoriously-tardy DPJ.

I did gigs at Ithaca College and then Elmira College over the weekend. It was snowing sometimes in both places, or sometimes just about to snow.

(I kept reciting to myself the poem “Ithaca” by Constantine Kavafis, but I didn’t perform it. It may be the patron-poem of touring poets, though.)

After the Ithaca College show, the organizers took me to a Cajun restaurant and I stepped outside midway to watch the snowfall. I’m not very snow-savvy, and at first I thought that the ice was beading into pearl-like strings in the trees, but then I realized they were necklaces leftover from Mardi Gras.
Try the Ithaca Ginger Ale.

I liked Buttermilk Falls, just outside of Ithaca, because it’s the least-steep waterfall I’ve ever seen. A few degrees more gradual and you’d have to call it something else, or lesser, like a “downhill river.” A few degrees colder, and you’d have to call it “solid.” If you visit in the winter, it’s called “trespassing.”
If you slip, it’s called “frikkin freezing.”

On the left is the oldest living covered bridge in the state of New York. On the right is the most optimistic trailer park.
And I know trailer parks.

Hotel clerk: “We’ll put you in the Becky Thatcher Room!” Me (joking): “Really? Because I kinda had my heart set on the Tom Sawyer Room…” Hotel clerk (very sincere): “Oh, I’m so sorry, sir—the Tom Sawyer Room is booked straight through the weekend.”

Turns out: Elmira was the summer residence of Mark Twain, and the whole town has a Twain theme. This is the hut where Twain did some of his most famous writing, so I paid a little homage, but nothing orthodox.

What are the four most all-American words you can string together and paint on the side of a building for the national sun to rise behind? Land of the free? Nope. Home of the brave? Nope. Red, white and blue? Nope. It’s: Huck Finn Little League.

Recent contributor Buddy Wakefield won the Individual World Poetry Slam in Worcester last night. That’s two straight years (wait—“straight?”) in the two-year-old event. I wish I’d been there to heckle him…but I had a real job. I mean: a college gig in another state.

Gargantuan congrats to The Buddy.

“Listen–they’re playing our dog…”

Oscar and Roberto heave a load of old shingles off El Sermon Del Monte church. Oscar and Roberto both have ash marks on their foreheads—Ignacio on the ground does not. Father Gamboa won’t permit anyone on the roof who didn’t attend Mass this morning, Ash Wednesday, and Ignacio skipped it to pick up the dumptruck in La Brea, so that’s how he landed the safer job of raking the sidewalk. Jesucristo tiene un milagro para ti… reads the banner on the wall by the palm tree. Entra a su iglesia.

“Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife” by Derrick Brown was my favorite poetry book of 2004. There—that’s for everyone who asked, and for anyone who cares. My blurb for “Butterfly Knife” was going to say something like:

This book should be titled “Read ‘Em and Weep.” Not because the poems are that good (they are) but because you’re not.

Then I decided I was way too biased (and insulting), so I kicked the review to Buddy Wakefield. Buddy Wakefield is the reigning World Poetry Slam champ—or he will be for at least for the next 5 days (370 days if he defends successfully on Feb. 12 at iWPS). Turns out Buddy is pretty ga-ga for “Butterfly Knife” as well.

So for two skyrocket websites, hit buddywakefield.com to wish our boy well in Worcester, and then click yourself over to brownpoetry.com for a tour through the unglib realm of Derrick Brown, to snag his book or to wish him, today, a happy birthday.
Derrick Brown is gondolerious.

Derrick Brown runs an influential tree house with his brothers Donnie Darko, Napolean Dynamite and the makers of jet fuel. They hide out in warm socks between thick white blizzard breaths and choir claps, preserving every smile anyone ever took away from you. They sling-shoot Yes bullets at girls (girls are allowed) and dreamers. If Derrick ever grew a mustache he would get away with it. He’s that cool. There are definitely some of his old works slipped into this collection which expose Brown’s writing weaknesses, but his consistent lengths of genius easily outweigh the momentary lapses of reason. “Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife” is among the top three books of poetry by a performance poet I have ever read. It may be the best. —Buddy Wakefield

Derrick Brown kisses girlies.

julbugxoxo writes in to say:

Hello poet, I wanted you to know how much I love the kite poem. It’s my fav, but here’s an idea. I think you should write a poem about me. My name is Julie and like hot dog dogs. Just an idea.

Seriously—that’s a big fucking number.

Steve Connell (2003 National Poetry Slam champ, Team Los Angeles) doing soundcheck for opening night of his “Two-man One-man Show” with Sekou tha Misfit (also 2003 Team L.A.) at the Greenway Court Theatre last night in Hollywood, California.

Tourettes Without Regrets got pig blood on my shirt.

When I featured there last October, a guy in a George W. Bush costume got into a pig heart duel with a guy in a Satan costume, twelve pig hearts each. When Satan missed on his last shot, his pig heart hit me in the chest, which sorta sucked because I was wearing a new shirt and I wasn’t supposed to get pig blood on it.

Tourettes Without Regrets is hands-down the most hard-core poetry venue in the nation. Every month 400 spectators pack a theater in Oakland, California, for an open mic variety show from the dark side. The night I was there I witnessed: an erotic haiku contest; a freestyle battle that unhinged every rapper but the winner; an eight-year-old girl winning the slam while her stripper mom signaled time with a “volunteer bra;” and the emcee explaining to a fire juggler the following:

“We run a very tight show here. So get up, juggle, juggle, juggle, light your crotch on fire and then sit down.”

That would be the poet Jamie Kennedy (www.suicidekingsspokenword.com), who is so controversial by now you can easily misplace the notion that he’s extraordinary. During last January’s show, Jamie passed a card around and asked his audience to write down their favorite line of the night. Or their favorite line period. Or whatever. Then he mailed it to me, and I’m posting it here—just in time for tomorrow night’s Tourettes Without Regrets. Alcohol, by the way, is served.