Hey True Believers!
 
November 06  marked Wordslingers' 7 year anniversary. 
Now ain’t that a trip!  
 
For seven years the folks at this station have given me license to act as a kind of liaison between the growing audience that listens to WLUW Listener Supported Community Radio and Chicago’s poetry community at large. And I'm having a ball! I'm doing something that continues to excite as well as inspire me. Not only when I’m on the air but in between when I’m answering emails, reading the works of various poets, listening to recordings of past shows, or out a venue hearing another vibrant poet connecting with an audience. From Wordslinger’ s inception the mission  was to a share Chicago’s poets and their work to as wide an audience as possible and to offer Chicago’s poets yet another venue to perform their works to an appreciative, albeit invisible audience.

 
In 7 years there’s been some high points and some low ones. I ran myself down into a depressive funk that lasted most of 2001. I was working long hours in a position I truly hated. The tragedy of 9/11/01 got beneath the my armor of cynicism and stayed there. Existential anxiety all but paralyzed me in a clockwork of questions regarding faith, passion, humanity and purpose. For much of 2002 Wordslingers limped along on pre-recorded shows. 
 
By 2003 I woke out of my self imposed hiatus and with the help of a kick in the butt by my friend Ken Green Wordslingers was up and running again with live in studio guests. Admittedly Ken and I are natural class clowns, always joking around, signifying, breaking balls, etc. So some shows were equal parts comedy and poetry. When Ken moved on I kept plugging away. 
 
However, by the end of 2004  I was having doubts. If you are a writer or an avid reader you’ll understand that much of our lives are solitary and given to introspection- in my case I have a tendancy to not only dig myself into a hole but drag furniture down there with me. Introspection in itself isn’t a bad thing, (I believe we’d all be better off if more people took a closer examination of their individual lives in order to effect positive, life affirming amendments to the societal whole.) But I digress. 

 
I was having doubts as to whether people were hearing us, feeling us, these poets these poems, these stories, these small yet potent acts of revolution against the tele-sedated culture of icons and cheaply packaged realities. A few weeks prior to this stream of thought, another radio venue that featured poets, Northeastern’s WZRD had folded. I thought about about my doubts and in my usual solitary fashion attempted to weigh those doubts without any external input from anyone else. I figured that if I stopped Wordslingers I could transition the sense of loss and resulting down time into producing my own work.
 
In May of 2005 I sent out an mass email saying that my plan was to fold up shop in a year, but not before getting every poet that wanted to be on the air a chance to do just that. 
 
That email must have been infected with a highly contagious Mad Poet disease. Some poets responded almost instantaneously. It’s numbers redoubled themselves from at least three poetry based websites whose founders in turn sent it to their mailing lists.
 
The moral of this part of the story might as well be; doubt be damned!  As the emails came in the tone was pretty consistent. Wordslingers is valuable. And folks like what's happening.  
 
Wordslingers.org  was developed while I was still riding the crest of the wave of a great deal of positive as well as negative animus. The majority of visitors to Wordslingers.org saw it it as a natural outgrowth of the show. A smaller minority saw it as potentially competitive enterprise, a web based pulpit from which I might unfurl a yellow banner of explicit rue and spite or a tabloid featuring the lifestyles of the dissed, damaged and dumbfounded. As if the world needs more of that?
 
The purpose of Wordslingers.org is three fold. First, to give WLUW listeners a second chance to hear the poets they may have missed due to time constraints or, to WLUW's low signal range. Second, to archive some of these terrific voices so that anyone who wants to can hear some pretty damn good poetry. (Visit the growing Vox Cafe) Third, as place to let fly various thoughts and opinions on a variety of social, political and poetry related issues.
 
So that’s the skinny. I hope to keep on doing a very basic, no drama, no polemics, no style councils exchange and keep to an integral mission; to share Chicago’s poets and their work to as wide an audience as possible and to offer Chicago’s poets yet another venue to perform their works to an appreciative audience. 
 
Big thanks and megawatt grins go out to all the guests who have graced the WLUW studio sharing their power and love of words. Every show is like a different workshop delving into different forms and principles of the writing craft.
 
Big thanks to the nth power goes out to those for listening to Wordslingers and encouraging others to listen in as well. Please keep the faith.
 
See you in 2007!
 
Poetic Contagion
Spread The Words
 
Michael Covenant Watson

Too Young to Teach   by  Oz Devilhorse
(More of his work will be aired live on March 19th)

   We gotta go back to the early 70s. Everybody was kung-fu fighting. We had Vietnam, big long cars, and steel mills. There were only 4 channels on television, and it was ok to have livestock within city limits. Back then it was also permissible for teachers to swat a kid on the palm with a ruler for misbehaving. Ms. Bird was our teacher. I remember her being attractive, and maybe 25 years old: too young to be teaching kids.

 “Come up to my desk,” Ms. Bird would say. Then the 7-yr old convict would slowly walk up and extend one hand. 

   Those moments gave me a sick feeling, even when I wasn’t on my way to the desk. See, I was one of the good kids, and rarely spent time on the wrong end of her ruler. But, seeing another kid go up there ... I wanted to laugh sometimes, but I also worried that she might call me up next. Since she was in the disciplinary mood, what if she’d found out about one of my quiet transgressions? Thus, the paranoia & morose humor never neutralized each other. Their collision actually made me sick.


   Nothing could be heard in the classroom, except wood striking against a child’s hand. SWAAP! SWAAP! And I’d count silently to myself, 3, 4, 5 ... Some kids would immediately scream out because of the pain. Others had to be broken down; maybe it’d take 15 pops before a long whine came out. All along the way, Ms. Bird would demand, “Open your hand! I’m not through with you. I said open your hand!!” Silence. Silence. SWAAP! 16. SWAAP! 17. “Open your hand, I said!”

   Still, there were 3 boys who never did make a scene all school year. Ah! But it did take Ms. Bird several months to figure out how many swats would cause these boys to gush quiet tears.

   Funny. These boys would insist that they felt no pain. 
	
	“Ms. Bird can’t hurt me.”
“But, I saw those tears! You were crying!”
“No I wasn’t, you’re a liar!”

   But maybe they were right. Maybe they were weeping for Ms. Bird: tears of pity for a woman on an impossible mission.


   Instead of pity, I learned to hate Ms. Bird. What else can you do when you’re just 7 years old? There is no discussion or grievance procedure. Disrespect will be rewarded with the wrong end of the ruler. So, all I could was hate her. Why?

   It was clear that some students couldn’t stay on her good side for very long. She’d erase the boundary between good & bad, and re-draw it with certain kids—once again—on the wrong side. Larry was one boy who was in Wrong-ville as soon as he stepped into the classroom. 


   Then ... then there was the time when several boys were around my desk. Ms. Bird interrupted, “What’s going on over there?” No one responded. The other boys scurried off like cockroaches, back to their desks. She asked again, “what was going on over there?”

   Someone ratted, “Ozkr was looking up pussy in the dictionary.”

   Thus, I was immediately summoned. My comeuppance. 15 swats? Maybe 100? 
But there was one issue that Bird had kangarooed over:

   I was showing my fellow classmates that there’s no such word as turd, and that pussy isn’t what they kept saying it was. Pussy had nothing to do with a girl, unless it was a female housecat. 


   I’d begun to cry before I made it to Ms. Bird’s desk. She railed as I walked up the aisle amid the silence of my classmates: the admixture of fear and muted laughter. Ms. Bird was taunting, “you are so nasty. Just disgusting!” And when I stuck out my hand, she said, “Get away from me! You are so nasty, I don’t even want to touch you.”

   That was worse than taking an undeserved beating. Being called so intensely disgusting was an open-ended punishment. There was no moment of closure. In her mind, no amount of swats on my hand would burn away such a sin. She just sent me hurtling into history as being more despicable than the boys who’d peed on the restroom floor. Playing games … trying to see how far you can step backward and put such an arc on your pee that it’ll still reach the urinal … then take one too many steps and piss all over the floor … Ms. Bird could beat those interests out of a boy. But I was her terrorist: polluted beyond imagination and incorrigible.

What's It Gonna Be, People?

Will we still find ourselves ducking, dodging, 
looking over our shoulders, 
watching these streets from the corner of our eyes, 
double locking our windows, 
practicing sociological martial arts, 
punching, chopping, flipping, feinting 
tumbling like a bag of loose joints, 
and thinking about carrying a pistol?

Will we still be hopscotching redlines around certain neighborhoods 
according to certain times of day, 
when the moon is full, when the eagle flies, 
when the cut rate liquor sign flickers out?
when the who’s who of wasted human resources 
struggle on the pages of do nothing policies 
between the footnotes and the margins?

Will we still wonder about folks less cynical than silly for dreaming the improbable  “I am a community of one”  dream? 
Will we still find ourselves considering being ku kluxed
by amped up thugs that look just like us, 
rolled like dice with six sides of snake eyes 
plunged face first into the grief of pulled triggers and full caskets
as just the cost of doing business in the toxic culture ghetto that makes up the quilt of the America that America chooses to ignore?

Will we still find ourselves as extras 
in another porn video featuring foreign policy and domestic poverty sound tracked to the Buick bouncing beat of  “no way up, no way out”?   
Will we lace up our slave labor sponsored shoes while thinking about how fast we can run, 
or how fast anybody can run 
versus a pitbull suddenly off it’s chain, 
versus taser toting Gestapo, 
versus hurricane floodwaters 
versus another disaster for the mighty whitey rich right wing to orchestrate political advantage of, 
versus bullets that don’t even have our names on them but chase us duck and cover from shadow to shadow 
down streets made of locked doors and broken keys? 
Will this be the day?  
Will this be our right place wrong time day didn’t move fast enough day?

Is this what was meant when the pioneers sacrificed, 
when the heroes died 
when the frontiers were open but waiting for blood, 
when the songs of freedom were raised like fists 
when poetic consciousness fathomed the lightless catacombs of an American soul  
when the mothers were waiting but holding back tears 
when fathers were bending lower, then lower still like trees  beneath the weight of gravesite dirt covering yet over another brick in the road toward 
what?

Will we still hate the same people we hated the year before, recycle poisonous spite 
and little big egos 
from the landfill of empathic dereliction 
wear our game faces, look tough, 
shoulder, muscle and road rage our way past each other, 
Will we clumsily ignore our fracturing reflections in the gaping spaces between our actions and intentions?
Will we pray to the heavens to give us this day our daily enemies to lead us not into benevolence but define us by the viral load of romanticized fascism?

Will we shame the system or become the empire?
Will our poems still believe in change,
Will our true stories of our true selves open doors 
of not how many enemies made easily 
but how many affinities gained by effort?
Will this be the year of the overcoming, 
the seizing of the time, 
the lifting every voice, 
the calling to action against the reavers of rights?

Another year ends as another begins
Disclosure or ambush?
Charity or inclemency?
Intelligence or charade?
What’s it gonna be people?

MCW 12/09/2005

comment? mwatson@questinternet.net

This Relentless Thought Just in From Joel Brussell

Dialogue at will!

A few months back I attended and participated in the Chicago Poetry Fest.
As I watched other poets the question came to mind; what is the purpose of reading poetry to the public? Is it simply self expression, not caring or oblivious to its affect on audience members?  If this is the case, it makes perfect sense that 90% of the audience members are other poets. Until we make some real conscious efforts to involve the public it will always be a small, self congratulatory network of other poets desperate for a venue.

I believe the only way to get the public really interested is to be aware that poetry like television, must be entertaining.

While I may completely agree with a radical political poet’s beliefs, I’ve attended enough poetry events only to watch closely as the non-poet audience,  mentally heads for the hills with the first spouting or yelling or listing of the world’s injustices.

Should the same poet choose to deliver the message in- between bites of ham sandwich, occasionally swabbing mustard off the corners of their lips, I guarantee the audience will be with the poet at least a few seconds longer.

Many people would say my work is infantile, of little substance, too much stand-up etc
Those are valid criticisms as I strain to reach for my pacifier.

I am simply attempting to start a dialogue over whether poets should have some awareness of what of their work does or doesn’t do to the audience?

With the slightest semblance of sincerity,

Joel Brussell

JUST WHAT IS OUR ALTERNATIVE ANYWAY?	
	 
       I’ve noticed that when the word – alternative is used in modern conversation it has more to do with openly assailing qualities or effects deemed negative- or at least disagreed upon at the expense of discovering what makes them tick. 
	In this sense alternative derives it’s existence from being so against something that it spends an inordinate amount of time and resources being antagonistic. This tilts the scales against discovering and providing new ideas or solutions.
	This seems to be a symptom of the aggressive, in your face culture of the time. The pedagogy of the pit bulls, of the loud, the pseudo didactic and dogmatic teaches it’s apostles to stake out their ideological turf –not as if they were the lone discoverers of a particular brand of thinking, but as if their very core identities were in jeopardy of being stolen or destroyed. 
	In this atmosphere communication from points of openness, i.e., deep listening shrivels down to the lowest common denominator- irresolvable conflict. There’s no middle ground, common threads are ignored. It’s a boxing match, ideologues come out swinging from their own paradigms. Humanity disengages from it’s heritage. Curses ignite, bullets fly, bombs fall. Every day we struggle across an obstacle course that seems to consist of scores of enemy camps. Where there is so much to be said there’s no one able to hear it.
	There has to be – at the least a growing frustration born from an inherent comprehension of empathic shades of grey, that most stark contrasts are drawn by impoverished hearts failing to plumb deep enough and self crippling minds refusing to quest higher. 
	Witness the world. No one seems to hear a thing save for consistent drumbeat of fear. Is there an alternative to that?

M.C.Watson.