Author Archives | Don McIver
Basic Human Needs Award winning poet, Don McIver is a four time member of the ABQ slam team, a host/producer of KUNM’s Spoken Word Hour, the author of The Blank Page, The Noisy Pen, and editor of A Bigger Boat: The Unlikely Success of the Albuquerque Poetry Slam Scene. He’s performed all over the United States including the Colorado Performance Poetry Festival, Tucson Poetry Festival, the 3SidedWhole, the 2011 and 2012 Solofest, and TedXABQ, and TedXABQ Women. He’s produced, curated, and hosted poetry events big and small including the 2005 National Poetry Slam, and been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. He’s a board member of New Mexico Literary Arts, a former Albuquerque Slam master, a member of the Executive Council of PSi from 2006-08, he Poetry Wrangler for Sunday-Chatter (where he’s performed numerous times), and is the Poetry Curator for the NewMexicoMercury.com.
Dispatches from the 25th Annual National Poetry Slam
So, 20 years ago, Trinidad Sanchez Jr., Matthew John Conley, Jim Stewart, Bob Wilson, and Kenn Rodriguez all piled in a vehicle (Eric Bodwell's I believe) and made the trek to Ann Arbor for the National Poetry Slam (NPS). Since that time, ABQ has sent a team to NPS every year, and this year, 2014, marks the 20th time we will pile in a vehicle (rented now) and head out. This year, NPS is in Oakland and the tournament is much bigger than it was back then.
Albuquerque has a long, storied history with trips to NPS. From near fights in airports to national championships, from overnight drives to luxury flights, from personal vehicles to rental vehicles, from crashing on couches to staying in host hotels, ABQ makes it work from year to year. And this year is no different...
Continue reading...Weekly Poem: City Life
02. May 2014
Bent screws.
Yard bricks displaced.
Wooden fence posts splintered.
A late night car hopped the curb,
ramped up my neighbor's driveway
and took out the corner of our fence.
A short fence, anyone could step over it with almost no effort,
but it kept people out,
kept us safe from bums,
random drunks, and passers through
that call this part of the city home
too...
Rhetoric is a Greenhouse Gas
22. January 2014
Reconstituting public opinion around the exigence of global warming.
Continue reading...Weekly Poem: Thanksgiving Day
29. November 2013
From the road,
the Brazos Cliffs rise up suddenly from the valley floor,
as the mountain falls away
and leaves brown, gray rock
exposed like broken bones.
I imagine being the first to trundle up the hillside in furs
with food,
and stepping up to the ridge and looking out
and down:
2,000 feet...
When everything tastes like chicken (Part 2)
28. August 2013
Last weekend, I was asked to judge for the Dukes of Ale’s State Fair Pro-Am Craft brew contest. It was fun, engaging, involved a lot of talking, sniffing, and tasting of beer, lots and lots of beer. As I was judging, I couldn’t help but think how slippery judging the aroma, appearance, flavor and mouthfeel of beer really is.
Judging beer or poetry and determining what is “good” and “bad” is very hard, if not impossible. Yet, I think there is a criteria for it that a lot of us recognize, and that criteria is actually pretty simple. The criteria that overwhelmingly is used to prescribe some sort of value on art is “craft”...
Continue reading...When everything tastes like chicken
11. July 2013
My wife and I aren’t regular movie goers. We catch a few of the big new releases during the summer (especially Science Fiction-Superhero releases (I’m a sucker for that)), but we’ll miss a lot of movies and opt to put them on our Netflix queue or just forget about them. So, seeing Hangover Part III, being released recently, we bumped the first movie in the trilogy up to the top of the queue.
Yesterday, we watched it.
We didn’t laugh at all during the whole movie. Yet Roger Ebert (actually a critic I agree with a lot of the time) pronounced, “Now this is what I'm talkin' about. The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line.” So why did Ebert’s pronouncement not agree with our experience? Why did we not find the movie funny? ...
Continue reading...The last poet standing
06. May 2013
In Amiri Baraka’s review of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I was struck by not only the vitriol, but how he was making a similar argument that I had made a few years ago during my review of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960. Lacking the vitriol, I took the editors to task for trying to be inclusive but missing what was happening outside the Academy...
Continue reading...A spoonful of cinnamon: Poetry is better in doses
17. April 2013
When V.B. Price asked me to curate the poetry section of his online venture called the New Mexico Mercury, I told him I thought the way poetry was being delivered actually worked against people enjoying it. I thought that having too many poems at one time only catered to the audience that loved poetry. What about the audience that might be interested in poetry or the audience that didn’t “understand” poetry? So I argued that we too often give people who might be a little wary of poetry too big of a dose...
Continue reading...
12. August 2014
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