Don McIver

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…

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”…

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? …

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…

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…