The poetry readings at A Maze in Tchaiovna have been great, but soon they will be no more. There will be one more, on June 24th, but I don’t know if I’ll make that one, because we’ll have guests in town then. After that, Kae is leaving and the whole thing was her project. It was such a different group than Alchemy, and I suspect a large part of that was just the force of her own personality. Some, of course, might have been the location, but I don’t know of anybody who’s picking up the mantle.
Also, Alchemy is over for the summer. Perhaps it’s just as well. I haven’t been writing as much lately or, for that matter, as well. When I go to a reading, I like to have at least one poem that I think is absolutely amazing, which will leave the audience in open mouthed awe. Of course, it seldom does, but if I have one poem that I feel deserves that reaction, I am happy. I read six poems tonight, all performed for the first time on stage, but none of them were up to that level, or even close. Still, they weren’t horrible.
There were quite a few people I’d never heard before and a couple of them were good. The girl who got up and read song lyrics was lame, but a couple of people read rhyming poems, which I’m always entertained by. One guy read a poem which was kind of bad couplets (been does not rhyme with Hallowe’en, but he totally redeemed himself on the second poem, which was about getting drunk in a Czech bar and it began in English but after the second beer had slipped almost totally into Czech, and it was good Czech, funny Czech.
Certainly better than anything I’ve ever written, or could write, in Czech or any other language than English, so there’s that.
