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Just got back from a poetry reading and it was the most fun I’ve had at a poetry reading in a long time.

Unfortunately, it was a one-off.  It was the end party of a student literary magazine and the student who was the driving force behind it is off to England for her graduate studies, so that’s that.

There was a lot going on.  There were lots of musicians, there was a play, there were chlebičky and cupcakes, really brilliant cupcakes.

The main thing that made it special, though, was the crowd.

I’m used to going to poetry readings where there are 20-25 people in the room, most of them are American or English, and 30 is considered young.

This was a crowd of Czech University students, and it was a good sized crowd.  Lots and lots of good looking, young women which inspires me to perform, no doubt about it.

I felt my bit went pretty well, although only one person bought a book (looking on the positive side, one person bought a book!)  The reading started off with poets who’d been published in the magazine, there were 5 of us, then there was the play, which was kind of a dark, weird, multi-media thing, then the students read, and some parts of that were very interesting.  Some of them have read at Alchemy before, but it was good to see them in their natural environment.  David was hammered and it was quite intense.

Must go to sleep now.  Early class tomorrow.  Didn’t even stay for the last band, and they sounded pretty  good.

We were watching the news, about the refugee crisis, and my wife, Helena, said there should be someplace on Earth where everybody could go to.  The problem with that, of course, is that there’s not.  Every place on Earth that is uninhabited is uninhabited for a reason.  We’ve got an entire continent where almost nobody lives, but you can’t send all these people to Antarctica.  They wouldn’t survive two days.  Literally.

Lake Sahara (projected)

On the other hand, you hear scientists talking about terraforming Mars, and making it habitable.  Surely there are places on Earth that are closer to habitable than Mars.

Here’s my idea:  The Sahara Desert is larger than the United States. There’s certainly room enough for all of the refugees of the Earth to live in. And, unlike Mars, there is a breathable atmosphere. It’s also quite warm, which is good.  The problem is, there’s no water.

Here’s my solution to that, and it also helps to solve the problem of rising ocean levels.  Dig a huge pit, from the northwestern tip of Sudan in the East, to southeastern Morocco in the west, about a hundred kilometers wide and a coupple of kilometers deep.  Build a canal, or a few, to bring water from the Mediterranean and, voila, Lake Sahara.

Of course, it’s salt water and totally undrinkable.  There are two solutions to that.  One, of course, is desalination.  It’s not a complicated process, we have the technology.  The reason it’s not more commonly done is that it’s energy intensive.  But, the Sahara Desert has sunshine all the time, so solar energy is a no-brainer.  They could desalinate all the water they need to turn the region into another central California,and still export energy and make money.  Also, when you dig out the pit, you will have a lot of stone, which needs to go somewhere, and that will form a region of  highlands all around the lake, trapping condensation from the lake and increasing rainfall.

It would be a big project, and expensive, but profitable in the end.  I’d like to hear from any engineers out there as to whether this is feasible or not.

Well, here’s another one for the record books, in the  never ending saga of ‘Jesus fucking Christ, are all poets the biggest phoneys in the literary universe’?

M. Derrick Hudson – not even slightly Chinese

A poet by the name of Michael Derrick Hudson, a plain, ordinary, undoubtedly hideously oppressed white male, couldn’t get his  poem (“The Bees, The Flowers. Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve”) published.  He’d sent it out 40 times, and it got rejected every time.  So, instead of saying to himself “Well, gee, maybe it’s a piece of crap after all” (Which is to his credit.  I wish  I had that much  confidence in my own work), he decided to send it out under a different name:  Yi-Fen Chou.

Well, he still got nine more rejections, but then it got published, and now it’s appearing in an anthology of America’s Best Poetry of 2015, which I guess is the poets version of America’s Got Talent.

Some people are saying he’s  a fraud and a racist, some are saying hey, if  it’s a good poem, it’s a good poem.

I thought that, like the title, it was a bit longer than need be.  It used a lot of big words and it wasn’t real clear what it was about.  And, the  major poetic sin in my book, it didn’t rhyme.

I’ve read worse poems, for sure.  At least it seemed to be saying something.  But, it further blurred the line between ‘long poems that don’t rhyme’ and ‘short stories that don’t make sense.’

But, I must say, this whole brouhaha provides evidence for one of my pet theories:  Publishers don’t  know their asses from a hole in the ground.  Once you’ve tossed out rhyme, and the need to actually be understood, they are left guessing as to what is a good poem and what is not.

Just got back from my first ever poetry slam and it was grand.  It was no big deal, really.  There were just two of us who signed up, and one was the emcee, and it was his idea.  We did it in the middle of the regular poetry reading, so it spiced things up.

This guy

I delivered a piece from Poems from Prague, which is from 2002, I think, and have not read it in in nearly all that time.  I had a real good time.  I would not mind doing that again.

Right now, I am hammering this out, seem to be stuck on a Czech keyboard, which is why I am typing out some usual contractions, because I§m looks silly.

Nothing really more to say about poetry slams.

Watching a food program on TV now and  this guy travels all around the world, I have seen him eating insects in Africa, but tonight he is visiting England and he says !mmmm, that§s good! after every thing he eats, even haggis.

You never hear one of these guys saying !bleeech,  That suck§s!

Truth, or entertainment.  It seems entertainment is winning.
Talked afterwards about how to get more people to sign up

The kids have been back in school for a week and so far, so good, no phone calls from teachers or administrators at any rate.  This week, however, will mark the end of  summer for me.

I’ll start with 4 classes at a gymnasium on Tuesday, and I’m looking forward to that.  It’s a great school, some really bright kids, and the youngest class I’ll have will be first years so they will be brand new to me and that’s always exciting.  My goal for the year is just to get everybody talking, communicating in full sentences, confident enough that they will open their mouths and speak in English.  I plan to start off very slow and methodical, be very patient until I get into a rhythm, and then let fly.  The devil is in the details, but I am looking forward to it.  Friday, I’ll have my one of my favorite groups of kids, except there’s going to be an age rotation there, too.  The older kids, who were up to about 11, aren’t going to be with me any more, and they were one of the brightest groups of kids I’ve ever taught.  They caught onto my games, they would improvise nonsense sentences, they would shout and scream in English.

But, I will have a new group of 4 year olds and some of them will be brothers and sisters of the kids in that group.

Also, I’ve got not one, but two poetry readings this week.  That’s really getting back into the swing of things.