Poetry

I just got back from the opening of the Exquisite Corpse show at OFFCenter, where a bunch of artist teams got together to recreate that ole surrealist game of painting parts of a piece without seeing the parts the other person...well, it's kinda hard to explain, but each piece was created (painted and drawn, mostly) by (I think?) 3 artists, and the effects were really striking, since all the parts were stacked on the wall, and ended up being lifesize or more than lifesize, the top portion being usually the head and neck, then the torso, then whatever was below that, like fish tails, yoga positions, and leg-like schtuff.

So, Micaela hosted a poetry reading that was really good, but the funnest part was when we took an intermission and took turns sitting at the tables with big sheets of paper, folded to either draw parts, or to write lines of poetry, reading only the line written before us, and then folding the paper back so the next person could only see the line we'd written. The resulting poems were funny, surreal, oddball, passionate, compassionate, and evocative. I think I could actually write poetry if I wasn't responsible for it!

And there were some funny and poignant moments, like when a shall-remain-nameless-well-known-local-performer walked up to an art-therapist-who-shall-also-remain-nameless and said, "Wanna do a line?" We all looked up at her at the same time, and she said, "Of poetry, I mean!" And then a local dude named Rick was sitting next to me passing me the most amazingly heartfelt words, it would send me off into deep poetry land. I did NOT want to get up and read, but when I opened this particular poem he'd contributed to it made me cry, so I said, Ok I'll read this one.

And to think -- I'd mainly gone over there after work for the food, and came away with so much more (including a check for jewelry sales, btw, yeehaw!).

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