Category Archives: Essay

Kieren’s Irish Pub is expensive and echoes “like a motherfucker.” Our hostess warned us that if we happened to whisper to a neighbor that we thought the person on stage was really hot, he/she could probably hear us. It’s a strange room to have a poetry slam. Giant and vaguely colonial, with a lot of ornamentation on the white painted woodwork. And it’s expensive. Sooner or later, I’ll have to ask someone why they would choose to have a bunch of poor poets meet weekly at a bar in a downtown Minneapolis.

This was my second slam. I was there with friends to support the great Paul Nemeth. Since it was finals selection, all the poets were fantastic, and so I’m going to use that as an excuse not to critique. Though, the highlight of the evening was one Neal shouting out, “They call it bipolar disorder -I all it a superpower!”

Did you know that Harold Bloom called slam poetry “the death of art”? So says Wikipedia. If it’s true (that he said it, and that slam poetry really is art’s death) then what a glorious way to go out.

The death of art is why I moved to the Twin Cities. Or at least part of it. After spending ten months in New Orleans, I was ready for cold weather again, and it was revenge, I’m sure, that I got such a nasty winter. Now it’s 90 degrees outside, demonstrating what a native Minnesota said about the weather: it’s passionate.

But poetry and art and death. I wanted to live in a place where I could find a reading or a play every night and I wouldn’t have to sell parts of my body to pay rent, like in New York. Like most Iowans, I decided that the Twin Cities seemed like a good option. It’s not overwhelming, but large enough to be interesting. And I’ve been spending too much time ignoring it.

I have lived in the Twin Cities for almost a year and I have not yet gotten to know this place. There is so much here to offer. Thanks to Paul, I now know that if I’m ever board on a Tuesday I can get a literary fix at Kieren’s. There’s more, I know. But this is a good start.

On Tuesday, a young woman got on stage at Kieran’s Irish Pub during a story slam and admitted to about thirty or forty strangers she had no idea what she was doing. Her arm was in a cast for the second time in her life. The first time was twenty-one years ago when she was four and she blamed her brother, but it was half her fault, though she never let her parents know.

Then two weeks ago she was drunk and dancing and fell. The hangover the next morning, she said, was the worst she’d ever had and completely concentrated in her left wrist. No one she called could get her to the hospital. So she called her brother, who lives at him with his parents, is a drug addict and a depressive.

“I don’t know where I’m going with this, really,” she said. “It just came to me, like, tonight. That my brother, the one I said broke my arm the first time, whose life is totally screwed up, came to take me to the hospital. He was there when I needed him.”

The audience was pretty harsh that night and she walked away with a five or a six. There’s a certain kind of honesty no one wants to hear.

And she is the inspiration for this post, because I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing either. Or, at least, I wasn’t until I finished retelling the story.

I put off making a personal web page for years because I didn’t know what I wanted to say or how I wanted to portray myself. As an aspiring communications specialist, I’m deeply troubled by inconsistent messaging and style. But then I got sick of waiting.

So, here it is. A web page and blog. Rediscovering my obsessive roots, it’s going to be about the Twin Cities metro literary scene, because that seems to be my preoccupation anyway. For now.

This is why I came up to these cities in the first place and it’s been my poorly conceived mantra: anything with words. And so, I will write about my passion and work from there.