Becoming a Poet

I find myself becoming a novice poet. The past four months have aided me in this pursuit. As mentioned in a previous post, I helped form a guerrilla poetry society here at BYU-Idaho to support free expression among students. We call ourselves the Mid-Morning's Mackles. Our group has become a great success with an average turnout of around 15 people each week, a short-lived section in the student newspaper's A&E section, our own 30+ page book of original poetry, a facebook group of over 80 members, a rumored chapter in Minnesota, and, most importantly, amazing relationships among members.

The group began when my friends Ryan Hayes and Garrett Sherwood said, somewhat jokingly, that they were quitting music for winter semester to become poets. Once this comment surfaced a few times I joined them in their pursuit. It was decided that we'd use a guerrilla approach to meeting where we would have no set schedule and the specifics of our meetings would be shared via the internet about 24 hours before. On occassion we'll use the school sanctioned "poetry slam" as our meeting, an event I've become manager of for Spring Semester. We tend to share our unique brand of poetry as well as our vociferous acclamations of eachother's work. We have a reputation.

Aside from the Mackles meetings, I have also branched out into the community. In Idaho Falls, I participated in my first competitive poetry slam. I registered late with some other Mackles and almost didn't make it in. My friend Jeannette volunteered me to take her place on the roster and I got to be number 17 out of the original 15 planned performers. My poems included my two crowd favorites Public Defecation and Painted Woman. The first poem is pretty self-explanatory and scored me an 8.5 out of 10 and got me into the finals. The second poem about socially constructed conceptions of beauty won me an 8.3 and earned me third place. I was excited for my scores considering the highest given was an 8.9. All things considered, the experience was great and I look forward to future competitions.

Lastly, this past Thursday was the school's first poetry slam of the semester. They call this event a poetry slam although it's more of a reading, there is no competitive aspect to it. After spending 4 hours in the food court passing our over 700 flyers, we had about 49 people in attendance and of that 49 there were 20+ participants. It was fun working for "the man." I plan on making the second show competitive.  It will be interesting to see what the outcome will be.