Posts Tagged ‘Jason Fickel’
December’s Bloomington Writers Guild’s First Wednesday Spoken Word (cf. October 4, September 6, et al.) took a slightly different tack this evening. Jenny Kander (a.k.a. the “poetry lady”) has been a fixture of the Bloomington poetry scene since practically her first arrival in 1992, creating and hostessing poetry reading programs on two local radio stations, writing and publishing poetry herself — including two chapbooks of her own work in 2004 and 2010 as well as compiling and editing several full length multi-poet collections — and generally encouraging local poets, a number of these also Writers Guild members.
With Jenny retired now and in process of moving to a new apartment, Writers Guild stalwart Joan Hawkins has also been leading an independent fund raiser on her behalf, and so, this Wednesday, the two came together in separate rooms of Bloomington’s Backstreet Gallery, with a silent auction and grab-bag book sale in one, and the Writers Guild session, with her as its opening featured reader, in its normal, adjacent meeting space.
She was followed by two “lightning round” groupings of four, and then five local poets as a combined “second feature”– a number of these “graduates” of Jenny’s encouragement, as they shared with us as well — with all interspersed with music provided by guitarist and songwriter Jason Fickel. And following that, First Wednesday ended with its normal “open mic” time with me next to last with two poems that appeared (as had several, as well, of the lightning round offerings) in Kander’s two-decade-ago compilation, A LINEN WEAVE OF BLOOMINGTON POETS (Wind, 2002).
My return, that is, having had a scheduling conflict last month and missing the June Bloomington Writers Guild’s First Wednesday Spoken Word (cf. May 3, et al.). But this month I was back! And I shared in an especially enjoyable July 5 session at Backspace Gallery downtown.
And that’s even including the sudden rainstorm that trapped us inside for an extra fifteen or so minutes after.
But back to the event, the musical interludes featured guitarist Jason Fickel who introduced us to several distinct styles — e.g. slide guitar, steel guitar, blues. . . — bracketing poet Terry Sloan with sometimes science-based, philosophical, witty, often satirical pieces (as an example, one crowd-favorite titled “On the Failed Attempt of Evil Knieval to Leap the Yawning Chasm of Non-Existence”), accompanied by projected collage/illustrations by Jon Vickers (perhaps best known locally as founding director of the IU Cinema), and followed by writer, director, and audio producer Brian Price with excerpts from two recent books (“of short fiction, monologues, and poetry,” to quote the blurb), THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER AND OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST (2022) and THE OLD CART WRANGLER, THE NEW SILENCE, AND OTHER NOTIONS (2020).
Then, after a break, came the “Open Mic” section with four walk-on readers of which I was second, continuing my five-part “Casket Suite” tale sequence on the New Orleanian filles à les caissettes who brought vampirism to the New World. Tonight’s was part three, “Reflections,” in which the glamor girl of the group, Lo, explains why the superstition that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors is, of necessity, false.
jamesdorrwriter 