2003-07-31 / 1:46 a.m.

I'm a little bit disgusted with slam as a genre and as a type of poet at the moment. But individual pieces stay in my good graces. It's not Beau, either; I thought about it for many hours today and it isn't about him at all. Christopher and Marc Smith and Eric Ott and Dawn Saylor and.... all of them. It's a billion facets of the same ego. All that shit with Beau and Big Poppa E is just like Tupac vs. Biggie and it's fucking dumb. I mean, if there was a war and I had to fight I'd back Beau on the basis of Isangmahol alone, but... it's just dumb. I don't want competition. There's no need for it. In the publishing world, you get print or you don't, there's no further competition till it's Pulitzer time. It should be that way. I want poetry that speaks for itself without all the affectation of the stage life. That's theater; theater is a wonderful thing but it's not literature. The fact that is employs language to convey emotion does not make it literature. I don't need to prance around on stage showing off my verbal rythm or how far I can make my voice carry because I know how to fucking write. I can move an audience without dance steps and different voices and impersonations or mockery.

A little of it is Beau; but not him personally... just that I read Frany and Zooey (ALL of it, for only the 3rd time)and I understand Franny now, minus religion of course...... "I know this much is all; If you're a poet you do something beautiful..." Beau Sia has 2 poems in all that noise, 2 beautiful, moving, stirring, meaningful poems. Christin Aptowicz has 1. Taylor has 1.Jeffrey McDaniel has 1. There you are; there're the best slam poets I can call readily to hand and you've got four poems. How many are printeds in the New Yorker every year? How many in the Goergia Review? Fuck, in the goddamn Birmingham review? More than fucking four. I think slam is for theater kids who can't really act and writers who can't get published. Right now. It just to make me cum, so..... but right now, I don't want to touch it; it feels pathogenic. (I think I'd like to be un-disillusioned if anyone thinks they can counter my recent observations; the last goddamn thing I need is something else to be bitter about; I do know that... and this didn't come from David. The last time he wrote the word "slam" to me was when I still lived in Mississippi; this is all Kristyn let-down, not thrust upon my from anywhere else.) Before the indignant notes start rushing out all over the place, I am of course not referring to Saul Williams in any of that. I'm changing my aesthetic, not losing all reason.

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