Cafe Gutenberg

Last night Richmond and surrounding counties sustained and impactful blow in the form of torrential rains. The Shockoe Bottom area bore the brunt of this unfortunate event. Our hearts and prayer are with not only our creative home, Cafe Gutenberg, but the other businesses and business owners in the bottom. Let's us all send all the positive energy we can muster in their direction as they struggle through the rebuilding process.

Stay safe.

whoa!

Thursday night's slam was well worth the wait. Far beyond my expectations. If you were not there, you really missed something. We had a lot of new readers, in such a vivid and fascinating array. Where else could you be exposed to such a variety of the intimacies of the human condition? This I feel, above all, is the draw to this very vital event. Shared experience. More reality than you could ever see on reality TV. It has become so well recieved that many were turned away at the door in an effort not to exceed the fire and capacity codes. Which is somewhat ironic because each poet was spitting fire. I feel very honored and blessed to be in the company of these poets, documentarians of this our generation.

In attendance on Thursday was a reporter from Style Weekly. I was contacted over the weekend and informed that they would like to do a story on our slam night. Ha, imagine that. As Grandma would say,"well well well". If the wave does swell, we'll ride it for a spell. I let some of the poets know. And hopefully we all can share in this blessing.

So everything is GOOD. I'd even go as far to say "All Good"! Stay safe and keep pushing your pens until we meet again.

- d.l.

It's that time again...

Hello all,
Well, Thursday marks the third installment of our monthly slam. I’m seeing some new names submitted for registration. I’m really looking forward to hearing the new voices as well as the standards, of which we have pleasantly grown accustom. In keeping with our ever changing style, we will be choosing two winners this week. Both will be eligible to compete in the “Grand Slam” Thursday, September 30th 2 double”0” 4. It’s official, mark your calendars now. Lately, the performance portion of are poetic presentations has become paramount in persuading the judges (please pardon my alliteration). Hint, hint!

There are many more surprises to be revealed in the coming months, but why the leak spoilers here ;-) . So mums the word for now. Tracy Johnson, my partner in crime, took some pictures of the last slam. I'll post them here soon (technical diffs).

Hope to see you all Thursday @ Café Gutenberg for the slam! Until then, keep pushing that pen on paper.

forever endeavor,
- d.l.

Oops! The Postman doesn't knock at all...

"Damn you internet server. Will you not cease in taunting me at every turn?"

Unfortunately, our registration form was down for a while. I've been slammed, slammed, slammed lately. With some duct tape and last minute coding, we now have a new and improved registration form (actually, it will be the same to you, but the back end is a BEAST). Thank yous to Victoria Marinelli for bringing this travesty to my attention. My apologies to those affected by this outage.

I can't wait for the next slam. I spoke with a few of the poets about possibly getting together some time during the month (to chat, read or whatever). I want to continue with that energy of the slam without the slam, so to speak. Just to have a bunch of people together for creative thought, dialog and exchange. Let me know if your interested (btw: I'm not a joiner so there will be no clubby - secret handshake crap and the first person who speaks of printing up T-shirts will get pimp-slapped). Either way, holler back.
Also, I spend a majority of my time yelling and schmoozing during the slam. If you have some ideas for improvement, please let me know. If you are even interested in hosting: LET ME KNOW! LET ME KNOW! I want to perform too! I don't want to just let you guys have all the fun. So that's that. I'm not really big on the four-page scroll bloggery rant. I'm more of the "hey here is some more junk I forgot to mention the last time" blogger. My entries will be short and sweet, unless I've got some mad, crazy antics to share. Stay safe and see you at the slam.

forever endeavor,
d.l.

That's right the "Just Poetry Slam" has it's own blog.

Last Thursday's Slam was a complete blast! Many many thanks to all the poets who have made this event a success the last two months. Thank you, thank you and thank you always to the wonderful people at Cafe Gutenberg for allowing the imates to run the asylum, so to speak. Congrats to Dorothy Marie Rice and S. Ross Browne, our first two slam winners. Okay, one of the really jacked-up things about being the host is I continually forget to say something vitally important (it's pretty pathetic actually). In keeping with that tradition, I failed to mention on Thursday that past winners cannot compete. That's right, they can't compete because they are automatically registered as combatants in our Grand Slam (no, not the Denny's breakfast). Well, Dorothy read and wowed the crowd as usual. She wowed me some much that I blacked-out on the whole rule situation. So there you have it, my conscious is now clear. Keep pushing your pen on paper.



forever endeavor,
-d.l.