Beat Poetry Festival Comes To Pittsburgh

How'd the Beat Festival go? George Wallace was good, and Russ Green was ok. Jim Deuchars hosted, he had some good stuff himself. It was two nights, first at East End Book Exchange, second at Brillobox. The second night they had an electronic artist ("allinaline") mixing music from a miniature synth to accompany the poets.

Nothing seemed too surprising. I feel like the legacy of the beats lives on in more or less every poet I see in Pittsburgh, from the New Yinzers to the more formal small press people. Everyone has influences from that "beat" tradition: straightforward narration, confessional attitude, heightened examination of the brutal everyday, a casual veering between singing and talking-- pretty universal stuff.

This all to say when the "beats" came out and showed us their stuff, it wasn't anything we hadn't seen before. Not that the material itself was supposed to be fresh; e.g. The Mad Muse read Shakespeare to start her sets off. In doing this she claimed a kind of diplomatic function: "at some point in my life I was trying to bring literature to the drunks." Well, all the poets I know drink, it's not surprising given the modernist/beat/man-of-the-world stereotype, which I think is unfortunate: using the self-image of a writer to encourage drinking seems short-sighted at least.

So the beat poet festival: nothing new, although we shouldn't have expected anything new. The beats _are_ alive today in Pittsburgh, go drink with Baldinger et. al. if you can find the rock they're under. George Wallace of course was excellent throughout and he brought some real N.Y. talent to Pgh for those past few nights.

I was able to record some blurry-quality videos of the Brillobox event. The audio should be ok:

Mad Muse reading a section from Shakespeare's "As You Like it".

George Wallace reading "Jazz is My Religion":

From the videos you can see the kind of performance value these people brought to the stage. --poetryburgh@gmail.com