Untitled 2

(in response to Ralph la Charity's poem about the spoken word poetry scene in my home state Ohio, titled 'not an artifice') ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... a particular kind of modernist exploratory engagement, engaged in by those who proved themselves worthy of having been born vocally equipped... certainly the population flung across that stretch of land had been explosively leavened by historical accelerants and really needed to be made sense of, not by fashionable theories, but by being expressed in heart-searching speech... I can imagine there was need for live vocal access to the heart of that moment's experience, by people whose ability to elicit each other's heightened speech proved they belonged together. I tasted only a bit of that later, out of state, too late to live it as a full life arc.