Where the audience is the entertainment
By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer
Audiences are restless. Perhaps, it’s
thanks to TV, remote controls and video games. But these days, watching is not
enough. People want to be involved; it’s all about interactivity. They want to
rise up from their seats and be the singer, musician, comic or storyteller. They
want to go on stage and be the poet.
Open mic nights and poetry readings are
back. These days they’re occurring at various spots around the valley: SPACE on
Saturdays, occasionally at the Coffee Grinder, and at the frequent gatherings of
the Not So "Dead Poets Society."
Even the Wood River High School got into
the act Saturday, Jan. 31, by hosting a Poetry Café in the school’s commons
area.
So what’s the attraction?
Well, poetry is a charming form of
letters. Some might think it once was better. But it’s still written and it’s
read. It’s at the formal end of literature, just storytelling told in miniature
instead.
And it doesn’t stop there. The interactive
aspect extends to Poetry Slams wherein the audience becomes the judge.
In fact, ever since Marc Smith, a poet
from Chicago initiated the first "Poetry Slam" in the mid-1980s at the Green
Mill Bar in Chicago, slams have spread across the nation. Ten years ago, the now
defunct Main Street Book Café in Ketchum held them monthly and then they were
put on monthly by Iconoclast, in its original store. Gary Hunt, owner of
Iconoclast, is again hosting frequent poetry readings in the store’s now bigger
space on Main Street.
"We are going to be doing a event for
Pablo Neruda, this year for his 100th birthday," Hunt said. "All the publishers
are making a big deal about it. We’ll have a big birthday party for him and have
readings in English and Spanish."
Another poetry event will take place May 9
when author and poet Jim Harrison will be reading at the Community Campus
Theater at the invitation of the Hailey Cultural Center. Along with him will be
Joseph Bednarik, who has long published Harrison’s collected poems. Bednarik
will conduct an onstage interview with the normally reclusive Montana-based
writer, in front of an audience.
"He’ll read from his new books," Hunt
said. "All in the name of Ezra Pound. He loves old Ezra. Basically, he’s doing
an homage."
Hunt added that since April is National
Poetry month, there will be a "big poetry event coinciding with that."
The Not So "Dead Poets Society" was
started by Gary Hoffman in 2002 and has been gathering occasionally at Tully’s
in Ketchum. As of February the group will move to Strega, where the hours are
later as well there being food and wine available, Hoffman said.
Normally readers share previously
published material from such poets as "Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charles Bukowski,
Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling and Ogden Nash is always popular," Hoffman said.
"It’s kind of fun, we have a good time,
and get a real cross section. Along with readings, I have tapes of the great
poets, and I play a couple of poems read by the poets themselves." The next
gathering is Thursday, Feb. 12.
Poetry aside, other establishments are
offering interactive nights. The Ketchum establishment, the Coffee Grinder, for
instance, is now having regular activity evenings, also on Thursday evenings,
from 7 to 9 p.m.
This month its Love Month at the Grinder,
starting with Speed Dating on Feb. 5. In the following weeks there will be Make
Your Sweetie a Valentine on Feb 12, Acoustic Love Song Night, Feb. 19, and
Relationship Forum, Feb. 26.
These fun-filled activities clearly are
intended to take you right through every step of a relationship, all in one
short month.
Speed dating, done all over the country
and abroad, is like musical chairs dating. Singles gather at a café. Then
couples are paired up at separate tables to begin their first date. Following
approximately five minutes of conversation, a bell is rung, and the men move on
to meet their next date.
There’s more. Much more. There’s karaoke.
This sing-a-long to the dots can be found valley wide: at The Mint in Hailey,
the Casino and the Roosevelt in Ketchum, Breezie’s in Fairfield, and every
Saturday at the Silver Dollar in Bellevue. Even the Boiler Room in Sun Valley
has gotten into the act hiring the valley’s karaoke specialists, Billie and Iris
of Eboni iz Jammin’.
Open mic nights, of course are always
intriguing. Who knows whom one may see or hear? The alternative performing venue
in Ketchum, SPACE’s regular open mic nights is not only open to musicians but
poets, storytellers, clowns and fools.
What could be more fun, more outgoing and
silly, after all than making a spectacle of yourself in the name of
entertainment?