Thank You, Erin Jackson

I just spent a couple of (wonderful) hours writing a remembrance and review of Sunday night”s Poets Asylum at the Java Hut in Worcester – only to have Firefox eat the post when it didn”t like the picture I tried to upload. I am sad. Not because my words were deathless prose, but because Sunday night was full of lively poetry and wonderful words, and I think I managed to capture something special about each poet who competed that night and now I have to start all over again and at 4:30 in the morning I know I don”t have the energy or the words left to make you understand what an amazing experience it was.

And after that queen of run-on sentences, I”m still going to try – because it truly was that kind of amazing experience. I”ve been in and around the local poetry scene (with some forays into the national) for about a dozen years. I”m not a mainstay – I”m a bystander and a specator who occasionally enters the fray and steps up on stage myself. In that time, I have been moved by many poets. I”ve been awed, I”ve been entertained, I”ve been amused, I”ve been struck by thought, imagination, wonderment, amazement, introspection and pure, unadulterated enjoyment. I”ve never been actually moved to tears – until Sunday night when Erin Jackson performed her first poem in the four-round iWPS qualifying slam at the Java Hut in Worcester. Erin, a member of the 2006 Worcester Poetry Slam Team – Team Awkward – did a four minute piece about growing up with her brother, and no words I could put out there could possibly do it justice.

Her poem was only one standout in a night of amazing poetry by the eight local poets who”d earned a spot in this qualifying slam by winning an earlier slam. The iWPS qualifying slam chooses the Worcester represntative to the Individual World Poetry Slam to be held in Vancouver January 31-February 4, 2006. The eight competitors qualified by winning slams throughout the autumn season at the Java Hut. They included Erin and fellow team members Bobby Gibbs, Eric Urban and Gary Hoare, co-host of the Worcester Poetry Asylum Jon Wolfe, Java Hut favorite Nick Davis, Providence Poetry Slam Team member Trevor Byrne-Smith and the host of Worcester”s Youth Poetry Slam, Alex Charalambides.

The poetry was amazing – and the bout was a classic cliffhanger that was decided by the last poem of the last round of the night. Erin Jackson, the only poet who has ever made me cry – and the only woman to make the qualifier – will be representing the Worcester Poets Asylum at the Individual World Poetry Slam in Vancouver. Congratulations, Erin – and thank you!

[tags]poetry, poetry slam, iWPS, individual world poetry slam, Erin Jackson, Poets Asylum, Java Hut, Worcester poetry[/tags]