Fantastic Poets

At the end of this ramble is today's writing "sensating the poem" exercise, a brief one, from what I used in my workshop on Saturday. First: What a week of poetry this has been, performing at Blissfest in Manitou, then on Saturday giving a "sensating the poem" workshop for the Authorfest of the Manitou Springs Library -- a wonderful group of writers attended and then Saturday evening, hosted by Aaron Anstett, went to a performance by Colorado's western slope pre-eminent poets, Art Goodtimes and Rosemerry Trommer. They were fantastic -- best poetry performance I've been to in years. With poetry in other languages, poems sung by Rosemerry, chanted by Art, some performed together, they slapped my ears with wonderful word power, awakened new energy for writing, and stole my heart. I regret, not being able to video-tape them to use their performance as a teaching tool. Benefit: New resources and joy: Rosemerry has a website, http://www.wordwoman.com/ and Art, "aka, thunderbear" just google Art Goodtimes poet and you'll find him. Today, at lunch, I will perform three poems for the Business and the Arts awards luncheon, before 300 people, at the Antlers Hotel. Scared. I shiver. Cannot eat before performing. Remind myself, this is about the audience, not your ego. Give them accessible poems, celebrate life, share the magic of words. Exercise: Write down three experience that were or are important to you. Then pick one, then describe what: it looks like, feels like, smells like, tastes like, and sounds like. Write several images for each sense. Then write a sensate narrative description rich with these images. Third: add the reason what prompted you to write about this in the first place, that sixth sense, then re-write it one more time, start with a TITLE, and flow with your feeling words into a sensate poem. Creativity is in the doing. Write.