Crowd gathers for Poetry Pachanga.

Good times were had by those that wanted them last night as the major events day culminated with a poets’ dinner at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts center followed by the Poetry Pachanga in the San Benito Community Center Auditorium.

MC’d by festival organizers Daniel Garcia Ordaz and Brenda Nettles Riojas, the gathered poets then declaimed a group poem concocted during dinner with the instruction that all the assembled poets write a line or two to be read informally together to create a heretofore unknown work of art. So after the crowd came to order, the poets assembled and read lines from succinct to wordy in no particular order and with no knowledge of what was going to be immediately before your own piece until it was heard. This produced some shocking and often hilarous moments. I read a piece I’d scribbled into my notebook on the way out of Austin after the October music festival on the Sunday afternoon the evening of which Bob Dillon was to appear. So we missed it. I’ll post the lines in a comment to this post. At the end of the show Mr. Ortiz did call for poets to turn in their lines, but since I hadn’t typed the lines up yet and didn’t want to tear the note page out, I guess I’ll have to email mine.

I also suggest that those poets who are so disposed attach their impromptu pieces as comments to this post as an impromptu public record. Then we can all mix and match for startling effects to our heart’s content.

After the improv, the poets took turns reading their poems to an appreciative audience. The content and style varied widely, as one might expect in as broad a crowd as this.

I invite all to post the piece they presented as comments to this article or, were I to hear there is some preference to be posted on a more permanent page.

Also, to my fellow poets, I offer these pages as a place to put your poems. See what happens. Reader Patricia A. has posted several most pleasing pieces at this point, her first public appearance as a poet, if I understand it right. But she’s worked on these to good effect and knows what works for her. It’s a pretty broad range from haiku to Rilke translations and then throw in that really touching piece, “We don’t need new cabinets,” a really hot wire of a poem.

This event has changed my perspective on what I want to do with this Web site. I am most comfortable in the arts. While I do have opinions about public topics, most of the time I want to adopt a fairly Bhuddist opinion on having opinions–they are shadows of the illusion of separation and should be observed and then let go. Actual Bhuddists, do feel free to correct me on that view. I’m a dabbler.

So I invite more poetry. I’d like it to be the kind of place you can go eat your breakfast and read something exciting and new instead of the side of the Cheerios for the three-hundred-thousandth time.

Stan Raines–