Audio By Carbonatix
Last night’s Literary Death Match was probably the first and last time an audience at Purdy Lounge will hear beautiful, funny, thoughtful poems read from the dance floor. Wait, that’s not true. Tonight O, Miami, the month-long poetry festival funded is also hosting Broken Social Spam there, mixing poetry and vinyl with DJ Le Spam and Broken Social Scene.
So, to be more exact, if you go tonight, last night would have been the first night of poetry at a place perfect for sucking face. That’s what O, Miami’s about: putting poems into the ears of all the people, not just the bookworms.
After an intro by O, Miami’s Scott Cunningham, host Ann Heatherington, a sassy, tall lady, introduced the judges, and read off places that Literary Death Matches had been held before, including alleys and barns. Those might have been better than the nightclub format, which ended up being quite a loud little place.
The structure of the event went like this: Ann threw little papers with the four combatants’ names at the audience. We read to her who’s going up first, then she forgot what we read, and decided who was going to go up against whom in each round. Each poet read for seven minutes. If they went over, Heatherington shot them with a dart gun. The winner from each round battled it out at a tense game of musical chairs.
Regarding the judges:
- PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award-finalist and Vida author Patricia
Engel is Colombian, grew up in New Jersey, has been living in Miami for
seven years, and loves cats.
- Guitarist and songwriter Andrew Whiteman
of Broken Social Scene is Canadian (duh) and apparently makes the best
guitar sex face. Hetherington asked him to make a literary sex face,
which wasn’t to be forced, but came out sometime later. It was dark, but
it was there.
- Finally, New Yorker editor, former Miami New Times writer, and author of Celebrity Checkhov Ben Greenman is staying with his parents here in Miami, is very funny, and really gets poetry.
The first LDM contestants were the Foryoucansee Collective, the team behind Hialeah Haikus.
Alejandro Nodarse and Elena Santayana read poems with local flavor.
Nodarse went up first, and elicited a few giggles from the audience with
a mix of bro haikus and poems. “I want to taste the rainbow,” he said,
“Britto, not Skittles.”
Santayana read wonderfully rich poems
about her ass, which is a thing all of us in Miami think about a lot,
our asses. Sprinkled with Spanish and a shout out to Cheesecake Factory
at Dadeland, she started with, “I am 150 pounds of pure Cuban sunshine.”
The audience was thrilled to hear about her nalgas and when judge Ben
Greenman noticed that every poem that wasn’t a haiku, actually was a
haiku, Nodarse nodded proudly.
Next was Matt Gajewski, famous for his radio show, Pure Imagination. He came ready to fight in a kitschy workout outfit and read one long, intense poem about a guy Stan who changes his name and is never satisfied with the results. Whiteman noted that it was about identity. Gajewski wrote this fantastic piece of work last night. Seriously, last night? Wow. Though Matt is extremely talented, the lure of the Miami won out and Foryoucansee Collective secured the round.
After a bit of music by the DJ, which was all good, and all what one might call “white people music” (Wilco, Talking Heads, Royksopp, Magnetic Fields), Mary Sheffield of The Rumpus and Zombies Organize took the stage. At this point, the ladies drink special had kicked in, and the room was really loud.
She trucked through and read a graphic poem about a woman who wants to lose weight, not leaving out any gory details, like how she shits her pants when she takes diet pills. Dave Landsberger of Jai-Alai Magazine read two poems, and included a wonderful ode to Miami, which left the crowd hooting and hollering. He found himself the winner of the second round.
As judge Greenman pointed out,each round had one poet that read a single narrative account against an opponent that read multiple poems (Landsberger and Foryoucansee also both read about Miami).
The musical chairs tiebreaker left the Foryoucansee Collective victorious and, as you can see here, joyous with a “gold” metal. Definitely a few people not used to hearing poetry read aloud or even reading it in a book, got a taste of genius last night in an easy to swallow death match pill.
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