Going for it

My dear friend M. has just returned from a long trip to El Salvador & Nicaragua, where she spent her time traveling (mostly by herself!) and working on a reforestation project with Nicaraguan women who had been injured during wartimes there. At least I think thats what she was doing...now that I'm trying to write about it I'm realizing we have seen each other twice since her return and we really haven't talked much about her trip. (I know, now you're all thinking what a lame friend I am to have not asked more questions.) Anyway, my point is that M. is one of those really incredible people who just seem to have a natural knack for living adventurous lives full of awesome experiences...trekking around South America by herself really just barely begins to touch on all the cool stuff she's done.

And I bring this up because I have been kind of obsessed lately with discovering really cool people who seem to just go for it, in life. I am not one of those people, though I often lust for that kind of confidence and motivation. I think the closest I've ever come to that kind of behavior is applying for art school, but in the end I didn't go for it...so that's too bad, but at least my grandchildren won't have to be paying off my student loans.

Back to the point: meet Anis Mojgani, my latest poetry obsession since Elizabeth Bishop, and this guy is actually still alive so that's a definite plus. But he's getting married in May. Shoot.

He is pretty much my definition of what going for it means; the kind of person who jumps into things with everything they've got and just makes success out of what they have.

Mojgani grew up in New Orleans, went to art school in Georgia and then moved to New York where he started participating in the city's "notoriously competitive" slam scene. After a few years competeing with NYC-Urbana, he moved out to the west coast (Portland) and eventually started touring with the Poetry Revival guys (Derrick C. Brown & Buddy Wakefield). He's won tons of slam awards, nationally and internationally, and I was lucky enough to be convinced by L. to go see the last tour he participated in, "The Night Kite Revival" at Western this fall. It was honestly one of the most intense and moving performances I've ever seen, and if you ever stumble onto the chance to get to see one of them live, take it. Buddy Wakefield is from Seattle and performs around the area a lot.

If only I had the metaphorical balls to get up on stage and perform. There are plenty of opportunities in Bellingham for me to do so, but usually I just sit in the crowd and am in awe of the guts some people have. It's one thing to share your work in a workshop-class, but quite another to do it in front of a huge room of people. Who vote on your prose & delivery, I might add.

Needless to say, Mojgani has some balls...er, guts. But his poetry is also sentimental and funny and exquisitely weird in the most satisfying sort of way. There's a reason he's a back-to-back national Grand Slam winner, and if I wrote like him then maybe I wouldn't think twice before getting up on stage. Slam is the freshest kind of poetry, I think, and so much more about the experience than it is about the finite details. If you have the nine minutes to listen to this slam from '06, I don't think you'll be sorry.