Live First Wednesday Spoken Word Returns

Co-sponsored by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association, and downtown host-venue Back Space Gallery, the Bloomington Writers Guild’s First Wednesday Spoken Word Series (cf. October 5 2022; March 4 2020, et al.) has returned in its pre-Covid, non-zoom live format. Two readers were featured, interspersed with interpretive music by ORTET with additional guest trumpet David Miller, along with an also live open-mic session.

Cleveland poet and 2022-23 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate, and author of RATTLE & NUMB: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS, 1992-2019, John Burroughs was lead reader with a number of short poems on varied subjects, including such things as bubbles and childhood, dogs, the “City of Lost Places,” and trying to get out of ruts, all dramatically read and often amusing; followed by the Writers Guild’s own Joan Hawkins, accompanied by ORTET, with “Bill and Joan In the Bardo,” an imagined conversation with experimental author William S. Burroughs and the wife he had shot, after both of their deaths.

Then after the break there were four walk-on readers of which I was third, with “The Flavor of the Jest,” the first tale in my five-part “Casket Suite,” originally published as a finalist (and ultimate winner, see February 2, January 17 2022, et al.) of DEFENESTRATIONISM.NET’s 2022 Flash Suite Competition. Based on a vampiric New Orleanian urban legend, it also included an implicit warning that the remainder of the “suite” will be doled out over the next four or so First Wednesday sessions.