Laura Winton is a poet who sees the Academy of the Future as containing Hip Hop Poesy, Slam, PerfPo, Spoken Word, and Media Poetics. She’s got a year toward her M.A. in writing from Illinois State University, her actual M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU, is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Minnesota (she works with great po force Maria Damon there), and cut her teeth at an open mic at an Irish bar in Minneapolis. As Laura says, “Those first few years at Kieran’s were like an MFA program to me -- my writing grew exponentially.”
Here then is the tale of her zine, originally Voices from the Well, documenting the poets in the Kieran’s open mic scene, now evolved into Karawane, dedicated to work that brings together text and performance, named after a dada sound poem.
And you, Dear Reader, Hark! Should you dig the tale and be so inspired, this essay is also an interactive Ask -- why not write The Poem, and then submit to Laura for possible inclusion in the next issue?
Thus is the New Poetry born!
~Bob Holman
Karawane: Or the Temporary Death of the Bruitist
History and Call for Submissions
In 1996, having just moved to Minneapolis and re-started my life as an artist, I stumbled into an open mic at Kieran’s Irish Pub, called “Voices From the Well.” I read my own work on my second time to the open mic and very quickly, this became my artistic community. It was welcoming, it was friendly and interactive, the way readings at bars tend to get, and there were a number of poets there whose work I thought was extraordinary. I learned very quickly the value of testing a piece of writing in front of an audience and how to read the audience to gauge the success of the work. Those first few years at Kieran’s were like an MFA program to me -- my writing grew exponentially. At the same time, I began to experiment with performance values, bringing in ideas from Dada and Surrealist performances, from performance art, from on-the-spot collaborations with musicians, simultaneous readings with other artists, and impromptu writing and revising onstage.
Sensing right away what an amazing community we had of writers who perform their work, I began a small literary journal, Voices from the Well. With a nod to the Beats, who promoted themselves collectively through their journals and readings and the network of writers they created across the country, I saw Voices as a document of this extraordinary collection of individuals. I envisioned it as a collective project, also with those visions of Beat glory in my head, but it became quickly apparent that more people wanted to be published than to publish, and so Voices became the product of my own vision, rather than a collective one. This is not to say that people did not feel a sense of ownership. Typos and misprints were often called down from the stage on release night, much to my aggravation, and boundaries had to be negotiated between the ownership of the worker and the ownership of the published. I initially published three issues a year and with modest distribution and advertising sales, even managed to occasionally pay writers in some of those first issues.
Over time, Voices risked becoming too insular and possibly repetitive. Although the initial criterion for inclusion was that you had to participate in an open mic or reading event in Minneapolis, I later decided to open the journal up to any writer who read their work anywhere in the world. I changed the name from Voices from the Well, which indicated a specific time and place and collection of individuals, to Karawane: Or, the Temporary Death of the Bruitist. Named for a sound poem by the Dadaist Hugo Ball and also for the Dadist/Futurist practice of Bruitism, the art of noise to elicit a reaction, it signaled my growing passion for experimental literature in performance.
