Taylor Mali Never Gets Old
Taylor Mali is one of my favourite performance poets. I can listen to his work over and over and over again. It never gets old. He’s a master at using humour in his poetry, which I appreciate. But even when he’s making jokes, he’s still making important points. There are messages behind the pretty words.
And while my poetry is of a very different style than his, he has been a big influence on my desire to make poetry come alive and exist off of the page. The more I think about it, the more I think that I’d prefer to create an album of my poetry than a book—or maybe do a package that combines the two. A book that comes with a CD (as opposed to a CD that includes the words in the liner notes) would be pretty cool.
But, I don’t have nearly enough solid material to put together a full album. Not yet. I’m working on it, though. I’m writing new poems and I’m testing out the audience response at Raving Poets to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe in a year or two, I’ll finally be ready to attempt publishing a full length book and/or album. Until then, I’ll keep submitting to magazines (and keep getting rejected).
