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Slo Deliverance Slo Deliverance is a poetry reading, yes. It occurs monthly (first Wednesday at 7:30) at Linnaea's Cafe at 1110 Garden St. in SLO.Slo Deliverance is more than a poetry reading. It is a dream. It is a burning desire. It is a benchmark. It is a park full of benchmarks. It is a laboratory. It is a monthly therapy. It is a portal for pilgrims to peer into another world. It is a porthole for sailors of the spoken word to peer out at the passing partial panorama. When I began working with poetry in this area, my challenge was to find the poetic voice of the region and then contribute to its avenues and venues of expression. What we did not want to do was to provide just another place where people could read poetry and where well-known people could read their poetry for money. Not, as Seinfeld says, that there is anything wrong with that. Au contraire, I feel that poetry is the greatest entertainment one can get for one's entertainment dollar and that poets should probably be rebelling against getting nothing for their performances. But I do think sometimes poets who should be paid are not and vice versa. We had a phrase in business. The expert is somebody who comes from 50 miles away and carries a black bag. Yet I am ready to pay some people well to come a thousand miles and feed and shelter them just to get them on the Slo Deliverance stage. Poetry is meant to be performed. Slo Deliverance intends to use every possible means to make live poetry experiences as exciting as a revival meeting tent, as entertaining as cirque de soleil, as spiritually rewarding as a talk with Gurdjieff. It offers the open mike to any kind of spoken word imagineable. Sometimes we do have featured guests. Sometimes we don't. We work mainly on themes. We use poetic dialogues. Sometimes they are patch work quilts of several poets. Sometimes they are the work of one poet as in the recent "Mutiny on the Bountiful" created by Jean Gerard. All are invited to submit complete or partial dialogues. We encourage songwriters and legend raconteurs. We offer a path from Slo Deliverance to The Poetry Page on ourslo.com. That is, we invite Slo Deliverance performers to submit their works for publication on our eZine. We employ recorded beats for those who like beats behind their performance. We create background music for the poetic dialogues. We use screens and computers for slide shows and teleprompters. We record our events for our performers. We have no problem with the other poetry readings. We love them. We attend them all. We just want more and we want more open mike and we want more innovation. We merge poetry and poetry with other art forms and artists. We want, as the comic Gallagher says, to fully extend the concept. We invite your participation. Also, watch The Poetry Page for our Cayucos Beach Full Moon Spoken Word and Legend Bonfire. We are not mispelling when we say Slo instead of SLO. Here is how Slo Deliverance got its name. When we were initially discussing the poetic history of the region with Karl Kempton and Norm Hammond, we learned that the Chumash had four deities - Sun, Eagle, Morning Star and Coyote . The Chumash word for Eagle is slo. Further, I asked Karl to throw the Ching for a name since he had done so well with "Corners of the Mouth" which he and Kevin Sullivan created twenty years ago. The hexagram Karl threw was 40. It is all about deliverance and thunder and rain. So, we are Slo Deliverance. You can find a good write up on hexagram 40 at http://www.compassionatedragon.com/hexa40.html Beat Poetry
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