My name is Podergot Tumor and in different parts of the world at different stages there

will be arguments about poetry on the page and poetry on the stage, the idea of performance,

poetry and written poetry and some people saying what poetry should be and what it shouldn't

be. I find myself often bored by the imagination of binary in that because poetry has been

around since before people were writing and poetry was memorized and recited and heard

and experienced first before there was this binary between page and stage.

Poetry loses by imagining itself as a singular form and within the context of that sometimes

we can be brought into a conversation that's actually self-defeating and what we're

really being called to is to turn to what is foundational for us and what is foundational

in poetry is the experience of being moved to try to say something in the face of the

unseeable. Dear New Blood by Mark Turcott. Dear New Blood, you don't need me, I know, here

on this podium with my poem, you hunched in the back of the room, tilted in your lean,

reservation lean, you ho-hom your gaze out the window toward some other sky. Dear New Blood,

dear Holy, dear fully mixed up, mixed down, mixed in and out blood, go ahead and kick the

shit, kiss the shit from my ears, I swear I swear I listen, stutter at me, you uptown

weed, you thorn, you petal aim my old flowered face at the sky. I know you don't need me,

here on this podium with my poem, you pressed flat to the wall, shoulders cocked, loaded

for Makwa, for old growlers like me, you yawn your glance out the window at the tempting

sky. Wake me, bang my dead drum drum, clang clang my anvil my bell, shout me, hush me

your song, your shiny impossible, your long wounded song, tell me everything you know,

you don't, tell me, do you feel conquered and occupied? Maybe I've forgotten, sing it

plain, has America ever been America to you, let you be you in your own sky. Sing deep

...