Karaoke + Poetry = Fun has, over the years, brought together poets from all ends of the aesthetic spectrum.
Language poets will sing duets with New Formalists; a pale-faced Saint Marks scenester will cheer on an elbow-patch academic as s/he belts out middle-period Pat Benatar.
It's an Aaron Sorkin utopian vision of Poetryland, a place where Robert Lowell's imagained camps of Raw and Cooked poets come together to sing along to Bonnie Tyler.
Here's a shot from the last KPF in Hudson, NY. That's Rosangela Briscese, the Managing Director of the Ashbery Resource Center and Webmaster for the ARC website, on the right, along with Kenny "K9" Casanova, our karaoke DJ for the evening. Kenny was recently voted the "Number 1 Karaoke DJ in the Capital Region" by Capital Region Living magazine.
They are singing "Summer Lovin'" from the hit musical Grease.
That's Marion Wrenn, editor of Painted Bride Quarterly, as she belts out the Monkees' "Daydream Believer." This KPF took place at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. I love how they project the lyrics up on the screen. That's production values.
The BPC just updated its website, so check it out.
That's Jen Hyde, who was a Pratt student when she first started
helping us out with KPF events. She's singing a Madonna song with the
KPF songbook in her arm. This KPF took place at the Four-Faced Liar, a bar in the West Village. She now runs Small Anchor Press in Brooklyn and is an excellent poet in her own right.
And this is invariably how KPF event ends--the last drunken
stragglers, usually complete strangers, who come in wanting to sing
karaoke. They are told that, in order to do this, they will first have
to read a poem. In this case, a particularly hirsute young man drafted
up a poem on the spot, read it, and then sang a soul song which this
guest blogger cannot remember.
