Stone Soup
"Stone Soup" has — even from childhood — been one of my favorite stories. (The version I've linked to is a bit warmer and fuzzier than the somewhat cynical version I remember from my youth, but it's still a fine yarn.) The reason I bring this up is that a friend of mine here in Wollongong runs a periodic coffee house-salon-open mic afternoon she charmingly calls "Stone Soup." Today, Margaret and two of her friends (whose names do not appear here because I haven't cleared it with them yet) performed a little three-minute play I wrote and — in my directorial debut — directed. They did a great job, and if there's a chance to get them to perform it again, I'll see if I can video it and post it. (I may expand it to a 10-minute, which would be long enough to enter into short-play competitions.)
Moreover, I did my very first piece of performance poetry. Oh, I've read poems of my own on occasion, but this was the first one I ever consciously worked up as a performance and learned by heart, reproduceable in essentially the same form for different audiences on different occasions. It was fun. Maybe I'll find a poetry slam in Sydney one of these days and enter. (This poem was only one minute, which may be too short; I'll have to write, work up, and memorize another one, closer to the target time limit of three minutes.)
If you have ever entered a poetry slam, tell me: did you like it? Was it worth the effort for you? Was it fun?
posted by Laura E. Goodin @ 7:14 PM (permalink)
3 comment(s)
3 Comments:
My eldest son, who is about your age, also loved that story when he was in about year 3:-) He heard it on the radio and was practically ROTFL!
Good luck with your poetry aspirations. If done as real perforance pieces such things can be fun, but so often poetry readings are pretentious and dull.
I've slammed in the past, and even picked up the first money I ever made through writing via prizemoney.
Given what I got out of performing poetry (occasional cash, trips to festivals via a performing word troup I was part of) it'd be kinda hard to say it wasn't worth it, but I don't know that I'd say I ever really enjoyed the process. Reading was one of those things I taught myself to do because it was necessary more than anything else.
Go Laura! Go Margaret!
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