POETRY READINGS YOU WON'T SEE IN COBOURG

Give it up for Vanessa Hidary. I love the attitude. It infects all her performances. You go goil. These are the lines that she recites.



Put down your dainty tea cups and saucers. Put your seat in its reclining position. Put a sling on your jaw for support, because Vanessa is gonna demonstrate my adage that poetry is a tongue best served raw, that Poetry is Poetency.



Maggie Estep, another Yankee Doodle Darling, that wouldn't pass the Cobourg Criteria of poetry as cup cakes with white glove approval.



Back to Vanessa from WHO GIVES A FUCK STREET. Cobourg culture exceeds the requirements of all Human Rights Commissions, looking out for offence wherever it might appear, tucked in the toilet seat hinge, jammed in the crevice of a worn out sneaker, dancing on the tongue of insouciant poets. Might make a scandal, might make people talk, buzz, spread the word of what poetry can be, spicy, hot, wicked, rolling on the ground like a thrashing dog.

Not the sentimental pious slop so often served at The Meet. Not the sanitized politically correct and compliant, not the dry driftwood washed ashore from the various gov't cozy caverns of complacency, CBC, libraries, universities, school systems.

Listen to this wild child poetry:



And God save Cobourg from the likes of Wally Keeler. He might read this poem, which had been posted to the Facebook community and received some positive reply, but the most memorable was from two lesbian lovers who commented that when they first read it, they thought only a woman could have written such a poem. Well life is full of surprises, I'm not the misogynist that ideologues, 1st, 2nd or 3rd wave imagine in their petite sexist minds.



Or what if he read this poem and the Human Rights Commission might take notice that Cobourg exists, and the rest of Ontario will wake up and notice Cobourg's embarrassment. Oh the shame of it all, The shame I tell you. As the poets of The Meet won't tell you, mediocrity is a sedative, poetry is a stimulant. That's why Cobourg never has and never will invite its born son to perform inside its borders.

THE WAL-MARTYR