Saturday, 9-10:30 pm, Bagley Wright Theatre
It will go something like a wrestling match, minus the ring ropes or the floor mats, or the wrestling, for that matter. Hate wrestling? Like poetry? Perfect. This is a civilized head-to-head--sophisticated, smart. You will not be subjected to anything so vile as a Lycra one-piece.
In one corner of the ring (to employ the wrestling metaphor anyway) is NPR commentator and mustachioed Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu, whose books include Raised by Puppets Only to Be Killed by Research and, recently, Casanova in Bohemia; in the other, smart-mouth Canadian "action poet" Sheri-D Wilson, author of such poetry collections as Girl's Guide to Giving Head and Between Lovers. Codrescu participated in (and won) a similar contest at Bumbershoot in 1999, against Victor Hernández Cruz. In the words of one organizer, "It's time for Andrei to come back and defend his title." (Bumbershoot does do slam poetry, too; this is different.)
The Heavyweight Poetry Bout occurs in eight rounds of freeform spoken-word performance, presided over by a drag queen and punctuated by a gong. It's modeled on the annual World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout held in Taos, New Mexico (where Sherman Alexie is a retired four-time champion): A panel of judges assigns a point value to each round of the contestants' performances and then declares a winner. (The judges are visual artists Karen DeWinter, Darwin Nordin, and Deborah Lawrence--none of them poets, out of fairness, you see. According to Bumbershoot's literary programmer, fellow writers would be biased because they would "come in with various ideas about schools and streams of writing and blah, blah, blah.") But even if you disagree with the judges, you'll still have your say: Integrity Voting Systems, a company that facilitates vote counting in such contentious situations as county elections and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, has been hired to poll the audience. What if the crowd votes differently from the judges? Says an organizer, "That will be really interesting."
"Interesting" isn't usually the word I normally use to describe performance poetry--blah, blah, blah--but Codrescu, for one, is captivating (I'm not very up on Wilson's stuff), and I could listen to him talk about anything. If Codrescu's work on All Things Considered is any indication, he will deliver a knockout in the eighth and final round, when the game is further complicated by this element: Each contestant has to deliver an impromptu piece about a topic selected out of a hat. (During this round in Taos one year, Sherman Alexie famously drew the word "asshole.")
What you need to win, then, are quick reflexes and considerable range. Codrescu's droll five-minute commentaries on NPR have included, in recent months, meditations on topics as timely and far-flung as 9/11, the flap of skin between upper lip and nose, Jung's concept of synchronicity, cell phones that dial your mother at inopportune moments from inside your pocket, the geopolitics of Romania, and the irrational fear of being killed by falling coconuts. He's hilarious, insightful, and bizarre. To wit, here he is on insomnia: "I haven't slept since 1967, and it shows. I see people who aren't there. Peggy Guggenheim, please put your clothes back on. I can't concentrate."
But Wilson is funny, too, and a fighter. Referencing Codrescu's Casanova in Bohemia, she is said to have recently announced, "We'll see what happens when Casanova meets Catwoman." Unlike, say, Tyson and Holyfield, Codrescu and Wilson are combative in a friendly, collegial, uncannibalistic way. (Wilson's last book features a blurb from Codrescu.) But mutual respect isn't diminishing the stakes of the competition.
Wilson is plainly the underdog, the lesser-known quantity, which is endearing in a Rocky sort of way, but Codrescu is the king of a kind of acerbic brilliance that will be, I have to say, tough to beat. Plus, Wilson, a mere Canadian, is up against something more: Codrescu's gravelly, romantic, and "somewhat accentuated" (according to one insider) voice. He always sounds good, even when he's saying things like, "I am the emperor of midnight and the duke of polenta"--yeah, he said that on the radio--and sounding good is what this contest, as a Canadian might say, is all aboot. Sorry, Sheri-D. My money is on the Romanian.
