Salt City Slam

Salt City Slam
Sam Weller Books
January 27, 2014

We got off to a bit of a rocky start because we showed up at the wrong venue.  Apparently Sam Weller bookstore had moved to Trolley Square several years ago.  Yes, years.  If I had given more credence to the map on Facebook than the address on the KSL event page we would have been fine, but KSL had the date and Facebook was silent.  Alas, we made a poor choice and ended up missing the Open Mic portion of the evening.  This also resulted in an unfortunate chair-free experience for the evening.  My resourceful companions scrounged up a low bench to share, but we gazed enviously at the chairs with backs on them all night long.

I’ve been about 7 months removed from my beloved writing community in St George so I was a tiny bit giddy to once again be around people who loved to wrap themselves around words.  I will admit right off that I was nervous that I might be out of my depth and relieved to see that poets of all stripes were embraced and applauded.  After the Open Mic (we saw only the final performer, who was hilarious) there was a featured poet whose name I very unfortunately did not write down.  She traveled here from Seattle and used the most evocative images.  My favorite of her pieces was her final one that used the image of atoms to explore the idea of catalysts and change.  Her powerful plea for an electron (agent of change) to come to her still resonates in my mind.  Of course, my summary is completely butchering the piece.  Such are the hazards of reviewing a poetry reading.

It wasn’t until after both of these events that the slam began and by that time we were so tired that we almost went home.  The featured poet was so fabulous that we felt full of happy writing moments and the hour long drive home loomed large.  But this was an expedition to check out the local writing scene so we stayed and were not disappointed.  Several of the poets had pieces that really piqued my interest and made me want to be a part of this community.  My biggest problem is logistics, really.  I left my kids with my parents at 5:45 pm and didn’t return until nearly 1 am.  This may be do-able for people without kids, but for a single mom who generally works nights this is unsustainable over the long term.  This really did feed my start in a big way, though.  Hopefully I can find a way to have poetry in my life without 2+ hours of driving.  In the meantime, I’ll sneak up to Salt Lake whenever it is vaguely feasible.  (And St George too!  SLAM on February 14, 2014 at Jazzy’s on Bluff)