It's not necessarily a poetry reading, but I just wanted to let everybody know about my experience over the weekend with Zelda's Inferno at Playa del Fuego. Zelda's Inferno is a local poetry workshop that meets at St. John's church every Sunday evening, and Playa del Fuego is an artist festival in Delaware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playa_del_FuegoI got there with some friends around 10:30 or so Friday night and we took part in several poetic activities over the course of the weekend, along with the other general activities and art activities going on in the camping community all together. Some of the poetry activities included Poetry Immolation, where we all wrote poems, read them once, and then burnt them in a large bonfire, so they were never to be heard again. There was some wonderful poetry written and read, which added to the immediacy of the event. We also had a poetry revolution, where a group of us dressed in various army-like costumes, and carrying plastic toy weapons, invaded every campsite in the festival and proceded to read poems at the participants at gunpoint (plastic toy gunpoint of course). There were also several workshops and exercises, and a few surreal poetry hours (which included some Mad Libs sessions). We also did an Exquisite Corpse, where everyone coming by the camp, as well as those in it, added a line to a massive poem without being able to see any other line except the one immediately preceding theirs. It was great fun and thought provoking at the same time. I encourage anyone who would find such things interesting to either check out Zelda's one Sunday evening or Playa del Fuego in either the Spring or the Fall.