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| Bowerbird Intelligentleman aka Bruce Morasch Photo by Poetri Smith |
At one of my earlier National Poetry Slam Slammaster's meeting in either 2001 or 2004, there was an intense argument over a rule between Taylor Mali and the late Danny Solis and right in the middle, PSI board president Mike Henry, who was moderating the discussion called on Bowerbird, who had his hand up for the longest time.
"I just want to say I'm happy to be here with you all," Bowerbird said.
The meeting erupted in laughter and broke the tension.
Even Danny was laughing.
That will always be Bowerbird for me.
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| Bowerbird enjoying the National Poetry Slam's Head-to-Head Haiku in 2012. |
from The Los Angeles Times
The Basement : Light of ‘Cultural Exiles’ Shines in Coffeehouse
By ESTHER SCHRADER
Sept. 15, 1988
Mark Phillips is singing.
Acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, his scruffy cowboy boots tapping the beat, the janitor at the Echo Park United Methodist Church is playing songs of railroad tracks and the West to a tiny audience in the church basement.
It is Saturday night at the unassuming church on Alvarado Street north of Sunset Boulevard. And on Saturday nights, the basement becomes a makeshift coffeehouse--a dimly lit sanctuary for artists of all kinds.
Since a former choir director at the church started the free Basement Coffeehouse eight years ago, the small room with a shabby stage, creaky card tables and religious books stacked in a corner has been the scene once a week of folk music and poetry readings, New-Age paeans and subdued talk among friends....
... ‘A Lot of Characters’
“It has a lot of character--a lot of character because it has a lot of characters,” [pastor of the church Rev. David] Farley said. “We’ll have a lot of people from the Westside all chiced up; we’ll have old bag ladies sort of huddled by the piano escaping the cold with some popcorn.”
Last Saturday night, Bruce Morasch, a UCLA graduate student who calls himself “bowerbird intelligentleman,” recited his rhymes, his voice booming as he padded from one side of the stage to the other:
I’m just a restless, reckless poet from Los Angeles:
orange juice for breakfast on the Los Angeles Crest;
movie stars and boulevards,
and cars and cars and cars;
a restless, reckless poet from Los Angeles.
bdbb, bdbb, bdbd, bdbb;
bdbb, bdbb, bdbdbd.
“One day, I don’t know, poetry just started popping out of me,” he said. “And so you look around for a place to share it. Places like these.”
As Morasch gestured broadly on stage, unkempt blond hair flying and black-clad limbs flailing, a woman who calls herself “Lalaland” stretched, catlike, on a Ping-Pong table in one corner.
“See, there is a message in my rhymes if you want to hear it, but if not, it’s kind of surface,” she whispered, punctuating her phrases with soft taps on a drum she bought at Toys R Us. “It seems to some as nonsense, but to others as a code.” ...
from The Los Angeles Times
Poetic Places : Poetry Readings in Southland Cafes, Bookstores and Coffeehouses Serve Up a Powerful Brew of Words and Ideas
By PENELOPE MOFFET
July 11, 1987
Sunday afternoon shoppers breezed along Melrose Avenue, passing the plate-glass windows of the Gasoline Alley cafe.
The passers-by served as unwitting, temporary backdrops to poets Starr Goode and Cecilia Woloch, who read their work for those who sipped espresso and iced cappuccino inside.
Occasionally a passer-by paused to peer in, as if wondering what new trend was being set. A few times, unwitting would-be customers pushed through the front door before stopping cold and backing out. “I have to confess that I am guilty of sloth. Like many artists and writers, I like to stay up late and sleep in late,” Goode said to a wave of sympathetic laughter from the 40 people packed into the small cafe. Then she read a poem called “Sleeping Past Noon.” ...
... Held on Weekends
Most readings are held on weekends, but a few take place during the week. Monday night, for instance, Los Angeles poets Kate Braverman and Bowerbird Intelligentleman performed their work as part of the Goat Hill Readings series at the Good Earth restaurant in Santa Ana.
About 20 people sipped coffee and herbal tea and munched on salads while Intelligentleman (a UCLA social-psychology doctoral candidate and computer consultant also known as Bruce Morasch) started things off.
“I’m a REST-less, RECK-less, poet from Los Angeles,” he chanted rapidly, while a strobe light flickered over his long hair, sweat shirt and jeans. “ . . . Fruits and nuts and nuts and bolts and lots of loose screws. . . . “ In between verses, he drummed syncopation on his chest and stomach and greeted the crowd’s laughter and applause with a sweetly mischievous smile.
Throughout Intelligentleman’s mostly rhythmic, high-energy recitation, one male listener calmly sketched his woman companion, who leaned back and stared at the performing poet. Smoke spiraled upward from a few cigarettes, dissipating in the room’s air conditioning. A friend, Darlene Allen, stood beside him and translated many of his poems into sign language. (No hearing-impaired people were in the audience, but Allen and the poet say they hope to stage future readings specifically for the hearing-impaired.)
from Cobalt Poets Series, #51A
By bowerbird intelligentleman
Sept. 7, 2004
bowerbird intelligentleman is the hardest-working poet in show business.
he is one of the original performance poets, and still one of the most unique, and has -- ever since starting the art-form back in the stoned age of 1987 -- loudly proclaimed his goal of "exploding performance poetry globally".
and since then, he has worked ceaselessly and tirelessly to "make it happen".
bowerbird has always been a strong advocate of _performance_ over _print_. he rejected print as a medium suitable for his work right at the outset, and has spurned many attempts over the years to channel poems in that direction. bowerbird also pushed the envelope of the performance poetry art-form. one of the first such poets to work from memory as a matter of course -- the l.a. times called it, on 7/11/87, a "rhythmic high-energy recitation" -- he has always showed a keen awareness of the role of performance, while still writing the words one-at-a-time and crafting them carefully. performing in a visually distinctive style, he has always caught the eye of photographers, and pictures of him performing have been published far and wide, including the most well-known magazines in the world.
his sharp attention to "transforming the audio into video" also led him -- when he first started performing, in 1987 -- to a unique innovation: interpretation of the performance in a.s.l. (american sign language). mona jean cedar attended one of his early signed poetry performances, and has gone on over the subsequent 15 years to develop this hybrid, in her compelling conglomeration of dance, poetry, and sign language.
as a computer junkie, though, he was a pioneer in using desktop publishing to serve the poetry community. he published one of the first poetry calendars to inform people about upcoming events (even before there were many events). he then went on to assist in the debut of "out loud", a subsequent calendar that lasted for years. he also taught desktop publishing to g. murray thomas, who went on to publish "next..." magazine, the poetry newsletter that served as the definitive los angeles poetry calendar for the entire last decade.
bowerbird also assisted several print poetry small-press magazines. he did desktop publishing for "the moment", one of the first magazines that grew out of the open-mike movement that sprang up in the 1980s. he also created an electronic version of several issues of the magazine, long before the mass phenomenon of the world-wideweb was to emerge. he ran type out for other magazines (like "verve"), and for broadsides too.
bowerbird has also done other aspects of computer/poetry interaction. he has created computerized slide-shows to back him in performance, written multimedia authoring-tools that poets can use to create shows, and even wrote a computerized scoring program for use at slam nationals. (the program can process all the scores from all of the bouts in minutes, and create a website to show them all in a half-hour after a single click.)
bowerbird has also written a wide variety of electronic-book programs, including one that does automatic imposition of chapbooks for printing. no more will a poet need to waste a whole tree in printouts to simply get all of the pages of their chapbook to come out in the proper order. along the way, bowerbird also invented the "bowerbook", a fun means of printing and binding a book one-at-a-time that mimics perfect binding.
in addition, bowerbird has experimented with the telephone for poetry. for a time, he owned 1-800-get-poem (now defunct). he was also the original sponsor of "cut-foot" (310.cut.foot) -- active to this very day -- the music/art/poetry hotline that his friend eric brown made famous.
but alas, bowerbird is also one of the world's worst poetry producers.
one of his first productions, created first in association with the poet pedro derycz (author of the infamous "my butt itches") and then independently, was "the let's go poetry and beer party", an open-mike poetry event that doubled as a party with free beer. the parties started in his apartment, and experience a short term of success, growing into a wide range of other venues, including the electronic-cafe, the arthouse, and even a steel-art workshop. at several of these locations, video-phone connections were made to share poetry with venues like the nuyorican poets cafe in new york, the stone soup poetry collective in boston, and various other places. but even with free beer, he didn't draw a crowd large enough for him, so bowerbird eventually brought the series to a close.
he should have just quit right then and there, undoubtedly. after all, if you can't make an event work when you are giving away free beer, what hope will you ever have? but did he quit? no sir. he just plunged stupidly ahead...
another of his failures was "the 100 monkeys project", an attempt formulated in the late 1980s to gather 100 poets pooling $100 each to create two videotapes, one a 2- hour tape (with a 1-minute poem from each poet), the second a 6-hour tape (with 3- minutes from each). that project stalled out with between a half-dozen and a dozen poets... then, in 1993, he created the "one and one only" series, at barnsdall art park, using the gallery theater there, a 300-seater, a size that was unprecedented in the openmike poetry scene (and would remain so until many years later). as with the "poetry and beer" show, even though many observers on the scene considered this as one of the premiere poetry events in the city to the time, it didn't draw a large-enough crowd for his taste, so bowerbird took it down. the "voice-change-on-every-poem" format later proved its worth in the slam. along about 1993, poetry became a hit on m.t.v., with poets from the nuyorican, thereby vindicating bowerbird's longstanding prediction that this would happen. another prediction was validated when def jam took poetry and put it on h.b.o. but perhaps his most uncanny prediction was made in the late summer of 1996; after murray thomas had informed him that his dream of "100 monkeys" had manifested itself at the 1995 slam nationals, when 100+ poets participated, bowerbird predicted that this festival would garner "the top press available" by the year 2000. pushed to name what he meant by "the top press available", bowerbird responded "oh, 60 minutes." sure enough, on november 28, 1999, just 34 days before the calendar said 2000, 60 minutes aired a story on slam. people called him crazy every step of the way, but bowerbird was always right.
in 1996, in cooperation with mark schaefer -- his best friend for many years, in poetry and otherwise -- the entity known as "opposed thumb" was created, and it has proven to be the major exception to bowerbird's long road of failure.
but in spite of his clear legacy of failure, bowerbird's biggest failure was still to come, in 1998, with "nap jam" -- the north american poetry jam. intended as the "yin" counterpart to the "yang" of the national poetry slam, based on cooperation rather than competition, nap jam was conceived as a 4-night explosion of performance poetry, where every participant would get to perform in front of all of their peers, with everything videorecorded, with the whole event brought to life in "potluck" style, by its participants. sounds good, but he couldn't get enough poets to travel to las vegas for it, so after a couple years of failed jams, he finally took down that show too, after having lost tons and tons of money on the whole venture...
even though he obviously can't get anything to work well himself, bowerbird nonetheless seems to have absolutely no difficulty in butting in and telling other people what _they_ should be doing. since he started doing performance poetry, he has been telling los angeles poetry producers that they should try to concentrate the community's resources rather than diluting its critical mass. absolutely no one ever listened to him. (or realize he was right.) for years he was a thorn in the national slam family, using their own listserve (which he had helped bring about and make a success) to tell them exactly what they were doing wrong. in explicit detail. with convincing argument after convincing argument. day after day. until they had no choice but to ban him from the listserve, thereby fully demonstrating the depth of their commitment to free speech. that wasn't the first listserve from which bowerbird has been banned. and it probably won't be the last either... some people just never learn.
even though (as is clearly evidenced here), once he actually gets going, it is extremely difficult to shut him up, it nonetheless remains true that bowerbird is very uncomfortable talking about himself in the third person -- which is why he rarely writes a bio -- so he will stop doing that now, and he will go have a sandwich because he is kind of hungry right now...
By CHRISTOPHER FOX GRAHAM
April 30, 2024
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