The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> Just Another Poet...

Just Another Poet...
Posted by Emil (Guest) squaremoon@emilsdiary.com - Tuesday, December 6 2005, 2:49:55 (CET)
from 24.148.34.117 - 24-148-34-117.grn-bsr1.chi-grn.il.cable.rcn.com Commercial - Windows XP - Netscape
Website: http://www.emilsdiary.com/
Website title: Square Moon Diary of Emil Keliane

http://www.shirazad.com/index.htm

Ryan Mergen is a bohemian with a laptop who's not afraid to hack your hard drive. He's performed his humorous, disturbing brand of in-your-face poetry across the U.S.and Europe for the last five years. He was the grand slam champ in San Jose in 2001 and in Munich in 2003. He won the Roma Poesia International Poetry slam in Rome in2003. He currently lives and writes outside Baltimore, MD.

How would you describe yourself? What are your goals as a writer?
I'm just a guy who likes to put words on paper in arrangements that are interesting to me. Then I like to tell those word arrangements to other people, often at the top of my lungs. If it wasn't for poetry audiences, I would be considered insane and forced to scream on street corners. My spoken word career has been one long cry for help. Not for me so much, but for the way human beings treat each other. Personally, I would like to live off the money that my word arrangements generate because of the enormous satisfaction I get from paying a bill with a poem. To that end, I am willing to sell out my work and artistic integrity to the highest bidder. As a matter of fact, I am currently awaiting Bill Gate’s response to my Petition for Patronage, but it is slow in coming, perhaps I should have sent the letter via email.

What's your most vivid childhood memory? My mother was crying, and my father woke me, nervous. Wrapped me up in my baba like a burrito. I rolled around in the back seat as we sped through the empty streets. Passed off to the babysitter in the middle of the night like a football, my toes icy. In the morning, I ate sugary cereal but they didn't have milk. Three days later, I met my new little brother.

Do you have a religion or a unique set of beliefs, and do your beliefs influence your writing? I believe in the sunrise. It is more than enough for me.

If you ruled the world, what would the rules be?
1) I'd give political power to the person who wants it least.
2) Everyone would have to settle on one name for God.
3) I'd make the leaders fight the wars, which would be viewable on Pay Per View. The profits would be used to save social security. I got it all figured out.


When did the impulse to write really set in? Who or what inspired it? I had a teacher in the third grade, a Ms. King, who cried all the time in front of her class. Looking back on it through the lens of adulthood, she was a little weird, but back then I used to write her little poems to try and cheer her up. Only lines I can remember writing were something like 'I know I’m just a little kid/ but you are sweet like Mr. Pibb. /So don't be sosad/ You should be very glad/ You're the best teacher I ever had.

Which works of art, in any medium, have profoundly influenced you? Whenever I get into The Artist's Rut (i.e. What is art? Who am I?), I go to the nearest MOMA and it instantly cheers me up. If half of the crap that gets canonized in those places passes as art, then I guess I’m doing all right. I also draw a lot of inspiration from luminaries like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. Milan Kundera, Roald Dahl, Kahlil Gabran, Bohumil Hrabal, Chuck Palahniuk and Lucien Zell have all taught me something. TalaamAcey, Saul Williams and Taylor Mali are the most inspirational spoken word artists at present, and if you don't know who they are, do yourself a favor and check them out.

Where do you find inspiration? If you write from personal experience, how do your experiences impact your writing? My life up to this point has been neither happy nor fulfilling. The main themes of my life have been loss and addiction. If I can find a deeper meaning to my suffering, then I have not suffered in vain. My greatest victories have come after I've read something dark and disturbing and somebody comes up to me with tears in their eyes and says "I'm going through the same thing, but you put it into words for me." Nevertheless, writing from a source of pain is easy, and writing from a happy place, well, that takes a little more work, but the end result is much more satisfying.

What about the trajectory of your work? Where has it been, where is it now and where is it going? I'm definitely stepping off of the overly moral soapbox that is slam poetry, moving away from the overwrought melodrama that wins slams and going in amore experimental direction (emphasis on mental). As a performer, I'm no longer afraid of the audience, and I love toying with them- pissing them off or leading them into a logical blind alley before I launch an attack on the blind side of their sensibilities. If I was a prize fighter, I'd want to be known for my sucker punch.

How seriously do you take yourself as a writer? Not very. I used to take my writing very seriously and I produced ponderous monstrosities that nobody liked.
I'd rather light a room up with laughter than give the world an existential crisis.

Describe your writing process. How often and where do you write?
Lots of cursing and deleting. Since I am a spoken word artist, I repeat my pieces over and over again until they sound right. I really don't care how they look on the page, how they sound is my biggest focus. When a piece is being born it is the only thing I can think about, I repeat it ceaselessly, ironing out the problems, until the thing is internalized. Sometimes, I wish I was a novelist so that the neighbors wouldn't think that of me as The Crazy Guy that screams at himself all the time.

Have you ever experienced a period when you were blocked and couldn’t write? If so, what do you think caused it, and what helped you break out of it? There was a soldier in Vietnam or some other large unpopular war who got hit in the leg by a grenade and the doctors couldn't get all the shrapnel out. Fifteen years later, he was eating dinner at a friends house and he started scratching a weird bump that had formed on his neck. Suddenly, the shrapnel popped out and landed on his dinner plate. Poems come out of me the same way. If it doesn't itch, I don't scratch. I view periods of creative inactivity as times to collect new shrapnel.

How do you juggle writing and work? Poorly. When I obsess on a poem it is to the exclusion of everything else. Scratch until the itch is gone.

What do you see as the difference between spoken word poetry and written poetry? Written poetry is typically voiceless, toneless and limited in rhythm. At the same time it can be much more contemplative than spoken word. Spoken word usually lacks the depth of its written cousin, but it's immediacy appeals to me. When spoken word is done right it's a lot more entertaining and sophisticated, in the pre-Socratic sense of the word.

If you could meet any writer from the past, who would it be, and what would you hope to talk about?
I'd really like to hang out with Oscar Wilde for a night, because I'll bet dinner with him would be almost as fun as fending off his advances.

Have you read any good books recently? Finally got around to Harry Potter VI. No way is Dumbledore dead. Rowling has got to know better than to kill off a main character like him. I mean, the damage to her franchise would be massive. No more Dumbledore puppets! The Horror! The Horror!

Are there any books you couldn't live without? No, but there ARE several foods that I couldn't live without.

What makes you want to scream and incite a riot? People who call the United States 'America'. Like they're speaking on behalf of all the people who live on both of the American continents. Unless they're saying "The people of America need rice," they should shut up

Which is more important: beauty, brains, or balls? Balls. I constantly try to find the line and then cross it. Safe poetry might be beautiful or brainy, but it won't connect you to an audience the same way that ripping your heart out chest and showing it to them will. A really beautiful poem to me is one that motivates half of the audience to leave, not because it is badly written, but because you have smacked some moral assumption of theirs so hard in the booty that they have to go home and seek positive reinforcement for their limited world view.

What is your guiltiest pleasure and what is your most politically incorrect passion?
Midget Porn. Ooops, I mean Little Person Erotica. Is that politically correct?

The Heartland Security Blues
by Ryan Mergen

Ain't no peace when a heart's been broken to pieces
where all women feel electric
and one lil' touch could
jolt the whole sheebang
back to square one
what then to do?

after six months alone
a man has needs and has wants
and I'm as frisky as an airport security guard on high
alert, yeah
baby, just dying for Al Qeada to
try to git through my line
I got me a love paranoia
that's got me thinkin'
smiles are like fingernail clippers
yeah, hers prolly isn't deadly
but PLEASE MISS JUST STEP BACK BEHIND THE LINE
so I kin check your motives
for chrissakes there's innocent people that could git
hurt
and i jes don't like the looks of you
you match the profile
and you could be one of them love terrorists,
i mean, my God, what exactly are you packing
in them suspicious bulges? Are you strapped?
When I search you I best not find no plastique.

Oh wait, but that was just a smile,
just a smile, real friendly like. Yeah, O.k.
Get on through,
guess i was wrong about that one
Near as I can figgure,
Love is a lot like Osama Bin Laden
when you look for him, you don't never find him
but when you got back turned and you're busy doing
something else
that's when he pops up and blows up your embassy.
But I'll be damned if I let one of them
shimmy past my defenses again
i got my eye on you
and damn it if my nerves keep jangling
with each new terror alert
man, they don't pay me enuff for all this
pertectin' the heartland
this just ain't worth it
screw this shit
I'm going on break!



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 11018
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf4/rkvsf_core.php?.APXy.
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9