It’s not easy to draw crowds to poetry events, but WiK managed twenty plus customers last night packed into the Gnome for an evening of great variety. Each performer had five minutes to display their talents, and each took a very different approach to their five minutes of fame. Thanks are due to all those who contributed to the overall success of the evening. This follows last year’s poetry and improv, showing we’re building a strong annual tradition of showcasing WiK poetry in June.

Thanks to Sydney Solis for demonstrating how performance poetry should be performed. Thanks to Preston Houser for demonstrating the shakuhachi way to enlightenment. Thanks to our intern Andrew Sokulis for daring to come up with spontaneous improvisation on a theme (takes guts to do that). Thanks to Ken Rodgers for not being a poet but spouting poetically. Thanks to James Woodham for his very original folk song rendition, thanks to Mayumi Kawaharada for haiku-ing in a foreign language, and thanks to Gary Tegler, narrator of Core Kyoto, for inspirational flights of pure sax fantasy. Thanks to Robert Yellin for unearthing his pre-pottery poetical self, and thanks to Mark Richardson for some serious stuck-in-the-elevator surrealism. Thanks too to special guests Amy and husband for making the effort to attend and for raffling off her new book, Best Behavior in Japan.