Thursday Afternoon at NPS

Wow!

What a great couple of days its been. Austin is hot, but we march up and down Congress Ave as we head to the multitude of venues.

I "bout managed," which is basically helping the MC for the event. Locally, we don't use bout managers, but at nationals its best if you pass off some of the duties. It makes watching the bout much easier and means I get to enjoy the poetry at Nats but don't when I'm doing it all in Burque. My MC was Sonya Renee, from DC, and she was great. Gracious and in command. Hopefully, she'll come through Burque soon.

Afterwards I went over to Antone's to catch Team ABQ and loved it. Antone's is the blues club that Stevie Ray Vaughn cut his teeth at. Nice big room. ABQ squared away against Chicago, Los Angeles, Delaware, and Colorado Springs. The draw was tough being the first poem out of the gates, but after 1 round they were in 3rd place. Kenn made a great coaching call and Damien knocked it out of the park and put ABQ in 1st place after the second round. The result? ABQ wins their first bout and moves into tonight's show with a 1 and squares up against our sister city of slam, Denver (man do I love those Denver poets!), the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Delray Beach, and Salt Lake City. Both Denver and the Nuyorican won their bouts on Wednesday as well, so this one is going to be hot, even for Austin where the weather is just plain hot.

Hope to put up some live poets from our room in the Hyatt this evening.

From the 2006 National Poetry Slam, this is Don McIver

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