• Performance Poets and Slam Poets
• More Traditional "Literary" Poets (meaning those more focused on getting published than performing their poems)
• Writers, Public Readers and performers of prose, essays, speeches, short stories.
  
• Live Storytellers (not reading the story but telling or performing the story)
  
• Other Spoken Word Artists, including "alternative" and "experimental". 
  
  This section will also enjoy overlap with our writer, actor, public speaking, and musician sections, as poets tend to gravitate toward these art forms both in their own right, and in a collaborative sense.
  
  

We are very excited about this section of AudienceConnections.com. Among the many hats Michael Louis has worn, he has read and performed his own poetry, spoken word, and theatrical monologues throughout the Los Angeles area for 20 years.

Acutely aware of the opportunities and challenges of the today's poet, Michael is a fierce advocate of maintaining and elevating the art form, in both the literary and performance realm.

While some in today's society do revere and enjoy fine poetry, Michael has a full understanding of the general public's misperceptions about what poetry is, who poets are, and how poetry can have a profound impact on today's "if it bleeds it leads" media driven and "material obsessed" culture.

Michael says:

"One of the biggest misperceptions the public has about poetry is when they think of purely outdated poetry or today's poetry that isn't really that good. They'll think of the worst "traditional" or "literary" poetry ever written, or pretentious over-the-top "performance" or "slam" poetry. They think of the poetry that was force fed to many of us in grammar and high school – meaning subjects, styles, and content they could care less about. Most people who say they don't "like" poetry, or ridicule it as being pretentious or overly emotive have never heard great poetry performed or read great poetry.

Period.

The poetry/spoken word section of AudienceConnections.com is about how to create magnificent, moving, beautiful or mind-blowing poetry. How to read or perfom it, and how to market it (if that is the desire of the poet).

There will be tools, training materials, and resources covering a vast array of subjects common to the poetry and spoken word world.

There will be contests and featured guests – for both traditional "literary" style poets as well as "performance" or "slam" poets. See our Contests, Featured Artists And Entrepreneurs section for more information.

We're going to have a lot of fun, opportunity, and growth in section.

Promise.

So stay tuned, stay close, and get ready.

And for goodness sake, subscribe if you want to be notified when things really get cookin'.

Here's something I recently came upon... I thought you might be interested in. Looks interesting.

The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund
http://www.dorothyprizes.org

 
PURPOSES OF THE FUND

The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund offers a poetry contest to award prizes to young poets with unusual promise. The first year of this writing contest was 2004. The Fund plans to disburse between $125,000 and $200,000 in "Dorothy Prizes" each year, reserving the right to adjust the size and number of awards to suit the quality and quantity of the submissions in any given year. The Fund also sponsors the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience, and has endowed the Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Lyric Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.