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The Hocking Hills
Festival of Poetry |

Greg “The Bad Poet” Kimura returns to us for his
third appearance at the Hocking Hills Poetry festival. He is thought of as one
of the festival's favorite performers. Greg discovered poetry
after his
second screenplay about a roller blading septuagenarian was pilloried
and banished from Hollywood. “I took two years to write and about two weeks to
find out how bad it was.”
In poetry he found a creative home: ” You can write something in ten
minutes,” he says, “and whether it’s good or bad– it doesn’t matter. The point
is to engage the creative process. Trying to write ‘something
good’ just gets in the way. In fact, I encourage people to write bad
poetry. I myself became quite skilled at it and am still known by many
as, “The Bad Poet.”
“Art is simply spirit expressed in an image, a song, a dance, a piece of
wood, a slab of clay, a garden, or a handful of words. From the modern
viewpoint, nothing is more impractical and unprofitable. But, if you want to
know beauty, if you want to seek truth, if you want to open your heart to life,
you will engage in an artistic process. To me the choice is very clear: if you
don’t choose to create, then you destroy; if you don’t choose beauty, you’re
going to be lost to something else. Write
bad poetry!”
For the past few years Greg has been volunteering
with high schoolers, helping them polish their writing skills.
Greg Kimura received a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada
College.
Cargo
(For
Malidoma Some', Loon Lake 2000)
You enter
life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be
delivered to a hungry world.
And as much
as the world needs your cargo,
you need to
give it away.
Everything
depends on this.
But world
forgets its needs,
and you
forget your mission,
and the
ancestral maps used to guide you
have become
faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo
weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage
becomes a risk.
The ship
sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
"Is this the
way?"
But the way
cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the
cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is
simply this:
You have
gifts.
The world
needs your gifts.
You must
deliver them.
The world
may not know it is starving,
but the
hungry know,
and they
will find you
when you
discover your cargo
and start to
give it away.
Greg Kimura
"Poetry doesn't belong to
those who write it, but to those who need it."
- Mario Ruoppola (Il Postino) |
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