When you are hosting company in your home, having invited them over, your hospitality is the key to making your guests feel welcomed and eager to return.  This is critically true of hosting a poetry event.

Hosting is not simply reading names off of a list and calling folks to come up to recite their poems.  Though it looks simple enough, hosting involves a great deal of facilitation and coordination--when it's done right.

A host can make or break an evening.  A person in the audience may even get up and leave...just before they've received their blessing for that evening...all because the host just didn't quite give them any reason to stay.  Of course, if people come out for poetry, they are there for the poetry, not the host, and it is up to that person to decide when to leave.  However, to the contrary, an audience is like clay, longing to be probed and prodded and molded into something spectacular.  They will stay if there is reason to.  And that's where the host work comes in.

In my experience, I've noticed that venues will stay packed--through the evening and through the year--if a host does more than merely announce who's next on the list.  Although it seems, whenever there is a list involved, that poets should be called up on a "first come, first serve" basis, this may not be the most gratifying order for the night.  Calling poets up in number order, without any deviation, can often create choppy vibrations--the energy goes up and down.  There is no melody.  There is no harmony.  There are no smooth transitions.

Particularly when a host is knowledgeable of the varying styles of the poets featured, it is quite simple to create a flowing evening that will leave audiences stupefied with excitement, having never known what hit 'em.  A host does not have to be a rocket scientist or a Civil Rights historian to say something thought-provoking.  Just keep it real.  Talk about what you know about.  Encourage feedback and outbursts (not heckling) from your audience.  Incorporate your knowledge into the evening without making the audience uncomfortable.  Even yet...don't be afraid to make them uncomfortable, if it means talking the truth.  It's not nearly enough to just make folks laugh, especially with the same jokes week after week.  Be creative enough to be creative.

At other times a recurrent theme will develop among the readers.  The job of the host is to recognize this divination and spread it among the audience, connecting poets through shared ideas and unifying the mass as a great family.  To be a host, you must know when to take a break and when to skip one--a scheduled intermission may best be postponed or even unnecessary if the energy is high.  And of course, you don't want to call up another poet behind a hot feature, knowing that the audience has dispersed to purchase CDs from the feature poet.  Ironically, that would be a good time for a break.

Quite honestly, we can greatly change our world with these weekly opportunities of expression.  Personally, I feel we've too much spiritual work left to take such golden opportunities for granted.  There is power simply in our ability to come together.  The host is the pastor.  The poets are the choir.  And the audience is the body.  Make somebody say "Amen."

Amen,
Von