Poet comes East

Almost every arts venue on campus will be open this weekend. This includes the Cat, where Danika Dinsmore is reading tonight. Dinsmore is a woman difficult to summarize in one word-"poet" will have to suffice.

Dinsmore, who lives in the Seattle area, is a poet, performer, editor, and teacher. Educated at California Lutheran University, Dinsmore also holds an MFA in writing and Poetics from the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She also holds an advanced certificate in screen writing from the University of Washington, another example of her diverse interests.

Her first book of poetry, traffic, was published in 1997 from It Plays in Peoria Press. She co-founded the Northwest spoken word LAB (SPLAB), a non-profit literary arts center in Auburn, Washington. She currently teaches for the Puget Sound Community School in Seattle and offers workshops in libraries, schools, and at North Seattle Community College. She has read in various literary arts venues across the country.

Dinsmore comes to Oberlin as a result of an arrangement with sophomore Stefan Kamola, himself a poet who knows Dinsmore from the literary circuit in Washington state. She read in Tiffin, Ohio last night and is stopping by Oberlin for a couple of days.

Her diverse nature leads, perhaps naturally, to diverse subject matter. Dinsmore has been known to write about Buddhist biker chicks and the sensuality of produce, and may be the only poet ever to use the words bludgeoned, kidney pie, slaughter, fetus, and woozy fits in the same stanza. Her unusual approach to the high art of literature should catch some attention in Oberlin, a community with more than its fair share of creative writers.

Dinsmore's reading promises to excite and invoke interaction with and within the audience. In her own words: "this is a poem/this is the poem/this is the best damn poem you've ever heard/this is Ginsberg Waldman Dickinson Stein Whitman Keats DiPrima on Jupiter/this poem makes you want to snap/this poem makes you want to hoot. . ."

Dinsmore will be performing at the Cat on Friday, November 20 at 9 P.M. On Saturday she will be offering a workshop at 3:30 in Harkness. Both events are free. Those interested in having a poem workshopped should bring it by Harkness room 305 or e-mail it to stefan.kamola.