Intercultural Exchange

Imagine you've come from another culture and you want to know, "What is an open mic poetry reading in Boulder Colorado like?" You might appreciate a description of the details. The Laughing Goat cafe is dark in the back, but has a big windows letting light in along the street front. There are many details to recount: the looks of the barista’s (a curly locked young lady with hippy jewelry and her pierced, bobbed co-worker, or the handsome tattooed man leaning on the counter). There is an altar at the entranceway to the cafe. With an outsider's eye, we may note comparisons and contrasts to other situations we've experienced. We can make some assumptions about the values of the group of individuals we observe via the physical details of their context, details like setting, actions, use of breath, the sound of the voices, the movements of the crowd and the body language of the poet.

What if you were from a place that didn't have same-sex cafes, or a place where there are no distinctions between music and poet's language? What if the only poetry performances you had witnessed was language inevitably intertwined with Allah?

The concrete details might warrant some interpretation in order to better understand the values of the participants in such a strange language ritual as poetry at a Boulder cafe open mic.