Raven Mack, a writer, zine creator, artist, poet, and all-around renaissance man from the Charlottesville area, has been running his Rojonekku Hand To Hand Haiku Tournaments in various places around Virginia for about a year now. Tonight, he returns to RVA for the first time in 2014, bringing this unique event to Balliceaux.
Raven Mack, a writer, zine creator, artist, poet, and all-around renaissance man from the Charlottesville area, has been running his Rojonekku Hand To Hand Haiku Tournaments in various places around Virginia for about a year now. Tonight, he returns to RVA for the first time in 2014, bringing this unique event to Balliceaux.
Raven describes the Hand To Hand Haiku Tournament as “essentially March Madness, but with words.” Participating poets compete head to head in a single-elimination style matchup; the poet with the best two out of three haiku advances to the next round. “The ultimate goal of the event is to give local wordsmiths of all varieties an open forum for sharing, competing, and cross-pollinating in short poetic form, as well as create an entertaining competitive spectacle for observers to soak in,” Raven says. “Ideally, having street poets, academic poets, slam poets, MCs, babbling fools, possessed by spirit types, comedians, prophets, and any other type come together in this format allows us to mix styles and get to know one another a little better.”
As the event’s host, Raven will also hold forth between rounds of the tournament, treating audiences to what he calls his “Rojonekku speaking-in-tongues-the-devil-doesn’t-understand universal nonsense gibberish.” Having seen this particular phenomenon in person before, I can tell you it’s entertaining, and worth the price of admission on its own.
In addition to these between-rounds pontificating, a new feature has been added to the Hand To Hand Haiku Tournaments: a Haiku Death Match in which Raven competes in a best of 25 round of haiku, defending his place as “Dude Who Does Haiku Things.” He describes his competitor for the event at Balliceaux tonight as “a grey-bearded wizard type who once claimed to be a burner of metallic priests.” Based on my personal intuition, I’m going to guess that the wizard in question is Lamb Of God bassist John Campbell, but I may be wrong, so don’t quote me on that.
This event is the first of three planned Hand To Hand Haiku Tournaments planned for Balliceaux, which will take place on the fourth Wednesday of each month–so if you can’t make it this month, mark your calendar for April 23 and/or May 28 to catch return engagements. Raven hopes to make this a permanent monthly event, but your support is essential to make that happen–and seriously, these events are not only entertaining but nothing like anything else you could be doing on a Wednesday night. And it’s free! What more do you want?
The Rojonekku Hand To Hand Haiku Tournament kicks off tonight, Wednesday March 26, at 8 PM, at Balliceaux, located at 203 N. Lombardy St in the Fan. Admission is free; for more info, click here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1427612904145010
