Mindy Nettifee
Mindy Nettifee is an award winning writer and accomplished performance poet. She is the author of two full-length collections Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide Press) and Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody Press), and a collection of essays on writing Glitter In The Blood - A Poet's Manifesto for Better, Braver Writing (Write Bloody Press). She is a three time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a Powell's Books Indie Press Best Seller 2013. She is a co-editor of the anthology Courage - Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls due out Spring 2014 on Write Bloody Press.
She has performed and taught in over 500 hundreds of venues, colleges and universities across America and Europe, competed in five National Poetry Slams, opened for indie rock act the Cold War Kids, headlined national poetry tours The Last Nerve - A High Tea Poetry Brawl, The Whirlwind Company and The Poetry Revival, and was featured in the critically acclaimed poetry concert documentary The Drums Inside Your Chest.
Mindy currently serves as director of the nonprofit poetry organization Write Now Poetry Society, which she co-founded with actress and author Amber Tamblyn in 2007. Write Now's mission is simply to build the audience for great contemporary poetry. Through her work at Write Now, she has curated poetry events for The Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, GirlFest, the Mission Creek Festival, and others.
“The last time you came to see methere were anchors in your eyes,hardback books in your posture.You were the five star general of sureness,a crisp white tuxedo of a man.I was fiddling with my worn coat pockets,puffing false confidence ghosts in the cold January air.My hands were shitty champagne flutesbrimming with cheap merlot.I couldn’t touch you without ruining you,so I didn’t touch you at all.It’s when you’re on the brink of somethingthat you lose your balance.You told me that once.When I can’t bring myself to say what I need to,my heart plays Russian Roulette with my throat.I swear I fired that night, but, nothing.Someday, I’ll show you the bullet I had for you,after time has done the wash.I’ll take it out of the jar of missed opportunities.We’ll hold it up to the light.You’ll roll it around your mouth like a fallen tooth.You won’t forgive me exactly,but we’ll laugh about how small it is.We’ll wonder how such a little thingcould ever have meant so much.”
“If a man is only as good as his word, then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours.The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian in the same sentence — that really turns me on. The way you describe the oranges in your backyard using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath.I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue wrapping around your diction until listening become more like dreaming and dreaming became more like kissing you.I want to jump off the cliff of your voice into the suicide of your stream of consciousness. I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die. I want to map it out with a dictionary and points of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart than a strategy for communication. I want to see where your words are born. I want to find a pattern in the astrology.I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions. I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments, in the haiku of your epiphanies. I want to know all the names you’ve given your desires. I want to find my name among them,‘cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word. I want to thank whoever told you there was no such thing as a synonym. I want to throw a party for the heartbreak that turned you into a poet.And if it is true that a man is only as good as his word then, sweet jesus, let me be there the first time you are speechless, and all your explosive wisdom becomes a burning ball of sun in your throat, and all you can bring yourself to utter is, oh god, oh god.”