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Morris Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus left college to pursue his performance poetry career against the wishes of his family. He chose to reside in New York, Chicago and Seattle, switching between the cities as his needs dictated. He has toured the USA and Canada as a performance poet. In 2003, he was a member of Green Mill national slam team, and was a popular poet across town in Chicago at Mental Graffiti. His chapbooks include "All These Things I Do, I Do for Love", "The Profane Document", "The Last Temptation of Cactus", and "Juvenilia". He has two CD titles, "Triassic Classic" and "Swallow the Sky". The ramblings of Morris Stegosaurus' inner thoughts are made public on Live Journal. The poems below were recorded at e-poets.net studios in Chicago, in June 2003.
- September 2003
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Morris Stegosaurus (aka Keith Morris Kurzman) is a difficult artist to categorize, and yet he is undeniably entertaining and provocative. His performance is highly charismatic in the full slam poetry tradition. But the through-lines of his poems often relate symbolic and surreal situations as dialogues with personified objects, without regard for whether those objects are concrete or abstract. Where slam poets are often literal, didactic, or operating in an absence of irony, Stegosaurus may be whimsical, sarcastic, or idiosyncratic. So yes, there is meaning in his stage name, as a banner for the oblique language he brings to the stage. Often it's better to not attempt to interpret Stegosaurus' performances but simply let them happen to you; they may be more about the phenomena of language and performance than about the subjects in their titles.