Why Must You Always Say These Things Out Loud?

Many writers have noted how each time and place exudes a type of music. Why Must You Say These Things Out Loud seeks that music, here in America, through a series of variously experimental free verse prose poems and micro-fictions. The title, in addition to being a serious question any writer might ask, is also an inside joke about the courage of the poetic encounter, or one’s willingness to go beyond “normal” language, taken from the words of a manager of car salesmen, uttered after my brother in law, among the salesmen, said he was going to attend “the very last Carma Bums poetry show.” The question is where are you in this play, knowing all are welcome who want to come listen?

Michael Lane Bruner is a founding member of the performance poetry troupes the Lost Tribe and the Carma Bums, which performed across the western United States between 1985 and 2009, influenced by such sources as the Beats, Living Theater, Surrealism, and the free-verse tradition in American poetry. Bruner is also a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and in that capacity he has published several scholarly books and dozens of peer-reviewed essays on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. His creative writing has appeared in venues such as Evergreen Review and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.