AWOL Love Vibe

Canadian improvisatory avant-garde performance [poetry] troupe circa the mid-late '90s, later rebranded Verbomotorhead, inspired by such [CanLit] predecessors as bill bissett and [The Four Horsemen]. First convoked at a 1992 [poetry slam] in San Francisco ("We found ourselves bummed out at the corner of Haight-Ashbury, just checking it out, the glory days of the past. Yeah. There was a Ben & Jerry's on one corner and a Gap on the other and we were, like, gawd, where's the love vibe? And, we kinda felt it had gone AWOL and then we became the AWOL Love Vibe") after a very uncomfortable pitch session with Suge Knight at Death Row Records they proceeded to have an intensive residency at a Bohemian castle in 1995 where they eschewed the printed word in all its forms and took a solemn vow of orality.

For a three day period around the turn of the century they occupied [Black Sheep Books] and stewed for three days among the stacks for inspiration until they had collectively cooked up 122 poems between themselves (membership consisting of saxophonist John Sobol, academic Kedrick James and playwright Alex Ferguson), later edited down to a daily poem for the 2002 Insomniac Press publication the Exstatic Almanac, including a CD of vocally performed selections.